the city in film
The January 2019 issue of the APA’s Planning Magazine features Ezra Haber Glenn’s capsule review of the 2018 film, Blindspotting.
Blending humor, drama, social commentary, and masterfully lyrical dialog, the film helps us wrestle with the big questions of today’s cities while steering clear of overly simplistic answers…
Click here to read more.
Check out the Atlantic’s CityLab for Ezra Haber Glenn’s latest review of Charm City, a new documentary by Marilyn Ness set on the streets of Baltimore.
Thus, while the film is full of the clichés and conventions of both police procedurals and “poverty-porn,” the overall experience is refreshingly new. Viewers are neither titillated nor terrorized, but are instead invited to take their time and actually experience these places and interactions, reflecting on how they are lived and felt by the people in the documentary….
See CityLab for the full review.
The Atlantic’s CityLab features Ezra Haber Glenn’s review of Jeremy Workman’s new documentary, THE WORLD BEFORE YOUR FEET. Click, read, watch, share.
As he describes his current project on his blog “I’m Just Walkin’,” it’s a natural, deeper “counterpoint” to his cross-country walk: “Instead of seeing a million places for just a minute each, I’m going to spend a million minutes exploring just one place.” What emerges is a kind of plain-spoken psychogeography, an honest fascination with the details of life and the little mysteries of the city….
See CityLab for the full review.
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.
UrbanFilm’s Ezra Haber Glenn’s latest op-ed on NextCity discusses THE EXPERIMENTAL CITY, a new documentary by Chad Freidrichs (THE PRUIT-IGOE MYTH). The film explores the lost history of a futuristic attempt to solve urban problems by creating a full-size city from scratch in the isolated woods of northern Minnesota.
Freidrichs has assembled a comprehensive collection of “tomorrow land” visuals and presents them in a visually luxurious symphony of future urbanism: 1960s colors and Jetsonian optimism combine to maximum effect, the visual equivalent of an Esquivel record re-mixed by Steven Soderbergh. The colors, typefaces, film stock, effects and even the static buzz-and-pop of pre-digital hi-fi are all perfectly matched….
Click here to read more.