building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

The old vestiges of the town admired by Victor Hugo in Notre‐Dame de Paris (1831)
fell into ruin to make room for the contemporary metropolis described by
Benjamin:
The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time […]. Like an ascetic
animal, he flits through unknown districts – until, utterly exhausted, he
stumbles into his room, which receives him coldly and wears a strange
air. Paris created the type of the flâneur […] they themselves, the
Parisians, who have made Paris the promised land of the flâneur – the
“landscape built of sheer life”, as Hofmannsthal once put it. Landscape –
that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flâneur. Or, more precisely:
the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a
landscape, even as it closes around him as a room 109 .
The natural landscape of the flâneur is the contemporary metropolis, that of the
pioneer is the wildness 110 , the world told by Thoreau and interpreted by Emerson.
A long, elaborate cinematography interprets this process, first with the vast
productions of westerns, followed more recently by sophisticated post‐modern
productions.
In the book La frontiera contro la metropoli (2010) [The frontier versus the
metropolis] Emiliano Ilardi analyses these phenomena from the current point of
view, lingering over the structural inconsistencies of present‐day suburbs in the U.S.
The European suburb is the result of specific social policies, nearly always the
consequence of the expulsion of the less well‐off classes from the centre of the city.
In America, the opposite process has taken place: “The [American – editor’s note]
state does not have the power to solve the internal conflicts; it may only offer new
spaces, therefore it is the rich classes that rush to the periphery raising a wall to
contain the poor and conflictual centre. In a cult film such as 1997: Escape from
New York (1981) by John Carpenter the urban centre represented by Manhattan
109 BENJAMIN, Walter, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughin,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999, cit. pp. 416‐417 (first publication of Benjamin’s papers edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Das
Passagen‐Werk, 1982; Italian translation Parigi, capitale del XIX secolo, Turin, Einaudi, 1986)
110 See SCHAMA, Simon, Landscape and memory, London, Harper Collins, 1995 (Italian translation by
Paola Mazzarelli, Paesaggio e memoria, Milano, Mondadori, 1997)
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