2|SPACE | POWER | CINE-CITY

SM3138 | Sem B, 2015 | School of Creative Media |Prof SHANNON WALSH

THIS WEEK

We will move through a number of topics today:

• Why are cities important?

• Cities, Everyday life and Space as Relation(s)

• Cognitive Mapping Practices

• “Site-Seeing & the Cine-City”

• Film: “Los Angeles Plays itself”

• Group Discussion

1| THE CITY & EVERYDAY LIFE

Why are cities important?

For the first time in human history a majority of the world live in cities.

• 70% of people on the planet live in cities

• 3.5 billion people live in cities, rising to 6.4 billion in the next 40-50

years

Studying Cities & Everyday Life….

Whilst initially rooted in human geography, the inquiry posed by

everyday life and the spaces of social reproduction, have

gathered diverse kinds of theorizing touching on anthropology,

economics, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, urban planning,

etc.

Studying Cities

Urban studies scholars from Jane Jacobs to Bruno LaTour, and human geographers, such as David Harvey and Neil Smith, have tackled questions around the city as a site where contestations and antagonisms around existing social inequalities operate, and the effects emanating from scale.

Exploring questions of globalization and political economy, theorists have also grappled with the effects across and between scale, territory and capital (Saskia Sassen, Anthony Gidden, Manuel Castells, Amartya Sen).

In cultural studies, theorists have challenged ideas around representation and cultural production in lived spaces of the city globally (Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttal).

Hong Kong's sky slums highlight wealth gap

In the same city: $640,000 Parking Space & Slums created on top of high-

rise buildings

Survival strategies used by marginalized populations as weapons of resistance and adaptation (Rao 1991, Scott 1989, Deleuze & Guattari 1987).

Space is a Relation

As Henri Lefebvre argued (1971), social and spatial relations are interdependent, and often reproduce the existing system of power relations.

The way in which people use space, then, becomes a political and social question, as usage forms a circulation of affects on a given territory.

A territory is not just a collection of people and objects, but it is constructed through practices that are suitable to a society's particular historic needs(Lefebvre 1971).

These practices are often managed and reproduced by those holding power, and also exploded by those who resist (Harvey 2006; Scott 1985).

Space, then, is a key terrain in which people construct themselves and their life-worlds, describing what various scholars have terms ‘habitus’ or forms-of-life (Bourdieu 1990; Agamben 1998).

Space as Relation

Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant detention

(Tings Chak, 2014)

Everyday Practices

Space, then, is bounded and defined by the ways in which people

experience and use it. (deCerteau 1984; Vaneigem 2006)

Attention must be paid to situating knowledge in the struggles and

contestations of marginal, indigenous, and others who’s voices are

often excluded from dominant narratives. This is done through

attention to narratives and practices that emerge in space, and in

sites of contestation. (Bourdieau 1990, Spivak 1987; Said 1978)

Meanings & Attachments

Going further, other scholars looked at how space is created

by the ‘fields of care’ or the meaning and emotional

attachment imbued into it through the affective bonds and

associations made by people living there (Tuan 1977; Thrift

2008).

But spaces should not be considered as a blank slate for

affective desires; they are also the sites of institutional and

structural oppressions and the political, social and economic

relations that animate them (Massey 1994).

What do we learn?

Cities create and reproduce many elements of power through

everyday relations:

Inequalities (class, ethnic, gender, sexuality)

Migrations and movement

Conflicting histories & knowledge from above and below

2| Mapping

Langlands and Bell, Air routes of the World by night, 2001

Every map is

someone’s way of

getting you to look at

the world his or her

way.

-Lucy Fellowes, Smithsonian

curator, quoted in Henrikson 1994

Surveillance Camera Players, 2001 / 2005

Bill Bunge – Radical Cartography

“Maps attempt to integrate over time, that is, maps assume an average span of time. This means that nothing that moves is mapped, and therefore property is inherently preferred over humans…In order to restore truth to the map it is necessary to achieve a fiction of accuracy through an assumption, namely that the map is drawn at an exact instant of time. In this case, the time is June 20, 1915 at 2 p.m. on a sunny day. This fiction freezes the men and horses on the roads, the strawberry pickers in the fields, as well as the crops in rotation and the animals in pasture. This restores life to the dead map of property.”

– Bill Bunge, Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution,1971

Bill Bunge

Denis Wood

A NARRATIVE ATLAS OF

BOYLAN HEIGHTS

Inspired by Bill Bunge’s radical

cartography in the 1960s and

1970s, the atlas contains

diverse examples of creative,

place-inspired maps, including

maps of night, crime, fences,

graffiti, textures, autumn

leaves, routes, the

underground, lines overhead,

stars, and jack-o-lanterns.

MARLENE CREATES:THE DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS IS MEASURED IN MEORIRES, 1988

FILM DIRECTOR DAVID LYNCH’S MAP OF TWIN PEAKS

In 1957, sociologist, Paul Henry De Lauwe mapped the movements of a student made over one

year. Her Paris itinerary formed a small triangle with no significant deviations showing the

narrowness of the city in which each individual lives out their lives.

Site-Seeing: The Cine City

Along with various scholars, art, film and architecture have been

fundamental to ways of understanding and relating to the city.

“A product of the era of the metropolis and its transits, film

expressed an urban viewpoint from its very inception.” (Bruno 18)

“Since the beginning of the twentieth century…the

screen…became the city square” Paul Virilio

• Bird’s eye view, Overhead shots, Panaroma perspectives, The

Phantom train, Street motion of urban strolling

“If the urban landscape is a product of the city’s own mapping, it

is also a creative of its filmic incarnations, for these, too become

part of its geography.” (27)

“Film shared much in common with this geography of travel culture…particularly linked to notions of flanerie, urban ‘streetwalking’…

• Wandering not just gazing

• The railway passenger, the urban stroller, the female spectator…

The Cine City

A LABORATORY OF CITY FILMS

• METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang, 1927

• PARIS QUI DORT, Rene Clair 1923

• THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, Dziga Vertov, 1929

• SUNRISE, F.W. Murnau, 1927

“Urban Dream Machine”

“Utopians and dystopias of the machine age uniting the city and film”

Metropolis, Fritz Lange, 1927

Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987

“The film is…an architectural document of a city that no longer exists; with the passage of time, it turns ever more into a work of mourning.” 34

Chung King Express, Wong Kar-Wai, 1994

“Portraits of a city that turn the screen into a moving canvas”…

Thom Anderson, 2004, 169 min

A "city symphony in reverse" (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself dismantles not only popular stereotypes about The City of Angels, but also its most famous trademark, Hollywood. Packed with clips from nearly 200 films set in Los Angeles (not L.A., the nickname despised by the film's narrator), Andersen's immersive cine-essay divides and examines the city threefold: as background, character and subject. Drawing us into a fanatical, almost secret urban history Los Angeles Plays Itself is at once a hilarious travelogue and mesmerizing experience.

Cognitive & Emotional Mapping

1. Form groups of 5-6.

2. Discuss different ways the campus can be experienced, and generate ideas of how these experiences can be represented via a map/maps.

3. Try to link your ideas to an emotion or concept (ie. Love, Fear, Trouble, Power, Wonder) or to a physical reality (sockets, screens, hallways)

4. Spend the next 30 minutes exploring the area, collecting materials for your maps and prepare to present your ideas to the rest of the group.

5. Record your map – on paper/on your phones/via photographs, or any other way you see fit. It is up to you how you choose to organise yourselves in your group – however, it is important that each person has a role!

You may, for example, use or think about:•found objects•photographs or filmed footage (on your mobile phones)•Signs•Senses and perceptions•Routes, patterns and forms of navigation