Lecture Four - Cities and Film.

• the city in modernism
• the possibility of urban sociology
• the city as public and private space
• the city in postmodernism
• the relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

George Simmel (1858 - 1918)

• german sociologist
• dresden exhibition 1903
• asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
• Herbert Beyer 'Lonely Metropolitan - 1932'

Urban sociology

• Lewis Hine (1932)
• the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism
• George Simmel 'The metropolis and mental life'

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856 - 1924)

• creator of the modern skyscraper
• an influential architect and critic

Cason Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)

• skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
• fire cleared buildings in chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan

Charles Scheeler

• ford motor company's plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927)

Fordism

• mechanised labour relations
• coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay 'Americanism and Fordism'
• 'modern times' 1936 - Charlie Chaplin, relates to this, making a comment on this aspect of modernity, a critical point of view on the body being swallowed by machines

Stock market crash of 1929

• factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
• leads to 'the great depression'

Flaneur

• the term flaneur comes from the french masculine nown flaneur  - which has the basic meanings of stroller.
•  Charles Baudellaire "a person that walks the city in order to experience it"
• art should capture this

Walter Benjamin

• adopts the idea of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
• 'Arcades Project' final incomplete book about the parisian city life in the 19th century
• Berlin Chronicle/Berlin childhood (memoirs)

Photography as a flaneur

• Susan sontag on photography
• solitary walker, stalker, separate from the crowd, stealing images from an environment, voyeuristic stroller, looking for beautiful moments in the urban environment
• street photography

Flaneuse

• female flaneur
• Janet Wollf
• figure of the flaneur is male because women didn't have the same freedom to walk without company
• bringing the private experience onto the street
• Susan Buck-morss - only women on the street are prostitutes or bag ladies

Arbus/Hopper

• women at the counter smoking, NYC, (1962)
• automat (1927)
• lonely sense of dread
• in between moment
• almost like a film still
• foreboding

Sophie Calle 'Suite Venitienne' (1980)

• following a man on the streets of Venice
• follows his every move
• romantic/stalking relationship
• photographed without their knowledge

Venice

• 'Don't look now' (1973)
• city as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways n which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up back where you began

The Detective (1980)

• wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence, Sophie Calle
• a man follows her taking photos
• she takes photos of him taking photos of her

Weegee (Arthur Felig)

• press photographer
• lower east side New York
• appears at emergencies
• people think he's in touch with spirits
• appears minutes after the crime
• had a police radio
• his work is collected in a book 'The Naked City'
• echoed in video game 'LA Noire'

Ridley Scott 'Blade runner' (1982)

• futuristic LA
• set in 2019
• retro style