COP 2: Cities and Film notes

Modernism, urban society, lecture notes

Dresden Exhibition 1903 
Georg Simmel, a german sociologist, was asked to give a lecture on the role of intelligent life in the city but instead reversed the idea to the effect of the city on an individual. This relates to urban sociology. The resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social, the technological mechanism.

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856 - 1924)  was the creator of the modern skyscraper, it was a practical design with a simple interior however the outside detail related to the arts and crafts movement rather than modernism. The fire in 1871 made way for more buildings in which he could create.

Manhatta 1921 - Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler
Sheeler dived into industrial environments - modernism, compositions of shapes relating to a more abstract structure.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theoretician, turns the worker into part of the machine, much like the cogs that would make the machine function. Relating to this subject, Charlie Chaplin created a political comment in the film, Modern Times. Stock Market Crash 1929, unemployment goes up, leading to the 'Great Depression'. "The Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) looked into the term of flaneur, french masculine for 'stroller'. A means to stroll, a way of investigating people and the affects of the city. A person who gathers information for artistic work, an observer, holds a certain detachment to the city. Walter Benjamin, took this term and used it as an urban concept for an analytical tool and as a lifestyle seen in his writings. The street photographer is seen as a modern day version of the urban observer. Sontag records and captures city life through the use of photography, 'a stolen moment in the bustle of the city'.The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. Daido Monyama 1970's, Shinjku district of Tokyo - Captures the dark side to the city, exposes himself to this material of life. Janet Wolff, The invisible Flaneuse, Mainly all men, separates the genders. Susan Buck Moss, suggests the only woman figure you see on a street is either a 'bag lady' or a prostitute, a dark perception on city life and how the public perceive others. Sophie Calle, "Suite Venitienne" (1980) - Calle would follow people that she would see on the street and photograph their journey until she lost sight of them, in which she would then forget them and find another person to photograph without their knowledge. I found this quite interesting through how the photography recorded was essentially the only information that you would have of the person Calle would have been following, the clothing and the places that the individual visits being the only defining thing for their identity. Venice - City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time you always end up back to where you began. - This form of narrative and movement with in the city of Venice, creates a suffocating and claustrophobic atmosphere for the audience, the idea of not being able to escape the maze of the streets. The Detective (1980) - Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence. She pays a detective to follow a woman, taking photography and notes, in which she then takes photography of the detective, in which she purposely takes photography - leading him to places that mean something to her, an interpretation of a love story. Cindy Sherman - Here is New York Documentation of Photography after and during 9/11 - Not professionals but others as well, the public who captured photography of the event. Could buy prints and money was donated. Wee Gee (Arthur Felig) - Uncanny ability to find these scenes, interpreted that he had a police car radio and was able to get there before the police, to be able to take photography of the graphic scenes before him. A dark side of the city in which he was situated in - consumed by this obsession. Lorca Di Corcia - 'Heads' 2001 New York - Lost in thought images in which she took of unsuspecting individuals on the street, was dramatic, a powerful image - look as if they had been staged. However she was taken to caught due to not getting permission for taking photography of one of the people that she photographed. Thomas Ruff - Pixelates images of 9/11, replaying and reinterpreting the footage and creating imagery from which. Liz Wells makes a film where she runs the 9/11 footage backwards were the building seems to piece back together. She then took her work further by documenting cities, 7/7 bombers through mobiles and surveillance - unseen.