Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema

Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural divide; cities and gendered, racial, and class divides; urban planning and urban space; film as a particular medium, with specific parameters, in the broader age of media; film as mass entertainment and as revolutionary propaganda. Even with this wide range of topics and their themes, there are many more to be explored, herein and elsewhere, so complex and rich are the relations of the urban to the cinematic.

Apropos of its history as a medium, cinema emerged in the West in the late nineteenth century, but this new technology and art form spread quickly to other parts of the world, assuming almost immediately an indelibly transnational character.^[1] This multifaceted and migrating history underscores how there is not necessarily a singular modernity but multiple modernities in a wide range of non-Western and global geographic contexts.^[2] Film scholars subsequently sought to grapple with film’s encounters with modernity in many locations, and in many modalities, around the world.^[3] The essays in this issue examine the cinematic depictions of life in major cities around the world, including Paris, Hong Kong, Beijing, São Paulo, Beirut, Agadir, Algiers, and New Orleans. These settings and, very often, locations engage but also complicate important cinematic and national traditions such as those of France, China, Brazil, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, and the United States. The contributors analyze the promises as well as pitfalls of modernity throughout global film history on various sites at various moments and at various scales. Altogether, the essays provide a selective yet comprehensive mapping of the entangled relationship between the historic city, modernity, and the remaking of the urban at the contemporary moment of world cinema.

The modern city and cinema have been co-constitutive since the beginning of world film history. In their nineteenth-century emergence, modern cities were essential to the “invention” of cinema as modern technology, cultural form, and social experience. By the 1920s, the bustling city itself had become a crucial subject as well as protagonist for cinema, for example, in such influential works as so-called “city films” like Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Walter Ruttmann, 1927),^[4] or as the centerpiece of pioneering science-fiction works like Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).^[5] In Dziga Vertov’s documentary Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929), the major cities of the Soviet Union in its early years come to the filmic fore: the spectators witness the wonders of lively urban life in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov. In all of these now canonical works, early films’ “cinema of attractions”—when absorbed into longer-term, more complex depictions of the city—offers the spectators a panoply of myriad urban pleasures.^[6] City-set films depict the movements of the human body and the registers of human perceptions of space, time, and world against the urban context. This tension comprises the widely cited experience of walking, or of flânerie, in the city—often unfolded in a highly gendered mode.^[7] Such cinematic renditions of humanity against urbanity occur and shift in a long historical arc over a variety of types, as Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice have observed, “from the de-individualized abstract forms of Vertov and Ruttmann to the palpable and textured flesh which marks the films of Wong Kar-wai and Spike Lee . . . or, in the realm of perception, in the gulf between the modernist faith in the power of the visible to produce reliable knowledge epitomized by Vertov’s ‘kino-eye’ and the disillusion and dislocation of the postmodern filmic image in Wenders or Atom Egoyan.”^[8]

As feature films developed into their recognizably “classical” form in the 1910s and 1920s, cinema as a kind of “vernacular modernism” increasingly established a venue not only for mass entertainment in the age of mechanical reproduction but also for social debate and critical reflection in the public sphere.^[9] In Germany, for example, genre representations like The Street (Die Straße, Karl Grune, 1923) or Metropolis gave way to the more political city of the Brechtian Kuhle Wampe, or: To Whom Does the World Belong (Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Slatan Dudow, 1932), The Three-Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper, G. W. Pabst, 1931), or M (Fritz Lang, 1931). Even in the far-flung peripheral region of the modern capitalist world system such as China, cinema played an important role in the formation of a functional public sphere. Goddess (Shennü, Wu Yonggang, 1934) is such a film about urban culture in the great Eastern metropolis Shanghai. The film’s subject matter about a prostitute/single mother lends itself to a platform for Chinese citizens in the Republican Era (1912–1949) with debates about social tolerance, intolerance, inclusion, exclusion, stigmatization, and modern society—all while exploring the city in a highly gendered mode. Yet these films, styled to unfold debates in civil society, soon give in to a heated rhetoric about class consciousness and social inequality in films set in Shanghai, such as Street Angel (Malu tianshi, Yuan Muzhi, 1937), one of China’s first talkies and a classic of the so-called “leftist film movement.” Shanghai becomes both a sinners’ paradise and a rotting locus of capitalist oppression of workers—in comparison to rural areas, a city like Shanghai is a den of corruption and depravity as well as a key site of modern nation-building. The city holds an eternal charm and abiding enigma for film audiences throughout the world in modern history.

A major theme of city films has to do with the deliberate depiction of urban space in modern times and amid modernizing processes. The city provides numerous new kinds of spatial forms for the establishment and growth of a social lifeworld and political public sphere. Whether it is in Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Tokyo, such films offer a dense, even dizzying array of urban spaces, from the street itself to bars, cafés, and restaurants, to department stores and shopping malls, to skyscrapers and futuristic infrastructure.^[10] People live, work, socialize, and mobilize in such locations and places, and they enact social and political dramas in the midst of buildings growing out of new urban planning, human rituals, and cultures that materialize what Henri Lefebvre famously termed the social production of space.^[11] Lefebvre’s case studies include the remarkable contiguity of the physical and social forms of cities over centuries of historical transformation, for example, in Venice.^[12] These spaces, however, can also be deployed to register the failure, or at least significant stumbles, of modernity, as they were in the celebrated postwar films of Italian neorealism in works like Rome Open City (Roma, città aperta, Roberto Rossellini, 1945), Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1948), and Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, Vittorio de Sica, 1948)—with notable parallels to the so-called rubble films from Germany, like The Murderers among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946) and Somewhere in Berlin (Irgendwo in Berlin, Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946), which likewise registered the historical moment with urban destruction and decay. Such early postwar depictions of devastated cities as sociopolitical metaphor have proved so powerful that they have resulted in what Barbara Mennel has termed “retro-rubble.”^[13]

In yet another interesting turn, in the East, Tokyo reemerges as a modern megacity in the postwar years from the rubble and devastation of World War II. Yasujiro Ozu’s films such as Tokyo Story (1953) explore the relevance of traditional values and social institutions such as marriage and filial piety against the backdrop of a modern metropolis where people inevitably undergo basic stages of life: youth, growth, aging, and death. Ozu develops his signature film aesthetics as he zeroes in on the behavior and feelings of ordinary Japanese urbanites in their daily routines. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and in-laws enact dramas of life in a complex web of interpersonal relationships in modern Japanese spatial settings: homes, offices, bars, neighborhoods, temples, railway stations, and so forth. His so-called “pillow shots” juxtapose the precisely drawn private spheres of his characters to the most “modern” facets of the Japanese urban landscape.

While the earlier films build on the social and political dynamics at more micro-levels, the postwar filmic city has also become fascinating as a site for larger-scale social struggles and ideological clashes, between colonialism and decolonization, between revolution and the status quo, between progress and conservatism, and between modernization and tradition. Films vividly portray how modern citizens debate, argue, and battle things out in urban settings from around the world. If one compares the impact of a canonical genre film like Metropolis to the great noirs like Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947) and Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948)^[14] and then to The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), to Travis Bickle attending a political rally in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), to Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) and Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004), one witnesses the way that the changing city can function as a seismograph for modernity in sundry political registers. More recently, for example, the astonishing breakthrough of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) to the world cinematic stage and its greatest accolades is premised, in large part, on metropolitan Seoul’s ability to materialize, in nuce, the broader and deeper debate about socioeconomic inequality and its fatal stakes. In the film, Seoul allows an impoverished family to interact, seemingly randomly, with a feast-fed, mansion-housed family—a plot built on the randomness of the unexpected yet mind-altering urban encounter that Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin have emphasized in the modern city.^[15] Notably, in the recent so-called “Berlin School,” in films like Christoph Hochhäusler’s The City Below (2010), Christian Petzold’s Ghosts (2005) and Undine (2020), or Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004) and The Dreamed Path (2016), this same constellation is at work: random encounters, shocking inequality, and the subsequent dramatic stakes all play in the narrative and thematic foreground. In each of these films, it is the city’s core experiences of precarious employment, random encounter, and both threatening and promising proximity that yield the remarkable film itself and underscore the abiding, interwoven potential of the urban and the cinematic.

The issue starts with an essay on Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front Trilogy.” Xuesong Shao examines how the Sixth Generation director’s three-film ensemble—Shanghai Dreams (Qing Hong, 2005), Eleven Flowers (Wo 11, 2012), and Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe, 2014)—addresses multiple movements across the city/country divide, including city-to-country movement during Mao’s rule as well as the later, market-driven rural-to-city migration of the post-socialist era. The essay unfolds abiding sociopolitical tensions throughout these complex periods, including those between the rural hinterlands vs. the booming coastal cities, socialist remnants vs. neoliberal consumerism, as well as personal memory vs. collective amnesia. The films also engage fascinating and revealing genre mechanisms, mixing elements of family melodrama with, for instance, horror, particularly in the ghostly figures adrift among the multiple migrations that Wang’s films foreground. Finally, the essay takes up the very deliberate use of the female body to navigate both these temporal and spatial complexities of post-socialist China. Shao explores how Wang refunctions the male gaze in order to explore the politics of this reciprocal city-to-country migration and its often traumatic fallout.

The nexus of socialist spatial restructuring and post-socialist psychological disorientation addressed in Wang Xiaoshuai’s films is also the subject of representation in the films of other prominent mainland Chinese directors. Jia Zhangke is such an active, influential director in international art film circuits. His film 24 City (Ershisi cheng ji, 2008) is set in Chengdu, a large city in China’s interior, and details the pains, trials, and tribulations in China’s transition from a socialist-planned economy to a quasi-capitalist-market economy. The film cultivates a realist film aesthetics and aims to represent real social life. It is partly fiction and partly documentary, consisting of a series of interviews with real people as well as fictional characters centered around the fate of the workers of a military airplane factory in Chengdu. As such, the film chronicles the decline and disappearance of older urban space in the form of a socialist factory of industrial production and points to the emergence of newer forms of urban space in a post-socialist society: shopping centers, malls, and plazas. It depicts the imminent relocation and destruction of an old factory in order to give way to a new urban design conducive to shopping and consumerism in a large Chinese city. The restructuring of urban space and the attendant destruction of old communities is the subject of another fascinating Chinese film: Shower (Xizao, Zhang Yang, 1999). The ultimate demolition of a traditional public bathhouse in an old Beijing neighborhood to make room for a modern shopping center results in the end of a lifestyle and the uprooting and dislocation of a close-knit urban community. Memory, nostalgia, and contemporary social activities build up multiple layers of temporalities and convey a sense of a vanished socialist cityscape in post-socialist China.^[16]

In her essay, “The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology in Hong Kong Cinema,” Vivian P. Y. Lee offers a long historical view of colonial Hong Kong and its postcolonial handover to mainland China from the late 1960s to the present moment. She concentrates on three thematic clusters of Hong Kong cinema and analyzes their engagement with the city in moments of progress and crisis, in times of social and political transformation, and at critical junctures of participatory media production, consumption, and protest. The films she discusses include the social problem and youth films of Patrick Lung in the late 1960s and the “hero films” of John Woo and Ringo Lam in the late 1980s; non-action genre films with feelings of nostalgia and dystopia; and independent films made after the Umbrella Movement in 2014, a large-scale civil disobedience movement that resulted in a protracted mass protest in the busiest administrative and commercial districts of Hong Kong. For Lee, the early social problem films anticipate, and influence, the construction of city space in the wave of 1980s and 1990s action films, highlighting what Lee terms the inter-generic mechanisms of city-space depiction. Here, too, city space registers radical transformation in broader society, all in a very different colonial and postcolonial milieu/context.

Elaborating on the nexus of French colonialism and Third World decolonization is Nadia Yaqub’s essay, “The City in Early Alternative Arab Cinema.” Yaqub explores three films from the late 1960s through the 1970s, or the long 1970s in Arab film history. She explores and compares Return to Agadir (Retour à Agadir, Mohamed Afifi, 1967), Omar Gatlato (Merzak Allouache, 1976), and Beirut O Beirut (Beirut ya Beirut, Maroun Baghdadi, 1975). The three films are respectively set in three cities from three different countries in the Middle East: Agadir, Algiers, and Beirut. Yet they share a history of French colonialism as well as early postcolonial urban development and urban planning. These films might be termed examples of an alternative cinema of the Arab world that forge and interrogate the interrelationships among the individual, modernity, and city life in that geopolitical region.

Paris, the city where cinema allegedly emerged, is the focus of Jeff Fort’s essay, “Paris Centrifuge: Cléo de 5 à 7 in Black and White, or: The Ills of Colonialism.” Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) was made at a moment when the Algerian War was approaching its end, but the film nonetheless obliquely references the war and, more generally, the colonial horizon of France at the time. The film stages a series of dialectics between health and illness, life and death, whiteness and blackness, the metropolitan West and colonized Africa. Fort explores Cléo’s anxious flânerie and her external encounter with the metropolis’s crumbling colonial project. The film’s many oblique but legible indices in this direction call for critical examination. The film also provides an interesting contrast to the aforementioned The Battle of Algiers, which directly takes on this momentous national struggle for decolonization that unfolds across the city of Algiers.

Jaimey Fisher’s essay focuses on the U.S. city of New Orleans, as represented in Spike Lee’s celebrated documentaries about the city during and after Hurricane Katrina and the resulting levee collapse. As the most famous nonfiction works of this renowned fiction filmmaker, these documentaries are unusual because they set out to depict a city in world-historical transformation, a transformation laying bare gross environmental injustices and racism. Lee’s nonfiction work on New Orleans diverges from most of his fiction films in its extensive engagement with collective political forms at multiple scales and the mass media public sphere that informs them. Via Critical Theory’s engagement with civil society and democracy, the essay investigates Lee’s unusual, four-hour film If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2011), which follows up on the multiple political scales first introduced in his earlier film When the Levees Broke (2006). Fisher examines how Lee’s films relate to political participation in civil society as well as degenerating forms of the political public sphere.

Antonio Barrenechea scrutinizes urban formation in a cluster of films set in São Paulo, Brazil. Latin America produced one city symphony in the early period of world cinema, São Paulo: sinfonia da metrópole (1929). The film illustrates a developmental ideal and celebrates the growth of Brazil’s largest city. In this case, vanguardism yields to a disciplinary call for order and progress. After exploring these tensions in urban depiction, however, Barrenechea focuses more on “trash cinema” that depicts the underbelly of Brazilian society beneath the glamorous surface. He analyzes what is called the “Coffin Joe trilogy” by the Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins (1936–2020). Hated by some critics, the Coffin Joe horror films of the 1960s struck a chord with the working classes in a way that more critically celebrated films never did. The latest of the Coffin Joe films was released in 2008 and provides an opportunity to consider the role of the city today. Barrenechea examines how these inexpensive films, made by a cineaste with scant resources, have been received by film critics and elite classes.

All in all, this ensemble of essays aims at a compelling analysis of the complex yet fascinating relationship between city and cinema at various sites of the world in the modern era.

Notes

1. See, for example, Sheldon Lu, “The First Screenings of Lumière Films in China: Conjectures and New Findings,” Asia Cinema 30, no. 1 (2019): 129–35; and Lu, “Historical Introduction: Chinese Cinemas (1896–1996) and Transnational Film Studies,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Lu (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 1–31.

2. For issues of modernity and the city, see David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

3. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb, “Introduction: Decentring the Cinematic City—Film and Media in the Digital Age,” in Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media, ed. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2016), p. 5.

4. See Helmut Weihsmann, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’ 1900–1930,” in Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, ed. François Penz and Maureen Thomas (London: BFI, 1997), pp. 8–27.

5. Barbara Mennel, Cities and Cinema, 2nd ed. (2008; London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 131–39.

6. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 7th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 114–33.

7. See, for instance, Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993); and Jaimey Fisher, “Wandering in/to the Rubble-Film: Filmic Flânerie and the Exploded Panorama after 1945,” German Quarterly 78, no. 4 (2005): 461–80.

8. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, “Introduction,” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London and New York: Verso, 2003), p. 10.

9. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77.

10. For the cinema of the street, see Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 37ff.

11. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1991; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). For the specifically political aspects of the production of urban space in a Lefebvre mode (and homage), see David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012).

12. Lefebvre, Production of Space, pp. 73–77.

13. Mennel, Cities and Cinema, pp. 116–18.

14. For the spatial operations in films noir, also offered in a Lefebvre-influenced mode, see Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004).

15. See Anthony Vidler, “Spaces of Passage: The Architecture of Estrangement: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin,” in Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 65–79.

16. For relevant discussions of Jia’s films and especially this film, see Sheldon Lu, “Masculinity in Crisis: Male Characters in Jia Zhangke’s Films,” in Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 97–114.