Cities and Cinema

Barbara Mennel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351016179
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

The second edition of Cities and Cinema provides an updated survey of films about cities, from their significance for modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary relationship between virtual reality and urban space. The book demonstrates the importance of the filmic depiction of capitals for national cinemas in the twentieth century and analyzes the transnational transfer of cinematic images surrounding global cities in the twenty-first century.

Cities and Cinema covers the different facets of the cinematic depiction of cities. It rehearses distinct methodologies and offers a survey of the history of the cinematic city. The book also deepens our understanding of tropes and narrative conventions that shape films about urban settings and that reflect the transformation of cities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with a discussion of the Weimar "street film, " it analyzes how the city film defined modernity. The book outlines the sociological context and the aesthetic features of so-called film noir, made in 1940s Hollywood and depicting Los Angeles. Paris became the site for the development of auteur cinema, which repeatedly depicts characters moving through the city. Tokyo took up noir to signal modern crime. The volume delineates how filmic genres, such as science fiction, comment on the present by imagining future forms of urban living. After analyzing how cinema captures the relationship between sexual identity and urban anonymity, migration and urban space, and marginalized ethnic and sexual identity in ghetto films, the book emphasizes transnational dynamics and global cities in the twenty-first century. Its conclusion points to the increasing virtual mediation of cities with new media.

Cities and Cinema offers a historical overview of the development of films about cities and a theoretical approach to the intersection of urban studies and film studies. This title is designed as a textbook primarily for second-year undergraduate students in Film/Media studies, Urban studies, as well as Geography and Planning.

Part I

This section establishes the significance of the relationship between cities and cinema with three chapters that chronologically pair cities with groups of films. Chapter 1 describes the emergence of the city film during Germany’s Weimar Republic, its first and ill-fated democracy from 1919 to 1933, particularly in relationship to Berlin, the country’s capital and cultural metropolis. Chapter 2 relates the cycle of film noir, highly stylized, black-and-white, American, private-eye films, to the immediate post-World War II period, establishing Hollywood as the location for film production and Los Angeles as the films’ primary setting. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship of the filmmakers of the French New Wave – a group who rebelled against the French studio system during the late 1950s and early 1960s – to Paris, the topic and the site of production and reception of their films. Taken together, these three chapters provide a historical outline of the interconnected development of cities and cinema from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Cities have been central to the development of cinema in its three central aspects: production, representation, and reception. Cities are important sites for the film industry as studios are often located in urban environments or in their proximity. Cities provide settings for stories. They are also the primary location for film distribution and consumption. Because Berlin, Hollywood, and Paris signify different modes of film production, together they tell its story. Weimar Berlin represents early forms of organization with several production companies. Post-World War II Hollywood brought forth the studio system at its height; and Paris of the 1960s exemplifies auteurism – an emphasis on the vision of the individual film director.

Part I, then, lays the foundation for this book’s arch. The connection between cities and cinema lends itself to demonstrating larger cultural shifts from national to transnational and modern to postmodern contexts. Chapter 1 illustrates how modernity was simultaneously experienced as violent shock and embraced for its technological and aesthetically innovative opportunities. This Janus-faced quality continues in the portrait of the modern city in film noir and the French New Wave. The cinematic vision of the modern metropolis emphasizes its public spaces, such as streets, in contrast to rural and suburban spaces.

The part’s chapters address three classic examples of city films but also portray important moments in national cinemas. While each city represents a national cinema, each film period, cycle, or movement captures a defining moment in the history of national cinema, on the one hand, and in the account of city films, on the other. At the same time, the portrayal of the cities points to concepts – modernity, urban alienation, and human desire – beyond their respective national dimension. The three groups of films also influenced each other: the style and themes of Weimar cinema reappear in film noir, which the directors of the French New Wave quote and reference. These connections do not contradict the understanding of national cinema. Transnational exchange was common, sometimes resulting from migration, for example when film workers from the Weimar Republic fled the Hitler regime and found work in Hollywood. Later, French directors paid homage to individual filmmakers and actors in Hollywood who sometimes, like Fritz Lang, were film émigrés from Germany.

These cinematic exchanges demonstrate continuity in the form of topics and aesthetics in the filmic representation of cities. Weimar cinema famously advanced Expressionism, a highly dramatized, black-and-white aesthetic that emphasized shadows and the play of light and dark, and which subordinated realism to the vision of an individual director. This Weimar cinema style influenced film noir and the French New Wave. Similarly, Weimar’s urban cinema also often relied on New Objectivity, an art movement that represented modern life realistically, which also reappears in the films about Los Angeles and Paris.

Finally, gender cuts across these three cinematic moments, projecting dangerous and sexualized femininity in the public space of the city. The streetwalker of Weimar cinema reappears as the femme fatale in film noir and lives on in female characters in the French New Wave who are unreliable objects of desire. In contrast, male characters master the urban space. Films often conflate the sexualized and dangerous urban woman with the city in question. In sum, this first part depicts city films in three distinctly different geographical and historical contexts and shows the continuity among them.

1 Modernity and the city film: Berlin

Learning objectives

• To comprehend the significance of Berlin for the concept of modernity
• To understand the development of the city film in the Weimar Republic
• To outline the contributions of different theorists of the concept of modernity
• To define the genre of the street film and consider its gendered dimensions

Introduction

“A new genre was born: ‘city film’,” claims architectural historian Helmut Weihsmann about avant-garde films in the mid-1920s (1997: 10). City films as a crucible of modernity created urbanity as a modern space, and during the 1920s in Europe, the modern city par excellence was Berlin. After World War I Berlin played a central role in Germany and Europe as the locus of modernity and cosmopolitanism, a place where modernist art flourished. Berlin was the theme of several city films, the site of production with several studios located on its outskirts – including the famous Ufa in nearby Babelsberg – and it was also the site of elaborate movie theaters where important premières took place. Coffee-houses were the public setting where literati, journalists, and artists met and discussed culture and politics. Those who migrated to Berlin from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example influential directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, from Poland as did Robert Wiene, or from the German hinterlands as did Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, gathered in bars to make contacts to enter the new movie industry. When Berlin advanced the development of cinema, the prevalent genre of the street film became an emblem of modernity. Yet, Berlin was not the only modern city in the 1920s. Neither did films about Berlin constitute the only modern cinema in the world. Shanghai, London, Tokyo, Madrid, and New York City, with the Manhattan skyline, Broadway, and Harlem, all circulated images of modernity. However, Berlin commanded a particular confluence of urbanity and cultural production with the simultaneous theorization of the phenomenon of modernity.

The birth of the city film

The 1920s witnessed a significant output of city films that defined modernity. The decade between the early 1920s and early 1930s saw Karl Grune’s The Street (1923), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Robert and Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Rochus Giese, and Fred Zinneman’s People on Sunday (1928), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Lang’s M (1931). All these films take place in a city – most often Berlin, but not always – and portray urbanity, especially the period’s understanding of the dangers and pleasures of modern urban life, such as crime, anonymity, a loosening of morality, unemployment, and class struggle, as well as movement, speed, entertainment, and liberated erotics. These films foreground “abstraction, circulation and movement and monumentality,” what contemporary sociologist David Frisby identifies as characteristic of modernity (2001: 20). Weihsmann differentiates between a “documentary style,” in which filmmakers reproduced different “urban motifs,” and the “pictorial colportage,” which mixed documentary footage and fiction shot on location (1997: 9). While some city films advance documentary realism, for example People on Sunday, others rely on artificial sets, most famously Metropolis.

Figure 1.1 People on Sunday: random encounters in the city

The genre of the city film depicts topics that pertain to urbanism. Several films present the city as the setting for social problems: M famously tells the story of the search for a child murderer, while The Last Laugh portrays the fate of a hotel employee who has lost his position but continues to wear his uniform to garner respect. The figure of the prostitute embodies both liberated and commodified sexuality located in the streets of the metropolis, for example in Grune’s The Street, Pabst’s Joyless Street, and May’s Asphalt. All three films belong to the genre of the street film developed between 1923 and 1925. Other social problems, such as class conflict, organize cinematic space as in Lang’s Metropolis, where a vertical, futuristic city divides into the upper world of the factory-owner and the nether world of workers, portraying a dystopian vision of urban modernity. The experience of the modern metropolis changed visual perception and yielded new narrative forms and aesthetic styles: abstract shapes and compositions, episodic narratives, and cinematic montage express the experience of urban modernity. Images, events, and anonymous encounters in the city become the raw material for Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and People on Sunday. Because film was part of mass culture, changing in tandem with urban modernity, cinema of the 1920s functioned in a double role as both “product of urban modernity” and “producer of urban culture” (Weihsmann 1997: 10).

The film industry not only created urban sets as imaginary locations for films but also an artificial city for film production: Babelsberg, in the no-man’s-land between Berlin and Potsdam. Here, the Weimar Republic’s development of the studio system took place. Babelsberg was home to Ufa (Universal Film Aktiengesellschaft [Universal Film Corporation]), the studio that Klaus Kreimeier labels “one of the most important movie studios in the world” (1996: 3). It was founded during World War I for the purpose of national propaganda. In this “film-city” (Ward 2001a: 21), unemployed and underemployed architects built their visions in set designs, because in the period immediately following World War I they could find work constructing buildings (2001a: 22–8). Film studies scholar Janet Ward emphasizes the artificiality of Babelsberg, describing it as “Babelesque, consisting of towers and tunnels over eighty-odd acres of artificially lit outdoor and indoor playgrounds” (2001a: 21). And while movie production created its own fantastic city outside of Berlin, movie-houses, called film palaces, changed the face of the metropolis.

Theories of modernity and urbanity

In the early twentieth century, sociologist Georg Simmel, philosopher Walter Benjamin, journalist-turned-film scholar Siegfried Kracauer, and sociologist Max Weber theorized the formation of modernity. The paid special attention to the metropolitan city and popular culture, especially of the cinema. Their writings reflect on the cinematic representation of urban space in general and Berlin in the city film from the Weimar Republic specifically.

Simmel had already emphasized the importance of the emerging metropolis for changing life, culture, and subjectivity at the beginning of the twentieth century. His seminal 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” focuses specifically on the effect of the city on subjectivity by describing “the metropolitan type” as a rational and intellectual response to uprootedness, the increased speed of information and impressions, and the “intensification of nervous stimulation” (Simmel 1903: 175, italics in the original). Simmel noted that in contrast to the quiet life of kinship and family in traditional rural communities, the metropolis produced rapid and multiple impressions that individuals had to integrate. Discontinuity and fragmentation characterized city life, where actions and events suddenly assaulted inhabitants. The shift at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century radically ruptured the “sensory foundations of psychic life” and produced a new kind of “sensory mental imagery” (Simmel 1903: 175). Simmel described the effect of the modern metropolis on subjectivity as a combination of imagery and sensory perception, motion, and stimuli. These blended characteristics encapsulate the potential of the medium of film to express the features of urbanity. A film such as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City reproduces the sensory experience of the city through its “associative montage,” a method that captures the fragmented aspects of modern life in the metropolis (Hake 1994: 130).

Other films combine the contrast between the rural and the urban environment with a narrative that moves from the country to the city. German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Sunrise – A Song of Two Humans (1927), made in the United States, is a case in point. A woman from the city tries to seduce a man from the country to kill his wife while crossing the river on the way to a metropolis called “the city.” The destructive seductress embodies urbanity, while the wife, who is also a mother of a small child, represents the country. Her social role in the village defines a caring and quiet character. In contrast, the independent “woman from the city” appears as a vamp. Clad in a tight, sexy black dress, smoking, and using make-up, she incarnates “the archetypal metropolitan female of the 20s” (Fischer 1998: 43). Drowning his wife would destroy familial ties yoking the man to the rural soil.

Sunrise relies on Expressionism, the art movement that emphasized the inner vision of the artist over realistic and mimetic representation of the outer world. Beginning in the early twentieth century, artists intentionally distorted the representation of reality in poetry, drama, and painting, to express their artistic vision. Poetry and drama often represent a character with the label “the new man” or “the new woman,” instead of an individual with a name. In painting, striking colors and skewed angles define Expressionism. The most famous Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene), uses artificial sets and emphasizes the play of light and shadow. Famous for its unreliable narrator, the Expressionist classic relies on a frame narrative that takes place in a mental institution.

Sunrise, however, primarily employs the destabilizing force of Expressionism to depict the vamp, the destructive and dark female figure that relates to the vampire, the stock character associated with the night. When the man goes to the rendez-vous with her at night, he walks through the marsh, and the mobile camera follows him, eerily capturing shadows in the moonlight. When, in contrast, he travels to the city with his wife, urban pleasures, play, as well as dangers reignite their love. On their arrival, echoing Simmel’s description, traffic surrounds and overwhelms them, as a streetcar almost runs over the wife. The city’s many distractions – going dancing, having their photo taken, and visiting a barber-shop – offer excitement to the couple and by extension the audience of the film.

Sunrise self-reflexively refers to visual media in negotiating between country and city, associating cinema with the latter. When the city woman tells the man about the metropolis, a film appears against the sky, transposing the urban onto the rural environment. Once the man and his wife are in the city, they go into a photo studio and participate in the modern technology of photographic self-representation. British scholar of popular culture Raymond Williams proposes that the country paradigmatically represents “childhood” (1973: 297). The couple adds technological and visual literacy to the journey. Thus, the individual story of the couple from the country enacts the history of humankind. The city woman attempts not only to destroy the relationship between the husband and his wife, but also to sever his ties to the land by persuading him to sell his farm and take his cash to the city. Tying the market to the city, the film’s narrative casts the woman’s emotions as a ruse for her calculating rationality.

Simmel defines the metropolis as the place that relies on a money economy, which for him goes hand-in-glove with a heartless and selfish rationality that redefines human relationships in terms of exchange value and turns all action into “production for the market” (1903: 176). The potentially alienating effect necessitates that the metropolitan character reacts with “his head instead of his heart” (1903: 176). In order to be efficient and productive, according to Simmel, cities are home to the division of labor.

Many city films depict distinct professions, from Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Sunrise, M, and The Last Laugh to the most explicit articulation in Lang’s Metropolis. Its spatial composition maps class exploitation onto a vertical axis (see Case Study 1 at the end of this chapter). The factory owner lives and socializes in a spacious office with...