OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Cities and Film Lecture

• The city in Modernism
• The beginnings of an 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
• Writes Metropolis and Mental Life

Dresden Exhibition 1903

• asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the cit but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
• (Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932)

Urban Sociology

• The resistance of the individual to being levelled swelled up in the social-technological mechanism

ArchitectLouis Sullivan (1856-1924)

• Creator of the modern skyscraper
• An influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
• Mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright
• Guaranty Building was built in  1892 - Influence from the arts and crafts movement, form follows function applies 

Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
• Fire cleared buildings in Chicago

Manhatta (1921) - Documentary Film by Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

• Celebration of the city skyline

Charles Scheeler

Fordism: Mechanised labout relations

• Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "American and Fordism" of 1934
• "The eponymous manufacturing systme designed to spew out standardized lost cost good and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them" (De Grazia: 2005:4) - Irony

Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin - Critique of the production line

• "In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him"

Stock market crash of 1929

• factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically 
• Leads to "The Great Depression"

The man with a movie camera

Flaneur

• The term  flaneur comes from the French masculine noun flaneur which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer".

Charles Baudelaire

• 19th century French poet Baudelaire proposes a version of the flaneur - that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it"

Walter Benjamin

• Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
• (Arcades Project, 1927-40), Benjamin's final incomplete book about Parisian life in the 19th century
• Berlin Chronicles

Photograph as flaneur

• The photgrapher is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes - Susan Sontag

Daido Moriyama (1970s) Shinjuku district of Tokyo

• Drunken flaneury, stumbling from one location to another

Flaneuse

• The invisible Flaneuse. Woman and the Literaure of modernity
• Janet Wolff
• Theory, culture & society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-46

Susan Buck-Morss

• The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the arcades project

Arbus/Hopper

• Woman at a counter smoking, N.Y.C (1962)
• Automat (1927)

Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne (1980)

Venice

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

The Detective (1980)

• Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence
• His photos and notes on her are displayer next to her photos and notes about him
• Set in Paris

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980)

Here is New York book/exhibition

Weegee (Arthur Felig)

• Press photograph (1930-40s)
• Reporting on emergencies in the city

The Naked City

• Book of Weegee's images - 1945
• Naked City Film - 1948

L.A Noire 2011

• First video game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival

Cities of the future/past - Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1929)

Ridley Scott, Bladerunner - Made in 1982, set in 2019

Lorca di Corcia, Heads (2001) - Form surveillance

Public/Private

Walker Evans - Many are called (1938)

Postmoden City / Bonaventure Hotel, Ed Soja 

Postmodern City in photography: Joel Meyerowitz, Brpadway and West 46th Street NY (1976)

• Eye is overwhelmed
• A lot of detail/information
• Polar opposite of Weegee's work

9/11 citizen journalism: The end of the flaneur?

• Adam Bezer (2001)
• Recording my ordinary people of extraordinary events

Surveillance City

• Everything is recoded by CCTV