OUGD501 - Context of Practice: Cities and Film Lecture

Cities and Film

• New York watching the fall of the World Trade Centre. Images taken by people who were there at the time. 
• The lecture looks at the city of modernism, the beginners of an urban sociology, the city as public and private space, the city in postmodernism and the relation of the individual to the crowd in the city.

• Trade fair that attemps to celebrate the city in the part of the early 20th century
• Public health and safety, education
• Simmel reverses what he is asks to do and decides to focus on the city
• Leading up to the time when Freud's psychoanalysis theory

• Concern that the city might swallow up individuals
• Overwhelmed by the techological things in the city
• A worker engaged in the construction of the city
• No health and safety measures in place here
• Vulnerability presented in Hine's images

• The rise of the city that we know and recognise now
• Pioneered by architect Louis Sullivan
• Form follows function

• Although it is very decorative, the way that the form follows function applies is in the organisation of the building
• The basement is where the mechanics are so they are unseen

• Influenced the city sky line because of the fire which clears a lot of the city centre buildings and makes way for his new buildings and this new landscape

• Silent movie which illustrates the city

• Looking at the production line
• Production line is designed and set up to involve the repetitive movements
• Mass production and mass consumption
• The Ford production of cars
• Fordism comes to relate to the whole motion
• You are maintaining the system by earning the money as an employer and then putting it back in to the company - repetitive action

• A critique of the idea of the production line
• He physically gets stuck in the machine himself
• A typical Chaplin film
• He is bad at the production line and messes it up causing chaos
• Suffers a mental breakdown and goes crazy all over the factory
• He gets accused of being a communist
• As a waiter he performs a pantomime which becomes a hit
• At the end of the film we get art over industry

• In the factory the machine makes use of him
• MI5 spied on Chaplin

• Juxtaposition of the people in the food queue
• We have this questioning of the American dream
• The promise that was offered to immigrants and people in rural areas

• The Flaneur is a bourgeois figure
• He experiences the city from a removed point of view because of his class and position, so he is an observer

• The idea that art should capture this and we see it recorded in impressionist paintings at the time
• Gentlemen are sitting down and observing this scene
• They are part of the crowd and apart from the crowd

• Attempts to categorise and organise the planet
• The arcades that Benjamin investigates is designed for a view of the city that is uninterrupted by the weather so there is a protected environment
• This would be an ideal spot to observe humanity
• There is also an attempt to incorporate this with urban planning

• Presents the photographer as the flaneur
• Observing but not participating
• This is particularly important in street photography
• Appears to be an observed moment that is in fact a constructed moment

• Repeat of this motif of a grainy black and white experience of the city
• Started to look at it as a drunken flaneury
• He is looking a this particular district of Toyko
• Fascination of the slightly darker side of the city

• Streets of New York in 1950

• Wolff says that there should be an investigation of the female figure on the street

• Susan investigates Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
• She suggests that often there is a suggestion that the only representation of the female in the street is that they are either a bad lady or a prostitute

• The blackness is heavier around her body
• We are getting a still from the story
• Something has happened or is about to happen
• We are not told what that is but there is an implication of darkness

• Documents the black and white photography at a distance
• Writes a diary style entry to accompany it

• She knows that the story isn't going to end it is going to continue and at some point she will be confronted by the person that she is following
• The idea that is looked at in the film 'Don't look now' a couple who go to Venice to recover after the loss of a child and they are haunted by a figure with a red cape, this is a way of explaining a metaphor of the mind - a state of grief which they are trapped in and they are not sure what is real and what is imagination and what is fantasy

• She hires a private detective to follow her and pays someone
• She records him following her
• This is another feature of her work
• His diary of her is shown in the final exhibit
• Tries to appear as though she is leading him around like a love story almost

• Film still rely of a film noir stereotype
• Beautiful but trapped by her desire
• The woman dwarfed by the city

• World Trade Centre - shot at the base of it
• Wanted to make it look unidentifiable
• The experience of the city is played upon
• It is about imagery of the city rather than the city itself

• Taken again at 911
• The expression of the woman on the street is uncannily similar to Cindy Sherman's image from 1977
• Even the camera angle is the same

• Dark experience of the city
• Reporting on emergencies in the city
• Photographs in the way that we see here
• His name comes from the fact that people thought he had a weegee board
• Got there before the press as soon as the crime is committed
• He has a radio in his car which is a centre for all of the action
• He also develops his films in the back of his car in a dark room
• Two way access to these events
• These kinds of images influence the film noir genre

• A book developed in to a film

• The first video game showed at the Tribecca film festival
• Film set in LA 
• You play as the crime investigator
• Players much investigate
• Sophisticated level of game play

• Modernism in film
• Although picture in 1929 is a city of the future
• Image of the skyscrapers appearing
• They are also appearing in Bladerunner
• Borrowing from historical periods
• The aesthetic goes back to the film noir aesthetics

• The face in the crowd
• The idea of the individual and the relation to the crowd
• Something only experienced in the city
• Investigates in several different cities
• He hides lights in the pavement and sets up a trip wire system that illuminates individuals
• At this point he photographs them
• They almost look like film stills

• There is this kind of detachment created by the lighting
• Singling somebody out with the lighting
• The loneliness of the city in the crowd

• Work was backed up by the legal system
• As it was made for artistic purposes and not for commercial gain he was allowed to use the individual's image
• There is a separation made there of financial gain for commercial reasons

• People directly staring in to the lens, they are unaware that the photograph is being taken
• Moments of between
• Neither here nor there
• A limbo
• Everyone in the image appears to be alone

• Ideas investigated suggesting that buildings constuct our behaviour
• The idea of an unseen seer who is seen

• Investigates New York looking at colour images
• Different to the black and white images in modernism
• Lack of direction in the framing here
• We are not told where to look

• Dark and dramatic image
• Detachment from something you would expect people to react to

• The event is recorded almost endlessly on film but also through a type of journalism
• Means that the city and the observes become one in the collapse of the building

• She re edits the film so that it runs backwards
• The footage of the towers falling was shown again and again to the point where you can no longer relate in any kind of describable way what it happening
• Idea is child like

• The image that you see is purposely over pixelated
• Using google images
• Photography is no longer enough to reflect such an event