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    F i l m - P h i l o s o p h y
    ISSN 1466-4615
    http://www.film-philosophy.com
    Volume 3  Number 39
    September 1999

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    Deborah L. Parsons

    Urban Montage



_The Cinematic City_
Edited by David B. Clarke
London: Routledge, 1997
ISBN 0-415-12746-7 (pbk)
252 pp.

There is little sign of any abatement to the flood of studies on urban
culture that front publishers' catalogues each year, and yet there always
seems to be room for more. Collecting together eleven essays by literary,
film, cultural studies, geography, and urban planning scholars, David
Clarke's _The Cinematic City_ moves beyond standard studies of the
representation of the city in film to consider the relationship between
urban space and 'cinematic' form. Although I am slightly dubious about
Clarke's claim that this is a previously overlooked issue -- excellent
studies by Anne Friedberg (1993) and one of Clarke's own contributors,
Giuliana Bruno (1993), as well as Leo Charney's edited collection _Cinema
and the Invention of Modern Life_ (1995), offering stimulating accounts of
the status of the cinema as part of the experience of modernity -- his
volume certainly contributes to the field, extending discussion to the
postmodern and contemporary city. Publishers are probably right to be wary
of collected essays, but when designed and edited well they make excellent
introductory and stimulatory texts, and Routledge did well to back this
one. From early meta-texts of the city in film, such as Fritz Lang's
_Metropolis_ (1926) and Walter Ruttmann's _Berlin, Symphony of a City_
(1927), to more recent films such as Ridley Scott's _Blade Runner_ (1982)
and Joel Schumacher's _Falling Down_ (1992), considered through the context
of cultural and spatial theory, _The Cinematic City_ provides an excellent
introduction to key texts for the study of film and the city, and to
current theoretical issues within film and urban studies.

The underlying thesis of the volume is that 'the city has undeniable been
shaped by the cinematic form, just as cinema owes much of its nature to the
historical development of the city' (2), an argument that, as Clarke
recognises in his introduction, was already a fundamental aspect of the
work of Walter Benjamin over half a century ago (and also his Frankfurt
School colleague, Siegfried Kracauer). Indeed much of Clarke's commentary
draws on Benjamin's much discussed and much debated metaphor for urban
modernity, the flaneur, whose wandering scopophilia emerges with the
conditions and landscape of the metropolis and predicts the perceptive mode
and apparatus of the film camera. For cinema not only represented the
changes of modern urban life, it also provided a new perceptual framework
through which it could be articulated. Analysis of Benjamin alongside the
insights of film theory highlights the correspondence between the
perception of urban space by the cinema-goer and the 'experiences offered
by the flickering, virtual presence of the city' (10).

This aspect of Clarke's argument is stimulating and rewarding, yet I am
less satisfied by the rather vague discussion of postmodernity and the
cinema, which seems to blur with that of modernity without satisfactorily
developing a contextualised understanding of either differences or
progression between the two. The references to spatiality in the work of
Baudrillard, Derrida, and Lefebvre offer interesting directions for further
reading and reflection, but it is never made fully clear if they are meant
to imply a newly postmodern 'cinematic'. Do the conditions of postmodern
urbanism result in a new mode of perception for example, represented in and
influenced by new forms of cinema presentation and reception? Moreover, are
there spatial phenomena characteristic of some cities more than others
(even within the Western world, might U.S. and European cities be distinct
in their postmodern development) that will influence different systems of
viewing? I also feel that, given Clarke's focus on the flaneur, it is
somewhat surprising that he neglects to mention Michel De Certau's elegant
correlation of pedestrian and linguistic form into a spatial poetry of the
city (De Certau, 1984). For although the single essay only affords limited
space, De Certau's analysis of the everyday social experience of space as
one defined by a mobile perspective is surely invaluable for Clarke's
discussion of 'previewing' the city.

Apart from these quibbles of omission, the essays themselves do cover an
impressive range of issues. Amongst the highlights of the collection is
Giuliana Bruno's study on the filmic portrayal of Naples and the screening
of the films by prominent Neapolitan film-maker Elvira Notari in New York
in the 1920s. Stating that 'Notari's films substituted motion pictures for
memory' (53), Bruno argues that the screening of these female melodramas,
set against a panoramic backdrop of the southern Italian city, provided a
space of public community for their Italian immigrant audiences, and an
imaginative link with the geographical space of their homeland. John Gold
and Stephen Ward's essay on the urban documentary between 1939 and 1952
also takes an interesting and original focus, analysing the positive
representation of slum clearance programmes and the promotion of the garden
city in government-funded films in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, as well
as highlighting the use of the cinema medium to interest the population in,
and promote, policies for town planning.

A number of contributions concentrate on dystopic visions of the city in
film, for example Frank Krutnik's discussion of the Hollywood noir thriller
as a means of articulating a crisis of spatial and psychological
indeterminacy and sense of disorder in urban America of the 1940s and
1950s, which itself provides a useful introductory background for Marcus A.
Doel and David B. Clarke's re-reading of the neo-noir or tech-noir
archetype, _Blade Runner_. Rejecting the mythologising of _Blade Runner_ as
a paradigm of the postmodern epoch, Doel and Clarke argue convincingly that
the film is predicated in conventional modernist assumptions of race,
gender, class and biological difference, and offers an ultimately
reactionary extrapolative account of only 'a trying rather than a malicious
world' (151). With the questioning of a postmodern 'cinematic' by Doel and
Clarke, at least with regard to _Blade Runner_, the possibility of such a
concept becomes a focal point of the closing essays of the volume.
Elisabeth Mahoney's critique of the gendering of space within the city, for
example, calls for a new subjectivity and new imaginary specific to the
experience of postmodernity, but argues that its emergence is dependent on
the breakdown of the conventional framing of space in terms of a system of
social binary oppositions, and the rejection of the modernist metanarrative
of ways of looking, both of which, she states, remain powerfully persistent.

Somewhat disappointingly, however, in view of the promises of Clarke's
introduction, the volume does not entirely fulfil its aim to engage with
the relationship of the city and the 'cinematic', the latter term rarely
extending beyond reference to what is actually 'cinema'. As the commentary
above reveals, the essays deal principally with examples of films and film
production, rather than with what 'cinematic' actually implies -- that
which is cinema-like, or has the qualities of the cinema. Studies of early
film, for example (Elsaesser and Barker, 1990; Hansen, 1991; and recently
Rossell, 1998), have highlighted the importance of optical entertainments
such as the magic lantern, stereoscope, and Phenakistoscope as precursors
of the film medium, but also influential in the development of a
'cinematic' consciousness and aesthetic across genres. It is not until
James Hay's excellent penultimate essay, 'What Remains of the Cinematic
City', that an attempt to address the concept of the 'cinematic' is
offered. In a reflective account on the position and practice of cinema
studies a century after the showing of the first moving pictures, Hay
suggests that study of the 'cinematic' should involve 'considering the
place(s) of film practices within an environment and their relation to
other ways of organizing this environment', and an inter-disciplinary
approach to an 'understanding of cinema or the field of social relations
wherein cinema could be said to have had effects' (211-212). His lucid
account stems from a discerning belief in the need to understand cinema in
terms of practice rather than as a historical and self-contained object,
and the criticism that cinema studies has still not yet focused on 'the
relationship between the cinematic and an environment as mutually
determining and constitutive' (223) with a similar degree of analysis to
that applied by cultural geography, architecture, and urban studies. I am
not entirely convinced that _The Cinematic City_ as a whole achieves Hay's
goal, but, this said, it certainly has the right intentions and will act as
a stimulating example for future studies.

Overall I recommend _The Cinematic City_ as a highly accessible book, and a
requisite for any reading list in film, cultural, and urban studies. The
individual essays are both informative and innovative, and accompanied by a
generous number of illustrative stills (crucial for a text of this kind),
along with a usefully comprehensive bibliography for further reading at the
end of Clarke's introductory essay. Clear and informative, with theoretical
issues combined with case study commentary, it will undoubtedly prove a
popular reference text for undergraduates, teachers, and researchers alike.

University of Birmingham, England


Bibliography

Bruno, Giuliana, _Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the
City Films of Elvira Notari_ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1993).

Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz, _Cinema and the Invention of Modern
Life_ (London: University of California Press, 1995).
--- _Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift_ (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998).

De Certau, Michel, _The Practice of Everyday Life_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).

Elsaesser, Thomas and Adam Barker, _Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative_
(London: British Film Institute, 1990).

Friedberg, Anne, _Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).

Hansen, Miriam, _Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film_
(Cambridge, Mass.: University of Harvard Press, 1991).

Orr, John, _Cinema and Modernity_ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).

Rossell, Deac, _Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies_ (New York, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1998).

Selby, Spencer, _Dark City: the Film Noir_ (London: St James, 1984).


Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 1999

Deborah L. Parsons, 'Urban Montage', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 39,
September 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/parsons.html>.

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