CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY
PART-I
Dr. Nilgun
Bayraktar
HUM 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 elsewhere 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).
modern experience
movement
&
vision
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 GeorgesEugène 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 Tower
emblem 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.
"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 aesthetics
The 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