the city in film
As described previously, I’ve been exploring a new medium, the “filmerick” (limericks to summarize great films). Here’s a new one in honor of Chloé Zhao’s poignant and meditative on-the-road epic, Nomadland:
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
They may think that you don’t have a plan,
When they see that you poop in a can,
But it’s them that did go mad,
You hard-working nomad:
You’ve a home on the road in your van.
For my longer (and slightly more serious) review, see The Arts Fuse.
A big thanks to mubi for releasing Nimic, the latest work from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favorite).
This delightfully-eerie short combines Matt Dillon (who can pull off “clueless and confused” like no other actor working today) with a devilish Daphne Patakia (who quite literally steals the show from the more senior actor), capturing all the End-of-Empire fear of a host of recent offerings in the “stalker/imposter/body-snatcher” genre (It Follows, Goodnight Mommy, Get Out, Us, Under the Skin — and even Lanthimos’s own The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and distills this anxiety down to its purest essence in a 15-minute package. (Also worth noting, as with a number of these other films, there’s some subtle race and gender subtexts at play here; one only need do a quick search for “you will not replace us” to discover the real ugly fears at the heart of so much of the current cultural divide, explored in these collected works: far more threatening than serial-killing maniacs or flesh-eating zombies is the terror of being usurped.)
Dillon plays a middle-aged father of three, a cellist who gets up like any other day, boils an egg for breakfast like any other day, and heads off on the subway for rehearsal — just like any other day. But returning home, something is off — a glitch in the matrix, perhaps — and he finds himself followed by a doppelganger: the sweet and sly Patakia, who — strangely, mysteriously, intriguingly — looks nothing like Dillon (just roll with it). As she follows him home, Diego Garcia’s deft cinematography provides the perfect “stalker-cam” viewpoint: we find ourselves at once both in pursuit and pursued, as the fish-eye lens bends the very streets of the city around the characters. (The score — starting, stopping, on-screen, then off: strings whining, bending, screeching, humming, all at once — heightens the pace and the sense of tension and pursuit.)
As the circle bends back on itself, we begin to question even more of the reality we’ve just seen. See it once, and then watch again to truly appreciate how much mystery, confusion, fear, and dread a great director can pack into a short.
The August issue of Planning Magazine is on the streets, including my latest take on the 1959 science fiction classic, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte.
After being trapped for days in a coal mine, Ralph Burton (Belafonte) emerges to the aftermath of a radioactive attack. Searching for survivors, he makes his way to New York City. Despite similarities with today’s social isolation — and the prescient foreshadowing of the urban abandonment Belafonte’s real-life generation would soon experience — planners will nonetheless marvel at these images. The city has never looked so empty, so beautiful — or so sterile and dead…
For the full review, see Planning Magazine.
In July UrbanFilm’s Ezra Haber Glenn presented an old favorite, King Vidor’s “The Crowd,” as part of the Brattle Theatre’s Elements of Cinema series.
It’s a hard film to categorize: it combines aspects city symphony, silent comedy, melodrama, epic genres, and a sort of nascent proto-neorealism. The visuals are heavily influenced by the German Expressionism of the 1920s, but really blends everything into a style all his own…. As you watch, be sure to pay attention to the way the characters interact with the city and the crowd: the city of the 1920s is an extremely public place: notice the tension between private and public, between free will and conformity, between individual and “the crowd.” There are profound tensions — especially for an increasingly urban America after the closing of the frontier. Watching movies together in the great old movie houses like this — alone in the dark with our fellow city-dwellers — provided an important forum for us to navigate these tensions, in our own heads and in public, individually and as a crowd.
See the Brattle’s Film Notes to read the full introduction to the film.
A condensed version of this article appears on The Atlantic’s CityLab.
When used judiciously, establishing shots are one of the most useful techniques in film and television. As the curtain opens on a new scene, a director is able to convey a whole range of important information—the when and where of the setting, as well as the overall mood and moment that we are about the enter—all through a single short shot. Such is the power of imagery.
The first season of Amazon’s new serial adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s alternative-history thriller, “The Man in the High Castle,” has already made excellent use of this technique, often lowering the viewer into scenes of Nazi-occupied New York or Japanese-occupied San Francisco with shots of key buildings or landmarks. We know and love these cities and we immediately recognize these places—only to be jarred by the superimposition of the familiar (Times Square, the Golden Gate Bridge) with new “alt-history” signifiers (swastikas galore; Rising Sun banners; propaganda on the billboards). In a similar vein, the show’s haunting credit sequence—one of the best in recent memory—uses both landmarks and maps to set the stage and orient the viewer. Planners and urban designers would be wise to take note: these short segments beautifully illustrate the ways history, memory, landscape, politics, mapping, and meaning are interwoven in the ways we “make sense of place.”
Early in the second season, however, these shots take on an entirely new—and quite horrifying—relevance, especially for urban planners who know their history. As the story traces back to the corridors of power in the Fatherland, we get our first establishing shot of the Nazi capital of Berlin, looking east past the famous Siegessäule (Victory Column), towards the Brandenburg Gate.
Figure 1: Alternate-History Berlin, from “The Man in the High Castle,” Season 2; from http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/the-man-in-the-high-castle/images/7/77/Screen_Shot_2016-07-23_at_9.41.37_AM.png/revision/latest?cb=20160723134640
The column itself is nothing surprising: visitors to Berlin today will find it there in the Großer Stern (Great Star) rotary, although when it was originally erected in the 1870s it was much closer to the center of town. In 1939, the 59-meter column was relocated to this spot as the opening salvo in a massive urban planning assault on the historic city led by Hitler’s First Architect, Albert Speer. (In the process, the column was also made 7.5 meters taller through the insertion of additional stone drums; as will become obvious, size mattered quite a lot of Hitler and Speer.)
Speer’s plan—developed in close collaboration with Hitler, who understood the nationalistic power of architecture and urban design—was to transform Berlin: the old city was to be reborn as Welthauptstadt Germania (Germania, World Capital), the seat of the new empire. (The location titles of the show chose to stick with “Berlin,” presumably to give the audience a clearer real-world referent; or perhaps, in deference to his uneasy truce with Japan in the show, the Führer is holding off on claiming total world domination for the moment.)
Continue reading “Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (no spoilers)”
