Here are my notes from the sixth lecture Cities and Film on 01/12/2011.
Cities in modernism
An urban sociology
Public and private space
City in postmodernism
Georg Simmel was asked to lecture on the role of the individual in the city but reversed it and wrote about the effect of the city on the individual
Looks at the resistance of the individual to be levelled, swallowed up in the social technological mechanism.
Louis Sullivan - Architect
Creator of the modern skyscraper.
Influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
Guaranty Building
image of building and detailed images
The details are influenced by the arts and craft movement. Can see the natural influence of the plants.
Divided the basement into 4 zones, basement ground level, middle zone is offices, top zone is lift materials and more offices.
It must be every inch proud and souring.
Skyscrapers in the modern city represents the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity.
Charles Scheeler
images
The city is a towering, mechanical presence. Images taken in Detroit as part of a 1.3 million dollar advertising campaign.
Fordism: mechanised labour relations
The human becomes embodied by the machine.
'The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardised, low-cost goods and afford its workers desin enough wages to buy them'
Stock market crash of 1929
Factories closed, unemployment rises. Leads to the great depression.
Flaneur
Comes from the french masculine noun flåneur.
A person who walks the city to experience it. Suggests that art should capture this experience. A figure who is simultaneously a part and not a part of the crowd. Just there to observe peoples actions and reactions.
Walter Benjamin
Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings.
Photographer as Flaneur
Flaneuse
Female version of the flaneur.
The invisible flåneuse.
Susan Buck-Morss
Suggests that typically what we think of when we think of a woman alone on a street is either a bad lady or a hooker.
Arbus/Hopper
2 images
Distanced observed moment of a lady alone in a bar. A sense of threat, the darkness on the right has a depth to it. The representation of the darkness is represented as the head and shoulders of the dark clinging on to her.
What we get is an observed moment, just before or just after something that has or will happen. Something where our imagination has to fill in the gaps.
Sophie Calle
Creates a photographic piece of work where the person has a relation to the city. Followed strangers on the street and took photos of them without them knowing.
4 images
She creates an experience that is somewhere between stalking and a love affair. Creates a relationship between herself and the man she follows.
The act of following encourages this obsessive reflection.
Venice
Labyrinth of streets and alleyways. Somewhere that would be easy to get lost, but because it's small it's easy enough to end up back to where you began.
Don't Look Now - the story of a couple who travel to venice to recover from the death of a child. The woman in haunted by a figure in a red cape that glides around the city. Every time she sees the figure it disappears. Trauma of grief.
Calle - The Detective
image
Gets her mum to hire a secret detective to follow her. To document her existence in note form. Wanted to take him to places in Paris she loves and what not. Leads on a journey creating a kind of relationship between the two. A story written by her documented by the detective.
Cindy Sherman
Looks at the figure of the woman in the city - stereotypical. The woman is in some sense almost lost or trapped by the city. Low angled view points, looming presence of the skyscrapers in the characters behind in the cities.
image of back of the aoman
Weegee (Arthur Felig)
Dark side of the lowers east side of New York. He developed his work by following the emergency services and documenting their services. He persues the incident as they happen, develop the photos and take straight to the press.
images of people on floor
The Naked City
LA Noire
Based on the idea that is found in the naked city. Set in 1947.
The street and anything that happens on the street is available for artistic consumption.
Postmodernism in the modern city
9/11 Citizen journalism
The end of the flaneur?
Impossible to become a detached flaneur. The body in the city is also destroyed in a mental capacity.
Different aestetic. Returns photography to it's original use. Returning to the idea of citizen journalism.
Further research list available on the powerpoint.
