Urban Film
Film is an urban phenomenon. From its inception, film has depicted the burgeoning city and screened these images to an urban audience (Bruno, 2007). Since the birth of cinema, urban landscapes have inspired filmmakers and storytellers. Even in the early soundless films, made in studios, the city was integral to film and was often constructed in new and bold ways (Bruno, 2007). Cinemas have always traditionally been situated within urban centres, limiting the audience but reinforcing the urban qualities of the medium. The urban film is an embodiment of modernity, reflecting repeated attempts to capture the fleeting moments of life in the metropolis.
Johannesburgâs own history and development is uniquely concurrent with film history. Despite being a mere mining settlement a decade before, Johannesburg screened its first moving pictures months after their world premieres in New York in 1896 (Gutsche, 1972). Film production followed shortly, thereafter, making the city one of the oldest film centres in the world, although the quantity and quality of those productions has varied greatly over the last 100 years. The development of the city is even more chequered. Johannesburg grew rapidly but unevenly. Colonial policies, followed by apartheid legislation, built and maintained a city divided into areas of race and class. The physical forms of division were reinforced with social and political policies. These policies were repealed in the early 1990s but the inequalities of built fabric and infrastructure remain. Films of Johannesburg have represented some of these urban conditions but they also have the potential to reimagine an undivided city, to edit or stitch together new spaces.
It is important to understand the ways in which the city has been represented and how it features in these popular mediums of culture.1 The relationship between film and the city, however, does not end there. Films go on to influence their audiences and can alter peopleâs perceptions of the city. Screen images and narratives contribute to a collective knowledge and memory of spaces and places in the city. Images of the city on film and television screens give symbolic meaning to spaces by defining purposes and activities for a large audience, and by simplifying and interpreting reality for the viewer. These new meanings shape perceptions, leading to altered behaviour and contributing to the process of place making in the city. Therefore it is pertinent to understand the way in which these representations are interpreted by the audiences that view them, and how those interpretations might influence and change their perceptions and understanding of the spaces shown. Furthermore, this research shows that the changes in perceptions and everyday practice assist in understanding, and in some cases, bridging the divisions that exist in the unequal urban conditions of Johannesburg.
It is impossible to know and grasp the whole city (even the physical component of the city), because it is so large, complex, diverse and ever changing. Most people only experience the city in terms of the limited spaces in which they live, work and socialise. In Johannesburg, this has been exacerbated by the legacy of apartheid. Spatially, Johannesburg has been divided into black and white, township and suburb, with large tracts of industrial zoning and mining wasteland between. Although spatial segregation is no longer enforced, this spatial fragmentation is still, by and large, a reality. Therefore, the knowledge of Johannesburg is even more fractured for its residents than for the residents of most other cities around the world.
The physical city exists in parallel with the city of peopleâs minds.2 The city of the mind is informed by actual experience, but also by all the different representations of the cityâphotographs, artworks, maps, books, the media, the Internet, musicâand through stories and second-hand accounts. Film and television reconstruct, reimagine and edit our urban spaces and the activities occurring therein. The screen âre-presentsâ the city and its spaces through its images.
Films, with their combination of visuals and storytelling, have the potential to dominate the information contained within the city of the mind. Visual information has been acknowledged as a dominant form of knowledge (Denzin, 1995), making the visual medium of film a powerful influence on the geography of the city of the mind. The representation of urban landscapes and the city in film is well documented by planners, geographers and architects (Alsayyad, 2006; Bruno, 2007; Clarke, 1997a; Clarke & Doel, 2005; Denzin, 1995; Hallam, 2010; Lamster, 2000; Lukinbeal, 2002; Mathews, 2010; Penz, 2003; Schwarzer, 2004 to name but a few (see bibliography)). However, the influence of film on the city, on its inhabitants and practitioners, has not been given such great consideration, although it is understood that there is a process by which films do feed back into the urban environment (Alsayyad, 2006; Bruno, 2007; Clarke, 1997a; Clarke & Doel, 2005; Denzin, 1995; Hallam, 2010; Lukinbeal, 2002; Mathews, 2010; Schwarzer, 2004). In some cases, scholars have admitted the difficulty in conclusively establishing this process (Gold, 1985) but generally, the subject is conspicuous by its absence.
There is very little understanding of how films are being received by residents of the spaces and places depicted on the screen.3 Therefore, this research examines how residents of the city receive urban films and, furthermore, how these films influence the everyday practice of these residents. This book also shows how these changes in perceptions and everyday practice strengthen understanding of the complex city in situations of division and inequality.
Divided or Unequal Cities
Divisions between socioeconomic classes have steadily widened for more than the last 30 years globally (Harrison, 2003). These inequalities exist at several scales, from an international and transnational scale to the local scale. The inequalities exist in the gulf between the developed and the developing world. These inequalities are also manifest as spatial divisions in the city, although the causes and correlations are complex.
Friedmann and Wolff, in one of the earliest studies used the metaphors of the âcitadelâ and the âghettoâ to describe the expanding classes at the top and the bottom. They selected terms with an ecological referent to highlight the fact that they were not only describing strata within a hierarchy, but groupings that were segregated spatially from each other as well. (Abrahamson, 2004, pp. 95.)
Unequal labour and economic practices have resulted in spatial divisions between classes and races (Mooney & Danson, 1997). Wealthy classes intentionally separate themselves from the rest of the city with physical walls and elements of security that come to symbolise this separation (Abrahamson, 2004). In Johannesburg, the continuing suburbanisation of the city since 1994 has exacerbated the physical segregation that is the legacy of the apartheid era (Mabin, 2005). The segregated and divided city ârestructures social relations, and shapes the subjective identities of urban residentsâ (Murray, 2008, p. 148) impacting on everyday practice in Johannesburg. Social relations and networks enable residents in the âghettoâ to survive but are not able to provide bridges outside of the community, thus limiting social mobility (Varady, 2005).
Inequalities and division are present in the production of space, but also in the production of film, particularly with regard to the processes of distribution and screening. Cinema is part of a creative industry and is subject to very real and practical constraints stemming from investors, producers and governments. Chris Lukinbeal has discussed the economic production of film and the industrial nature of cinema by outlining the history and development of location shooting (Lukinbeal, 2002). Film commissions, now in existence in nearly every major city, influence and determine the locations where films are shot and sometimes set. While films are created in the social space and generate numerous meanings, they too are subjected to the dominant political and economic space flows. These spaces of flow or urban networks have been historically highly unequal and continue to be so. Colonialism, imperialism and the physical occupation of territory may now be less prevalent, but there is a shift in scholarship towards cultural imperialism. In film, this is reflected most often through the dominance of Hollywood productions. Chris Barker suggests that this cultural imperialism of foreign television can be resisted but the most likely outcome will be âthe emergence of hybrid identitiesâ (Barker, 2005, p. 518). The inequalities that exist between developed and developing nations are reflected in the spaces of flow and in the distribution and exhibition of cultural products. However, the focus of this book is the inequalities that persist at the scale of the city. This is not to say that these transnational inequalities are not active at the city scale but the focus is primarily an examination of the relationship between spatial and socioeconomic inequalities at the urban scale and its depictions in film.
Dunne, in her scholarship on Mexican film, has suggested that films can function as a form of âcounter-cartographyâ, particularly in the use of aerial shots that reveal and map urban inequalities (Dunne, 2011). These images are also intended to give the films greater credibility by locating the films within a broader social context (Dunne, 2011). The locations are urban spaces in a country that is grappling with poverty and inequality. In addressing divisions within societies, film scholars have focused on the potential of national cinemas. In Indian cinema, Hindi films overlook differences of class, gender, sexuality and religion in order to build a national community (Virdi, 2003). These differences disable the narration of a national cinema because each aspect of identity has its own history (Virdi, 2003). At a national level, cinema is unable to unite divisions. This is reflected in a historical study of Argentinaâs cinema and radio from 1920 to 1946:
Instead of unifying national myths, the Argentine culture industries generated polarizing images and narratives that helped provide much of the discursive raw material from which the Perons built their mass movement. (Karush, 2012, p. 3)
Although not an aspect of inequality but more of division, some political transitions have been mitigated by cinema. Between...