OUGD501 Lecture notes: Cities and films

OUGD501
LECTURE NOTES
CITIES AND FILMS

Here is new york, a democracy of photography in New York 9/11 attacks taken by both professional and amateur photographers.

LECTURE OUTCOMES

• 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 (1895-1918)

• German sociologist 
• Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903 
• Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

DRESDEN EXHIBITION 1903

• Simmel is 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 Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932)
• Follows the Berlin Trade exhibition of 1896
• Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932
• Freuds New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis 1932

URBAN SOCIOLIGY

LEWIS HINE 1932

The resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903

ARCHITECT LOUIS 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 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY
• Coined the phrase, in 1896, in his article The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. Here Sullivan actually said 'form ever follows function’
• He and Adler divided the building into four zones. The basement was the mechanical and utility area. Since this level was below ground, it did not show on the face of the building. The next zone was the ground-floor zone which was the public areas for street-facing shops, public entrances and lobbies. The third zone was the office floors with identical office cells clustered around the central elevator shafts. The final zone was the terminating zone, consisting of elevator equipment, utilities and a few offices.
• The supporting steel structure of the building was embellished with terra cotta blocks. Different styles of block delineated the three visible zones of the building. Sullivan was quoted as saying, "It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.
• Sullivan’s ornament is unmistakably original, but it is not without precedents in the contemporary tradition of the English Arts and Crafts movement. “The numerous parallels between Sullivan’s ornament and the architectural decoration of Furness make it clear that Sullivan’s ornament came directly from Furness and, through him, from earlier ornament by English architects.” (Sprague 1979)

CHARLES SCHEELER

FORD MOTOR COMPANIES PLANT AT RIVER ROUGE, DETROIT 1927

Episode looks at the work of artist/photographer

on the occasion of the introduction of the new Ford Model A. Sheeler was commissioned to photograph the plant in Dearborn, Michigan as part of a larger $1.3 million advertising campaign.

FORDISM: MERCHANDISED LABOUR RELATIONS

Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism” of 1934
"the eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them” (De Grazia: 2005:4)

Production line

Sought to gain maximum productivity with minimum effort through repetitive mechanical action

Cycle of mass production and mass consumption- in this case cars

MODERN TIMES 1936 CHARLIE CHAPLIN

Wrote directed and starred in

Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker, employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos.

'In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him' (Marx cited in Adamson 2010 p75)

STOCK MARKET CRASH 1929

Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
Leads to “the Great Depression”
Margaret Bourke-White

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA 1929

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ZciIC4JPw

Russian silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Accompanied by live music originally many contemporary versions of the soundtrack have been recorded

his film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This imagined city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. Celebrates industrialisation mechanisation transport communication. The camera has access to intimate moments bed/birth as well as public street life. World peopled by mannequins.

FLANEUR

The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll" 

Bourgeois  dilletante, a literary figure from 19th century france but developed during modernism by Benjamin

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 city life in the 19th century
Berlin Chronicle/Berlin Childhood (memoirs)

PHOTOGRAPHER AS FLANEUR

SUSAN SONTAG ON PHOTOGRAPHY
The photographer 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. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' (pg. 55) The flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer

DAIDO MORIYAMA 1970'S
SHINJUKU DISTRICT OF TOKYO

Drunken flaneur, americanisation of tokyo

Direct reference to Klein

Tate Modern: Exhibition

10 October 2012 – 20 January 2013

FLANEUSE

• The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity
• Janet Wolff
• Theory, Culture & Society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-46

The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis, mainly accounts for the experiences of men. It ignores the concomitant separation of public and private spheres from the mid-nineteenth century, and the increasing segregation of the sexes around that separation. The influential writings of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman, by equating the modern with the public, thus fail to describe women's experience of modernity. The central figure of the flâneur in the literature of modernity can only be male. What is required, therefore, is a feminist sociology of modernity to supplement these texts.

SUSAN BUCK MORSS

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.)

Susan Buck-Morss, in this text suggests that the only figure a woman on the street can be is either a prostitute or a bag lady

• Arbus/Hooper

Gives us the reflection that somethings happened here implication of darkness

 Women at counter smoking N.Y.C (1962) 

 AUTOMAT(1927)

SOPHIE CALLE SUITE VENITIENNE 1980 

‘For months I followed strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.’ Frieze magazine

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
• Couple go to Venice to recover after the loss of a child.  The woman is haunted by a figure in  a red cape that darts through the city.
• Issues of memory. Grief Trauma
• Plays with time
• Mixed up identity

THE DETECTIVE 1980

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

Detective (1980), consisted of Calle being followed for a day by a private detective, who had been hired (at Calle's request) by her mother. Calle proceeded to lead the unwitting detective around parts of Paris that were particularly important for her, thereby reversing the expected position of the observed subject. Such projects, with their suggestions of intimacy, also questioned the role of the spectator, with viewers often feeling a sense of unease as they became the unwitting collaborators in these violations of privacy. Moreover, the deliberately constructed and thus in one sense artificial nature of the documentary ‘evidence' used in Calle's work questioned the nature of all truths. Tate.org

CINDY SHERMAN UNTITLED FILM STILLS 1977-1980

• Woman is lost, threatened by the street. Trapped- presence absence
• Film noir stereotype

The shots of the WTC don’t look like the WTC unless you knew the towers well and could recognise the windows in the background. I wasn’t trying to make photos of Manhattan; I wanted the pictures to be mysterious and to look like unidentifiable locations. So I used types of building that looked as if they could be anywhere.

HERE IS NEW YORK BOOK/EXHIBITION

2001/1977

WEEGEE (ARTHUR FULIG)

Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and '40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity nickname,
a phonetic rendering of Ouija, because of his frequent, seemingly prescient arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities
Originally from the Ukraine
Weegee developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car
In 1938, Fellig was the only New York newspaper reporter with a permit to have a portable police-band shortwave radio.