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• 1 media/Scalar UH background and title June 2016.jpg media/Scalar UH background final.png 2013-01-31T09:11:13-08:00 Introduction 46 plain 2014-09-15T15:16:11-07:00
  Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  INTRODUCTION UNDER REVISION
  This special issue, under review with Urban History (Cambridge University Press), argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, film, murals, television, and other visual and textual evidence, these essays explore how diverse visual forms not only shape metropolitan spaces, experiences, and identities, but also shape the ways in which people imagine, remember, and forget such spaces and events. Focusing on postwar urban history in local, national, and transnational contexts, this issue attends to questions of community, citizenship, race, class, gender, modernity, and memory. These questions, familiar to urban historians, can be seen from new angles by foregrounding the visual elements of urban political, economic, social, and cultural life. Finally, by presenting this special issue through the Scalar online authoring platform, we hope to offer both new research on urban visual history and also new models for the visual and textual presentation of such research. In selecting essays for this special issue, I looked for scholars whose research examines the inseparable relationship between what Carlo Rotella describes as “the city of feeling (constructed in words and images) and the city of fact (made of steel and stone, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people).” In the first essay, Laura Grantmyre examines competing visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. While the city’s redevelopment agency circulated images focused on the neighborhood’s built environment, presenting it as desolate and in disrepair, Charles “Teenie” Harris, a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s African American newspaper, portrayed the neighborhood as a vibrant community. Bridget Gilman examines representations of everyday cityscapes from another angle in her analysis of Robert Bechtle’s Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Gilman highlights how Bechtle’s work avoids the city’s natural and architectural icons, or recognizable panoramas from atop one of the city’s many hills, in favor of the “native vision” of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Staying in postwar California, Adam Arenson tells the story of Home Savings and Loan art and architecture, created by Millard Sheets and his studio of artists. Arenson surveys this interplay of community banking and public art, focusing on how communities responded to the bank branches whose distinctive mosaics, murals, stained glass and sculptures remain fixtures in many California communities. Like the public relations campaigns that helped Home Savings navigate local zoning boards, Mona Damluji examines a series of documentary films produced by the London-based Iraq Petroleum Company in the 1950s. Counter to films that portrayed Baghdad as an Orientalist fantasyland for western viewers, the Iraq Petroleum Company films presented the Iraq capital as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The films, screened across Iraq, projected a modern Iraq for Iraqi audiences. A different set of films and videos provides the archive for Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964 Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Garden neighborhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbors to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past fifty years, raise questions about what it means to be a witness in a vertical city of apartment buildings and trace the architectural and perceptual limits of urban vision. Finally, my essay looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by anti-busing politicians and parents in the 1970s. News coverage brought school desegregation battles in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation and helped establish busing as a “massive” national issue. By presenting these articles in Scalar we are able to pair our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of video clips, photographs, and maps. As digital technologies continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, the six essays in this special issue offer historical perspectives that compliment and complicate how we engage with contemporary spatial visualizations. Among these contemporary projects, the critically acclaimed “The Wilderness Downtown” offers a starting point from which to understand this special issue’s themes and contributions. Developed by writer/director Chris Milk and the Google Creative Lab for the band Arcade Fire, “The Wilderness Downtown” uses the Google Maps street view feature to customize a music video based on the viewer’s childhood address. 
  After the viewer enters the address where they grew up on the landing page, the video begins with a young person in a gray hooded sweatshirt running down a wide residential street. As new browser windows open and tile across the screen, the viewer sees multiple images simultaneously: an aerial view of the address they entered, a street level panoramic view, and close-up shots of the runner’s feet and hooded face. These tiled browser windows close midway through the video and a new window prompts viewers to write a virtual postcard on the screen to their younger selves. 
  The video concludes with the young figure (now rendered as a computer graphic) running amidst a flurry of animated trees exploding out of the ground. Designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the Google Chrome browser and promote Arcade Fire’s album “The Suburbs” the video succeeded on both fronts. The project won several advertising and web design prizes, including a Clio Award and Favourite Website Award. The website also helped to generate buzz for “The Suburbs,” which went on to be named Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. Critics have rightly praised “The Wilderness Downtown” for its evocative combination of video, music, custom rendered maps, and cutting edge HMTL5 web features, but I introduce it here to highlight how the historical approaches to urban visual culture in this special issue offers tools for analyzing contemporary projects like “The Wilderness Downtown.” The essay by Laura Grantmyre, for example, calls attention to the video project’s limitations as a memory device. Using present day visuals from Google Maps to provoke memories of one’s childhood home is central to “The Wilderness Downtown,” but Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that for many people their childhood addresses no longer exist. Grantmyre notes that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African-American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these families, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, a their former addresses might be unrecognized by Google Maps, or a street view might reveal a freeway, arena, upscale apartment complex, or vacant lot where their home once stood. Rather than images of a childhood home producing nostalgia, these urban gaps and erasures suggest traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as “root shock.” Grantmyre reminds us that these “ghost neighborhoods,” as Phil Ethington calls them in the context of Los Angeles, remain part of the visual history and memory of cities. In this context, the photographs of the Lower Hill District taken by Teenie Harris offer an especially important visual archive of a thriving neighborhood. Similarly, Bridget Gilman shows how Robert Bechtle’s photograph-based paintings like Twentieth and Arkansas and Twentieth Street VW, can be seen as precursors to the street view images used in “The Wilderness Downtown.” Bechtle’s work, however, can also defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps has made ubiquitous. Adam Arenson’s essay on the reception of Home Savings and Loan art and architecture highlights how “The Wilderness Downtown” plays differently if you enter a commercial rather than a residential address. Aerial photographs make clear that bank branches, shopping malls, and distribution warehouses dot metropolitan landscapes and these sites of capital and commerce can both compliment and complicate the residential memories foregrounded in “The Wilderness Downtown.” Arenson also presents a postcard of a pedestrian mall that Millard Sheets designed and decorated to reinvigorate the downtown of his hometown in Pomona, California. The image features a Home Savings branch and, like the main street postcards Alison Issenberg has identified as central to efforts to promote downtown business districts in the early twentieth century, casts a different light on the virtual postcard viewers are asked to write in “The Wilderness Downtown.” Mona Damluji’s analysis of how Iraq Petroleum Company’s films and public relations materials projected an image of Baghdad being made modern through oil production, calls to mind contemporary intersections of technology, modernity, and resources. Viewed from this angle, the best sites to map in “The Wilderness Downtown” might be the Google Data Centers in places like Council Bluffs, Iowa; Quilicura, Chile; or Dublin, Ireland, that make web access to the video and, for many readers, this Scalar project, possible. Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case and my examination of how conservative politicians and parents used television news to oppose busing for school desegregation make it clear that the concept of “neighborhood,” central to the “The Wilderness Downtown,” is not politically neutral. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behavior, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighborhoods. Fearing the failed neighborhoods of the Genovese case, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of “neighborhood schools” as sites that needed to be defended from the threat of racial integration. These efforts to protect decades of federally supported racial privilege disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favor of color-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighborhoods and schools. For busing opponents “neighborhood” was a fighting word. The filmic representation of the Genovese case and the television news coverage of busing protests cast “neighborhood” in more sinister terms, and prompt different questions about the young person running in the “The Wilderness Downtown”: Are there people in the houses watching this runner? Is this figure running from someone or something? Is the person welcome in this neighborhood or are they running away from it? The young person running in the video is wearing a grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, likely to conceal the actor’s race and gender so that viewers can more easily ascribe their personal memories to the video. 
  “The Wilderness Downtown” was released in August 2010, but it is impossible for me to view the video’s “hoodie” runner now without thinking about seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, shot to death by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012. Martin’s hoodie sweatshirt became a symbol of racial profiling and, after protestors wore hoodies in marches calling for Zimmerman’s arrest, an emblem resistance. Martin’s murder is the highest profile example that “neighborhood” means differently in different contexts, and the essays in this special issue offer models for analyzing how ways of seeing and practices of looking erect borders of inclusion and exclusion in urban spaces.
  I have introduced this special issue’s thematic foci in relation to “The Wilderness Downtown” to demonstrate not only the essays’ innovative research on urban history and visual culture, but also how these historical studies can illuminate themes that might remain unseen in contemporary projects. Watching and re-watching “The Wilderness Downtown” has also led me to learn more about Nicollet Towers, my childhood home in Minneapolis. The panoramic street views showed the apartment complex undergoing exterior repairs and featured a large sign for Volunteers of America Minnesota. These visual clues led to me to websites, newspaper articles, and e-mail correspondence that taught me new things about the place I grew up: that the building was built in 1979, meaning my family was among the first to move in; that the building has always been managed by Volunteers of America Minnesota, whose mission is to “help people gain self-reliance, dignity and hope,” that the agency helped to ensure that the apartments remained rent subsidized after federal funds declined in the 1990s; and that Nicollet Towers recently underwent a renovation as part of a public-private partnership for financing affordable housing, led by the MacArthur Foundation. Watching the animated trees in “The Wilderness Downtown” sprout from the concrete courtyard of Nicollet Towers reminded me of how, in the mid-1980s, that concrete replaced the real grass and trees in the courtyard. 
  The video also made me realize how much more I know about the metropolitan spaces about which I write and teach, than I know about the city where I grew up. As an urban historian, I find “The Wilderness Downtown” to be a generative project because it encourages me to move among and across visions of urban space, on personal and popular scales, in historical and contemporary contexts. It is my hope that readers will find this special issue to be similarly generative for thinking about urban history and visual culture. Table of Contents:

  • Laura Grantmyre, "Conflicting Representational Discourses of Urban 'Renewal' in Pittsburgh’s Hill District: Was a vibrant community supplanted by a symbol of racial injustice or was a desolate slum replaced by a marvel of urban modernism?"
  • Bridget Gilman, "San Francisco Views: Robert Bechtle and the Reformulation of Urban Vision"
  • Mona Damluji, "Visualizing Iraq: Oil, Cinema, and the Modern City"
  • Carrie Rentschler, "The Archive as Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder"
  • Matt Delmont, "How Busing Became 'Massive': Television and Anti-busing Activism in 1970s Urban America"

  You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use main menu on top left of screen to navigate to essays.
• 1 2013-08-17T09:45:24-07:00 Re-Enacting Crime’s Witnesses in the City 18 plain 2014-11-02T14:59:42-08:00 Two other films, Death Scream and 38 Témoins, suggest more specifically that to comprehend urban apathy, spectators must be able to see inside the lives of urban dwellers through the filmic portrayal of high-rise apartment units. Both films fully re-enact the Kitty Genovese murder: one from the context of mid-1970s New York, the other from contemporary Le Havre, France, where the seemingly universal psychological truths of bystanding transcend the place-specificity of particular cities and the historical crimes for which they become known. More than other films on or about the Genovese case, the 1975 made-for-TV social problem film Death Scream depicts the often fragile sense of community among apartment building residents, the limited communication that structures their social relationships with each other, and for some, the legitimate reasons for why they may fear speaking to the police about what they saw or heard of the crime against female character Jenny Storm. Five years before the film Groping was produced, Death Scream portrayed apartment dweller's refusals to engage with the violence being committed against their neighbour and in front of their apartments by also depicting them dropping their window shades. In shots filmed from the street, viewers of Death Scream see bystanders' collective non-response in the shadowy profiles of residents cast against their opaque window coverings. Death Scream retells the Genovese murder from the perspective of the diverse apartment-living witnesses to the crime, set in the context of 1970s New York. The film's all-star cast includes Raul Julia as Latino Detective Nick Rodriguez, Diahann Carroll as a depressive, African-American suicidal woman, Tina Louise as the murder victim's one time lesbian lover, Ed Asner as a married man who encourages his wife, played by Cloris Leachman, not to talk to the police because of their fears of involvement, and a 12-year old Helen Hunt who plays Det. Rodriquez’s daughter Teila. German-born actor Eric Braeden, well-known for his role as corporate patriarch Victor Newman in the long running U.S. daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless, plays an undocumented Polish immigrant whose fears of having his and his wife's immigration status discovered, waits until days after the murder to report to the police what they saw and heard of the murder from their street-facing first floor apartment. Death Scream’s re-enactment of the Genovese murder opens the 1975 telefeature (warning: the clip may be triggering for some viewers). Shot at night, with several references to the dominant news account of the Genovese murder, viewers see the victim, Jenny Storm, park her car near her apartment building as the camera shifts view to a man who follows her movements from the sidewalk. After being frightened by a cat’s meow, Storm turns and is faced with a male attacker who grabs her, pulls her out of the light and starts to stab here as she yells out 'Help me! Help me!' With its references to horror film camera work, where the camera shoots what the perpetrator sees, viewers follow the female character as if they too are teh killer hunting his victim. A male resident of the apartment building hears her screams and gets up from his bed, opens the French doors to his balcony and yells out 'You there, get away from that girl! Get away from her!' in reference to real-life witness to the Genovese murder Robert Mozer who verbally intervened during Moseley's first attack on Genovese. In his own testimony at his murder trial, Mozer reported, “I didn’t think the person that called [out] would come down to help her regardless of the fact that she screamed, so I came back… (1964, 236), implicating the witnesses to the murder in his own justification for his assault. Death Scream re-stages Mozer’s speech act in order to judge its inadequacy in stopping Moseley’s attack on Genovese. In Death Scream, the character playing his wife (whose role actually references the wife of another witness who did not yell down to the street) urges the witness to get back inside, warning him that the assailant might have a gun. ‘Do you want him to come up here at shoot us?' she asks. 'It’s all right, I scared him away,' her husband Harry states matter-of-factly. Genovese’s neighbours, the Koshkins, spoke to the press and testified in court offering a similar explanation for why they did not call the police: because Mrs. Koshkin thought it would put them at risk from the killer. Throughout the scene in Death Scream, Storm implores her neighbors to help as her killer continues to stalk her, but no one comes to her aid. Across the rest of the scene, we watch the crime being committed from the multiple perspectives of different apartment residents. Mrs. Kosinsky looks out the window to see Jenny Storm crouched in agony on the sidewalk; her face pained with concern, Mrs. Kosinsky follows Storm’s movements from the apartment’s other windows. Ed Asner’s character peeks out through the lace curtains that cover the bedroom window above the bed he shares with his wife, who sleeps through the initial screams only to be awoken later by the victim’s screams from the apartment stairwell. Her husband tells her to go back to sleep, explaining that she is just having a nightmare. Another couple stands together at their apartment window in their nightclothes, watching with concern as the victim struggles to climb the front exterior stairs of the building. They argue later about what they would tell the police if they called them, calling into question the veracity of what they have witnessed with their own eyes and ears. Rather than risk embarrassment from not being able to answer police questions, the husband, played by Art Carney, tells his wife, played by Nancy Walker, to put down the phone. She ignores him and calls the police, who are not receptive to her call, suggesting that police indifference may also be to blame. At this point, their neighbor is already dead. The Kosinksy’s see Storm’s assailant return to the scene, and they argue about whether to help. Another neighbour, Betty, played by Diahann Carroll, swallows a handful of pills as Jenny collapses in the building’s lobby. Jenny calls out repeatedly for Betty as the latter falls into a pill-induced stupor, unable to offer her neighbor aid as she watches Jenny being attacked again by her assailant on the interior stairwell of the apartment building. Death Scream is the only film of the oeuvre that depicts the failures of witnesses to intervene once the victim moves inside the building, where her assailant follows her and continues his attack. Winston Moseley, Genovese’s killer, committed his second attack against her within the stairwell of the neighboring apartment building, which one witness, Karl Ross, witnessed from the top of the stairs. He did not call police until Moseley left the scene. Death Scream is the only film analyzed here that addresses Genovese’s lesbianism, in a six-minute long scene of a police interview with character Hilda Murray played by Tina Louise. In the scene, police hassle Hilda as they interview her about her whereabouts the night of Jenny Storm’s murder. Clearly wary of the police, Hilda begrudgingly outs herself as a lesbian, detailing her night of activities at a club and then later at a female lover’s flat. She talks back to the police from a position of having experienced vice police raids of the lesbian clubs she frequents. Up until the police show her morgue photos of Jenny’s body, and reveal that they treat Hilda as a suspect, she is led to assume that her sexuality is under investigation. The police do not prepare Hilda for the shock she receives viewing the photos as her one-time lover. She realizes she is being treated as a suspect in the murder and she screams out in horror, “No woman would do that!” The scene likely references the first public outing of Kitty Genovese’s sexuality in the 1974 true crime book Chief co-authored by New York chief of detectives Allan Seedman. Besides the scene with her one time girlfriend, which reveals her lesbianism, viewers learn little more information about Jenny Storm’s life, also referencing the lack of detail about Genovese’s life included in news reports of her murder (see Rentschler 2011a, Gallo 2014). Like other films, Death Scream's places social responsibility for the crime squarely in the hands of the crime's witnesses, deflecting it from the police, who are mostly depicted as hard-working, responsive and morally innocent upholders of the law, contrary to most popular opinion of New York police in the mid-1970s. In a series of clips from the film Death Scream, shown above, the undocumented couple from Poland refuses to help the police out of fear of being deported. After first refusing to talk to the police, Mr. Kosinsky goes to them after he sees the assailant steal a chicken from a local street market, after which the man then threatens him and his wife with a knife. After going to the police to report the man as the woman’s killer, Kosinsky confesses, ‘I am not afraid, I have a problem.’ Realizing Kosinksy is undocumented, Latino Detective Rodriguez reassures Mr. Kosinsky that the police do not care about his immigration status. In a portrayal of police less common today in depictions of largely white-identified anti-immigrant police cultures, the police in Death Scream offer to assist the Kosinsky's with their immigration problems in exchange for help with the murder case. The offer appears not as a ploy but as a genuine promise to help. Throughout the film, the police appear above reproach. Death Scream depicts the witnesses struggling with their inaction from within the tight space of their apartment living room. In the process, the film reveals the range of reasons neighbors gave for not calling the police. One resident attempted suicide the night of the murder; the Kosinsky couple fears deportation as illegal immigrants; and a middle-aged couple lives by the credo of not getting involved in other people’s business. Intercut with scenes where each couple talks privately about their reasons and fears of involvement, the killer remains loose in the city, assaulting other women while the police continue to investigate. The entire case hangs on the witnesses to the first murder, who over the course of the film begin to reluctantly report what they saw and heard. In one scene, viewers watch a couple from the apartment building watching news of the murder that reports on neighbors’ lack of involvement in the case. News here functions as the moral witness in place of the apartment dwellers who failed to act on what they saw and heard of the murder outside their windows, much like the role news plays in The Detached Americans in 1964. In 38 Témoins, the 2012 French film based on Didier Decoin's novel that retells the Genovese murder, a police officer forces a middle-aged male character, Mr. Petrini, to reluctantly re-enact what he yelled down to the street after seeing a man attack a woman below his apartment window. ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ he screams out, echoing an infamous scene in the 1976 film Network in which anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, instructs his viewers to stick their heads out their windows and exclaim ‘I am mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ The ‘this’ to which Beale refers is a litany of mid-1970s urban and economic problems: people out of work and frightened of losing their jobs, the declining value of the U.S. dollar, shopkeepers arming themselves against potential robberies, ‘punks running wild in the streets,’ ‘air unfit to breathe and food unfit to eat,’ and a news system invested in the normality of urban homicide and homelessness. ‘It’s like everything’s going crazy now,’ Beale intones, ‘so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller. We say, “please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say a thing. Just leave us alone!”’ Shaking in his anchor chair, wet from the rain and still wearing his overcoat on air, Beale urges his viewers to testify with him. Later in the scene, urban apartment dwellers open their windows and repeat after Beale. Before entering the studio, Beale tells a security guard that tonight, ‘I must make my witness,’ and by extension, the city residents do as well as they verbally express their anger from their windows, just as the reluctant male witness is coerced to do by the police in 38 Témoins. While Death Scream depicts 1970s New York s a city defined by economic instabilities, increasing crime and white crime fear to which the characters directly testify, in 38 Témoins the witnesses are for the most part unable to provide reasons for why they did not call the police. They instead make excuses, perhaps none more seemingly unfeeling than main character Pierre’s statement that he thought the woman who had been murdered had simply gone home after she screamed out while being assaulted. Across several scenes, the film visually dwells on Pierre’s apathetic, and depressive, ennui. Pierre saw and heard the woman being assaulted across the street from his second story corner apartment. Many of the film’s scenes are shot from within the apartment he shares with girlfriend Louise, who was away on business at the time of the murder. After confirming that Pierre was home at the time of the murder, Louise begins to suspect Pierre had witnessed more of the crime than he was willing to admit. From his window, he had a full view onto the crime scene. Women in the film, notably Louise and a female journalist, occupy the moral center of action, taking responsibility for their own and others failures to act on behalf of a female neighbor being assaulted. Like Death Scream, 38 Témoins dramatizes the process through which apartment dwelling witnesses are compelled to admit what they heard and saw of a violent assault against a woman in their immediate vicinity by intimates, police officers, and in the case of 38 Témoins, a journalist who covers the case. In a series of scenes, a journalist, a police detective and a police lieutenant interrogate Pierre, and at times Louise, about what he heard and what he saw the night of the murder from his living room window. More than a revelation of what they heard or saw, in 38 Témoins the film’s main action is in getting the witnesses to admit what they had seen and heard of their neighbour's femicide. The film does this by staging a police re-enactment of the murder in which the witnesses must play themselves on the night of the murder. The re-enactment occurs late in the film, after a news story reveals how neighbors failed to report what they saw and heard to the police. The scene is reminiscent of the re-enactment in Death Scream except that in 38 Témoins the re-enactment is an intentional re-performance of the crime that is meant to hold witnesses accountable for their inaction. Over seven minutes, the film depicts the police re-enacting the murder scene. A police officer is assigned to each of the witnesses, who asks what they heard and how they heard it. The witnesses' answers direct the action of the re-enactment, telling the police officers how to stage the screams and the silent pauses between them. The re-enactment forces the witnesses to physically remember the crime, ‘putting what has been dis/membered back together again’ as Richard Schechner argues (1981, 4). Pierre describes to a detective how the screams should be longer and stronger, to more accurately reflect what he heard that night. Louise listens to his description of the screams as his failures as a witness become blatantly clear to her, and to the films’ viewers, through the process of re-enactment. Re-enactment here becomes its own act of witness. 'Getting a performance on film' such as the police re-enactment of the Genovese murder in 38 Témoins or the ways other films re-tell and re-play aspects of the infamous case, is 'a generative event' (Schechner 1981, 10). In showing viewers how the crime’s witnesses heard and saw the crime from the interiors of their apartments, they now become witnesses to the crime in so far as the re-enactment forces them to testify to what they heard and saw. A crowd stands in the street listening to the re-enactment, performing a visibly collective act of witness after-the-fact and depicting an idealized mass witnessing subject that stands at heightened attention to the scene in front of them. In this way, 38 Témoins refigures the urban crowd, not as a mob or menace, but as an ideal of public witnessing in the city. No such collective stood witness on the night of the murder, for there was no crowd to act as witness. The witnesses instead appear in the film segregated into their separate apartment units and unable to speak to each other. They represent, not a collective, but a failure to form collective action. In another scene, the police chief explains why from his perspective people did not intervene: some take too many painkillers to feel anything, others incorrectly assessed the situation, and some just do not care. Understanding will not help redress the situation; judgment will, according to the police chief, for it requires involvement that both films show witnesses failed to enact. 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).