The City Symphony
Program Notes
This series on “The Urban Landscape” presents a number of approaches to the question of what constitutes a “landscape film" along with the question of what constitutes an urban landscape. Appropriately enough, we begin with the City Symphony—a genre in which the city landscape is the subject and not simply a backdrop. Traditionally, film scholars have defined the city symphony as a silent experimental film genre that flourished during the late 1920s and early 1930s, presenting a visual analogy to music and structured as a “day in the life” of a particular city.
This opening night of “The Urban Landscape” series presents two examples of more recent city symphonies. In these examples, the city symphony expresses changing attitudes about urbanization. The experimental short Organism (1975) is a small revelation—mesmerizing and wonderfully reflective of the aesthetics of its historical moment of the mid 1970s, when New York City was still a magnet for artists despite its widespread economic and social despair and disrepair. Hilary Harris was a pioneer of time-lapse cinematography of the city. In Organism, Harris likens New York City to a biological organism, interweaving microscopic footage of human cells with macroscopic views of the city seen from great heights. The film presents a holistic, ecological view of the city as a living entity informed by a burgeoning computerization aided by an electronic score to suggest a view of the life of the city as a teeming organism of interconnected molecules continuously circulating, day and night.
As one of the most famous and commercially successful non-verbal, musical landscape films of all time, Koyaanisqatsi pushed the geographic as well as operatic aspects of city symphony to a meditation on urbanization at the national scale. Yet, despite its differences in both scale and breadth with Organism, Koyaanisqatsi is equally concerned with the increasingly rapid processes of mechanization and homogenization. Reggio's film is also utterly of its time - in the early 1980s Reagan-era, in which the scale and inclinations of a totalizing economic and cultural hegemony was taking hold. While Harris’ birds-eye views were afforded by the tall skyscrapers of the city, Reggio's film provides a “God’s eye” airplane pilots’ views of, suggesting not just a whole city, but a whole country now caught up in the frenetic tempo global capitalism and trade. With Philip Glass’ hauntingly, mesmerizing score, Koyaanisqatsi 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.
While the City Symphony film presents a mirror of city life, it is not a mirror of individual likenesses— but a representation of a zeitgeist, of time as a collective experience, in which the narrative is defined as the journey of the sun over the urban landscape.
