Lecture 4//Cities and films

Investigate city as it appears in modernism. 

Possibility of an urban sociology

The city as public and private space

The city in Postmodernism

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

• German sociologist

Dresden Exhibition

• Asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life int eh city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual. 
• Herbert Bayer, lonely Metropoliant, 1932. 

Urban Sociology

• Resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
• -Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903. 

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)

• Creator of the modern skyscraper
• An influential architect and critic

Details from Guaranty Building 

Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity. 

Manhatta (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

Charles Scheeler- Ford motor company's plant as River Rouge, Detroit (1927).

Fordism: Mechanised labour relations

• Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and fordism"
• "The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardizes low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them" (De Grazia: 2005:4)   

Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin

Stocke market crash of 1929

-Unemployment increases

-Leads to the 'Great Depression' 

Man with a movie camera (1929) -Cinema techniques that we revolutionary.

Flaneur

• Figure in art and literature
• French masculine noun, basic meaning of 'stroller' 

Charles Baudelaire

• Nineteenth century french poet

Walter Benjamin

• Adopts concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
• Berlin chronicle/Berlin childhood (memoirs)  
• Incomplete book about the parisian city life in the 19th century. 

Photographer as Flaneur

• Susan sontag on Photography
• Photographer as stealing images from an environment. 
• Stalking, cruising the Urban inferno.
• Street photography     

Flaneuse

• The invisible Flaneuse, women and the literature of the modernity
• Janet Wolff
• Theory, culture and society November 1985 vol.2 no.3 37-46  

Arbus/Hooper 

• Women at a counter, smoking NYC (1962)
• Automat (1927) 

Sophie Calle Suite Venitienne (1980)

Venice

• Don't look now (1973), Nicholas Roeg
• City as a labyrinth, ability to get lost but will always find your way. 

The Detective (1980)

• Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence
• His photos and notes on her are displayed next to her photos and notes

Cindy Sherman Untitled film stills (1977-80)

• Locations to be mysterious and unidentifiable. 

Here is New York book/exhibition

• A democracy of photographs

2001/1977 

Weegee, The Naked City

Cities of the future/past-Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1929)

Walker Evans Many are called (1938)

• Lost in thought