The American City in the Cinema

James A. Clapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351486064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

The American city and the American movie industry grew up together in the early decades of the twentieth century, making film an ideal medium through which to better understand urban life. Exploiting the increasing popularity of large metropolitan cities and urban lifestyle, movies chronicled the city and the stories it generated. In this volume, urbanist James A. Clapp explores the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema within the dimensions of time and space.A variety of themes and actualizations have been repeated throughout the history of the cinema, including the roles of immigrants, women, small towns, family farms, and suburbia; and urban childhoods, family values, violent crime, politics, and dystopic futures. Clapp examines the different ways in which the city has been characterized as well as how it has been portrayed as a character itself.Some of the films discussed include Metropolis, King Kong, West Side Story, It's a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, Rebel without a Cause, American Graffiti, Blade Runner, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, LA Confidential, Sunrise, Crash, American History X, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Deer Hunter, and many more. This work will be enjoyed by urban specialists, moviegoers, and those interested in American, cultural, and film studies.

1

The American City in the Cinema: An Introduction

Human place making and image making are among the earliest attributes defining humankind. In each practice there are exercised magical, even god-like, powers. Places become sacred, with the power to protect and define the notions of home and social identity; images convey a power of possession of the spirit, of reflections of our inner dreams and fears. Together place making and image making not only define what it is to be human, but they also enable all the potential and possibility of what humanity might become.¹

We might allow our imaginations for a few moments to visualize the following “movie” scene:

The moviegoers file silently into the picture place. There is a sense of anticipation, even an undercurrent of anxiety in the knowledge that what they are about to see could move them emotionally. They are uneasy with the sense that what they are about to witness is magical, something with a curious power through which images come to life, quicken before their very eyes, like those images that come with sleep, in the mysterious worlds where the real and the imagined commingle.

They are seated now, hushed in the low light of the picture place, seeing each other only in silhouette and soft shadow. Then the magic-makers come forward with their magic torches; the wonder is about to begin.

Now the gleaming surface of the wall is illuminated, and creatures, familiar and strange, begin to dance in the flickering light, jumping here and there, on and off the walls and startled retinas. Horned beasts that the audience recognizes appear, their eyes mirroring the restrained fright in those of the moviegoers. In the next flickers spears now seem to appear, entering the beasts, and there is blood on their necks and flanks. And now another creature appears—one that looks like themselves, but not: a man-beast, two-legged, but with horns and fur. In the flickering light, the man-beast dances and leaps about. To the side of the wall there appear more beasts, some big, some small, their legs jerking them over the surface, back and forth, tumbling them over one another.

The moviegoers gasp, or sit silent and wide-eyed. Some, who have seen the magic images before, are again fascinated. Others, seeing the images for the first time are enthralled, even terrified. But for all there is in the magic images the affirmation of a new truth that is part lie, a new stratum of reality, borne by the mysterious process as well as the images. They have been changed; they have no word to express it, but they have become the first moviegoers.

Who were these first moviegoers? Were they the little groups of viewers in clubs and bars, witnessing on suspended sheets the first crude films of itinerant filmmakers? Were they perhaps people in nickelodeon arcades? Or even earlier viewers of zoetropes?

In fact, the first moviegoers may have gone to the “movies” well before the dawn of recorded history. In a strict technical sense, the troglodytes of some fifty millennia ago were not watching movies as we know them. There were no cameras to capture images, only the pigments of ground stone, blood, and fruits to paint them. There were no screens, only the glistening walls of the inner recesses of the caves that also formed their dark, dank cinemas. Nor were there projectors to cast the images on the walls, only the torches and fat-fueled lamps whose flickering flames alternated the light and shadow that created the illusion of movement in the still images of bison, deer, horses, mastodons, and the hunters and shamans garbed in skins, horns, and antlers. The hunters and shamans also told the stories of the images, stories of the hunt and the kill, and the spirits that lived in the beasts.

Yet, in essence, all the fundamental ingredients of the motion picture were present fifty millennia before Edison and the other pioneers of contemporary film: images, light, and the illusion of movement it created. The flip-card, zoetrope, and even the sophisticated modern motion picture are only technical advances in the permutation of these fundaments.

But even more significant than technique is that whatever the technical process, primitive or sophisticated, the fusion of imagination and reality engendered a momentous new dimension in cognitive processes. Art historians have hypothesized that the cave paintings of prehistory might well have been occasioned by (or resulted in) the notion that humans might well have come to believe that they exercised some form of mysterious power over the actual objects of their artistic representation. If the images of bison, horses, and deer could be called forth from the mind’s record of them, then perhaps early humans felt a growing sense of dominion and control over the beasts themselves. The plausibility of this hypothesis is reinforced by other capacities of imagination, in the ability to take on the actual forms of the subjects, to imitate their sounds in songs and calls, their movements in dance, and ultimately to possess the very bodies and spirits of subjects themselves in the hunt, the capture, the kill, and the ingestion.

This sense of power in the image has its counterpart in humans as subject as well. Many aboriginal peoples still fear that the possessor of images of them is capable of exercising some control over their bodies and/or souls, a notion that is semantically retained in the expression “to capture,” in a photograph, painting, or sculpture, the essences of the reality depicted.

But, as we also know, the power of the image is reciprocal. Whether in a fertility-goddess figurine, the photograph of a loved one in a locket, or a motion picture, the potential power of the image over the possessor (viewer) of the image is perhaps even greater than over the subject represented. Whether in a dark prehistoric cave, or a comfortable modern cinema, we must often shake ourselves out of the willing (or unwilling) suspension of disbelief in the “reality” of the images we view, to regain control of our awe or tears or terror, by insisting to ourselves that “it’s only a picture,” a moving representation of the conjunction of “our reality” and the imagination of the moviemaker.²

Place and image seem to have a long, complex, and reciprocal relationship. Before there were permanent settlements, and humans sustained themselves by hunting and gathering, they had to be able to retain an image—the location of their places of habitation and security. Later, when they settled into more permanent villages in river valleys, they began to compose crude images of what were the very first cities. As cities proliferated and took a more import role in human affairs, painters took a greater interest in capturing their form and studying the new perspectives that cities gave to space. Artists put cities in the backgrounds of religious paintings and portraiture, and some painters made their careers composing townscapes for Grand Tourists. By the nineteenth century, when industrialism had given rise to the age of great cities, urban life and form had become the dominant visual theme or artists.³ The stage was set for an art form that could capture the city’s vibrant motion and tell its stories.

The life of cities began perhaps ten millennia ago; the life of the cinema is a little more than a century. Yet, in these two human inventions—the city and the cinema—there is a connection between the fundamental dimensions of human existence: space and time. The following may be seen as a montage of “establishing shots” that lay out the relationships between the city and the cinema. Although it concentrates upon the American city and cinema, many features of this discussion are relevant to the portrayal of the city and urban life in other cultures as well.

The City: The Dimension of Space

The City may be defined or described in many different ways, but it is most basically the creation through which humans have come to exercise control or dominion over the spatial (place) dimension of their existence. The city is the way in which humans create places that are of special social, economic, and political, as well as cultural and symbolic, importance. As a human-constructed environment, the city expresses, in its form and architecture, not only the way in which mankind meets the requirements of survival, but also the higher dreams and aspirations of life. In their choice of specific places to establish their cities, humans select locations that are not only appropriate to their social needs, but which also express metaphysical and mystical needs as well. The city is not only the locus of the home and the factory, but also the temple and cemetery.

In contrast to the nearly placeless nomadic or pastoral ways of life that preceded the establishment of permanent settlements, urban life delineates territory according to economic, social, and other functions of urban life. Within urban territory, space was traditionally defined between the sacred and profane (those areas outside the sanctified precincts), and between areas designated for government, commerce, production, and residence (the latter often subdivided by social class, occupation, religion, and race). In the city, space becomes socially differentiated according to its uses, from the purely functional to the symbolic. Space became valued for its productive capacity as well as the meaning and identity it gave to its owners and users. In the city, space became property, public and private, valued in a way that was fundamentally different from the value of space (territory) in pastoral, nomadic, and agricultural life.

Moreover, the city gave value to the territory beyond its walls or legally defined boundaries. In the environs of the city, agricultural land was given economic value for its ability (and necessity) to supply the city its food and other products of the land. Thus, the city, of necessity, exercised a control and dominion over its environs (hinterland). Today, the external territories of cities extend much further beyond the immediate environs, in some cases to the territory of other continents.

In effect, then, the city may be seen as humankind’s way of using and controlling the landscape, and defining and putting it into use for social and symbolic purposes.

Yet the city is also the creator of technologies that can transcend space and release the city from its spatial bonds. Modes of transportation and communication now allow urbanites to conduct many of the affairs, transactions, and economic and social connections of urban life, without the proximity such activities once required. First with suburbanization, then globalism, the day may not be too far into the future when urban territory may extend to extraterrestrial space as well. But whatever configuration the city might come to have, we will almost certainly endeavor to establish it as our place.

The Cinema: The Dimension of Time

One of the ways in which the cinema may be understood is as the human effort to exercise control over the other dimension of existence—time. The photographic image freezes time, allowing us to retain the precise visual memory of past events, places, and persons. The documentary film and photograph retain images of actual events; the dramatic film re-creates the past, depicts the present, and imagines images of the future.

Moreover, the motion picture permits the manipulation of time through a variety of cinematic techniques. It may create simultaneous events, time compression or expansion, flashbacks to the past, or premonitory events. Thus, the cinema can shorten or lengthen time by means of the pacing and cutting of cinematic sequences, taking viewers into the past or projecting them into a future time.

Within the time-length of a film, the viewer is able to experience historical events, covering centuries of time, or the enormous complexities of just moments in human experience. The dramatic components of a screenplay may be so well conceived and executed as to summarize the spirit of an historical period, or an episode in the life of a single individual. The cinematic language, in the way in which it relates visual images to one another, is able to suggest causes and effects by means of the artful juxtaposition of film frames and sequences.

Therefore, the cinema takes us out of the world of real time into a world in which time is altered, molded, and reshaped, and in which the relativity of time is made manifest (into what some have referred to as “reel time”).

Of course, both the city and the cinema are concerned with the dimensions of time and space. It has been observed that “. . . the cinema can demonstrate visually what science has discovered empirically or theoretically. We can say that a film, by varying the time dimension, in the one case substitutes space for time and in the other substitutes time for space, and thus the cinema is able to demonstrate that space and time alike are dimensions of the same continuum.”⁴

Parallels and Convergences between the City and the Cinema

The city and the cinema, however, are not exclusively defined by the dimensions of space and time. There are several parallels and convergences in their roles in American urbanism.

By 1920 in America (and in other industrialized countries as well), the large, metropolitan city had become the dominant feature of society. During this period, the essential elements of the cinema were established, except for sound. These two decades were a time when the large city, and the features of urban life within it, became the dominant subject matter of the arts, particularly of literature and drama and painting.

It is also reasonable to state that the art form of the cinema—more so than any other of the arts—was given birth by the large city, which made possible its success as an artistic medium that could reflect and interpret the life of the city with unprecedented power and realism. Many of the first documentary films, such as those of the Lumiere brothers in France, focused upon everyday life in the city. Thus the cinema shares and/or draws upon many of the elements that are common to the city, but those central to the focus of this book include the following:

Communication. One of the principal features of cities from their very beginning has been communication of information, ideas, and imagination. The city, particularly in its center, its downtown, and its agora, has been, and remains, the nexus of communication. This very feature of cities assisted in making motion pictures a successful medium of communication: cities brought together the audiences necessary for the success of a mass medium. This had been necessary for the success of a mass-participation medium, until the appearance of radio, television, and home-video entertainment technology.

Sophisticated technology. Also related to the purposes of communication was the development in and by the city of the sophisticated technology that the production of motion pictures requires. Many of the processes and components of film production (the chemical making and processing of film stock, lenses, timing mechanisms, lighting and sound, among others) were related to, benefited from, or were an outgrowth of, technological experimentation and development in other fields of urban life.

Collaborative enterprise. Because the city is an enterprise that both re...