Utopia and Cinema

The Cinematic City: Between Modernist Utopia and Postmodernist DystopiaAuthor(s): NEZAR ALSAYYADSource: Built Environment (1978-), Vol. 26, No. 4, Cinema and the City (2000), pp. 268-281Published by: Alexandrine PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23287791 .

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The Cinematic City: Between Modernist Utopia

and Postmodernist Dystopia

NEZAR ALSAYYAD

It is argued in this paper that our understanding of the city cannot be viewed

independently of the cinematic experience. Jean Baudrillard accepts the duality between the real city and the reel city, but he suggests moving in one direction -

from the screen to the city. However, an understanding of this relationship comes not from starting from one and moving to the other,

but in doing both simultaneously.

The relationship between the city and the

cinema, although less than a century old, is a formidable one. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the

only experiences that many of the world's

residents ever realize of cities they have not been to and may never do. Film captures the mentalite of society (Schlesinger, 1979, p. xi), disclosing much about its inner as well as outer life. Movies influence the way we

construct images of the world and accord

ingly, in many instances, how we operate within it.

Jean Baudrillard once argued that the city seems to have stepped out of the movies,

To grasp its secret, you should not then

begin with the city and move inwards towards a screen, you should begin with a screen and move outwards toward the city'

(Baudrillard, 1988). If one were to accept this premise, then cinematic technique and cinematic representation of the city over time should reveal much about both urban

theory and the urban condition. Has this

really been the case? Or have our theories

and experience of modernity and post modernity instead influenced and possibly limited the way we view the cinematic city.

To examine this proposition, I plan in this

paper to follow Baudrillard's advice. I will start by looking at a select group of well known films in a more or less chronological order, in an attempt to define the cinematic modernist city. In doing so, I will view the cinematic city through the lens of urbani

zation, and the figures of a rising urbanity. I shall also focus on modernism's Utopian

aspirations. I will then move to review

another group of films, which, at least for

me, highlight a break with this modernity. I will try to decipher from them notions about

a cinematic postmodern urbanism that can

be linked to the discourses of postmodern urban space.

Images are defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a likeness, a mental impres sion or picture, a vivid or graphic des

cription, or a metaphor. As such, images shape our understanding of, and reactions

to what is depicted. Images act as mental

reminders, cognitive maps, suggestive im

positions and creative projections (Suttles, 1972). The city itself is a 'social image' which has been studied in various disci

plines like literature, sociology, geography, anthropology and many others (Pike, 1980; Park and Burgess, 1925).

The links between the 'real' city and the

268 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 26 NO 4



THE CINEMATIC CITY: BETWEEN MODERNIST UTOPIA AND POSTMODERNIST DYSTOPIA

'reel' city are indirect and complex (Aitken and Zonn, 1994, p. 5; Muzzio, 1996, p. 194). Commentators on contemporary culture and

society note a convergence between what is

real in the everyday and how we image the

everyday. Baudrillard (1988) argues that

contemporary society knows itself un

reflexively, only through the reflections that flow from the camera's eye (Aitken and

Zonn, 1994, p. 7). Film is always selective and partial,

thereby enabling it to produce a variety of

meanings for the same image and for this

image to be viewed very differently by dif ferent audiences in different places at differ ent times. To understand conceptually the

relation between the cinema and the city, I shall focus on the axes of Modernism/ Postmodernism and Utopia/Dystopia. Rather than employing these concepts as dualistic, I will emphasize the ways in which their

mutually interdependent status sheds light on the meanings and practices of the cinematic city.

The Cinematic Modernist City

The cinematic modernist city makes its

appearance in several cinematic creations

of the early twentieth century. Berlin:

Symphony of a Great City (1927) is amongst the first depictions of a rising modernity in

early film. Created by German director

Walther Ruttman, the film documents a

typical day in the life of the city in 1927. This seminal film provides a 'reminder that . . . place and cinematic space, though in a

relationship to each other, [at the same time]

belong to different orders'. Berlin is an

important film that belongs to the modernist avant garde, and one that makes the

depiction of urban space and street life its central focus (Natter, 1994, p. 204). It also reminds us that 'the general precondition for an assemblage of disparate images being viewed as having narrative meaning', as is the case with cinema, is the 'stabilization of any number of possibly imaginable

symbolic spatialities into one' (Natter, 1994,

p. 203). Cinema as a form of writing is an

appropriate analogy for Berlin as a repre sentation of place.

The character most easily associated with

this experience of modernity is the flaneur (Wilson, 1991, p. 61). Secure in his distance from the scenes he observes and empowered

by his ability to penetrate the 'labyrinthine' spaces (Williams, 1973, p. 227) of the city, he weaves an inevitably modernist narrative.

The arrival of the cinema has meant the

return of flanerie, as in wandering around the city-spectacle, suggesting 'the confluence of "a privileged mode of specularity and its newest mode of recording'", namely cinema

(Natter, 1994, pp. 204-208). The flaneur is

typified by the camera in Berlin. Although we start with an Archimedean view of the

city, we move quickly to the train, then the car and then the shop windows, etc. Indeed, the street scenes in Berlin are all presented with a Baudelairian flair. The film has been

critiqued by some as a selective representa tion of the city at that time since 'various

contemporaries recognized enough of "their" Berlin in Rutmann's film to decry the absence of those other parts that "should"

have been included. Where are Berlin's

department stores, the dwellings of workers,

or the "real lives of the city's inhabitants?'

(Natter, 1994, p. 215). Rutmann's film stressed the dramatic

acceleration of the pace of life in the city as

compared to the countryside. He also drew

attention to the interconnectedness of places within the city via networks of trans

portation, communication, circulation, and

exchange. The street itself became one such

site, connecting places, events, and activities and providing a dynamic, collective under

standing of place (Natter, 1994, p. 218).

Metropolis (1926) was another important film of early modernity. Also, Fritz Lang's film was the first futuristic movie to be shot on a studio set. Lang's imaginary city, Metropolis, made the social division between an idle aristocracy and dehumanized

BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 26 NO 4 269



CINEMA AND THE CITY

labourers quite literal (Leigh and Kenny, 1996, p. 52). The city of the labourers lay

deep underground with its excessive

machinery and Taylorist time management apparatus, while the industrialists occupied a sunlit landscape of towering skyscrapers. When Metropolis was first screened it unsettled the nascent movie industry. Here

was a film with a political outlook, one that was socialist, anti-capitalist and anti-urban in nature, able at the same time to be anti

Nazi and anti-Fascist.

Metropolis dealt with a large number of (not

only urban) issues that had contemporary relevance to a broad audience. Problems

pertaining to the urban poor and social

unrest, generational conflicts, vices and

virtues of technology, and contemporary

doubts about the redeeming power of

religions, were all incorporated into its narrative. The film was predominantly concerned with the city itself, and Fritz Lang admitted that his interest in the visual

imagery of the film had been based on his initial fascination with the skyscrapers of New York which he saw for the first time in 1924 on his first trip there (Neumann, 1996,

p. 34). The city of the elite in Metropolis, was also reflective of many people's shared

fascination with the skyscraper as an icon of

modernity (Neumann, 1996, p. 35).

According to Gold (1985, p. 125), the treatment of the future city needs to be seen

in the light of the cinema's treatment of the

city in general. Throughout its history, the cinema has shared that intellectual bias against the city that has marked contemporary literature and the arts, and espoused the

widely held view that large cities are

alienating and hostile places (Gold, 1985, p. 125). Oswald Spengler's anti-urban notion, where he likens the city to a man-eating monster (Neumann, 1996, p. 34) can also be

applied to Lang's portrayal of the spatial layers of the underground city. In Gold's

words, 'Metropolis was less a prediction of the world of 2000 AD than it was a model of the 1920s scaled up to nightmare propor

tions and overlain with a pastiche of the latest that New York could offer' (Gold, 1985, p. 141). Inevitably, Hollywood had to

respond to this bleak vision of urban modern

ity. fust Imagine (1930) was a less futuristic film that attempted to present the flip side of

Lang's chilling urban vision. Produced by Fox, it was a musical comedy that featured a

skyline in the shape of ever-rising stock charts (Butler in Albrecht, 1996, p. 39).

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) satirized factory conditions in the city and extended the work-slave imagery of Lang to the entire modern industrial, economic and even social system. The dominant system

that Chaplin criticized was Taylorism. Under F.W. Taylor's management system (devised in 1911), factories were managed through a

management method whose fundamental

premise was that industrial work could be

performed more economically by a division of labour, combined with a 'scientific' time motion control. Here, the manufacturing

process was broken down to a single act that

a particular worker repeated over and over

in the course of a workday. Chaplin's criticism of Taylorism seems to be that it

dehumanizes workers and reduces their

function to mechanical tasks that need no

humanity. The Taylorist method allocated

work, specifying not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time

allowed for doing it, leaving no room for the individual worker to develop or innovate

The issues that these films raise have to be looked upon in the context of Utopian and dystopian ideas about the city and

countryside both in America and Europe. In

fact, for many people and cultures par ticularly in early US history and nineteenth

century England, cities were dirty, un

healthy, dangerous and even immoral places (Muzzio, 1996, p. 190). Many of America's best known thinkers like Jefferson, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson and even architects

such as Frank Lloyd Wright expressed great hostility toward the city and urban life in

general (Greer, 1964).





The mid-nineteenth-century notion of the

'Age of the Great Cities' (Williams, 1973, p. 217), where cities and their inhabitants were seen in terms of their novelty and oppo sition to rural dwellers, emphasized the

paradoxes of the urban experience. In the

writings about nineteenth-century London

by such contemporary novelists as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell there is a sense that in the very place and agency of

collective consciousness - the city - there is

an absence of collective feeling (Williams, 1973, p. 215).

What emerged was a dichotomous image not only between city and country, but also

between different parts of the same city: the

city of affluence and capital and the city of the working poor. The East End London of

darkness, oppression and crime could be

contrasted with the gas-lit opulence of a new and improved West End. In many

minds, the sense of 'the great city' was so

overwhelming that its residents were

collectively seen as a crowd, a mass or a

'workforce' (Williams, 1973, p. 222).

Throughout the nineteenth century the

city versus country debate raged, drawing

upon the romantic tradition of the pastoral (Wilson, 1991, p. 27). Defenders of the new industrial urban order equated the urban

with the artistic as well as the domestic

(Wilson, 1991, p. 28). To these defenders, the industrial city emancipated the working class and allowed women the opportunity

to uphold and contribute to bourgeois domestic ideals. At the same time, given

the overcrowding of cities, many reformers

tried to bring the country to the city (Wilson, 1991, p. 29). Many believed that

the ideal antidote to the horrors of the city was a quasi-rural/suburban retreat,

accompanied by the withdrawal of women

from commerce and other employment.

Early nineteenth-century Utopia Victoriana

was a utopia (u-topos, no-place/eu-topia, good place/ude-topia, never-land) of a rosy future where Victorian family values were

preserved and held together by saccharine

sweet male-female relations. Bellamy's

Looking Backward (1887) was a portrayal of such a vision. Although this does not con tinue unchanged from the late nineteenth

century, that vision reappears in post World

War II America, and was depicted in films like It's A Wonderful Life (1946). Central to the

urban/suburban discussion is the role that women were supposed to play. The middle class woman presided over a semi-rural

(suburban) retreat, which was the antidote of the noisy, crowded city that her husband

negotiated each day (Wilson, 1991, p. 45). Since there is no Utopian city without a

dystopian vision, positive and negative images of the city in film are inextricably intertwined. As is obvious, Utopias, when

pushed to their logical conclusion, become

dystopic and, conversely, all dystopias have embedded in them a Utopian dream. Hence, the modern city could not possibly be viewed and understood without the embedded traditions that it seems to have unsettled, and a postmodern urbanism is only possible as a reaction to or a rejection of an en

trenched socially conscious modernity. A postmodern rejection of the state's

modernist experience appears in Terry Gilliam's complex film, Brazil (1985). Brazil is a futuristic film in which the protagonist Sam Lowrey is part of a bureaucratic

apparatus that runs an urban settlement. He

relies primarily on his fantasies for escape from his dreary daily routine. Within the

bureaucracy that Lowrey works for, upward

mobility through the ranks is widely espoused as a goal. The city he lives in is manifest with elements of panopticonic surveillance by an extremely bureaucratic

central authority. Here we may benefit from Foucault's notion of the panopticon, a device by which a central authority watches its subjects, and a constant awareness of

being watched causes these subjects to

regulate their behaviour. Bentham's original design for the panopticon may have been

inspired by Le Vaux's menagerie at Ver sailles (Foucault, in Leach, 1997, p. 361);




CINEMA AND THE CITY

concerned with individualizing observation, with characterization and classification, with

the analytical arrangement of space. It was

also, 'a laboratory; it could be used as a

machine to carry out experiments, to alter

behaviour, to train or correct individuals'

(Foucault, in Leach, 1997, p. 361). In a modernist Utopia with a Fordist economy, state sponsored services required or resulted

in total control of the inhabitants by the state. The city in Brazil, spatially reminiscent of public housing projects, is a Fordist

dystopia where the services are inefficient and cumbersome, and state control is

panoptic. Sam Lowrey's dream world on

the other hand, is one of billowing clouds and the rolling green hills of a pastoral landscape. In short, hope (or a negative Utopia), translates into finding somewhere better to go. The city categorically, is not a desirable place to live and the preferred alternative would be closer to nature.

Another view of the modernity of sur

veillance is depicted in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). The protagonist L.B. 'Jeff' Jeffries (played by Jimmy Stewart) is a

voyeur (Wilson, 1991, p. 73) by dint of an

injured leg, who engages in the act of

watching his neighbours in a city apartment block. In the process, he begins to suspect that one of them may have murdered his

wife. The voyeur sinks into a private realm

exposing the dystopic qualities of clearly demarcated modernist boundaries, in a

sense setting the stage for the panopticonic surveillance of Brazil.

A different type of an American mod

ernity antagonistic to the city can be seen in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which remains an

enduring icon of American culture. In the

film, the protagonist George Bailey (also played by Jimmy Stewart) is part of a small town community called Bedford Falls. This

very Utopian town is contrasted in a night mare sequence where the idealized Middle American small town is supplanted by the wild urban world of Pottersville: a dystopic city centred around a neon lit Main Street of

strip joints, pawnshops and bars. This is a

commercialized, capitalized and vulgarized world. In this film, resolution comes when

George Bailey regains his rightful place in his small town community, thereby typifying a

Utopian ideal of the townsman. This anti urban sentiment is again echoed in the film Batman (1989) when the Joker says of Gotham

City, 'Decent people should not live here.

They'd be happier somewhere else' (tran scribed from movie) (Muzzio, 1996, p. 190).

In the 1960s, a general disenchantment with modernist cities sets in. This negative perception was aided by the ills wrought by the urban renewal project, whether in the

United States or in Europe. The demolition of large parts of traditional old cores and their replacement with faceless, uniform,

urban blocks of public, council housing facilitated the emergence of a cynical atti tude towards modernity and started another

phase in the cinematic modern city. We can see this in two films by France's most

recognized film maker and critic of this

period of modernity. In Mon Oncle (1958), Monsieur Hulot, the

principal protagonist in Jacques Tati's City of Modernity, continues to live in the tradi tional romantic city block while everything around him is changing. Hulot's brother-in law runs a plastics company and lives in an

impractical modern Cubist house. The story revolves round the clash of two worlds, the

old and the new, or Hulot versus Arpel, with Gerard, the little boy (Tati's nephew) providing the link (Penz, 1997). The uni

formity of modernity is critically assessed in this film, in sharp contrast to a film like The

Fountainhead, the seminal cinematic depiction of the architect as God, unchallenged in his modernist vision. Tati's was one of the first subtle critiques of the marriage between urban renewal as a policy (in this case in

France), and modernism as an architectural

ideology that created the banal modern city. Subsequently, Tati gave us Playtime

(1966), a very significant architectural theme movie. Here again the protagonist Hulot,





now a businessman visiting Paris, crosses

paths with a busload of American tourists.

The tourists get lost amongst the uniform

clusters of modern buildings and spaces and

Hulot himself cannot find the man he came

to see, in this transparent maze. Tati built a set with movable skyscrapers to make his

point that Paris is not Paris anymore, it is

part of an anonymous urban edge. The

principal character in this narrative of

cynical modernity is also the camera lens, a

blase (Simmel, in Leach, 1997, p. 73), critical of what he sees, amused though distant.

Tati is a chronicler (a witness) and critic of the architecture of the post-war period, and

as importantly, a humorous observer of its

effect on the culture and on the individual

(Penz, 1997). The only time we see distin

guishable Parisian monuments or elements

in Playtime, is when a glass door opens to

display the Eiffel Tower in ephemeral reflection. The residents of Tativille (Tati's suburb) are portrayed as living on top of one another, occupying glass-like boxes,

watching television(s) in an apartment building that itself resembles a stack of television sets in a store window.

What then is cinematic modernism? If one were to conceptualize these films along a single linear axis of historical periods, three particularly distinct experiences stand

out. The first is a Baudelairian experience that revels in modernity despite all its

oppressions and hardships; bathing the self in the crowded city (Paris) and enjoying its

spectacle are its elements (Berman, 1982, p.

131-171). The flaneur is the principal figure of this modernity: he walks the streets

weaving a descriptive narrative of the city. We can see this in the encounter between

the camera and the street scenes in Berlin-,

the camera is the flaneur. We can also see it

in the encounter between the rich and poor in the spaces of Metropolis. The modernist urban encounter meant a coming together of

the rich and the poor, who acknowledge one

another even though they do not engage one

another within the same space.

A second experience is that of an

industrial, Taylorist modernity where techno

centric tendencies abound, that turn the city into dystopia, again as depicted in Metropolis (1926) and Modern Times. Taylorism, ac

companied by Fordism meant increased

provision of services by the state, but also an

increase in control by it. An obvious result is the emergence of the panopticon as an

interpretive tool of a mid modernity as evidenced in a film like Brazil (1985).

The third experience begins with the mid

twentieth-century moment of high mod

ernism, with its inherent contradictions, as

typified by Tati's cynical critique of modernist aesthetic and blase urbanity in

Mon Oncle and Playtime. This is modernism

pushed to a particular dystopic conclusion. These three experiences are conditions of

modernity that are not necessarily indepen dent of each other, and are situations that

typify the modernist cinematic city.

The Postmodern Cinematic City

The postmodern cinematic city is imbued with the themes of the compression of space and time. Similarly, cinema as an art form has been highly successful both with its

usage of images and its ability to cut back

and forth across time and space; as well as

its simultaneous handling of intertwining and fragmented themes (Harvey, 1989, p. 308). Blade Runner (1982), a film by Ridley Scott about an apocalyptic Los Angeles in

2019, is a very widely discussed postmodern film. The city of the future is depicted as a

scrambling of the most sordid physical aspects of the urban present. A visually stun

ning exercise, the city, is part film noir/part urban jungle. A third world bazaar, where the language in the streets is a strange, immigrant, 'city-speak'.

The main protagonists of the film are a bunch of replicants (androids who look

exactly like humans and are virtually

indistinguishable from them), and Deckerd, the policeman - blade runner (played by




CINEMA AND THE CITY

Harrison Ford). While the masses struggle in the streets of the city, the elite live in

multi-storeyed, luxurious pyramidal struc

tures. The movie concludes with the hero

Deckard and his replicant girlfriend Rachel

escaping out of the city, to the north, where

they are greeted with a burst of daylight for the first time. After the Los Angeles riots, the images from Blade Runner were so

prevalent that Jerry Brown, then governor of

California, commented, 'the spectre of Blade

Runner haunts our cities'. Foucault's idea of

the 'panopticon', a dystopian inevitability in Brazil is also prevalent but in a different way in Blade Runner.

The search for the replicants in Blade Runner depends upon a certain technique of

interrogation, which relies on the fact that

replicants have no real history; since they were genetically created as full adults and lack the experience of a human childhood or other processes of socialization (Harvey, 1989, pp. 311-312). The strongest social bond between Deckerd and the replicants in revolt is the fact that they are both con

trolled and enslaved by a dominant cor

porate power (Harvey, 1989, p. 313). Scenes in Blade Runner provide a privileged tour of the city as sepia-toned and mist

enshrouded, a fully industrial and smog bound expanse which retains a semblance of

a romantic Utopian impulse.

The gaze which enables this powerful space is

augmented by the existence of a second field

defined by the controls and data screens of the

hovercart. These images impose an order on the

movement of the gliding vehicle shown to be

travelling through a traffic corridor whose

existence is invisible to the unaided eye. The

effect is one of scopic and epistemological

pleasure: the viewer sees and deduces how (not to mention that) the future works. One perceives and participates in this temporary alliance

between technology and poetry, this mechanical

ballet. (Bukatman, 1993, pp. 132-133)

Falling Down (1993) is not a film that can

easily be thought of as postmodern but it

fundamentally portrays a postmodern con

dition. The film charts the journey of two

male characters William Foster (played by Michael Douglas) and a retiring police officer

Prendergast (played by Robert Duvall), both of whom are trying to reach 'home'. In

Foster's case, home represents a fantasy, since what he calls 'home' is the house he

used to share with his ex-wife and child, a

family he is legally barred from visiting. In

Predergast's case, going 'home' means going to his paranoiac and unstable wife who has forced him to take up early retirement.

Foster represents an obsolete universal

'Everyman' (read bourgeois white male). He traverses a landscape that he constructs

as fragmented, hostile, violent, unreadable and therefore out of control (Mahoney, 1997,

p. 174). He is displaced both from the public realm as well as the feminized, maternali/od

space that he insists on thinking of as 'home'. He represents 'the great unmarked

or default category of Western culture, the

one that never needed to define itself, the

standard against which other categories have calculated their differences' (Clover, 1993 in Mahoney, 1997, p. 174).

The film Escape from L.A. (1996) casts a stark light on the dilemma of modernist

political legitimacy, which emerges from this increasingly divided society. The pro tagonist here is Snake Plisskin, the anti-hero of Escape from New York (1981), resurrected fifteen years later. Like the earlier film, the

city has been turned into a maximum

security prison for those national criminals deemed incapable of rehabilitation, a site of

expatriation, where criminals are stripped of

citizenship. The city in the film is a vicious

parody of contemporary Los Angeles. However, unlike the portrayal of the city in

Escape from New York, it is no longer clear that the degraded city is any worse than the outside world its existence is meant to

protect. The rest of the United States has

become the suburb to Los Angeles' city. The

leadership of the United States is under a fanatic dictator whose fascist solution is to

expel all foreigners, separatists and morally questionable people and to render them





utterly powerless. Within Los Angeles how

ever, despite the prevalence of countless

gangs and violence, people are free to admit

their identities. In a truly homogenous environment, city

suburbs could conceivably exist as a series

of closed communities connected only by a

common highway system. However, these

disparate communities bump up against one

another in a divisive and often violent way. Much of the negative media attention on

contemporary Los Angeles focuses on issues

of community breakdown leading to the eventual breakout of urban mayhem. Mike

Davis suggests that the cause of race riots in

Los Angeles is the same as that underlying fictional and media views of the city - the fear of race. Davis contends that our gleeful

response to the fictional destruction of Los

Angeles reflects our ongoing desire not only

to isolate ourselves from, but to destroy the

'other' (Davis, 1998, p. 282).

Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing (1989) is a racial tinderbox conceived as a response to the Howard Beach, Queens N.Y, incident in 1986 where three white youths attacked and killed a black man (Muzzio, 1996, p. 203). The city (Brooklyn, New York) des cribed by the movie is one that is extremely fragmented along lines of race. The chara

cters in the movie express their indivi dualized ethnic identities through music and racial role models. The movie itself starts with the song 'Fight the Power' by Public Enemy. Do the Right Thing is a statement on race relations in America and

the impact of the city on its residents

(Pawelczak, 1992, p. 263). This movie was somewhat prophetic in that it was released two years before the L.A. riots that were

sparked off by the Rodney King incident. In all these films, the American city is

being systematically fragmented and

privatized. The new 'public' spaces are new

mega complexes and malls that have

supplanted traditional streets. Instruments

of panoptic surveillance now regulate for

mer spontaneity. Within privatized spaces,

public activities are sorted into strictly functional compartments under the gaze of

private police forces (Davis, 1992, p. 155). Postmodernism in the cinematic medium

must be conceptualized in the continuum of

modernism. Post-Fordism was a reaction to

and a retreat from modernist economic

ideals related to the division of labour

portrayed in Metropolis or It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Postmodernism in its political manifestation is depicted in Blade Runner as control through fragmentation rather than

the regimented order of the modernist

dystopia of Brazil. The fragmentation in Blade Runner is both political as well as

spatial. Here we should remember that

postmodernism in ontological terms embodies a crisis of subjectivity. The postmodern subject is no longer the universal, all

knowing, fixed subject of early modernity. Rather, here the subject is the site of

difference, a difference that in and of itself is

implicated in different sites. Here, the

emergence of Haraway's (1990, pp. 200-220)

cyborg becomes a figure of this post modernity. The cyborg is usually a gender less being, a fusion of human and machine, but one who transcends all categories of

'otherness'. The cyborg and the replicant (as

depicted in Blade Runner), are both figures of

postmodernity; but while the replicant simulates gender or class in different ways,

making it a simulacrum (Harvey, 1989, p. 309). The cyborg, however, cannot be

framed within these categories altogether. Postmodernism in its broader scope, is

the crisis of knowledge and representation. Modernism decrees that the image is reality and the photograph is history. The post modern bind is precisely that we do not know the difference (deprived of a stable, neutral, outside place which may allow us to

explain this difference). The shattering of the Archimedean point that previously offered the subject the possibility of viewing the city as panorama has given way to a frantic montage of images (Soja, 1989, in

Mahoney, 1997, p. 169). Fragmentation has




CINEMA AND THE CITY

meant that we know our worlds in dis

jointed, chaotic ways. Film as a medium does not have the same restrictions as

writing and it is perhaps appropriate that the postmodern crisis has been depicted via this medium.

The post-modern flaneur, still exists. S/he

acknowledges this fragmentation, and yet persists in walking and experiencing the

city, while remarking upon what s/he sees. Here the postmodern narrative techniques,

used by some filmmakers, become as useful

a tool as the depiction of postmodernity in cinema. This is the case with Woody Allen's

seemingly disjointed but very urban films. The portrayal of the city as a place to be lived in and enjoyed appears in his film Manhattan (1981), a story of individuals

living life in a modern city. In it Allen, as the protagonist Isaac Davis, touches every base of white upper-middle-class New York like Bloomingdales, MoMA, Guggenheim, etc (Muzzio, 1996, p. 199). Juxtaposed with this view of New York, is a view of Los

Angeles as a suburban Utopia (to everyone

except the protagonist Alvy Singer, played also by Woody Allen) in Allen's other New York film Annie Hall (1977). Steve Martin's L.A. Story (1991) is about a city that en

courages people to act their most eccentric

selves. It is an open-air fun house where no

urban grunginess is allowed and where

even the muggers are polite. It is here where

we are in the most humorous of situations

that the true possibilities and limits of frag mentation are introduced and somewhat

resolved, leaving us with a choice regarding the nature of the urbanity.

These lighthearted films together with the more bleak ones offer a very complex view

of the two cities. The fragmented Los

Angeles of Blade Runner, a dystopia for its

residents, is a Utopia for the New Yorkers of Annie Hall, since it provides them with the

very fragmentation that they seek without

the spatial order of modern New York. And the depiction of Los Angeles in Annie Hall, vis-a-vis New York in particular, becomes

the utopic counterpart to Blade Runner's ex

tremely dystopic representation of the city. In the late 1990s, the postmodern city

moves from New York and Los Angeles

again to the small town of It's a Wonderful Life but this time it is a manicured post modern New Urbanism. The protagonist in The Truman Show (1998), Truman Burbank

(played by Jim Carrey), is unaware that his life is a soap opera. The city of The Truman

Show, Seahaven, is an enhanced version of

Seaside, Florida, where the movie was in fact filmed. This New Urbanist resort town has been described as a manufactured place

beyond the decay of the older cities, where the well-off can escape to the off-world

colonies of Blade Runner. The staged town

of The Truman Show is a simulated reality within a reality thereby blurring the dis tinctions between the TV show and real life. As the audience begins to identify with the

protagonist, Truman, the film calls into

question our own definition of reality by highlighting the virtues of the virtual city. Here, what is perceived as reality( by the

viewers) is really something learned on TV.

The boundaries between the real and the

staged disappear even for the audience,

taking postmodernity beyond mere frag mentation to a 'third place' (Baudrillard, 1988).

But this postmodern paralysis leads us to

ask, where do we go from here? What could

exist after Blade Runner (Harvey, 1989)? In Wim Wenders' Lisbon Story (1994), the

subject, himself a filmmaker, is scared to shoot since the city he captures on film is not the 'real' city. He believes his hand and his eye corrupt the images he records. The

protagonist in the film is his friend, the

soundman, who wanders about recording another narrative of the city based solely on sound. Here the soundman intervenes to tell

the cameraman/filmmaker that the magic of cinema is this very act of representation. The

filmmaker's returning courage is in many ways a return to modernity. Here again we

can see that postmodern disillusion with





the cinematic city along the axis of Utopian modernity and dystopian postmodernity

urbanity becomes not a decisive break with

modernity, but rather an ambiguous con

tinuity of it. As we traverse this axis from the modern

to the postmodern in all of the above

mentioned films, we come across a sequence of cinematic figures that expose the

modernity-postmodernity, utopia-dystopia continuum. The Blase is a figure whose

essential attitude is one of indifference toward the distinctions between things; a certain mental dullness wherein all ex

perience in the city appears homogenous

(Simmel, in Leach, 1997, p. 72). The Flaneur is a character whose ambivalence toward

the city is played out in his strolling gaze, as he describes the city without fully engaging with it. The modernist cynic, has an amused view of the modern city with its uniform aesthetics. The voyeur is an urban figure who is seduced by the private realm, and

engages with it, while attempting to be invisible himself. Then the camera takes on the roles of some of these characters par

ticularly the voyeur, but it also becomes a

panopticon - an element of surveillance and

control of the city. The figures of postmodernity appear to

be fundamentally different from those of

modernity. The replicant, a simulacrum that

can replicate gender and class, is distinct from the cyborg, which exists outside these

categories altogether. The postmodern flaneur

still exists in the form of Woody Allen's character in films like Annie Hall and Manhattan. He is aware of the fragmenta tion of the city, remarks on it casually, but

enjoys it for what it is. Once he discovers that he is being watched, the main character of The Truman Show becomes a figure of

postmodernity that can control the audience instead of simply being the object of its surveillance. Hence this figure becomes an inverted panopticon. Here the audience loses

any semblance of an Archimedean view

point and the distinction between the real and the virtual disappears. These are figures that help us understand the experiences of

Cinematic Stories

This issue of Built Environment covers various notions of the city: city as small

town, city as centre of civilization, city as

mosaic, city as hell, apocalypse city, city as

hope and city as corporation. The four

essays in this issue allow their writers to

explore in cinematic space cities they know and love. Anthony Sutcliffe's essay 'Cities in the Cinema' is an account of American

cinema and its relationship to Broadway between the late 1920s and the early 1950s. Sutcliffe charts the history of Broadway from its beginnings as an Indian trail

running through Manhattan to its position as one of the main roads in the city, which

persuaded the planning commission in 1811 to retain it as the only winding street in an otherwise uniform grid of roads.

From the first movie to imitate Broadway in cinema, The Jazz Singer in 1927, to Fred Astaire's 1940 Broadway Melody, Broadway was invoked in these films by either copying the form of a musical or by focusing on life behind the scenes as it was experienced in

Broadway. Some films like Forty Second

Street tried to capture the physical ambience

of the area with aerial shots of Broadway

and images of skyscrapers, subway en

trances and elevated tracks of the Great

White Way. However most of these early films showed only a side of Broadway and did not focus on the seedier aspects of

Broadway as a street of vice or crime. More

importantly these films captured little of the actual physical ambience of Broadway, which presented itself to those within it as a

confusing and overcrowded street. Within the

space of cinema Broadway was presented as

a forest of skyscrapers that provide a back

drop for the plot of the movie yet in reality the proportions of the street and the height of the building escaped the gaze of those who were in Broadway.




CINEMA AND THE CITY

Sutcliffe argues that the representation of

Broadway in American cinema between the

1920s and the 1950s was of little use to architects and planners because it masked

the true nature, both physical and social, of

Broadway presenting it as a vibrant street,

glamorous and exciting, with little regard to the reality of its condition as a corridor street that was tremendously congested and

equally unsafe. Ellen Boccuzzi's essay 'Rome: City and

Myth in Fellini's Roma and Jarmusch's Night on Earth' is the unravelling of two cinematic

texts as examined through the lens of

gender and the production of the myth of the city. Boccuzzi unpacks the gender issue in Roma as the body of a city and the body of a woman as two interchangeable sites of

desire as seen through the male gaze. Fellini's Roma is a labyrinthine, subterran ean and feminine space that is static and

alternatively discovered and appropriated by the moving male gaze. Unlike the pro tagonist in the Fellini movie who searches for the feminine core of Rome, in Jarmusch's film the protagonist, Gino is situated within an interior space, the taxicab, but forever

circumventing and reacting to the city from

the outside.

Boccuzzi's essay also deals with the idea

of architecture and urban space as the

producers and propagators of the myth of

Rome. The movie invokes the antiquity of Rome in scenes where the construction crew

that is assigned the task of digging a

subway tunnel under the city, is repeatedly obstructed by various archaeological remains of awesome beauty that disappear the moment they are unearthed. Here is the

idea that the myth of Rome, which pervades the soil of the city, is powerful enough to

quell or at least divert the force of

modernity. However in the end the old city of Rome is appropriated by modernity when a group of men speed through it on their

motorcycles. Illuminated by their motor

cycle headlights, certain parts of the city are

subject to their selection, silenced by the

sound of their vehicles and feminized by their excessive masculinity.

Boccuzzi's essay explores the way the city is constructed through the respective lenses

of two directors each of whom is a

modernist of sorts. She explores the notion

of the fragmented cinematic narrative; a

postmodern representation of the work of a

modernist director. Her essay examines and

compares the framework of different lenses.

Jarmusch's film deals with the other myth of Rome, the sexual myth, as it is played out

against the backdrop of the old city. In the film a collage of modernity, comprising of

vespas and telephone booths, is also show

cased against a somewhat mute facade of the old city. Gino, traverses two landscapes of the city - one real and represented by the

signs in the city and one imagined which are the cultural associations that these signs

bring up in Gino's mind. Susanne Cowan's essay 'A Woman's

Place in Cinematic Space: The Engendered Architecture of the Home' is an exploration in the way women and their relationship to the spaces they inhabit is imaged in America cinema from the 1950s to the late 1990s.

Cowan uses three sites (that of the suburban

home, the ritual of the family dinner, and the accessibility to a car) in four films (A Date zvith your Family, Two Ford Family, The Ice Storm and American Beauty) to critique the

portrayal of women in these films.

In all four films the women characters maintain a peculiar relationship with their suburban homes in that while it is tradi

tionally seen as their realm, where they have most control, it also binds them to their traditional role as homemaker. The ideal suburban family is typified by the dream suburban home, the upkeep of which rests with the mother of the suburban family. This remains true in the 1950s when she is the housewife and in the late 1990s when she tries in vain to juggle the multiple re

sponsibilities as wife, mother, professional, cook and housekeeper.

This desire to maintain the mask of





suburban happiness is typified by the ritual of the family dinner. While in A Date With Your Family the family meal is seen as the

extremely oppressive space where women

are meant to be seen and not heard, in The

Ice Storm and American Beauty the ritual of

dinner slowly collapses into opportunities for the women characters to vent their

frustrations. In the later films the flimsy facade of dinner etiquette is repeatedly interrupted and ruptured by the irreverence

and violence that the family members show

towards each other. These films also reveal

the significance of the car and the role it

plays in keeping women tied to very rigid definitions of gender.

In the Two Ford Family the woman is offered freedom from her isolation and

immobility not in any real way but rather in the panacea of a car. In The Ice Storm it is the women who remain bound within the

enclave of the suburbs without the privilege of mobility which is solely enjoyed by the male characters. The protagonist of American

Beauty on the other hand finds both refuge and power in her car but even this is only

temporary because in the end the car only serves to deliver her to her prescribed roles

as the mother at a pep rally or housekeeper in her suburban home. Susanne Cowan ex

plores the vehicles by which one experiences the city (or in this case, its suburban

periphery); the car, the house, the dining table, while focusing on two films both of which highlight the modernity/post modernity, core/periphery discourse.

In The Marginalized American City' Caitlin Dyckman examines two films, Devil's Advocate and Magnolia, and their common theme of the loss in human values related to

the absence of the city and its physical manifestations in time and space. By invoking seminal texts such as Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism, and

Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Dyckman argues that the social dislocation and isolation that is

experienced by the characters in the films is

a result of the city that ceases to function as

a place for meaningful human contact or

exchange. Urban space or the physical form

of the city is conspicuously either absent or

marginalized suggesting the characters

decline into greed, self-preservation and

immorality. Dyckman also examines the two movies

within the tropes of modernity, post modernity and supermodernity and how these notions are manifested within the forms of each of the movies. Magnolia and Devil's Advocate both play with the modern ist ideal of uniformity and mass production that denies individuality. These two films

critique that ideal by suggesting that modernism when it is not tempered with humanism begins a dangerous isolation of the individual from society and community. Magnolia's story line carries with it a very postmodern character in that it weaves in

and out of sub-plots that are situated within the framework of a larger narrative. Devil's

Advocate does the same in that the linear

form of the narrative is intercepted in the

beginning by an intense flash forward that reveals the entire story line in a few seconds.

The concept of supermodernism is mani fest in both cinematic texts in the lack of relation between space and place. In both

movies the characters lose their frame of

self-reference because they are unable to

relate to a sense of place. A supermodernism is manifest in these films in that the characters in these films are situated within a non-place where they are unable or

unwilling to define themselves. Dyckman explores the notion of 'hell' within the city in the context of a socio-economic structure;

'the lurking Devil within the self' typifies its

dystopic potential. Sutcliffe and Boccuzzi both examine

modernist representations of the city. Sutcliffe explores a representation of Broad

way that suited the motives of the story tellers and one that had little to do with the 'real' Broadway. Boccuzzi examines repre

sentations of a city that are themselves




CINEMA AND THE CITY

modernist, although portrayed through a

director's postmodern lens. Cowan and

Dyckman explore the dystopic nature of

Utopian urban ideals; Cowan by the clear

dystopic inversion of the Utopian suburb, and Dyckman, by emphasizing the city's absence.

All the films that we discuss in this issue, either reveal the dystopic potential of mod ernist Utopias, or present a postmodernist

fragmentation that cannot be understood

without the embedded assumption of modernist desires. I have increasingly come

to believe that our understanding of the city cannot be viewed independently of the cinematic experience. Jean Baudrillard's notion of starting from the screen and

moving to the city accepts a duality between the real city and the reel city that no longer exists. I propose instead that in order to understand this relationship, we start not

from one and move to the other, but do both

simultaneously.

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FILMS

American Beauty (1999) directed by Sam Mendes.

Annie Hall (1977) directed by Woody Allen.

Batman (1989) directed by Tim Burton.

Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) directed by Walther Ruttman.

Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott

Broadway Melody (1940) directed by Norman Tauroq

Brazil (1985) directed by Terry Gilliam

Devil's Advocate (1997) directed by Taylor Hackford.

Do the Right Thing (1989) directed by Spike Lee.

Escape from L.A. (1996) directed by John Carpenter.

Escape from New York (1981) directed by John

Carpenter.

Falling Down (1993) directed by Joel Schumacher.

Forty-Second Street (1933) directed by Lloyd Bacon.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946) directed by Frank Capra.

Just Imagine (1930) directed by David Butler.

Lisbon Story (1994) directed by Wim Wenders.

L.A. Story (1991) directed by Mick Jackson.

Magnolia (1992) directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Manhattan (1981) directed by Woody Allen.

Metropolis (1926) directed by Fritz Lang.

Modern Times (1936) directed by Charles Chaplin.

Mon Oncle (1958) directed by Jacques Tati.

Night On Earth (1992) directed by Jim Jarmusch.

Playtime (1966) directed by Jacques Tati.

Rear Window (1954) directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Roma (1972) directed by Federico Fellini.

Taxi Driver (1978) directed by Martin Scorcese.

The Fountainhead (1949) directed by King Vidor.

The Ice Storm (1997) directed by Ang Lee.

The Jazz Singer (1927) directed by Alan Crosland.

The Truman Show (1998) directed by Peter Weir.




Documents

Utopia and Cinema