ancient cities

150 City and Film
shock as a decisive element in training modern sense
perception. Kracauer praised the female whitecollar
workers who attended film screenings for
their ability to glean practical wisdom about urban
life from the cinema. Both writers deeply admired
the films of Charlie Chaplin, such as Modern Times
(1936), for their comic yet ultimately deadly serious
portrait of the human body at the mercy of urban
technological society. In Kracauer’s Theory of Film:
Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), he developed
an account of film as uniquely suited to
recording quotidian urban realities.
Cinema also played a significant role in the promotion
of new urban schemes by municipal authorities
and planning organizations. In films such as
Die Stadt von Morgen—Ein Film vom Städtebau
(Maximilian von Goldbeck and Erich Kotzer) and
Architecture Today (Pierre Chenal, 1931), proponents
of the modern movement in architecture
criticized the density and unhealthful conditions of
traditional cities and proposed alternatives ranging
from apartment towers to greenbelt towns. Shown
to much acclaim at the 1939 World’s Fair, The
City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939)
epitomized this tendency. Its evocation of the values
of a small New England town and depiction of
the modern metropolis as chaotic and unhealthy
suggests a transformation in the cinematic image of
the city, now tinged with anxiety, indicative of a
shift from early to late modernity.
Film and the Late Modern Metropolis
The American film noir cycle of the 1940s and
1950s is the most noticeable expression of the
trend away from earlier optimistic treatments of
the metropolis. At once a reworking of earlier
depictions of urban violence and perversion associated
with Weimar German films such as The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wine, 1919), The Street
(Karl Grune, 1923), Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
(Fritz Lang, 1922), and M (Fritz Lang, 1931), the
film noir presented a conspicuously downbeat
vision of the American city, populated by losers
and innocent bystanders trapped in deadening routines
in a dark and treacherous environment.
Classic examples of film noir include Double
Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Naked City
(Jules Dassin, 1948), and The Asphalt Jungle (John
Huston, 1949). Produced as urban renewal initiatives
were eradicating many downtown neighborhoods,
film noir evinced a nostalgia for older urban
forms, elevated subway tracks, and decrepit industrial
districts whose impending demise rendered
them fascinating. The neo-noir movement of the
1970s and 1980s presented an idealized version of
a mythical 1930s Los Angeles in Chinatown
(Roman Polanski, 1974) and a dystopian pastiche
of earlier cultural styles and ethnicities in Blade
Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982).
Negotiating the eradication of older urban
forms and the arrival of new forms of the built
environment, as well as the anxieties accompanying
these changes, became a defining issue for the
postwar cinema in a way it had not been for earlier
film. Fear of communism and the hostility of
many Americans during cold war America of the
late 1940s and 1950s to any form of public housing
found its most vociferous expression in the
adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
(King Vidor, 1949), a defense of the skyscraper as
a symbol of masculine individualism. A rejection
of studio filmmaking and the recent fascist past,
the film movement Italian neorealism featured
actual urban locations in Rome, Open City
(Roberto Rossellini, 1945) to convey a democratic
humanism.
French New Wave filmmakers investigated the
impact of urbanization on the young in films such
as Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1960) and
Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960). The
modern postwar urban cityscape was explored by
Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville (1965) and Two or
Three Things I Know about Her (1966) and later
taken up by German Wim Wenders in The American
Friend (1977). American cities appeared ambivalently
portrayed in films such as Taxi Driver (Martin
Scorsese, 1976) and The Conversation (Francis
Coppola, 1974), and Death Wish (Michael Winner,
1974), which gave voice to anxieties about crime,
police ineffectiveness, surveillance, and corporate
corruption during the post-Watergate era.
Beginning in the 1960s a new generation of
urban filmmakers emerged. Their work treated
racial and ethnic groups largely denied access to
filmmaking in the past. Shirley Clarke directed The
Cool World (1964) and Melvin van Peebles made
his notorious Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
(1971), the first blacksploitation film, that commenced
its run in Detroit and soon took other