City and Film

City modernism

Urban sociology – city a public / private

-       Postmodernism city = individual relation to the crowed

Greg Simmel – 1895-1918 - Metropolis and mental life.

The effect a built environment has on an individual

Herbert Beyer 1932

Lewis Hine photography

- Individual resistance to the city

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) – creator of modern skyscraper

"Form ever follows function"

Guaranty Building layout 

Skyscrapers – to represent power/the American dream and opportunity – big building big company ‘aspiration buildings’

Manhattan (1921)- Paul Strand and Charles Scheler – photograph of Ford Company at river rouge.

Fordism: - effect of factory on workers? Paid enough to buy goods?

Modern times - Charlie Chaplin (1936)

Society – his body is consumed by machine – the working age

Stock Market crash (1929) – lead to the great depression

French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer’’

A person who walks through the city to experience it - Art captivation

Walter Benjamin - adopts urban observer concept

‘Arcades project’ -1927-40

The photographer as a flaneur

-       Susan sontag – photographer – especially in street photography photographer is ‘urban observer’

flaneuse

Invisible flaneuse – women and modernity

Susan buck-Morris = the dialect of seeing – arcade project

Text is suggestive that a woman on a street is either prostitute or bag lady

albus/hopper – photographs of women sitting alone – lost/trauma

Failure – despair – feelings of failure – a lonely woman – prostitute?

Don't look now 1973 - Nicholas Roeg. 

Hiring of detective but subject reverses role to lead to poiniont places of reference

Lorca di Carcia Heads (2001) NY – illumination of individuals – setting out from the crowd – creates drama on that person

Alone in the crowd till singled out some way

A lawsuit was brought against him for exhibiting a photo of someone without his or her permission.  The judge dismissed it as protected by the First Amendment.

Surveillance city – heightened security after 9/11