Week 3: How do films depict cities?

From Roberto Rossellini's pioneering study of post-war Europe, Germany Year Zero (1947).



Our future? From Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).

Several years ago, I was poking around one of the antique stores on King Street when I discovered two reels of 16mm film for sale, cheap. I bought the reels, took them home, and after doing some repair--the splices were a mess--I ran the film through a projector. The reels were home movies of someone's European vacation, shot in the late-1940s. The central "character" in the footage was a middle-aged woman, and my guess is that her husband was behind the lens. It was fun to watch the woman strike poses in Paris and Venice, but my attention kept wandering to the mise-en-scene behind her; there were piles of rubble everywhere, evidence of Europe's slow recovery from the unimaginable devastation of World War II.

I went back to the antique store and asked the clerk if she remembered where she got the reels. She didn't, and to this day I feel guilty about owning another person's memories.

How do movies represent cities? How do they show urban blight or urban utopia? (Ironic fact: the word "utopia" literally means "noplace.") In class this week, we're going to discuss the city symphony, a genre of films that chart the social and psychological effects people experience when living in a giant urban environment like Manhattan (Manhatta) or Paris (Menilmontant).

To begin our exploration of the city symphony, I'd like you to answer a couple of questions in this week's blog response. First: out of the films we watched this week in class, which ,in your opinion, most accurately captures what it's like to live in a city? (Be sure to explain your choice.) Second: name one non-class film that is noteworthy in its presentation of urban space. I'd pick Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1981), which creates a techno-noir future Los Angeles of exponential overpopulation and seismic cultural shifts. (Next time you see the movie, notice how many street signs are in Japanese: this is an America that no longer belongs to us.) Tell me about a movie city that you can't forget...

Incidentally, the city symphony is alive and well on Youtube. Here's one contemporary example, about my favorite North American city. Chicago.

Week 2: Would you rather watch a film in a theater or at home?

Above is a picture of the North Park Theater, on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo, NY. When I was a kid, I lived 2 blocks from the North Park, and I'd walk there most weekends to see a Saturday matinee or a nighttime movie (if it wasn't rated R). The theater's 90 years old and only a single-screener, but it's still open!

In class yesterday, I mentioned a generational difference between most of you (in your early 20s) and me (age 46): I saw many of my strangest films in movie theaters (especially at midnight showings of Supervixens [1975], Eraserhead [1977-9], Reform School Girls [1986], Tales from the Gimli Hospital [1988], etc.) while many of you saw your weird films on cable TV or video. What's the difference?

I still prefer to watch movies on the big screen, but there's no denying that the video revolution has made it possible to watch a range of films incomparably more vast than what was available twenty years ago. In fact, it's only because experimental films have begun to appear on DVD that I'm able to teach this class; there’s no way the English Department could afford to rent all the films on our syllabus in 16mm. (It would cost thousands of dollars.) So hurrah for VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, downloading onto your iPhone, and the confluence of computer and TV that'll make instant downloading the industry standard in about three year’s time! (Or sooner?)

But are we losing something as we move away from the movie theater? In his book Bowling Alone (2000), sociologist Robert Putnam claims that post-WWII Americans have been cocooners, stay-at-home types. Less and less Americans get out into the world by joining organizations, lobbying for political candidates, and, yes, going to the movie theater. (The title Bowling Alone refers to a post-war decline in bowling league memberships, and a rise in men bowling solo, without friends.) Putnam believes that this increased isolation has led to a perilous decrease in social capital, very roughly defined as the sense of well-being a person has when they learn to trust the people in their environment.

When I lived in Illinois, I used to eat a couple of times a week at a fast-food restaurant called Wonderdogs, run by a chef nicknamed "Jay." Every time I went into Wonderdogs and said something to Jay besides "A Coke and a basket of fries," I built social capital with him. We became friends, and I found out that he was originally from Tehran, with beliefs considerably different from my own. But we were still friends, and Putnam believes that little encounters like this, if they happen often enough, create people happier and healthier than those folks who spend most of their waking hours alone in front of a screen. (Putnam cites evidence that joining and participating in a new group cuts in half your odds of dying next year!)

And is it ironic that I'm writing about this while sitting alone in front of a screen in my office..?

Nevertheless, I worry that staying home and watching movies on TV has lead to a decrease in social capital. This semester, we'll be discussing several theaters that were key to the development of the American avant-garde cinema--Art in Cinema in San Francisco, Cinema 16 and Anthology Film Archives in NYC, the Blinding Light in Vancouver--and these venues nurtured non-mainstream filmmakers and encouraged young artists to make their own bizarre films. Has this sense of community been lost? I don't know, but maybe you do.

So: would you rather watch a film in a theater or at home? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Is it possible to build a sense of community watching movie at home as well as watching them in a theater? (As Josh's post for Week 1 shows, it's possible to destroy a sense of community by showing Gummo, but that might be an exception.) I look forward to hearing your answers and thoughts.

Incidentally, Putnam first presented his ideas in an article called "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," and you can find that article here.

Week 1: What's the strangest film you've ever seen?

Over twenty years ago, in the spring of 1989, I took a seminar in graduate school called "Narrative Complexity in Film." The class was taught by Robert Carringer, who was (and still is) an expert on Orson Welles. In the semester, we studied three auteurs--Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder--whose movies were deemed by Carringer to be "narratively complex." It's no exaggeration to say that this seminar changed my life. I had never seen a film by Godard before, but I fell in love with his work and ended up writing my dissertation about the reception of Godard's films in America.

The fifth week into the class, in the middle of our Godard unit, we watched Weekend (1967), Godard's surrealist diatribe against capitalism. The plot of Weekend is simple: a husband and wife, both supremely shallow and evil people, travel from Paris to the French countryside to visit the wife’s sick mother. (In fact, during this trip the husband and wife plan to murder the sick mother and claim her inheritance.) What makes Weekend so bizarre isn't this set-up, but the individual episodes that the husband and wife get involved in on their journey. They get trapped in an excruciatingly long traffic jam (shot as a single long-take tracking shot); they meet a hitchhiker who calls himself God and turns a field of wrecked cars into a flock of sheep; they light Emily Bronte on fire; etc., etc. I found Weekend endlessly inventive the first time I saw it (which was in Carringer's seminar), and to this day it remains one of my favorite films.

Near the end of Weekend--and don’t worry about spoilers, since Weekend doesn’t try to create any kind of conventional suspense in viewers--the husband and wife are captured by a band of cannibalistic hippies. There's an amazing shot at the hippie's camp, near a lake. The camera tracks horizontally back and forth, right and left, across a tableau of a drummer pounding a fast beat. Meanwhile, various members of the hippie commune wander in and out of camera range and a voice on the soundtrack recites portions of the Comte de Lautremont's Les Chants de Maldoror ("I salute you, Old Ocean!"). The scene ends with the camera zooming out to the water, filling the screen with blue and sky.

The first time I saw this scene, I was so moved I cried. I still remember sitting in the uncomfortable auditorium seat, my head full of feelings and ideas ("Godard’s camera is inscribing a thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic!") that challenged my definition of what a film could be. I also remember hearing a noise behind me, faint at first and then louder...and I remember my surprise when I realized that the noise was the snoring of another student in the seminar: ZZZZZZZZZZZZ. But that was a valuable lesson too: it taught me that people don't necessarily respond to movies like I do, and that I need to remember that one person’s epiphany is another person’s nap.

And you? What's the strangest film you've ever seen, and under what conditions did you see it?