The Cinematic City

David Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134797967
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The Cinematic City offers an innovative and thought-provoking insight into cityscape and screenscape and their inter-connection. Illustrated throughout with movie stills, a diverse selection of films (from 'Bladerunner' to 'Little Caesar'), genres, cities and historical periods are examined by leading names in the field. The key dimensions of film and urban theory are introduced before detailed analysis of the various cinematic forms which relate most significantly to the city. From early cinema and documentary film, to film noir, 'New Wave' and 'postmodern cinema', the contributors provide a wealth of empirical material and illustration whilst drawing on the theoretical insights of contemporary feminism, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, and others.
The Cinematic City shows how the city has been undeniably shaped by the cinematic form, and how cinema owes much of its nature to the historical development of urban space. Engaging with current theoretical debates, this is a book that is set to change the way in which we think about both the nature of the city and film.
Contributors: Giuliana Bruno, Iain Chambers, Marcus Doel, David Clarke, Anthony Easthope, Elisabeth Mahoney, Will Straw, Stephen Ward, John Gold, James Hay, Rob Lapsley, Frank Krutnik

1
CHINESE BOXES AND RUSSIAN DOLLS

tracking the elusive cinematic city

Colin McArthur

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark contains the following much-quoted passage:

‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said Thaw.’… Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger, because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’

(Gray, 1981:243)

Thaw is both right and wrong. He is right to emphasise art as a key domain within which sense of place is articulated, but wrong to limit this process solely to artists. Gray implicitly recognises this by including ‘history books’ in Thaw’s list, but this is undermined once more by his insisting that the artist is the sole operational figure in the process. The key missing concept is, of course, discourse, a concept which, as well as including works of art, would also encompass more obviously ‘factual’ productions such as official reports, newspaper accounts, photographs, anecdotes, and jokes. This is not to argue that there are no pertinent differences between works of art and these other sites, simply that they might all be considered under the rubric of discourse. From this point of view, pace Thaw, Glasgow has a substantial discursive presence which has been influential in determining popular attitudes to that city and shaping subsequent narratives about it.

It is perhaps surprising that, in eighteenth century travellers’ accounts, Glasgow is most often compared with Oxford for the beauty of its prospect and the excellence of its ambience. It is post-Industrial Revolution accounts of the city which begin to articulate the ‘Glasgow discourse’ which was to become hegemonic. Initially signalled in urban planning and public health reports in the nineteenth century, this discourse was powerfully accelerated by tabloid journalist accounts of gang warfare in inter-war Glasgow and by folkloric embellishments of these, with the result that a monstrous Ur-Narrative comes into play when anyone (not least, it should be said, Glaswegians themselves) seeks to describe or deal imaginatively with that city. In this archetypal story, Glasgow is the City of Dreadful Night with the worst slums in Europe, infested with what one English novelist has called ‘a malignantly ugly people’ living out lives which are nasty, brutish and short. The milieu of Glasgow is so stark, the story runs, that it breeds a particular social type, the Hard Man, whose universe is bounded by football, heavy drinking and (often sectarian) violence. This image, which beckons Circelike to any who would speak or write of Glasgow, is about men celebrating, coming to terms with or (rarely) transcending their bleak milieu. An order of marginalisation, if not exclusion, is served on women. Mothers or lovers of the hard-eyed men who stalk this world, they are allowed no space for their own sense of what it means to be a woman in Glasgow. So all-embracing is this narrative that it can provide the underlying langue for the jocular act of parole in which a Glaswegian announces in Edinburgh (the Athens of the North) that he himself is from ‘the Sparta of the North’. One wonders too how active the narrative was in producing the (perhaps apocryphal) medical statistic that the unhealthiest man in Britain is likely to be a middle-aged, bachelor barman who smokes and lives in Glasgow.

This, then, is the hegemonic Glasgow narrative but, like many hegemonies, it is fragile and contested. Other narratives about Glasgow circulate: Glasgow as the centre of ‘the Red Clyde’, the region where communist revolution in these islands was thought most likely; Glasgow as the warm, open-hearted city that welcomes all-comers (the implicit contrast here is with cold, thin-lipped Edinburgh); and, the most recent arrival, Glasgow as City of Culture. This latter is distinguished from the earlier narratives by the substantial presence of public relations consultants in its making, initially under the rubric ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’, a slogan which implicitly refers to the discourse it seeks to supercede— Glasgow as City of Dreadful Night (Spring, 1990).

What the example of Glasgow indicates is that cities (and, indeed, all urban spaces and even ‘natural’ landscapes) are always already social and ideological, immersed in narrative, constantly moving chess pieces in the game of defining and redefining utopias and dystopias. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that cities in discourse have no absolute and fixed meaning, only a temporary, positional one. As the opposition Edinburgh/Athens: Glasgow/Sparta shows, to cite one half of the dualism is to invoke the other, even if it is not explicitly mentioned. The high ideological valency of the discursive city and its volatility of meaning has meant that it has been diversely mobilised within the great transitions of history: the rural to the urban; the agrarian to the industrial; and— the big one—the feudal to the capitalist.¹ The lack of fixedness of meaning cannot be overstressed. Within those great historical oppositions which shaped the modern world a whole range of spaces can be identified: wildernesses; pastoral landscapes; agrarian landscapes; villages; rural towns; suburbs; inner cities; metropolises. Several diverse binary oppositions from among this list may be deployed to signify the discursive positions characteristically taken within the great historical debates. Thus, in one version, the wilderness may be set against all urban spaces as a sign of moral worth, while in another version the small town might be valorised at the expense of the inner city. In considering the question of cities in films, therefore, one has to be alert to such changing valencies and to the possibility that while, in certain representations, a structural opposition to the city may be present in the text in question, in others it may be only implicit or even wholly absent.

It has been suggested (Ford, 1994) that in American² silent cinema, roughly pre1930, cities were used as random backdrops for action, the implication being that the city milieu in these films carried little or no ideological charge, so to speak, that the films were saying nothing in particular about cities. This argument is perhaps tenable if applied only to such films as Keystone cops and Harold Lloyd comedies, but alongside these were other films in which the debates around the transition to modernity, and the place of the city within these, resonated profoundly. The debate could not have been more starkly stated than in the opening of Lights of New York (1928). The first shot of a rural townscape is accompanied by the intertitle ‘Main Street. Forty-five minutes from Broadway— but a thousand miles away’; and a later shot of the city carries the intertitle ‘Broadway. Forty-five minutes from Main Street—but a million miles away’. This stark opposition is played out dramatically in the film. The country/city opposition, with the former as Arcadia and the latter as Sodom, furnishes the key structural opposition in Sunrise (1927). The plot is very basic: a woman from the city comes to the country and destabilises the marriage of a country couple. The master opposition of country/city is so deeply woven into the fabric of the film that a whole series of sub-oppositions can be laid out which contrast the city girl with the country girl:

See Table

So deeply grounded in (American) culture is the country/city opposition that it surfaces in the least expected places. For instance, in the film musical The Barkeleys of Broadway (1949), the central players, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, decked out in sports clothes, disembark enthusiastically from a train for a weekend in the country. However, they have dragged along unwillingly their friend Oscar Levant—in life and art a quintessentially urban neurotic—still in his city clothes. As Oscar is frogmarched along a country lane by the others, the three of them launch into ‘A Weekend in the Country’, a kind of question and answer song which starkly states and restates the country/city opposition, Astaire and Rogers singing the praises of the country, Levant of the city:

See Table

In Sunrise the country/city opposition is played out largely in the country with one brief visit to the city. In Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), however, the same opposition is played out in the city. Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), a simple, down to earth resident of a small town in rural Vermont, inherits twenty million dollars and is precipitated into the millionaire’s life of the city. When he attempts to give the money away to Depression-hit American working men in the form of agricultural smallholdings, the slick city lawyers administering the inheritance attempt to have him declared insane. As Sam Rohdie (Rohdie, 1969) has pointed out, this simple plot situation allows a whole series of oppositions to be set up. To illustrate the shifting valencies of the spatial categories referred to above, the master opposition is not, as in Sunrise, country versus city, but small town versus metropolis. Like the shifting master antinomies, the sub-oppositions too begin to shift and turn in the course of the film:

See Table

It was not accidental that the inter-war period in America should throw up films such as Sunrise and Mr Deeds Goes to Town. They represent America talking to itself about the great transition to modernity which, like everything else in that society, was severely telescoped. If Oscar Wilde’s observation that the United States was the only society to have passed from barbarism to decadence without the intervening stage of civilisation overstates the case, the following statistics indicate the rapidity of the transition:

In 1810 over 90 per cent of the US population was classified as rural, many were self-sufficient farmers. Even as late as 1880 the farm population was 44 per cent of the total population. One hundred years later this figure had dropped to under 3 per cent.

(Short, 1991:104)

It was in the inter-war period, however, that the United States—demographically and in terms of organised political power—could truly be said to have become an urban society and rural America, as expressed in Prohibition, Biblical fundamentalism and nativist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan, went down fighting tooth and nail, licking its wounds until the moment, the 1980s and beyond, when it would reconstitute its alliances and attempt, once more, to remake America in its own image. That the so-called ‘moral majority’ was able to do this with some degree of success may be partly explained by the survival and enhancement of antiurban, pro-small town/agrarian/pastoral/wilderness ideologies in American life, even (perhaps especially) among city dwellers. The valorisation of the small town and its values is a consistent theme in the films of Frank Capra, the director of Mr Deeds Goes to Town, even if, as in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Capra’s defence has to invoke desperate fantasies. A similar celebration of the small town is at work in the Andy Hardy films (a cycle starring Mickey Rooney which ran from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s) and in such films as Meet Me in St Louis (1944). As has been stressed above, all discursive spaces have volatile valencies with the same space being deployed to signify quite incompatible ideological positions. This is no less true of the small town in Hollywood cinema (Roffman and Simpson, 1994) which, as well as signifying all that is supposedly good in America, has also been made to stand as an icon of bigotry, small-mindedness and explosive violence, as in Fury (1936), Intruder in the Dust (1949), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Easy Rider (1969) and, deliriously, Blue Velvet (1986). In fact, the two traditions of representation continue to exist side by side and despite (or perhaps because of) increasing demographic evidence of the growth of cities, the small town continues to function in American cinema as a balm to hurt minds and bodies. This is strikingly so in as recent a film as Sleeping with the Enemy (1991). As is so often the case, the small town here operates as the binary antinomy not, strictly speaking, of the city itself but of ‘city values’. The Julia Roberts figure, physically and emotionally abused by her Wall Street commodities broker husband (Patrick Bergin), fakes her own drowning and moves from their chilly, modernist Cape Cod house to a small midwest town where she forms a relationship with a university drama teacher (Kevin Anderson). Interestingly, the bleak Cape Cod beaches are, with Bergin’s New York skyscraper office, the structural opposite of the warm, homely midwest town. In other discourses, of course, the sea coast could be made to signify positive qualities in opposition to the city, as in Local Hero (1983). As with Sunrise and Mr Deeds Goes to Town, the master antinomy of city/Cape Cod versus midwest town is supported by innumerable subantinomies as follows:

See Table

When Julia Roberts first arrives by bus in the midwest town, her face shows palpable joy as, from her viewpoint, the camera picks up the townspeople going about their everyday activities. The entry of individual characters to a new milieu —in the case of the Julia Roberts figure from (putative) city to small town, but often a rural figure entering a city—is frequently when oppositional ideologies are most sharply posed, as in the entry of Clint Eastwood’s western sheriff to New York in Coogan’s Bluff (1968); Jon Voight’s cowboy hustler entering the same city in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Kirk Douglas’ wandering cowboy entering Duke City in Lonely Are the Brave (1962). There is a similar entrance to New York, this time by ferry across the Hudson, in a film much touted as a significant statement about the city and modernity, King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928). In fact, The Crowd sends out conflicting signals about the city. On the central protagonist’s entry to the city, a montage of urban scenes—milling crowds, bumper to bumper automobiles and aerial view...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Contributors
• Introduction: Previewing the Cinematic City
• 1: Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
• 2: City Views: The Voyage of Film Images
• 3: Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935–52
• 4: Something More Than Night: Tales of the Noir City
• 5: Urban Confidential: The Lurid City of the 1950s
• 6: Cinécities in the Sixties
• 7: From Ramble City to the Screening of the Eye: Blade Runner, Death and Symbolic Exchange
• 8: ‘The People in Parentheses’: Space Under Pressure in the Post Modern City
• 9: Mainly in Cities and at Night: Some Notes on Cities and Film
• 10: Piecing Together what Remains of the Cinematic City
• 11: Maps, Movies, Musics and Memory