CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITYPART-I

CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITYPART-I

Dr. Nilgun BayraktarHUM 102

Spring 2014

The founding myth of cinema, or the “train effect”

• Paris as the site of the founding myth of cinema: “On December 28, 1895, cinema begins in the basement of the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris.”

The Lumière Brothers• Two French

engineers who invented the cinematographic process and gave the first public film projection in 1895

• They produced many non-fictional or “actuality” films that showed ordinary aspects of everyday life

CINEMATOGRAPH

• “In L’Arrivée d’un train, the locomotive, coming from the background of the screen, rushed toward the spectators, who jumped up in shock, as they feared getting run over.” (Georges Sadoul)

Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) by Lumière Brothers

Truchet’s poster for the Cinématographe Lumière screening in 1895

train affect: urbanity, speed, cinema, and the city

• “The on-rushing train did not simply produce the negative experience of fear but the particularly modern entertainment form of the thrill, embodied else- where in the recently appearing attractions of the amusement parks (such as the roller coaster), which combined sensations of acceleration and falling with a security guaranteed by modern industrial technology” (Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 1989).

movement&

vision

modern experience

modernity-cinema

• the rise of a metropolitan urban culture leading to new forms of entertainment and leisure activity

• the centrality of the body as the site of vision, attention, and stimulation

• the recognition of a mass public, crowd, or audience

• the impulse to define, fix, and represent isolated moments in the face of modernity's distractions and sensations (i.e. photography or poetry)

• the increased blurring of the line between reality and its representations

• the surge in commercial culture and consumer desire

Early film in cities and cities in early film

• Artistic and technological exchange also took place between London, Berlin, Moscow, and New York

• The growth of cinema--the growth of cities

• The development of movie theaters as urban sites of entertainment and distraction

Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris in 19th century

• Urban reconstruction turned Paris into an emblem of modernity by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann

• Transformation of the city from an organically grown town to a planned metropolis

• A vertically organized city--the underground world of sewer systems and later subways embodied a hidden modernity

old Paris

New Paris

Haussmann's boulevards crisscross Paris, seen from the top of the Tour Montparnasse

Eiffel Toweremblem of modernity

Modernity and the City Film Berlin

• In Germany, the genre of city film emerged during the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first and ill-fated democracy, from 1919 to 1933.

• Modernity was simultaneously experienced as violent shock and embraced for its technological and aesthetically innovative opportunities.

Berlin 1926

Street Cafe and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, 1920-1929

Berlin in the 1920s

City Film in Weimar Republic• A growing fascination with metropolitan motifs, motion, and

development

• The assumption that the camera could capture visual evidence of a city

• Karl Grune’s The Street (1923), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Robert and Curt Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1928), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Fritz Lang’s M (1931)

• Themes: crime, anonymity, a loosening of morality, unemployment, and class struggle; movement, speed, entertainment, and liberated erotics

Theories of Modernity and Urbanity

• Thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, who had a keen interest in the city and the cinema, insisted that modernity must be understood in terms of a fundamentally different subjective experience, characterized by the physical and perceptual shocks of the modern urban environment

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

“The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)

by Georg Simmel

• “The rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impression: These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life” (Simmel, 1903).

• “The metropolitan type” is characterized by a rational and intellectual response to uprootedness, the increased speed of information and impressions, and the “intensification of nervous stimulation.”

''Horse Smashed Cable Car Window," New York World, 1897.

''Horse Smashed Cable Car Window," New York World, 1897.

"When Unlicensed Chauffeurs Are Abroad," Cartoons, 1913.

Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

(1927)• Images, events, and

encounters seen as representative of urbanism become the raw material of the film

• It reproduces the sensory experience of the city through its “associative montage,” a method which can capture the fragmented aspects of modern life in the metropolis

Modernist aestheticsThe city symphony

• Berlin: Symphony of a Great City responds to experience of modernity as fragmented and abstract through its aesthetic choices of editing, rhythm, and rejection of traditional narrative