Program Notes

The series I have curated on “The Urban Landscape” presents a number of different kinds approaches to both the question of what constitutes a “landscape” film and also what constitutes “urban.”   And, I wanted to inaugurate this series with the City Symphony film form because it is a kind of genre of urban landscape film.  There is not any one central, agreed upon definition of a city symphony film, and different historians tended to include or exclude different films from their own definitions. Generally film scholars assert that the city symphony is an experimental form defined by its musical analogy to symphony which is structured as a “day in the life” of a particular city.   I would further suggest that the City Symphony can be thought of as a distinct genre of documentary: one which attempts to represent the city as central character and which is devoid of any individual narrative.  

Scott MacDonald, among other film historians, consider early actuality films shot in city locations, such as films by the Lumiere brothers, Edwin S. Porter and G. W. Bitzer, as part of the canon of this form.  But, I would suggest that the first “real” city symphony film, the first conscious iteration of this form, begins with Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s 1921 short film Manhatta, which actually is more of a song, than a symphony, drawing its analogy to poetry rather than to orchestral music.  But, since poetry is generally thought of as a musical form of literature, one can see how this film, created by avowedly modernist artists: the American photographer Paul Strand and the American urban landscape painter Charles Sheeler could be a perfect entree into thinking about film as a musical form.  Inspired by and structured with Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebration of Manhattan, this ten minute film seeks to present the beauty and majesty of a new mechanical, urban age typified by modernist New York.  It’s a film which frames the city as artists’ muse.  And perhaps, because of this, Manhatta can also be seen as a precursor to what becomes the fullness of a symphony in the “mature” city symphony films of the mid-to-late 1920s.  

What followed was a small suite of films spilling forth from two of Europe’s great capital cities: Paris and Berlin, quickly to be followed by Joris Ivens’s vision of Rotterdam in The Bridge and Amsterdam in Rain and then Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Russian masterwork of the form, Man with a Movie Camera, which some quibble whether it is technically a city symphony since it is an amalgamation of three different cities rather than just one.  The form is perhaps most typified by Walter Ruttman’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City which MacDonald suggests takes the concept of “a symphony” as the ideal of European thinking and cultural evolution.  Taken as group, these films from the mid-late 1920s might suggest a sense of cultural rivalry was in operation as much as a kind of international fellowship of urban vision, where each film, structured as a day in the life of their respective cities, presents a kind of virtual tour of quotidien city life, lived by regular folk and caught unawares by the film camera.

As a film form, the city symphonies tends to be decidedly modernist expressions, many of which express a sense of technological optimism and celebratory attitude about urban life and the modernist forms of movement endemic to cities.  And, it’s clear that cinema, the art of the moving image, was a perfect format in which to explore the various forms of urban movement, such as public streetcars, automobiles and elevators.  Urban theorist David Harvey has written that the tempo and speed of the city, in service to capitalism and accumulation, is an essential and disciplinary aspect of urbanism. (Merrifield, 143)  Indeed MacDonald suggests that the city symphony form provides a “sense of the city as a product” as well as the sense of the city in progress of growing & expanding (MacDonald, 148).  And even though one can see the expression of urban temporalities as informed by capitalist logics of increasing speed, one can also see Vertov attempting to use the very same sort of filmic celebration of the speed of modern life in the service of a communist political and social ethic, reflecting an excitement the advent of modern industrialization in the service of the Revolution. (MacDonald, 153)

Of course city symphonies aren’t always expressions of urban pride and celebrations of industrialism.  Another well-known city symphony film, The City, from 1939, by Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner made for the New York World’s Fair, highlights an anti-urban, critical view in the service of urban planning.  Lionizing a Roosevelt era benevolent governmentality, with its implication of social scientific objectivity, the film provides an anti-urban framework from which to celebrate the innovation of planned communities of the suburbs. 

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For this opening night of “The Urban Landscape” series I was particularly interested in looking at examples of city symphony form which both defined and transformed the form into thinking about the concept of the global city.  In this way, we can think of the prototypical urban landscape film form, the city symphony, as an expression of culturally changing attitudes about the processes and experiences of urbanization on society and, as such, on the constantly expanding notions about urbanization and globalization as interconnected.

I had never seen or heard of Hilary Harris before I read about him in Scott MacDonald’s book The Garden in the Machine, and when I saw Organism, I found the film to be a small revelation, mesmerizing and wonderfully reflective of the aesthetics of its historical moment, the mid 1970s, during which New York City was still a magnet for artists despite its widespread economic and social despair and disrepair.  Hilary Harris was a filmmaker who built his reputation as a master of time-lapse cinematography.  In Organism, his film from 1975, Harris presents a view of New York City as a biological organism, wedding together notions of the microscopic with the macroscopic view.  In this film, a kind of holistic ecological or “systemist" analysis of the city pervades. With its electronic music score, this film strikes me as utterly a record of its time, a postmodern fascination with a kind of scientific objective views of the systems of city life, utterly human, alive and yet beyond the human: a “systemist” view of society as a teeming organism of interconnected molecules circulating through the body of the city.

When I read that Harris’s work is included in Koyaanisqatsi, I wondered to what extend Harris’ time-lapse work in Organism had inspired Reggio’s film, and I would argue that many of the concerns evident in Organism are multiplied by Koyaanisqatsi.  As one of the most famous and commercially successful of City Symphony films, I think of Koyaanisqatsi as a breakout film, not simply a commercially successful film which has no standard narrative or individual characters, but also, breaking out of the construct of a city symphony as the exploration of a city locality.  As a representation of the increasingly rapid process of globalization, this film strikes me as both incredibly prescient and also utterly of its early ‘80s Reagan-era time, in which the scale and inclinations of a totalizing economic and cultural hegemonic global system was just beginning to dawn.  Harris’ birdseye shots afforded by the tall skyscrapers of the city are now augmented by the “God’s eye” or, rather, the helicopter and airplane pilots’ view of a whole city, a region and in that sense, a notion of a whole world caught up in the frenetic tempo global capitalism and trade.  And in watching this film, it occurs to me that globalism, like urbanism, is not simply a geographic or spatial designation but also a temporal process which is intimately intertwined with the ways in which time can be manipulated and bent to the will of some abstracting notion of society, civilization, as a collective organism.

The music of Koyaanisqatsi, Philip Glass’ haunting and mesmerizing score seems to suggest that this symphony is an operatic dirge, hauntingly chanting the Hopi words “koyaanisqatsi” translated as “life out of balance.”  His score is a ghostly critique of the hyper-modern, hyper-mechanized, industrialization reverberating with innuendo, suggesting words sung by invisible people who have been pushed aside, marginalized and disappeared. 

So, my last thought is that if the City Symphony film aims to present us with a mirror of city life, of urban experience, this is not a mirror of individual likenesses— but a representation of zeitgeist, of literally the spirit of its time and of time as a function of representing collective, commonality. The city symphony is dialectical form of urban vernacular, in which the everyday particular is perceivable as a compressed entity of totality.  I would suggest that these films are both a representation of society, the social and of geography: a film form existing outside of the confines of narrative, where the arc is the journey of the sun over the urban landscape.  Here is a film form which suggests the drama of everyday life is to be found in simply looking widely enough, in the collection of experience aggregated through rhythm, tempo and pace.  Here, the urban landscape is not the backdrop; it is the subject of the film, its meter and its rhyme.

                                    —  January 5, 2016