Judgment in the City--Conclusion
A lone character who never speaks appears at several points in 38 Témoins to silently judge Pierre and the other witnesses to the crime who failed to intervene. Standing on his apartment balcony, he stares into Pierre and Louise’s apartment, transmitting the act of judgment into a way of seeing from the exterior of the city into the interiorized affective space of their private lives as so many of the films analyzed here dramatize. In the repetition of scenes of this man staring in 38 Témoins, the neighbour’s silent judgment invokes the question, ‘why didn’t you help?’ In the third clip above, Pierre attempts to shut out his neighbor’s judgments by closing his curtains, but Pierre’s body language suggests his attempts have failed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes the stare as ‘an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story.’ If ‘staring bespeaks involvement and being stared at demands a response,’ (Garland-Thomson 2009, 3) it takes the police re-enactment and a moment of confession for Pierre to respond to the neighbors’ ‘stare-and-tell dynamic’ (see e.g. Garland-Thomson 2000).
The films this article has analyzed generate a cinematic mode of judgment that enables viewers to witness the city, generalized from New York, and the conditions of the Kitty Genovese murder, through our spectatorship of those cast into the roles of witnessing characters. Through them and through the camera lens, spectators pay witness to gendered violence in the city in ways that pose witnessing subjectivity at a psychological interface between the individual and the city, telescoping in on the high-rise apartment and its vantage point above the city street. Surveillance onto the city from this perspective is key to the urban imaginary in films on and about the Genovese murder. As different articulations of what Pamela Wojcik (2010) calls ‘the apartment plot,’ the films examined here focus in on different tenants of apartment living, not to dramatize a depth psychology of the apartment dweller, but to provide a surface glance onto the ways they imperfectly see, hear and act in the city neighbourhood in which they live. Through a show-and-tell framework, films that re-enact and re-tell the Genovese murder diagnose the problem of failed collective responsibility in the city, but they also seek to explain the reasons for this failure that, in some cases, take some of that responsibility off of the individual and place it back onto institutions of policing and immigration policies that make undocumented city residents illegal.
Existing in the space between fact and fiction, filmic re-enactments of the Genovese murder function as cultural technologies that turn bystanders into a recognizable, and locatable type of urban subject in the visual culture of bystanding these films produce. Films make up the visual culture of the larger popular and social scientific construction of the Genovese murder as an issue of bystander non-intervention in the city. As these films move through different scenes of the city in which bystanding gets positioned in relation to the apartment and the street, spectators bear witness to both the cinematic urban landscape made transferable from New York and to the story of the Genovese murder in Queens. In this way, films construct the meaning of the crime’s witnessing through portrayals of the physical space of the street abstracted from the specific scene of the crime—the 'look of the city' that Kevin Lynch (1960) argued was so central to the aesthetic experience of urban life, but which is also a key feature of the historical visual culture of an infamous New York crime story. Filmic re-enactments of the Genovese murder further frame this experience as necessarily social and political visions of the very capacity to act in the city on behalf of others, and to the limits, both infrastructural and perceptual, that lead to the repeated emphasize on its failures.