I’ve been reading Darran Anderson’s Imaginary Cities for a while now and am really enjoying it. I picked it up from a local used bookstore maybe in March or April of last year. It had a cool cover and an intriguing title, and the back cover description stated that it talks about possible and impossible cities, past cities, dream cities and future cities in a lucid, non-linear way and takes a lot of inspiration from one of my favorite books ever, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
The book’s been a lot to keep up with, as the amount of references and the lack of an index (though supposedly it’s on the website) can be enough to make your head spin. It’s caused me to start reading Plato’s The Republic, which I attempted but eventually gave up on in high school as well as Lewis Mumford’s The City In History, which has sat on my shelf for more than a year without so much as being cracked open. It also has me wanting to do a deeper dive into movies that use cities as characters or portray cities in a certain way, namely BladeRunner and some of the other futuristic/Sci-Fi/dystopia movies that are mentioned in the book, even though I’m not much of a fan of Sci-Fi.
One of the more interesting sections is where he mentions a few movies that were made in the 1920′s that serve as sketches of cities, They are Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Lewis Mumford’s The City and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (which is probably the most fun to watch with its weird camera angles and self-awareness/righteousness). Through some Wikipedia searching, I found that Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand made a similar film about New York called Manhatta. In all of these, the focal point is a day in the life of a city, with minimal or no narrative or explanation.
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis
I’ve now seen all of them. I actually saw the Mumford one sometime last year. The differences between the cities are fascinating and they say a lot about what those cities were like at the time of their filming. In Berlin, the primary activities that the director focuses on are the daily commute, the ritual of shops opening and the daily laborers of the city. There’s important emphasis on the new train networks and a lot of street poetry, documentations of chance (or maybe planned) interactions that show the thousands of urban possibilities, the multitude of things that might happen when you live in a place where hundreds of thousands of people are clustered together. Both of the New York films, on the other hand (including Manhatta and one section of Mumford’s The City) are much more focused on buildings and architecture, emphasizing New York’s new-ness and metropolitan verve. Both Berlin and New York clearly emanate a certain energy in these films, though the New York moments show a city busy with the activity of building itself up, a process which would not stop for quite a while, more or less right up to its near-bankruptcy in the 70′s. Berlin, of course, would face its day of reckoning and need to re-build substantially after the second war, but it escaped WWI largely unscathed, at least as far as I know. The director of the Berlin film is much more concerned with the micro activity of the city as opposed to the macro activity that seemed so important to anybody observing New York at the same time. On the other hand, the cities portrayed in Man with a Movie Camera are the Soviet cities of Kiev, Moscow, Odessa and Kharkov. It’s a telling portion of Soviet/Russian history, as the movie was made only a few years after Lenin’s death and the cities are awash in messages about workers and the proletariat, devoid of the blatant totalitarianism of the Stalin era that Americans most often associate with the Soviet Union and the Russians. It’s no doubt an interesting glimpse of what life might have been like had Lenin not died an early death at 54, a point which Anderson himself makes in the book and which I had never quite considered before. The Soviet cities of that era were primarily concerned with industrialization, and the film makes that more than clear in the powerful shots of smokestacks, trains, coal mines, factories and bars and theaters adorned with the word “Proletarian”.
As always, I’m most fascinated by New York (probably because I used to live there) and I can’t imagine what seeing New York for the first time in the 1920′s must have felt like. Lucky for us, we have Metropolis, which Fritz Lang said was inspired by his first impressions of New York as he came in on a boat, according to Anderson. I imagine it must have felt something like my first time in East Asia, where the newer cities have such a vibrant energy that they make American cities look like quiet little hamlets by comparison.
I was really excited when I saw that Manhattan was made Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, both artists whom I admire and have even written about on this blog before. I can’t imagine any duo better equipped to document New York on film in those days, as they were pioneers of the Precisionism movement which devoted a large amount of its energy to documenting the changing state of the American city. I only wish they might have made a follow up to this film a decade or so later when the great Art Deco towers of Midtown started racing each other towards the sky. I also wish we had these sorts of urban documentaries of the Soviet cities and Berlin after the second World War. The importance of capturing a place over time is part of why I take photographs - though I don’t expect that my photos will serve as an exhaustive historical record, the visual documentation of the city is an important part of understanding why the places we live are the way they are and teach us so much about the future and how they might evolve.
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