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The city seen: Cinematic representation of urban space

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The city seen: Cinematic representation of urban space

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Content THE CITY SEEN:
CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF URBAN SPACE
by
Clark Arnwine
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES)
August 2003
Copyright 2003 Clark Arnwine
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
under the direction of h . dissertation committee, and
approved by all its members, has been presented to and
accepted by the Director of Graduate and Professional
Programs, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Director
Date Aug u s t 1 2 , 2003
Dissertation Committee
Chair
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Dedication
This work is dedicated to my parents,
Lou Arnwine and William C. Arnwine,
whose support never wavered over the course of this endeavor.
In Memory of John Rodes
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my committee members for their help with this
project. David James has been an intellectual mentor, sponsor, and source of
support throughout the journey of this endeavor. Marsha Kinder offered
many useful comments, and some inspiring conversations. Michael Dear
shares an interest in this subject matter, which we have discussed on a
number of occasions.
Jesse Lemer has consistently given encouragement and stimulated
thought on this topic, especially as we jointly edited two issues of the journal
Wide Angle entitled "Cityscapes I & II/' I would like to thank all of the many
contributors to that effort, whose insights informed m y own thought. Ed
Dimendberg has been particularly relevant to my concerns here. Robert
Carringer introduced me to new perspectives on research methodology
when I worked with him on a project on Los Angeles and cinema at the
Getty Research Institute. Two separate year-long stints working at the Getty,
both revolving around issues related to my research, proved invaluable for
the opportunities for research and discussion. Daniel Dayan helped
immensely with my research into freeway subjectivity. Lynn Spigel gave
feedback on early versions of some of this material. Michael Kowalski and
Karen Voss each shared discussion around these topics w ith me.
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Jim Moran, Paul Bertino, Karina Palo-Bertino, Jim Arnwine, Derek
Dixie, Jean Arnwine, Bill F. Arnwine, and Neil Arnwine provided moral
support and encouragement over the course of this process.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation for the patient support
and inspiration of Shelley Saunders, who greatly helped me to finish an
involved undertaking.
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Table of Contents
Dedication ........ ii
Acknowledgements........ ......... .....iii
Abstract ....... vi
Introduction ........ 1
Chapter One. Paradigms of the City in Film ............... 10
Chapter Two. Cinematic Los Angeles ........ 51
Chapter Three. Real Reel L.A.: Documentary Types, 1918-1960 ......... 115
Chapter Four. Subjectivity and the Los Angeles Freeway:
Negotiating Postmodern Urban Space ......... .....155
Chapter Five. Fractured Spaces/The City in Conflict ........... 202
Afterword ....... ...268
Bibliography ......... 270
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Abstract
This work explores issues around the intersection of urban space and
cinematic representation. A starting point considers how film as a medium
represents the dynamic, topographical nature of the urban built
environment, especially in the case of the location film as opposed to the
urban milieu created on a backlot or sound stage. Basic properties of the
medium are examined, beginning with an historical context that starts with
the earliest urban-based films such as the Paper Print records of early
twentieth century New York, as well as other films that exemplify different
approaches to using existing urban environments as raw material for
cinematic production.
A major focus concerns the history of the cinematic representation of
the Los Angeles region, a major center of film production, from the inception
of cinema through the end of the 1960s. The particular nature of the growth
and development of Los Angeles is considered in conjunction with the
changing nature of the films set and filmed in this city in narrative as well as
documentary films, including films as varied as Harold Lloyd's vertiginous
Safety Last, noir films such as He Walked By Night and Kiss M e Deadly, the
semi-documentary The Savage Eye, and the New Wave influenced Point Blank.
The changing nature of the film industry as well as changes in the national
and international profile of the city contribute to changes in the ways that the
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city is depicted. One chapter examines an iconographic element of Los
Angeles topography embodied in the freeway system as to implications for
the subjectivity of inhabitants.
A final chapter examines the nature of several diverse forms of media
representation in urban zones tom by civil strife in more recent settings.
This section draws on diverse intellectual methodologies to explore the filmic
representation of counter-hegemonic London in the 1980s, the role of media
in the downfall of the dictator Ceaucescu's control of Romania, and the role
of local television during the civil unrest following the initial trials of the
police officers in the Rodney King beating case in Los Angeles.
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Introduction
It has now become commonplace to discuss the condition of the
postmodern subject, of how our bodies are increasingly extended by various
technological extensions that act as perceptual-motor prostheses: the world
is conceived differently when one's mobility is extended by the automobile;
when one's communication is mediated by various types of image
transmittal over fiber optic cables, from fax to television. These changes in
the conceptualization of the body coincide with shifting perceptions of an
urban space, which is increasingly marked by developments such as the
fortified and panoptic security city of a two tiered society (for instance, as
described by Mike Davis in City of Quartz1 ), by the privatization of public
space, and the rise of simulations of the city such as that of theme parks.
There is even discussion of the actual demise of public space as we know it
in the new formations of cyberspace. As information technologies proliferate
the space of the city is no longer conceived as a Newtonian or Cartesian
space charted by integral subjects, but space is imploded, becoming instead
the space of the computer screen. Many questions arise when confronting
these developments. Is the "virtual" city universal? Who has access to this
newly configured space? What issues of access in terms of class, race,
gender, sexuality arise?
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One way to engage the complexities of this new field of relations in
public space is to study rather the antecedents, the historical and social forces
that lead up to and facilitate current conditions. In his influential though
ultimately unfinished work on Paris in the nineteenth century, the Arcades
project, Walter Benjamin explored the multiple interconnections between
emerging technologies, the built environment and forces contributing to its
particular formations, and new aesthetic practices of the nineteenth century
in what he called a prehistory of his present time, which was a time of the
dense "modem" city. I would like to take his efforts as a model, and explore
the prehistory of the current/future postmodern subject in a newly
configured urban space. And, inasmuch as imaging technologies and
representational forms are central to our contemporary/em ergent
organization of society, this study will explore the preconditions of this
brave new world principally by exploring the relationship of the built
environment of twentieth century cities and the role of changing urban form
to the methods of their representation. The fulcrum with which I will
perform this investigation is the examination of filmic practice in the
representation of urban space. At the same time, this discussion will offer an
examination of the medium specificity of film as approached through the
way that cinema represents space.
Cinema is arguably an urban phenomenon: it was bom in the city,
cities were the most important early locus of exhibition, and urban themes
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have been a recurrent staple of motion pictures. The cinema emerged at a
time when the city was reaching to new heights, literally, in ever-greater
agglomerations of the metropolis. Throughout the twentieth century urban
space and urban experience have undergone reconfigurations, stemming in
part from technological changes and shifts in the social formations that
began in the nineteenth century. The turn of the century witnessed the
emergence of the vertical metropolis as the expression of consolidating forces
of industrial development and innovations in construction technology that
led into the reigning modernist architecture of the first two thirds of this
century. After the Second World War this model of the urban began to be
tom by various stresses, beginning with Keynsian driven suburban
demographic shifts, and cuhninating with the decline of the traditional
urban industrial city through flexible capital accumulation and the
transnational movements of labor and capital.
This dissertation will explore problems and issues relating to the
confluence of patterns of urban development, the construction of the urban
subject especially as mediated by technology, and problems regarding the
representation of urbanism in film. In addressing this nexus of study,
aesthetic developments in cinema cannot be conceived outside of their
relation to social patterns and relationships. However, I w ant to avoid being
deterministic in this regard: film and aesthetic practice in general are not
mere epiphenomena of some underlying economic or social structures, but
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rather offer the possibility to articulate vital issues of subjectivity and help
shape attitudes that inform the organization of society. Of course, "film" is
not a monolith and this study will be intent on recognizing the specificities of
particular historical situations, and the differences that exist between
industrial film production and the film practice of those working outside of
established commercial circuits. But throughout I will be interested in the
capacities of film as a medium to record/present/represent the depth of
urban space and the way it affects subject positions. In exploring this
problematic I will necessarily be selective about films that work in new and
innovative ways in engaging social space; the potential scope of this project
when considered broadly throughout the history of international cinema
clearly mitigates against a fully comprehensive reckoning in these pages, but
this study does point to areas that can be addressed and elaborated upon in
future studies. I especially focus on the cinematic representation of Los
Angeles, primarily in the period from the inception of film until 1970. While
I do discuss films outside of this range, this periodizing sets off a range of
approaches that films have taken in addressing this particular urban
formation, and also marks as a limit the changes brought to an industry by
the rise of the New American Cinema of the middle 1970s, and the collapse
of the vertically integrated studios with giant back lots. While there is a
proliferation of films set in Los Angeles that occurs in the middle nineteen
eighties, this project lays a groundwork to discuss the issues they raise, but I
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cannot fully examine them in this volume. Los Angeles offers an interesting
site for an investigation of the interrelationship of urbanism and cinema,
both for its specific patterns of development, as well as being the capital of
the film industry. This specific case study of Los Angeles notwithstanding,
this project's breadth across lines of genre, historical period, and
nationality—and thus attendant selectivity as to films and filmmaker—I see
as a virtue rather than a curse, in that the issue of problems of film
representation, urban space and attendant subject positions can be more
pointedly approached.
Film as a signifying system is both similar to and different from other
media in regards to representing changing social conditions. T.J. Clark in his
analysis of the emergence of Impressionistic painting in a changing
landscape in and around Paris in the mid nineteenth century, and Raymond
Williams in his study of changing poetic traditions in response to changing
conditions of the English landscape through class based changes in
ownership and usage present exemplary cases of understanding artistic
developments in relation to changing social conditions and patterns of
settlement.2 However, filmic expression is also conditioned by the fact that
in its mainstream case it is an industrial form of representation, requiring
expenditures of production, even for the most basic examples, that
necessitate expectations of mass distribution, which impact on the choices of
exposition. Even self-styled personal or avant-garde works of film require
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an industrial infrastructure of labs and supporting facilities that impact the
range of expression possible. These conditions are thus more circumscribed
than that of the conditions of an individualistic painter or poet, working
alone amid social changes. This industrialized nature of the medium reveals
itself in various ways, such as the absence of African-Americans in the
"canon" of American classical Hollywood film. One response in relation to
the cinematic depiction of the city is that Hollywood film production in the
thirties moved almost entirely into the studio, the sound stage and the back
lot, as production sought to capitalize on economies of scale. The limitations
of the new sound technology— which proved fabulously popular in terms of
exhibition— m andated more controlled circumstances of shooting, which
precluded going on location. As well, film stocks of the time required
massive infusions of light, easier controlled in a studio or back lot than when
left to the vagaries of meteorological conditions. Thus for a number of years
the city was recreated on the back lot, or on the sound stage, in ways that
were reduced to the "signs" of urban architecture, but were not the actual
locations shaped by social forces and weathered by experience.
However, in this study I am not principally interested in the creation
of the city within a studio set. This tradition has a long and distinguished
presence in film history, from the giant walls of a futuristic Metropolis created
at UFA's Neu Babelsburg studios, to the fanciful references to iconographic
views of famous cities in musicals such as An American in Paris or 42nd
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Street, to the scaled down mobile "skyscrapers" of "Tativille" shot in forced
perspective to create a startlingly illusionistic effect by Jacques Tati, in
Playtime, and on to such m odem creations as Dick Tracy and the 1998 Dark
City.3 Rather, I am primarily engaged here in exploring how film interprets
the city using the textures of the city as raw material—I am interested in the
location city, if you will, at certain crucial moments in cinematic history
when films turn to the location to represent the city, a category that includes
both documentary and fiction efforts that use the city as raw material.
Within this still rather broadly conceived approach to the problematic
of urban space and filmic representation I will focus on several specific issues
of film theory raised by this confluence, as well as several
moments / locations of film history to explore how these issues manifest in
specific instances. Chapter One examines some basic questions of film's
medium specificity in relation to an urban landscape, especially as raised by
the first expressions of primitive cinema and the initial movements toward
narrative, but also as manifested in other select cinematic engagements with
urban life. Chapters Two and Three take as a case study the filmic
interpretation of Los Angeles—the center of motion picture production—to
focus the specific dynamics of cinematic representation and the
interrelationship with patterns of urban development; taking as subject
matter the approaches of fiction film and the documentary in the first fifty
years of film production in the region, from the teens until the end of the
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sixties. Chapter Four further examines the nature of urban topography and
its effects on subjectivity through a look at a paradigmatic feature of
Southern California, the freeway. Shifting gears somewhat, though
maintaining a measure of focus on the particularities of Los Angeles, Chapter
Five, then, elaborates on possible theoretical approaches and specific
questions of cinematic and media representations of urban life, taking as a
particular area of inquiry instances of social strife, unrest, and rebellion: the
nexus of urban geography, historical forces and media representations in
London of the 1980s, Bucharest at the toppling of dictatorship, and Los
Angeles in at the time of the Rodney King verdict riots. Each of these
different moments of media history offers examples to reflect on this nexus
of dynamic, three dimensional urban space and the representational forms
that seek to express the realities within.
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End Notes: Introduction
1 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York:
Vintage Books, 1992).
2 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modem Life: Paris in the A rt of Manet and His Followers
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
3 On the production of the city in studio films see Donald Albrecht, Designing Dreams:
Modern Architecture in the Movies (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987);
Dietrich Neumann, ed., Film Architecture (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996); Design Book Review
No. 24 (Spring 1992), special issue on "Cinemarchitecture."
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Chapter One. Paradigms of the City in Film
A num ber of interesting questions arise in the considration of the
filmic representation of urban space. How does film, a two-dimensional
medium, convey the three-dimensional nature of lived urban experience?
Can it be reduced purely to a representation of volumetric space as
transformed through a lens onto a flat plane? This would seem to imply a
perpetuation of Quattrocento perspective in the new m edium — which raises
questions about the implicit ideology and world view of such a conception of
representation, and if such a way of seeing still operates today. Still, the
realistic nature of film has been cited by a number of theorists of film (Bazin,
Kracauer) as its particular quality and strength.1 Another position would
hold that images are necessarily coded in the transformation from "real" to
image, especially as in film where chains of signifiers wind through the
temporal unfolding of the narrative. The relationship between the space
depicted and the arbitrary limiting of the space of the film frame is highly
relevant here. To some, "reality" is already irrevocably coded and mediated.
Film would thus participate in those multiple existing codings; yet perhaps
also employ urban space in its own signifying practices— for example, an
alienating city space operating as metaphor for a character's inner psychic
state. This tension between film as recorder of an ontologic space, and film
as signifying system that expresses aspects of urban topography and power
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relationships through operations other than the lens in space, forms the site
of my investigation. This chapter explores basic parameters of film as a
medium and how these interact with the representation of urban space,
focusing on the special case of early cinema and some structural avant-garde
film practices that draw on this tradition, as well as other specific film
traditions that illuminate these issues.
One of the primary elements of the problematic of the representation
of urban space in film is the specific nature of film meaning. Film theory
over the years has often been constructed through two opposing camps:
those theorists such as Kracauer and Bazin that emphasize the realism
inherent in the photographic properties of the film image, and those theorists
that stress the formalist capabilities of film to create meaning through
manipulation of formal techniques such as montage that transcends the
actual forms depicted into a signifying practice separate from the objects
photographed (for instance, Eisenstein and Arnheim). An important
consideration here is the way that the film apparatus transforms volumetric
space in constructing the film image. The camera lens in a way recreates the
Quattrocento perspective with its fixed single "eye" focusing pyramids of
light onto a flat plane that acts as a window onto the world.2 This might be
seen as flatly supporting Henri Lefebvre's claim of the Abstract space that
has guided Western life these past centuries, a view inherently geometrical
and visual.3 Yet, film transformation of urban space is not limited to singular
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"realistic" depictions of a profilmic space. Different lenses give different
effects: Bazin for instance praised Welles' use of the wide angle lens which
had a much longer depth of field, and thus allowed for composition in depth,
as opposed to longer lenses that required focusing only on objects at a
particular distance from the lens. As well, the wider lens entails an increased
spatial differentiation— objects further away from the camera are reduced in
size; in contrast, long focal length lenses collapse space intervening between
objects, giving a flat appearance with objects of the same size though in
different planes relative to the camera (with a limited depth of field, though,
so that many objects in the frame could be out of focus). These particularities
of the apparatus and the effects they have on the represented image and thus
on the way that the image is perceived and read perhaps suggest that a view
of film as inherently realistic is naive. Amheim insists that the film image is
not realistic, but a distinct representation of space: "If film photographs gave
a very strong spatial impression, montage probably would be impossible."4
Besides effects of lenses, there is also the issue of camera movement, which
can traverse space and thus give a sense of depth. But both of these issues
have to be considered with reference to how they are folded into the story,
how they are put into the narrative space, which thus includes issues of
character construction and identification, and the relation of character to
space. Thus, attention to film conventions of the creation of space, such as
the 180° rule (that the camera will not cross an axis establishing a scene), and
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how space is necessarily distorted in the process of becoming a flat image in
a sequence of images are pertinent here.
To approach issues of cinematic representation of urban space this
chapter looks at how the earliest emergent cinema approached the problem
of conveying urban space, which can be largely encapsulated as a "optics-in-
space" the positioning of a camera-eye within existent volumetric space (and
an approach shared by certain aspects of the structural film movement).
However, there was also awareness of a some of the specific qualities
engendered by sequential photography, which were exploited in trick films
that bring in issues of time aside from the concrete time of a discrete film
shot (also properties used successfully by later filmmakers). But aside from
these specific parameters of film medium evident in early film, certain modes
of representation for portraying the landscape of the city have emerged.
These modes, which can be seen variously as conventions, codes, or
paradigms, have governed much of the urban film production, and will be
cataloged here.
Early Cinema: Actuality and the Urban
Early cinema offers a limit case of the use of film to depict emerging
cityscapes. Recent scholarship has emphasized how early cinema developed
in relationship to and out of other media and public discourses at the turn of
the century, such as vaudeville, magic lantern exhibition, postcards,
stereograph views, and Victorian melodrama, only later settling into the
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institution of feature cinema that might have more in common with a
novelistic model.5 As the m odem metropolis took shape, partly through the
innovation of new steel frame construction derived from railroad industrial
technology, and the invention and spread of the elevator, the novelty optical
device of the motion picture apparatus took notice of the changes in
topography. "Actualities," generally one shot views that depicted existing
locations, comprised the majority of films produced until 1903. Often termed
"view" or "panorama," the word panorama itself indicating the link with other
imaging models, both the large-scale painting on the inside of a cylinder,
viewed from within the center,6 as well as the panoramic photograph of
extremely wide aspect ratio such as the celebrated view of San Francisco
from atop Nob Hill by Edweard Muybridge (he of the sequential
photography of horses and nudes seen as a precursor to film). The motion
picture version of a panorama typically involves camera movement, either
panning or tilting, or mounting on a vehicle such as train or boat in order to
portray a landscape. Catalogs of the period contain many references to
views and panoramas of cityscapes. The Lumiere Brothers' catalog, for
instance, includes many films that depict various large cities: Marseilles,
Rome, Naples, Venice, New York, Boston, Cairo, Stockholm, all from 1896-
97. Indeed, the practice of the Lumiere Company was to send a cameraman
to a large foreign city, then follow prescribed models: an approach to the city
as captured by a camera mounted on an incoming train, the passersby in a
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prominent public square or in front of an important building from a fixed
camera position, or a military parade in a public space. The views obtained
are typically of the guide book variety: historic buildings, picturesque
facades, recognizable locations. These films act almost as a moving postcard
for a city, providing the appropriate iconography for an exotic location to
foreign audiences. Movement of the camera is only offered when mounted
on a conveyance; planned processions offer the only minimal control of
people in the shot. The local audience could be presented with familiar
scenes as well as exotic foreign views the operator brings with him, while the
company's catalog grew with the addition of the new material shot abroad.
An interesting example of such a mise-en-abyme is registered in a Lumiere
Brothers film "Entrance to the Cinematographe" (number 250 in their
catalog) in London showing the Empire Theater advertising the
cinematographe being filmed by the cinematographe, with horse drawn
carriages passing by in street.7
Similar efforts took place in the United States. Thanks largely to the
serendipitous cataloging of films via paper prints required for copyright by
the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress in the first two decades of
motion picture production, films that would be otherwise unavailable due to
nitrate deterioration or disposal due to lack of commercial demand have
been preserved. The Paper Prints Collection in the Library of Congress
includes a num ber of examples that depict New York City at the turn of the
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century, as the city is burgeoning with development. A num ber of these
films capture a New York City in finest period detail, dynamic with the
crowd, or an abstract collection of architectural forms, eerily devoid of
people. Often bearing the designation of "panorama," one type follows the
Lumiere example by mounting the camera on a moving vehicle, such as boat
or railcar. Panorama Water Front and Brooklyn Bridge From East River and Sky
Scrapers of New York City, From the North River (both 1903), interrupted only
by the changing of the film, exemplify one mode of the actuality: they
present a tour of southern M anhattan by boat through continuous pans by
the docks and boats along the waterfront, with the skyscrapers of Wall Street
in the background. Here the city surface is circumscribed by one type of
delineating view, a camera movement that traverses the working docks and
piers and shows the scope of the city; yet a view unavailable to even most
New Yorkers. While seemingly quotidian in the depiction of working
surfaces, the view is also extraordinary in the way it encapsulates the facade
of the city, the skyline an array of attractions emblematic of the city (and
cited by Fritz Lang as the inspiration for Metropolis observed when he sailed
into New York on a visit two years before making that film).
Panorama From Times Building, New York (1905) takes a high angle view
from twenty stories atop the newly constructed Times Building, panning
somewhat jerkily from Bryant Park to Times Square. The height of the new
building offers a vista previously unknown, conveying a new mapping of
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the city, a different organization of spatial knowledge of the massed
buildings that comprise the new topography, again in a view most likely
unattainable to those nickelodeon patrons within New York as well as
outside. Similar high angle views are obtained in the Panorama from the
Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (1899), while Panorama of Flatiron Building offers
a more conventional appreciative tilt up an exciting new building, the first
New York skyscraper in an instantly recognizable form shaped by its odd
comer lot caused by the slicing of Broadway. Films like Lower Broadway and
Move On offer street level views, the latter showing a policeman shooing a
pushcart vendor on in a possibly staged encounter, while a candid shot of
what appears to be some sort of health inspectors or police officials walking
through a crowded Lower East Side market filmed from a discrete slight
elevation appears in New York City Ghetto Fish Market. To our sophisticated
viewing tastes the one jerky shot of Panorama From Times Building, New York
is unremarkable, save for those interested in historical detail. But at that
time the new aerial perspective could well have proved vertiginous,
operating at the level of what Tom Gunning has termed the "montage of
attractions/' relishing a sense of presentation and stimulating content for
effect rather than the entanglements of narrative that would emerge later.
However, to take these out of context and look individually as these short
films as texts can be a somewhat misleading endeavor, as the exhibitor
played a role in presenting and "editing" a program, which could include the
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use of live music as well as selecting and arranging the film titles.8 But
regardless of the exhibition context, these actualities operate at the level of
social observation, of historical documentation, of direct if novel views—not
overtly artistic in a refined sense of using the capabilities of the medium in a
self-conscious sense, or for greater social or aesthetic purpose.
One can distinguish these rather simple actualities to the work of two
contemporaneous still photographers working in New York at roughly the
same time. Jacob Riis, on one hand, was a social reformer who uses similarly
unembellished direct photography to document social ills in a politicized
fashion—the photograph itself was not so important, (or the actually more
commonly seen line drawings made from them and printed in the press) but
rather the social action that followed from it. His work literally embodies the
Enlightenment project: by drawing with light (photo-graphy) one shines light
on dark comers of society in order to rationally change for the better and
higher social good. Of course now his photographs themselves have been re
imbued with an auratic quality through the project of art collecting, and they
hang in the halls of the Museum of M odem Art and fetch high sums at
auction. Slightly later Alfred Stieglitz also turned his eye to documenting
views of New York, but one sees in his work a process that is artistic, using
elements of light and shadow, of darkroom printing, and in the very
composition to abstract daily views, to express ineffable nuances of
observation. One sees a similar movement finally in the cinema through a
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work such as Manhatta , directed by the fine arts photographer Paul Strand
and artist Charles Sheeler. Many of their views replicate the simple views of
the actualities, such as the view of the Manhattan skyline from the harbor (a
view which supposedly inspired Fritz Lang's Metropolis) and there is less
room for technical innovation with the less forgiving camera equipment and
movie film stock, but they do frame some startling compositions, such as
one shot through some posts on a fence circling a skyscraper, with the posts
hugely overshadowing some ant-like hum an figures behind them. Made in
1922, Manhatta was a gesture towards a cinema of artistic expression and for
consumption outside of the traditional commercial venues; as a poetic
evocation of the life of the city it prefigured (though as a short) the "city
symphony" tradition that was to emerge internationally later in the decade
with such works as Les riens quel les heures, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City,
and Man with a Movie Camera.9
City Form and the Emergence of Narrative
Returning to the discussion of actualities such as Excavating for a New
York Foundation, Beginning of a Skyscraper and Pennsylvania Tunnel Excavation,
one notices that the very titles reveal an interest in the large-scale
engineering projects which were transforming the topography of New York
and shaping subsequent patterns of use, though the actual images look only
like excavated holes in the ground. These two distinctive alterations to the
city, the verticality of the skyscraper and the rapid hopscotehing of space
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brought by the subway, reemerge in two Biograph films of 1906, Skyscrapers
of New York and The Tunnel Workers. Both rely on actuality footage of these
large-scale projects as backdrops for highly melodramatic narratives that
play on issues of class division that often unfold on flat, artificial studio sets.
They exemplify a hybridization between the actuality genre and the
emerging one-reel melodrama.
The Tunnel Workers functions along a very basic narrative premise. It
begins w ith a worker returning home to discover the "perfidy" of his dark-
clad foreman leaning through the window greeting his family. The film then
shifts to actuality footage of workers hoisting and carrying rock at the
excavation of the Pennsylvania Tunnel between New York and Long Island,
grandly declared in an intertitle as "The Greatest Engineering Feat the World
has Ever Known." Real workers brashly mug for the camera in several
shots-always separated by title cards— as the night shift takes the elevator
down to the work site. The drama, however, shifts to a very fake set of a
riveted tunnel, from which the workers go through a door to another set
with very bad fake rocks made of folded paper. Here a fight ensues between
the foreman and the affronted worker, only to be eclipsed by an explosion.
As a crew from the riveted tunnel endeavors to clear the door blocked by
"rocks," the worker staggers out from the cave-in. Seeing a flailing arm, and
though injured himself, he helps save his supervisor. A title card announces
"Foregiven" (sic), where in the hospital we see a man in crutches shaking
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hands with a patient in white. There is little characterization that would
show the motivation behind this seemingly noble act; it as if the moral
parable provides an excuse to show the great public works project (which
would have given an exhibitor a ready-made publicity line to tout).
Apparently the longer one-reel format could not be compiled solely from
actuality footage (actuality films tending to the range of half a minute to a
few minutes)— the film world was not ready for a full-fledged
"documentary." Of course, numerous earlier short films of the subway exist,
especially around the historic opening. One striking aspect of subway films
is that even though special cars were attached to the trains to provide the
enormous light necessary, a forward shot of the train passing through the
beams ribbing the tunnel produce an uncanny effect. The result resembles
something like Tony Conrad's notorious Flicker, (comprised of alternating
all-white and all-black frames that can produce a hypnotic, even
hallucinatory effect; so much so that viewers prone to epileptic seizures were
warned against viewing when it was installed at the "Hall of Mirrors"
exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art), as the frame
pulses alternately darkened and lightened as the beams pass by, until the
train pulls into the light (and grounded reality) of the subway station. I
would argue that this comprises the first abstract film, though of course not
intended to the same purpose as similar films from the 1960s. But as
important an event for the changing geography of the city as the subway's
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opening, the ride itself does not make for conventional cinema. The
importance of the event as transportation mitigates against its offering a
conventional platform for the moving camera-eye that would offer the
attraction of the changing perspective of the city topography.
Skyscrapers of New York employs a more impressive use of location,
closer attention to the actual building process, and only a slightly more
developed narrative than The Tunnel Workers. The film begins with what
could have been an actuality film in its own right two or three years earlier, a
slow pan from a high building across skyline and rooftops with smokestacks
lending atmospheric effect, a park and streets emerging below. Following
this panorama are several actuality shots from atop a skyscraper under
construction: a line of workers handing bricks to masons on a scaffold below
them, a riveting crew on I-beams with one m an heating rivets, one man
catching them as they are tossed into his can and holding them for a third
laborer wielding a sledgehammer, and a dizzying shot of men athwart
beams guiding a beam into place, the depth below evident.1 0 A group of
men dangle on a hook as a crane suspends them above the skyline,
cheerfully doffing their hats for the camera. Following this compilation of
actuality shots that would have been familiar to the regular nickelodeon
visitor, a thin narrative is developed. "Dago Pete" is fired for starting a fight.
He hatches a plan for revenge, though, and steals the contractor's watch and
wallet, then informs on the foreman when the contractor discovers the loss.
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Pete takes the items to the foreman's home on the pretext of asking the good
man's wife for something; her daughter teases the funny m an (he walks with
a stooped and bowlegged gait, and wears a rather bum pkinish hat). Both
females leave the room, the mother to fetch the article, while the daughter is
chased away by Pete so that he can plant the contractor's belongings.
Meanwhile, at the skyscraper the foreman accosts the contractor for his
wrongful accusation. "Thrilling hand-to-hand encounter on one of the
highest buildings erected in New York" a title card breathlessly states in a
heading printed in a way reminiscent of newspaper columns of the day.
Beaten, the contractor falls off screen, down, the foreman shown in remorse.
But he is rescued in a great shot, dangling from the beams with busy city
streets clearly visible behind and below him as m en approach from either
side and grab him. The film concludes in a courthouse, blocked in an odd
fashion as all characters enter in turn, keeping their backs to the audience as
they stand before the judge and bailiff: the foreman and his wife, Dago Pete
who points accusingly, and the contractor. But, finally, the little girl enters
and saves the day at the last second as she points trium phantly at Dago Pete
who is led away, while the contractor and foreman shake hands and make
up.
Read from our context nearly a century later, the rather crude
allusions to class and ethnic differences structuring New York society jump
out. The guileless use of derogative ethnic slang for a stereotypical villain
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speaks to an audience aware of different immigrant communities that have
arrived in waves from Europe and elsewhere that bear marks of difference in
culture and language; the epithet a naturalization of the stereotype.
Interestingly, the film manages to negativize both the immigrant worker who
is naturally-inclined criminal, but also the contractor who is the
representative of the capitalist class at a time when Trust-busting was a
recent phenomenon and D.W Griffith could make a film critical of economic
interests such as A Corner in Wheat two years later for the same company.
Like The Tunnel Workers, Skyscrapers of New York blends actuality
footage and hyperbolic melodrama acting, though it does stage some of the
action at the construction location. These two modes of filmmaking,
actuality and melodrama, embody separate registers: the lighting differs
from the set to the outside, as does the degree of depth and the believability
of setting, and while the workers blatantly mug for the camera, the actors
assiduously avoid this "mistake," though they do perform histrionic
gestures. As films, these are not successful in creating a world. But the
sensational nature of the actuality aspects create a built in hook for an
audience still seeking Gunning's "attractions," while the narrative creates an
emotional draw. In splicing together the two genres the filmmaker has taken
on the role formerly embodied by the exhibitor, who could create a program
out of disparate elements that played to their particular constituency and
marketing strategy. These two films, The Tunnel Workers and Skyscrapers of
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New York, occupy a transitional moment between the actuality films that
once constituted the bulk of films produced (until around 1903), and the rise
of the one reel narrative film that was the mainstay of cinema until features
began to be imported from Italy and produced in the US in the early teens.
They literally embody this transitional moment in their structure. As such,
they also mark a movement away from an engagement with the urban form
as a spectacular attraction, and towards the greater control that studio
production offered to narrative film, controlling aspects such as light and
weather, but leading to an assembly-line production process along
economies of scale with rationalized planning that discouraged location
filmmaking of the sort depicted in Skyscrapers of New York.
Time Manipulation and Urban Fabric
A differing approach to the built environment of the city from the
early days of the film medium's emergence is embodied in the 1903 short
Star Theatre. This film would fall into the then-category of a trick or gag film:
from a fixed camera position in front of the Star Theatre the film uses time-
lapse photography to depict the gradual demolition of the theater, somewhat
in the manner that Melies used stop-action to conjure magical tricks. The
building literally disappears a few bricks at a time, workers flitting about as
the walls are chewed away, passersby mechanically appearing in frame and
disappearing just as immediately. Sometimes the film employs pixilation,
the animation of live figures through stop-motion photography, at other
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times it records short lengths with a continuously running camera,
undercranked to speed up motion. Strung together, these clips depict a
gradual disappearance of the building. The beginning and end of the film
use a continuous filming, "real time," except that the camera speed and
projection speed were of course not yet standardized, and open to
interpretation by the individual exhibitor. One of the properties of film is
such that through a close examination we can determine the total duration of
the demolition, even as the film itself takes three or minutes to project at a
"normal" speed. This is where the film m edium's relationship concretely
intersects a solid, built "Real" environment as an end-limit rather than just a
"reel" context constructed for narrative or other significant ends. In the same
manner that a close examination of Andy Warhol's epic Empire discerned the
specific time of filming as revealed in the hours counted out through the
flashing of the beacon atop the Empire State Building, one can calculate
through the passing of the sunlight and shadows that the Star Theatre took
about thirty days to be reduced to rubble and carted off.1 1 (And thus leaving
fertile ground for a film of the "beginning of a skyscraper type" that is seen in
a number of the early film catalogues). The reference to Empire proves
interesting, too, in that W arhol's film-project specifically interrogates the
properties of film, the ephemeral materiality of film stock extended to
impossible lengths juxtaposed to the solidity of the then world's tallest
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building (the typically Warholian collision of such superstardom and
banality).
Tom Gunning has written 1 2 how "primitive" film has provided a
model for later structural filmmakers' experimentations to investigate the
physical and perceptual limits of the medium, sometimes through direct
reframing of early films, as when Ken Jacobs optically prints the 1905 Tom
Tom the Piper's Son for his own film of the same title, or in Ernie Gehr's
Eureka which step prints a pre-1906 earthquake film shot from a streetcar
meandering down San Francisco's Market Street. With this latter example,
the original film was made as a curiosity, showing the main boulevard of an
emergent city on the approach to a local landmark, the ferry building (at a
historical time of some propinquity, mere months before the devastating
earthquake). The film apparently documents more than just the train-
mounted camera traversing the city, though, as close analysis of the film
shows an early model automobile that keeps driving circles around the
streetcar as it moves down the street amid horse-carts, cyclists and
pedestrians. Gehr's film renders the source film more an object of study and
contemplation, as the step printing elongates the temporal passage of objects
through space, leading the viewer to dwell on details of the historical
moment, the changing fashion sensibilities reflected in the cut of a man's
clothes, the signs adorning the facades along the street, or the pathos of
witnessing the particularities of a passing face of a person long since
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departed from this earth, perhaps within the impending catastrophe. Of
course, many of Gehr's films tend to balance between an impetus toward an
almost meditational state through rhythmic qualities of carefully arranged,
abstract shapes; and a concurrent inspiration toward an analytic approach
that seeks to discover how camera tricks can be employed to create given
effects, or to read closely the historically sedimented details that fill the
frame. One thinks of Untitled: Part One (1981), where a fixed, tight high-
angle shot with a long lens depicts the fragmented arms and legs of elderly
people, primarily recent immigrant Jews from Russia, walking through the
frame, or in Serene Velocity the tension between the pulsation of pure light,
and the intellectual activity of determining the shift in the zoom lens focal
length, or the unworldly visual appearance of This Side of Paradise (1991)
where the whole film is shot through reflections in a m uddy open field
where transient Poles conduct an open air market in Germany with the
camera inverted, rendering the reflections as if actual figures, but dreamily
different, as the viewer is drawn to a closer look at the subjects' humbled
circumstances, but through an other-worldly view, for the figures in the
reflections at first appear to be embodied figures. Many of Gehr's films
specifically interrogate the conditions of urban space, and the basic
characteristics of film that represent this space.
Perhaps the film that best exemplifies these tendencies in Gehr's work
is his tour deforce 1991 film Side/Walk/Shuttle. The film was shot from a glass
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enclosed external elevator on a high-rise hotel atop San Francisco's Nob Hill
(an operation conducted undercover, requiring repeated elevated rides and
the dodging of unappreciative hotel security guards). The shots are
conventional enough at the beginning, standard views of the surrounding
streets as the elevator (and camera) ascend and descend. Gradually, though,
the look subtly changes, as different tricks are applied. Film speed is
manipulated, the camera is turned upside down, and film is run backward
through the camera, all in conjunction with the up and down motions of the
elevator. The effect achieved is haunting, as once monolithic buildings
become weightless and appear to glide through space, or to lift off and fly
like giant spaceships. In one instance a building is upside down, yet still
appears somewhat natural, though disturbingly so. Gehr transforms the
Cartesian space of the city as he plays around with perspective, urban space,
and the camera apparatus to reveal the conventions embodied in our normal
viewing. The filmic texture of repetitive up and down movements guided by
the elevator, combined with our interest in the details of movement of small
people or automobiles on the ground below instill a detached, dreamy
attention that is meditative, but yet eventually the strangeness demands
consideration of how the more radical effects can be achieved with what
appears to be a nothing more than a simple camera and elevator. The
repeated constricted view of the few streets surrounding the hotel inspires an
analysis of the circulation along the city streets...as does the Star Theatre.
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Both films create their magic with little more than the bare optics of the
camera and film speed.
Star Theatre provides a type of model that anticipates the use of time
lapse cinematography in two recent non-narrative features: Koyaanisquatsi
uses high speed cinematography to depict the poeticized demolition of a
giant housing project, a project that takes much less real time than needed to
remove the Star Theatre, but approximately the same reel time, while later in
the film time lapse photography from a fixed position charts the ebbs and
flows of humanity through the walled canyons of the city. The film accretes
depictions of hum anity's unbalanced expansion and transformation of the
earth (the title itself meaning "life out of balance" in the Hopi language), but
while visually awe-inspiring within individual shots, the logic of the film is
rather simple, the points made in individual virtuoso shots or comparative
sequences operating at a rather simplistic, albeit elegiac surface level. Pat
O'Neill in Water and Power also uses time lapse photography to abstract the
movement of bodies through space in an almost scientific manner. The
canyons of downtown Los Angeles endure a trickle, then a torrent of
humanity as marathon runners pour through the streets.1 3 As with
Koyaanisquatsi, the use here can be seen as an analytical approach to the
intersection of the pro-filmic and the film medium: the capability to render
successive images at a rate faster than that used for flicker-free projection
allows for the slow motion depiction of rapid movement, such as that
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involved in the mere seconds required to blow up a building, while the
converse of this action, the under-cranking and sequential pixilation of time-
lapse cinematography allows for an analysis of dynamics imperceptible at
normal speeds of registration. O'Neill also uses motion-control technology
and other special effects to institute slow pans and speeded up actors'
movements, as well as the movement of the camera over cityscapes, which
works to use the volumetric space of the built environment to make
In some ways O'Neill's work resembles Gehr's—certainly, an interest
in the abstraction of people and volumes of urban space is shared by
both—yet they represent two divergent tendencies of the avant-garde
filmmaker. Gehr epitomizes the lonely isolation of the avant-garde
filmmaker, working alone with a 16mm camera, no crew, and with special
effects created only through minimal in-camera manipulations of film speed,
film direction through camera, or framing, and insisting on hand-carrying
his prints to exhibitions.1 4 By contrast, Pat O'Neill worked w ith the industry
standard 35mm gauge film, and incorporated highly manipulated film
images that employed laborious optical-printing interventions and motion-
control cinematography (some of which he had shot for various commercial
clients) into his complex meditation on Los Angeles, even receiving limited
commercial distribution for his "feature" length work (it is on the short end
of that designation in terms of running length, though in visual complexity
and complex organization it seems longer).1 5 Gehr operates at the level of
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optics in space, but exploring the nature of that within the camera. O'Neill
starts with optics in space, but manipulates the image in the editing and
printing stages to attempt to make a link between the physical space
captured through the lens and not a narrative level but a symbolic register.
Yet more directly the Star Theatre can be seen to prefigure other early
films fascinated with using the capacity of manipulating the capacity of film
based to render a sense of the real through successive projection of
intermittent by altering the frames per second to analyze processes of urban
life. The Gaumont release Onesime, Horloger (Onesime the Clock-maker, 1908)
employs the conceit of a restless young man, who reads a tract about how
time is governed by a master timekeeper. Having grown impatient having
to wait twenty years for his inheritance, he surreptitiously adjusts this master
timepiece, throwing time into fast forward. Suddenly all of Paris is thrust
into a frenzy: traffic surges briskly through the Place de la Concorde, with
the Eiffel Tower in the background, workmen contrive like swarming ants to
erect a house in fast motion, while shoppers clamor through a department
store, all of these comic takes on m odem life due to the trick effect of
undercranking, or shooting fewer frames per second than will be used upon
projection, giving the effect of rapid motion. Seeing these motions speeded
up lends new insights into the dynamics of traffic flows, of a construction
gang, allowing perception of processes from a grander perspective. In the
end Onesime receives his inheritance, as life has sped up to pass the time. In
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this case, literally, time is money. Rather than the title character, the
designation "clockmaker" could also said to be embodied by the filmmaker,
who in effect sets the clock of perception through the winding speed of the
camera.
Another French film that capitalizes on a similar conceit is Rene
Clair's first film, Paris qui dort (finished in 1922, released in 1923). A young
man, the caretaker atop the Eiffel Tower, awakes one morning to find all of
Paris still, the streets empty, with only a few figures frozen in mid action: a
policeman chasing a crook, a drunkard, a potential suicide with a farewell
note on the banks of the Seine. He knows what Paris should look like: we see
his mental images of bustling traffic flowing along the Champs Elysees,
pedestrians and horse carts and autos. He eventually meets up with a varied
group of travelers who arrived early in the morning by airplane. The group
enjoys themselves in the sleeping city, breaking on one's mistress who
happens to be with company, helping themselves to jewels and food from
revelers in frozen posture at a fashionable restaurant. Life in this
playground becomes increasingly boring as they reside atop their citadel.
Eventually, as strains begin to emerge in their island of bliss, they come
across a distress cry on the radio. Following directions they come upon a
young woman who tells how her uncle, a mad scientist named Dr. Crase, has
invented a ray that stills all motion. Apparently the height of the incoming
aircraft and the top of the tower eluded the power of this fantastic device.
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They force the m ad professor to correct this state of affairs. Life returns to
normal, and the still images begin to move as people come to: the cop returns
to chasing the thief, diners realize they have been robbed. But the young
man and Dr. Crase's niece, left alone as the others disperse, realize they have
no means, even as yesterday he could have had a mint. They return to
Crase's where she secretly throws the lever again, and streets full of
movement come to an abrupt halt. But Dr. Crase moves the lever once again,
and the streets move into high gear, with vehicles whizzing by the camera,
which proves especially thrilling when the camera is m ounted on a truck and
moves through the whizzing city. These shots are like the earliest Lumiere
cityscapes: the camera set up in a popular avenue with m idday activity, or
mounted on a vehicle to move through the same type of space: a
straightforward documentation of urban life— it is just that here the shot is
undercranked and appropriated for the narrative end. In a way this simple
trick resembles the comic chase effects in one of Mack Sennett's Keystone
Cops shorts. But Annette Michelson, in a highly perceptive article on Paris
qui dort,1 6 argues that this film, along with Dziga Vertov’ s Man with a Movie
Camera, engage modernity, through the content of a new city fabric traversed
by technological icons such as automobiles, the Eiffel Tower, and the ray; but
these films also pursue a meta-cinematic project regarding the nature of the
medium, which sets them apart from films approaching similar themes of
the new urbanism of the twentieth century metropolis: Ruttmann's Berlin,
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Symphony of a Great City, Vidor's The Crowd, or Cavalcanti's Rien que les
heures.
From Optics-In-Space to Montage
We have seen in my earlier discussion that the new cityscape of the
first part of the century which emerged concurrently w ith the development
of a film language created several immediate approaches to the
representation of urban space. One such is the high angle shot, revealing the
topography of the built landscape from a position that had not been utilized
previously, which could be used naturalistically as an "attraction," or as in
Manhatta, as an artistic play on the scale of ant-sized hum ans compared to
oversized architectural detail, a contrast staged through careful composition
and deep focus. Another natural early cinematic response to representing an
urban space is through the horizontal pan across buildings, often enhanced
through placement on a natural dolly such as a boat or train. Both of these
approaches, still widely used, constitute a principle of "optics in space,"
where the camera-eye occupies the place of a subject rather naively (though
the principles of the camera lens can be manipulated to achieve a flattening
through the use of a longer focal length or telephoto lens, as in the abstract
flattening that occurs in a shot late in Water and Power, where peaked-roof
houses become geometric shapes through the use of a long lens). At a
different level of manipulation of the filmed image, a different property of
the cinematic apparatus is deployed through play with the film speed
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through the apparatus (frames per second), which can reveal aspects of the
physical use and properties of urban space, from the dium al cycle of
habitation to wholesale changes in the urban fabric itself. Later, another
angles emerge to exploring urban space, such as montage, which juxtaposes
different images to create kinetic effects or ideas.
In Man with a Movie Camera, montage is used in several ways that
convey new attitudes toward modernity through the creation of a new type
of film language. At times the use of montage is an intellectual montage: we
see a couple getting married at a government bureau, followed by another
couple similarly getting a bureaucratic divorce. The shot of the estranged
couple, separated in the frame, and separated by editing separate shots, both
downcast, is followed by a split screen superimposition, each side of the
frame canted at an extreme angle, each showing a streetcar, but not in synch
with each other. The next after the couple receives the paperwork is an
elevated shot of two streetcars, passing each other from opposite directions,
then each turning away. The visual expresses the point being made by the
couple getting a divorce, going their separate ways. (This is followed by the
intercutting of a birthing and a funeral, sketching other markers in the cycle
of life.) At other times the choreography of bustling city life--crowds,
streetcars, wagons, automobiles set amid streets and buildings—is intercut
with the working of machinery, and of hum ans using, even becoming
machines, suggesting a complicated approach to a new form of human
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subjectivity and perception. This comes to the fore especially when the
frame dissolves into two halves that sink the picture of an old State
sponsored Theater building, or when multiple views of streetcars manifest as
a grid of movement, one corner forward, one comer across, another moving
away, another from closer up.1 7 The construct engages all phases of the
montage that Eisenstein discusses in "Methods of Montage ,"1 8 from relations
between shots in terms of shot length, in terms of graphic design, in terms of
a combination of movement and composition, and in terms of an "overtonal"
synthesis that is larger than the individual shots themselves, more of an
overdetermined intellectual montage that requires multiple reiterations to
unpack, as well as operating at a level of sheer sensual cinematic fabric.
Another type of montage is the short sequences of superimposed,
dissolving images sometimes known as Hollywood montage, or montage
effects, or in the credits as process photography. A staple of the studio
filmmaking of the 1930s and 1940s, created by individuals such as Slavko
Vorkapich, these sequences can compress swaths of time and space rather
economically. Complexities of city life lend themselves to such treatment,
and one can find examples in urban films. Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog
shows the futility of a young homicide detective who m ust pound the
pavement in search of his stolen gun, and successive shots of his feet from
low angle against the location streets, walking forward and back, then
stopping in exasperation are juxtaposed through dissolves to his sweaty face
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viewed from low angle against the bright sun and a sun netting that shows
him as if caught in a web. The whole sequence is unified by popular music
infused with a Latin beat, reiterating the cabaret feel of the underworld that
he must descend into in his search. In the process the sequence also reveals
the particular character of the slices of different neighborhoods that he
passes through.
Types of Urban Film Shot
So there are several initial ways to apprehend city form through film
that emerged early in the development of film form, and yet still operative
today. One response to a three-dimensional character of urban space is the
high-angle shot of a vertical space, another basic principle the horizontal
pan or dolly through space. Both approaches presupposes a camera eye
placed in a solid, three-dimensional environment, adjusting to a given
existent urban form. Additionally, an existent urban space can be portrayed
through montage techniques that can be merely an economical narrative
device or complexly intellectual (the advanced case of montage "creating"
the city through discursive techniques will have to be taken up elsewhere.1 9 )
But different approaches can be seen when the emphasis is on the frame
rather than a camera eye. The facets of the urban form can provide the raw
material for expressive cinematic purposes, such as graphic design of the
frame, for metaphoric or symbolic use, and the depiction of specific details of
an environment.
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There are also several basic codes or conventional cases of the filmic
response to urban space. Perhaps the most basic use of the urban milieu
operates at the indexical level, of representing specific details of an
environment. This can be at the level of the iconography of typical urban
details: the typical setting of tall buildings, taxicabs, streetcars, pedestrians,
grit, glitz, wetness, class markers of affluence and luxury or poverty. These
may operate as the specific details of a particular place, or as the
embodiment of a type of place, or most likely as a spectrum varying between
these poles of specificity. The details can constitute just setting, or the details
of the setting may be important thematically or in the narrative. Yet by the
same principle because the evanescent light and shadows fall upon a strip of
film one day they become archival examples of the codes and texture of the
day: details of hair and clothing styles, the advertising culture and visual
clutter of the environment, nuances of gait or of industrial design; of value to
historians, but also as a window unto a different world that nevertheless
transformed into the world that we inhabit today. A subset of this category
is the process shot through car window showing people talking or to
represent movement through city (interestingly a quite prevalent conceit,
but not discussed in critical literature except as to the technology of how
achieved).2 0
A rather straightforward use of the city in film is the iconographic or
postcard shot, where a well-known urban feature stands in for itself. In this
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case, the urban knowledge precedes the act of filming, and the filmed
document rather transparently depicts a location freighted with meaning on
its own. A special case of this is the aerial shot of the city skyline, which
opens so m any films. This is a highly conventionalized use of a postcard
shot, often merely setting the location of the narrative in the manner that a
title card would. The use of stock footage for this occurs in innumerable
productions of the 1930s and 40s that are otherwise completely confined to
the sound stage and back lot. While most such usage starts with
Manhattan's recognizable skyline, there are a few examples of the same that
start in Los Angeles, such as Samuel Fuller's Crimson Kimono, or the B film
noir He Walked By Night, which begins w ith stock footage of the late-1940s
downtown skyline, prominently featuring the City Hall Building (pursuant
to building code the tallest structure in Los Angeles for decades after its
construction in the late 1920s, both for earthquake safety of the public, but
also one suspects as a reminder of where the power of civic authority lies),
and a dead-pan narrator out of a dry documentary.
Naked City starts with a more developed use of the aerial shot than
most, starting with a very high angle aerial shot as Hellinger intones about
the "eight million stories," followed by closer aerial shots of the skyline from
the side, then finally one by night with the buildings of lower Manhattan
illuminated from within. I should note here one urban aerial shot that works
against this particular type. In Godard's Breathless, after spending the night
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together, the young lovers dress for the day, then lie in bed and kiss. The
next shot uses a musical bridge to soar over several Parisian landmarks,
including Notre Dame. This aerial shot— the only one in the film— literally
induces breathlessness in a viewer (an effect more noticeable when the aerial
view fills the frame in a darkened, theater with projected image than in the
home viewing situation). Being otherwise disassociated from either of the
main characters, unlike any other shot, it captures the sense of enraptured
lightness, the bliss, that their night of love has instilled within them.
The aerial urban shot or skyline shot constitutes then a special case,
usually used as an introductory shot to a film, or to introduce a new location
in a film. However, the postcard shot can feature quite prominently in a
film, such as On the Town, which is unusual for a musical in that some of it
was filmed on location in New York to capture the recognizable quality of
landmarks. But while On the Town extols the attractions of urban experience,
it does not engage filmically the quality of that attraction in a systematic
manner. Rather, it jumps from location to location just as the guidebook that
the sailors follow, without a more than superficial engagement with the
urban processes that create the location. In an article entitled "Insiders and
Outsiders: Latent Urban Thinking in Movies of M odern Rome," Richard Bass
discusses films that revolve largely around this type of shot in a city with a
heavy sedimentation of history. He identifies such "outsider" films as Roman
Holiday, 20 Million Miles to Earth, and Three Coins in the Fountain, which often
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feature extended montages that anchor the conventional, tourist icons of
Rome, but which distort the actual urban fabric in the process, and work at
only the most superficial levels. To these he compares films that rely upon
the innate knowledge of the local inhabitant, such as De Sica's Bicycle Thief
and Umberto D., which, though bleak, do not distort the actual geography in
a predatory way.2 1 Related to the postcard shot and to Bass's "outsider" film
would be what I call the "love-poem" film, which draws upon the same type
of romantic, postcard images that Bass sees as inaccurate and predatory in
the taking of the well-known images outside of context. One notes a number
of films often drawing on the same types of images, but yet a film made by
an insider. Woody Allen's Manhattan, or in LA . Story, which lovingly
portray a particular city, and draw on the iconographic, tourist imagery, but
must lay some claim to a type of authenticity of knowledge in comparison to
Bass's outsider.
A different type of shot that apprehends the urban environment is
what I call graphic appropriation. Often the lines and shapes of the city, of
streets, of buildings, or rows of windows, are used for largely graphic or
compositional purposes. An example of this can be seen in the 1950 Anthony
Mann film, Side Street, shot by Joseph Ruttenberg for MGM. The film stars
the principles of MGM's earlier They Live By Night, Farley Granger and Cathy
O'Donnell, in a story of the descent of an otherwise decent postal
deliveryman who takes some money from an office on his route that is
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involved with several murders and blackmail. In the film's culmination the
police chase the criminal who has Farley Granger's now-repentant character
captive, making him drive. The chase races through M anhattan's Lower East
Side and Wall Street areas, with ground level shots of racing cars intercut
with unusual extremely high angle shots from among the tall buildings
there. Both the ground level and high angle shots create a strong graphic
sensibility: in both cases the frame is matted on either side by buildings, their
verticality and rows of windows creating strong lines. In the high angle
shots, the cars appear small in the street compared to the massive buildings
they speed past, the effect even stronger as sunshine pours through from the
side streets contrasting with the shadow of the buildings on the pavement,
the alternating black and white pattern an arresting image. A grid is formed
by architectural elements, perhaps like a maze, or like the net that has
trapped the film noir protagonist in a combination of fateful circumstance
and his own moral weakness.
Interestingly, the example of purely graphic or compositional image
also ends up with a metaphoric resonance as well, as Side Street shows.
Urban space can be used in a symbolic or metaphoric manner, carrying
weight as a signifier apart from the detail of the particular streets, buildings
or landmark depicted. An example would be the oft-remarked final
sequence in Michelangelo Antonioni's Eclipse, where the images depicted
work not only in the indexical register of what they are, but also work
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metaphorically as a commentary on the characters and the milieu they
inhabit.
Image as Metaphoric Resonance
Eclipse occurs in Rome, but it is not the Rome of Rome Open City or
History Lessons. Rather than showing the historic, touristed Rome, or
working-class Rome, Eclipse takes place primarily in the upper middle class,
newly built city of the early sixties.2 2 The city as depicted here does not
overtly depict its historical dimension— neither the violence of its recent past
nor the dimensions of its grand scale— but rather reveals the ennui and
psychological alienation of a certain social class. I should add, "at a certain
historical period as well," though again the film does not index this
particularity. Rather, the modem, the new, works to efface history, to
provide a perpetual state of affluence for the individuals here to play out
their interior stmggles. The one exception is the stock exchange building
itself, constructed from the remains of a building built in 152 to deify
Hadrian by his son. The exchange itself is a minor economic player in Italy
compared to Milan's, so that the frenzied speculation of people like Vittoria's
mother juxtapose rather uncomfortably to the ancient, elegant former temple.
Not that temporal change cannot occur within this milieu, indeed, within
this film a stock market dive ruins the fortunes of speculators; but the
inhabitants of this insular world appear to have no conception of the
historical and social forces that create their type of life. The one exception is
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more of an ellipsis than acknowledgment, when Vittoria (Monica Vitti)
briefly discusses her father's photo, taken in military uniform; he died too
young for her to know him...the implication is a death in the war. Perhaps it
is this attitude of detachment and myopia that Antonioni is in some measure
criticizing in his depiction of the distanced relationships encountered in the
film. An overarching social situation is the weight of atomic annihilation
that looms over the world, as a newspaper headline trumpets. The unusual,
modem water tower in Vittoria's neighborhood even resembles a mushroom
cloud, which is why Antonioni chose it.
The representation of urban space serves to reflect and express the
alienation and distance of the characters. The locations depicted, when not
the bourgeois apartment interiors or the frenzied animalism of the stock
exchange floor, are public spaces, but devoid of people. The lovers, the
character played by Monica Vitti and her mother's young stockbroker,
wander through wide streets, a park, and by a building site with only
infrequent, isolated examples of other people passing by. Long shots utilize
deep focus and the wide screen to place the individuals as minute in
comparison to blocks of abstracted and geometrical shapes (swaths of grass,
walls of modernist architecture, rows of youngish trees) that fill the screen.
Estrangement from other people as well as their insignificance in relation to
the environment comes across. The city spaces here serve as metaphor for
internal states of alienation— seemingly consciously experienced by Monica
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Vitti in her trepidation about commitment to a two separate men, and also
implied by the filmmaker as a comment applying to this whole milieu. The
penultimate instance occurs with the celebrated ending to the film, where
there is a long sequence showing of a number of outdoor scenes that the
lovers had traversed earlier, but this time the lovers are absent, the frame
virtually empty.
This use of the urban landscape presents some interesting issues in
narrative: at what level of the narration do they emerge? Who "places" them
here? At first it appears to be Monica Vitti's subjective perception, as she
returns to another rendezvous, what Edward Branigan terms "interior
focalization."2 3 Yet, over the course of this montage sequence the time of day
changes, as sunlight diminishes and street lights turn on. This would move
the narrative placement or enunciation away from a "literal" interpretation,
unless she waits a long time, though earlier in the film she is usually
included within the frame during a sequence, even a sequence seemingly
grounded in her experience— Branigan’ s "exterior focalization." There are
certain repetitions from the earlier scenes: a horse and buggy passes, and
where earlier it bridged the moment of the lover's arrival in her vision, here
he is gone; a sprinkler that she earlier cooled off with stands alone until a
caretaker shuts off its flow. This movement into the specificity of the hour
could also be an instance of her imagination, imagining these scenes; but she
has disappeared. It seems more likely to attribute this to an implied
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narrator, employing the seeming objectivity of these observed scenes to
make explicit comments about the characters and their distance from each
other, their absence from these places that earlier provided moments of
sentimental romantic pleasure, but also using the formal emptiness
comments on the overall emptiness of the characters in themselves and their
quality of life.
Thus, the possibility of the interaction of film with urban space has
developed from the first nascent attempts to capture the mere reflected
image of city space on film, through different approaches to the type of shot
that presents topographical space and to an awareness of how it is shaped by
properties of the cinematic apparatus, and how the resulting shot can work
in multiple ways within film grammar. The specificities of these types
sketched here could be further elaborated. But it is useful to look at a
specific case study to explore the specific dynamics of the interaction of film
as signifying practice and an actual changing urban location. The next
chapters will place these issues of film and urban space in the case of Los
Angeles.
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End Notes: Chapter One
1 Andre Bazin, "An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of
the Liberation" in What is Cinema? volume II, edited andtranslated by Hugh Gray, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971). Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of
Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
2 A number of theorists have addressed the idea of perspective as a an ideological
construct, not a universal given. Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space" in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 379-420.
3 The work of Henri Lefebvre has been very important to m y formulating ideas about
spatiality. This revision of my project has excised direct discussion of his influential book
The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell),
1991.
4 Rudolf Arnheim, Film As A rt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1957), 32.
5 See the work of Charles Musser, Miriam Hansen, Andre Gaudreault, and especially
Tom Gunning.
6 See Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 20-25.
7 While experiencing a grand success as with their new visualizing novelty, the
Lumiere Company actually made these travelogues for a rather circumscribed period.
Scholarship on the Lumieres includes Alan Williams, "The Lumiere Organization and
'Documentary Realism',"Film Before Griffith, ed. John Fell (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983); Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, ed., Auguste et Louis Lumiere: Les 1000 premiers films
(Paris: Philippe Sers editeur, 1990), which is more of a catalog and coffee table book.
8 For further discussions of the influence that exhibitors had on early film-going, and
the dangers of neglecting this context for a canon-driven approach that emphasizes titles see
Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Stephen Bottomore, "Shots in the
Dark—The Real Origins of Film Editing" in Early Cinema: Space, Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas
Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990).
9 For further discussion of Manhatta see Jan-Christopher Horak, Lovers of Cinema: The
First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
1 0 Interestingly, the methods of skyscraper construction depicted here retum -
remarkably unchanged— in Shirley Clarke's city symphony, construction process film
Skyscraper (1959), made for a labor union. In both films huge I-beams are hoisted into place
via cranes, whereupon a riveting crew member heats rivets, tosses them to a bucket catcher
who holds the rivet as another pounds them into the beams. Shirley Clarke's film, which
was nominated for an Academy Award in the Short Subject category, transforms the
physical work of the engineering feat into a city symphony through unusual camera angles
and by editing rhythmically to jazz music, which in the process also celebrates an abstract
Labor. The Warner Brothers 1941 Merrie Melody "Rhapsody in Rivets" also depicts a
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similar construction process/ set to Franz Lizst's Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Shirley Clarke
also uses a city symphony approach to urban construction in Bridges-Go-Round, a short
which animates the Brooklyn Bridge through lens attachments which multiply the image
and set these circling within the frame as colors change, set to music. The film is a rather
simple play with objects, setting in motion a solid, timeless icon. Of course, because of their
architectural grace, bridges have a long history in the city symphony film, as seen with Joris
Ivens' early short The Bridge, which depicts how a mechanical bridge in Holland operates.
1 1 Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Andy Warhol Film
Project, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 15-19. The time duration of the filming of
Star Theatre is discussed in a publication accompanying a test-program laserdisk on the
N ew York City Paper Prints, published by the Library of Congress American Memory
Collection. Joanne Freeman and Gene De Anna, The Life of a City: Ear ly Films of New York
from the Paper Print Collection, 1898-1906: User's Guide (Washington, D.C.: Library of
Congress, 1992), 70.
Using time-lapse photography, the film shows the demolition of the famous Star
Theatre, on Broadway and 13 Street. Judging from the various exposures, work
must have gone on for a period of approximately thirty days. The theatre opened in
1861 as "Wallack's Theatre," and was re-christened the Star in 1883. It was well
known for its fine production, and a number of celebrated actors and actresses
worked there, among them Ellen Terry. The celebrated English actor henry Irving
made his first American stage appearance at the Star.
1 2 Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its
Relation to American Avant-Garde Film," in Film Before Griffith, John L. Fell, ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983).
1 3 Peter Greenaway's fiction feature A Zed and Two Noughts uses time lapse
photography prominently to explore philosophical aspects of life, death and decay,
materiality and time. It does not, however, significantly engage questions of space or
urbanism
1 4 As he did upon my initial viewing of the film at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles, as well as at a screening that I helped organize for the Getty Center's "Cine-
City: Film and Perceptions of Urban Space, 1895-1995," held in May, 1994.
1 5 I am not setting up Pat O'Neill as a model of gregariousness—which he is not—and
there is a loneliness of the optical printer operator, but rather setting up his work against the
even less collaborative work of Emie Gehr. For a more in-depth analysis of Water and Power
in the context of the avant-garde in Los Angeles, see David James, "Towards a Geo-
Cinematic Hermeneutics: Representations of Los Angeles in Non-Industrial Cinema: Killer
of Sheep and Water and Power," Wide Angle Special Issue: Cityscapes II, guest editors Clark
Amwine and Jesse Lerner, v20 n3 (July 1998): 23-53.
1 6 Annette Michelson, "Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair," OCTOBER 11 (1979), 30-53.
1 7 My understanding of this film owes a great deal to the commentary of Yuri Tsivian
on the laserdisc of Man with a Movie Camera. Also, the work of Annette Michelson and Noel
Burch have also proved useful.
1 8 Sergei Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage," Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and
trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1977 [essay dated Autumn 1929]), 72-83.
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1 9 For example Sergei Eisenstein's "Montage and Architecture," assemblage 10
(December 1989): 111-131.
2 0 This also raises the issue of geographic accuracy in rear projection scenes. An
interesting example is the film Little Miss Thoroughbred (1938), which ostensibly takes place
in Los Angeles, or an unnamed city with palm trees, but in one chase sequence has rear
projection backgrounds of both Los Angeles near MacArthur Park and N ew York City near
Washington Square! In the studio period it appears that stock footage shot for generic
driving scenes was often used, even repeated within a film; today film productions will
actually shoot scenes inside an automobile that is being towed through city streets. But this
can lead to interesting situations such as when I was watching the quintessential New York
film Mean Streets at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles, and recognized nearby streets in
a nighttime driving scene. Another time at a screening of Gun Crazy (1950) by the American
Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood the crowd of film fanatics cheered as a
church at the end of the block was used for a Midwest scene.
2 1 Richard Bass, "Insiders and Outsiders: Latent Urban Thinking in Movies of Modem
Rome" in Cinema and Architecture: Melies, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, edited by Francois Penz
and Maureen Thomas (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 84-99.
2 2 P. Adams Sitney discusses aspects of the geography portrayed in Eclipse in Vital
Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1995), 155-166.
By showing Vittoria, Riccardo, and perhaps even Piero as apartment dwellers in the
EUR and by shooting much of the film on location in that same display zone of
contemporary architecture and city planning, Antonioni situated his story in an
arena of cultural politics. The Esposizione Universale of 1942 became an
autonomous public corporation, Ente Autonomo Esposizione Universale di Roma
(EUR). Initially a grandiose project initiated by Mussolini for a world's fair in 1942,
celebrating the twentieth year of Fascism, its construction was suspended during the
war. With the consolidation of the DC rule in the 1950s it was reactivated, serving
the economic and ideological interests of the conservatives and neo-Fascists who
urged civic expansion toward the Mediterranean with luxury and middle-class
housing, against the Left's pressure for eastward expansion with housing for the
increasing poor population emigrating from southern Italy. By locating an arena
and sporting facilities in the EUR for the Seventeenth Olympics (August 1960), again
with neo-Fascist support and leftist opposition, the district became a showplace for
the economic miracle. It attracted residents from the international community,
middle-class intellectuals, and affluent Italians without access to the grand
apartments in the center of the city traditionally passed down to the heads of well-
established Roman families.
2 3 Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in
Classical Film (New York: Mouton, 1984).
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Chapter Two. Cinematic Los Angeles
Los Angeles provides an opportunity to explore the various
dimensions of the urban theme in film, both in terms of how the existing
built city can be appropriated to filmic purposes, and how filmic expression
can represent (with varying degrees of accuracy) aspects of a city's
development and social-economic structure. As such a laboratory, Los
Angeles exemplifies many changes in the representation of cities throughout
the history of the filmic medium and its technological and industrial
underpinnings, but it also provides a special case study, both for the
particular character of the city and region, and also because of the
relationship of the city to the film industry. "Hollywood" is the synechdocic
term that has become shorthand for the film industry centered in Los
Angeles, even though most film production does not even occur within
Hollywood the geographic district of Los Angeles—for decades one of the
largest film studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), proclaimed on their title
cards "Made in Hollywood, U.S.A.," even though the studio itself resided
twenty miles away in Culver City, near Columbia Pictures (and their
successor Sony after Columbia left Hollywood). But a "Hollywood" spread
across Southern California (including such facilities as W arner Brothers and
Walt Disney Studios situated for years in Burbank, Universal in the
eponymous and Hollywood contingent Universal City) has been the
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preeminent center of film production in the United States—even the world in
terms of influence and monetary success. Yet Hollywood has not always
represented the geographic location from where it emanates, though one
would presume that the film industry has special local knowledge that
would enable such representations. But Los Angeles (considered here in the
largest terms of the Southern California region) has changed in significant
ways over the course of the twentieth century, moving from a provincial
outpost, removed physically and psychically from a larger national
consciousness, to a major urban center, and model for urban development
around the world. The film industry has grown and changed with this
emergence of the city and region, which it has also in some ways promoted.
A consideration of the relationship of film representation of Los Angeles
must take into account changes in both the growth and national profile of the
city. Changes in the film representation of the city reflect both the change of
the city itself, but also how the motion picture industry interacts with the
urban space through articulation of the film medium.
The history of films about Los Angeles does not run a continuous
course. There are avoidances, the use of the city only as back lot, but not as
subject at the same time, an addressing the city only through narrow
windows, only through certain genres. Historical considerations of both a
social and industrial nature m ust be taken into account for these changes in
the representation of the city. Initially the film industry w hen moving to
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L.A. used the locations as a backdrop, but the tales told were not specifically
Los Angelean, but rather served as Anytown, USA. For instance, the
Keystone Cops were filmed around the streets where I live in the former
Edendale district, on the border of Silverlake and Echo Park. But they did
not address themselves as being in Los Angeles. The only times the city was
specifically referenced was in the genre of the Hollywood backstage story,
especially the mythic rise of a naive newcomer to stardom. By the 1930s
fewer films were actually shot in the streets, due to technical concerns such
as the requirement of sound cinema, the necessity of continuous and bright
lights for film stock in order to produce films at economies of scale, and the
general streamlining of the industrial production process w ith the
consolidation of the studio and star systems. This situation changed in the
1940s as more films were both shot in and featured Los Angeles, not always
in its specificity, but often referencing the city through landmarks and
geography. These films especially tended toward film noir crime drama, but
also included the returning war vet film and some domestic melodramas.
This recognition of the city is partly due to the new profile of the city due to
wartime economy and population shifts, partly due to the necessity of
filming on the streets as the studio system started to allow independent
producers, who, lacking studio facilities often turned to location
photography.
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In the later 1960s and early 1970s a new type of film began to address
Los Angeles as a specific location, as seen in films such as John Boorman's
Point Blank, Jacques Demy's Model Shop, and Michelangelo Antonioni's
Zabriskie Point, which mark a change in both film form and in the way Los
Angeles is represented. In addition to all being helmed by Europeans, these
films share several properties: they are more attune to questions of the city
fabric as it exists (rather than finding a shot that satisfies the pre-existing
type of shot that needs to be found), they are generally less plotted and more
atmospheric, less dependent on dialogue, they tend to use the frame in an
abstract fashion, have a component of social critique. Perhaps this can be
attributed to the fact these follow on a new modernist sensibility, the
propagation of New Wave influences in Hollywood. Another consideration
is a new internationalism in film production that relies less on the
increasingly moribund studio system and instead uses independent
production companies and a "deal" type of funding. The change of
portrayal of the city also follows on greater recognition of the city in national
and international profile, with milestones like getting a major league baseball
team increasing the city's recognition in the East, not to mention the sheer
growth of the region. By the 1980s, filmic representations of Los Angeles had
exploded, though often the specificity of the region was not codified and
based on thin stereotypes, such as the pretty but vain and shallow types who
live here (think of Woody Allen's comic portrayal of Southern Californians in
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Annie Hall, the cross-cultural interactions of the immensely popular Beverly
Hills Cop).
The changes in type of development and subsequent representation of
an urban center are less pronounced for the most frequent subject for urban
films in the first half of the twentieth century, New York City. Although in
the case of New York cinematic representations do change with the
development of the capacities and use of the film medium, starting with the
early actualities that depict the basic surfaces of the built environment (a
fascination with sheer topography which continues to fascinate, as seen in
brief establishing shots within films, through the decades). But with further
stages in the presentation of New York, film production becomes removed
from the locations that narratives take place within for several decades. The
dark streets of early thirties gangster films (usually New York, though
sometimes unnam ed or fictitious Eastern or Midwestern cities), brownstone
stoop stories (Dead End Kids, etc.), the high society world comedies and
melodramas, and backstage musicals of the 1930s are predominantly limited
to the back lot and sound stage rather than the actual streets and
neighborhoods that they represent. The reasons for choosing New York as
the setting for film are varied: the narratives that are of interest are situated
within the city. Gangster films, high society, backstage arts films, etc., all
take place with milieus rather specifically located in Manhattan. A case
could be made that the studio executives typically originated in the East, and
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carried a bias towards New York stories. Certainly it was the case that many
if not most screenwriters in the 1930s were brought to Hollywood from New
York with the advent of sound cinema, and m any of the plays that formed
the source material for films after the introduction of sound were created for
the New York stage (and perhaps, coming from the stage, they did not lend
themselves to narratives of the street, which combined with economic
imperatives to film within the studio walls). Later, New York films began to
move to actual locations for verisimilitude, as with the films noir of Naked
City and Kiss of Death, which were shot entirely on location, to social problem
films such as On the Waterfront, or later, The Pawnbroker, which uses some
location and establishing shots to lend atmosphere, to later films with a
realist aesthetic. Many films based in New York continued to flourish
through the sixties, from romantic comedies such as A Touch of Mink with
Doris Day and Cary Grant, to thrillers such as The French Connection, to Spike
Lee's and Woody Allen's continued love affairs with the city, each drawing
on varying degrees of location shooting to help create the world of the
narrative. These variations in the adaptation of the nation's largest city
conform to changes in the film industry in terms of production processes and
institutional organization.1
But w hat then of Los Angeles? What is the record of the film
industry's attem pt to portray the urban location where it resides? I intend to
make a quick sketch here of the contours of the film presentation of Los
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Angeles, followed by a closer look at some key moments in the evolution of
the depiction. Los Angeles did have some actuality-type short films made at
the turn of the century by travelling Edison cameramen. Many of these
unfortunately no longer survive, but they depicted the typical tourist sites,
such as Abbot Kinney's extravagant amusement park and real estate
development complete with extensive water canals named after Venice, or an
Ostrich Farm in Pasadena, even the first electrified movie theater on Spring
Street in downtown L.A. In 1908 the first fiction film was shot at a rooftop
studio downtown, and Cecil B. DeMille made the first film, the Western The
Squaw Man, in Griffith Park and behind a tavern in the community of
Hollywood northeast of Los Angeles in 1909, after his train stopped at his
intended location of Flagstaff, Arizona, and the fierce snow kept his crew on
the train all the way to California. Soon a number of movie studios had
sprouted in the Los Angeles region: Selig, Bison (later Mack Sennett), and
Fox Studios in Edendale (now part of the Silverlake district), Essanay,
Thomas Ince, Triangle and Vitagraph in East Hollywood. A number of
reasons are given by historians of the reason for the move to Southern
California of the film industry from such earlier strongholds as New York
City and Fort Lee, New Jersey. Some cite the rough treatment that agents of
the Motion Picture Patents Association, the MPPA Trust, m eted out to
independents that were not licensed to use the technology that the oligopoly
controlled. Supposedly, California was farther from the Trust entities, and
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the oft-repeated anecdote has the proximity of the Mexican border as an
escape route, though some now criticize this as apocryphal, citing the end of
the Trust in 1910. The agreeable weather that offered regular sunshine was
also a draw, especially since the then-existing lenses and film stock needed
lots of light, and studios at the time generally relied on sunlight diffused
through muslin as a light source for interiors shot on outdoor stages.
Pleasant weather allowed for more production days. The varied landscape
of Southern California offered many possible locations. The local population
had sufficient skilled labor to staff studio construction departments, and
access to raw materials for them to work with.
The new studios prospered, but did not take advantage of the specific
L.A.-ness of the city they worked within. Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops
chased comic villains around the streets of Edendale and Silverlake, but did
not do so in a specified Los Angeles; rather, they used the local streets as an
extension of the studio. Buster Keaton also used the streets of Los Angeles
frequently in his films. A fascinating book, Silent Echoes, obsessively details
the locations that Keaton used in different films, tracking down the actual
locations and photographing how they look today.2 I do not believe that any
of Keaton's films specifically reference Los Angeles as the site where they
take place, though he frequently used locations around his studio located
near Melrose and Cahuenga. He also used locations elsewhere in Los
Angeles, including the University of Southern California several times, while
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three of Keaton's films use Venice, California, though one of these is set in
New York (The Cameraman), and the other two shorts3 use an amusement
park setting, but not necessarily this particular Venice location.
Another of the great silent comedians used Los Angeles locations, but
again not in a manner that represents the actual city Los Angeles that was a
backdrop for his shenanigans. Harold Lloyd's thrilling, vertiginous films set
atop high rise buildings (the features Safety Last, a silent, and talkie Feet First-,
the shorts Look O ut Below, High and D izzy and Never Weaken) can be clearly
identified as Los Angeles locations. High and D izzy for instance, features the
Bullock's department store at the corner of Broadway and 7th Street easily
recognizable in the frame. Lloyd's vertiginous films offer new vistas on the
built environment; views that would not have been accessible to many of
those who did not work in multistory buildings. Through such imagery the
films provide a wealth of period detail, such as the traffic patterns of
streetcars, automobiles, and pedestrians, and the emerging landscape of a
city undergoing a real estate boom in the 1920s. Interestingly, while that
boom is set here in a downtown that is building up, along a model similar to
Eastern cities, but that downtown is located in a city whose dominant
development feature is concurrently being built out, w ith the streetcars and
autos bringing in shoppers and workers into the city center. The film does
not specify Los Angeles as a location—it could be any bustling city with
multiple storied buildings. The film setting references a type of modernity
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that has held sway for several decades, featuring the steel frame construction
methods featured in the early one-reeler The Skyscrapers of New York, but here
rising in Los Angeles. Of course, the building boom depicted is one phase of
construction (and limited primarily to downtown L.A. outposts in
Hollywood) that will soon pass in L.A., the victim of the Depression and
war, of development sprawl decentralizing both living, service and work
areas. A second wave of high rise construction will emerge in the 1960s to
the 80s, with higher buildings colonizing adjacent areas as well as sites
across the Southland. But in Harold Lloyd's high-rise films, the city depicted
is generalized, not the specific Los Angeles that it is actually filmed in, and
recognizable as Los Angeles through production knowledge and a close
scrutiny of the visual details.4
Another silent comedy that makes use of identifiable Los Angeles
locations is It, released in 1927. Inspired by Elinor Glyn's treatise on sex
appeal (she appears in a cameo), and giving its star Clara Bow the
appellation "The It Girl," the film discusses the ineffable quality of "It" that
renders people attracted to the opposite sex, and thus encapsulates a central
preoccupation of Hollywood films for decades to come, a reductive sex
appeal.5 The premise is rather simple wish-fulfillment fantasy: a department
store shop girl Clara Bow falls for the dashing son of the owner who is left in
charge in his father's absence, and she employs her formidable qualities of It
to land him, with a side plot involving the misplaced suspicion that the
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owner's friend has of Clara Bow being an unwed mother (actually her
roommate).6 While playfully engaging issues of the changing position of
women in the workplace, and hinting at the perils of sex outside of marriage
even as it ultimately embraces a freer sexuality, the film m ay be a slight
exercise. But it seizes squarely upon a site that constitutes a crucial aspect of
the modernity that effloresces in the first part of the century. The opening
shot zooms out from a close-up of the Waltham Department Store sign atop
the building, zooming out and tilting down to reveal a large, city-block sized
department store, the frame busy with automobiles and pedestrians passing
by as the camera zooms in on the entrance. It is a rather spectacular
establishing shot for the time, but is a trick shot in that the zoom movements
were of course created through an optical printer, as the zoom lens was not
in use at that time.
The department store as an institution can be seen as a development
out of the Paris Arcades that Benjamin describes in his unfinished Arcades
Project, offering a centralized site for the expression of commodity culture.7
On the one hand the department helped shape a movement in the status of
commodities from use value to symbolic goods, a process indexed by and
carried out through such elements as a theatricalization of display,
exoticization, and a shift in forms of advertising from lists of goods to bold
graphic display.8 The move to consumption for symbolic purposes rather
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than need helps create the phenomenon of spectacle that Debord decries in
Society of the Spectacle.9
But this location also offered working-class women a wage in the
service arena, an alternative to the alienation of factory production, and
working with social signifiers that could be used to transcend class
limitations. The department store also works together w ith the new forces
that are changing the topography of the city and social patterns. It is no
accident that Harold Lloyd looks down upon a large advertisement for a
department store when he dangles from the skyscraper in the short Never
Weaken. The location he is at is the corner of 7th Street and Broadway in Los
Angeles, at that time in the 1920s the premier locale for shopping and
desirable office space. The streetcars and automobiles visible below bring in
the office workers, shop girls, and customers, a part of the centralizing
nature of the city growth which was spreading under classic Chicago School
conceptions of center and periphery patterns of urban growth. The
efficiency of the department store participates in this dynamic by operating
through an economy of scale. Broadway also formed an initial core of
cinematic nightlife, as a number of movie screens were built there in the
teens and twenties. Interestingly, in his feature Safety Last Lloyd plays a
department store clerk, who climbs upward from his clerk job, though not in
the store hierarchy, but rather up the side of the building. As a store
promotion, he had planned to hire a stunt man to do the actual climbing
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after he himself scaled the first floor, but when the stunt man was harassed
by a policeman, Lloyd's clerk was obliged to keep climbing. The store
represented here was around the comer on Hill Street, near the Bradbury
Studio on Bunker Hill where Lloyd discovered the trick effect of conveying a
great height through clever use of perspective in his short Look Out Below. In
Safety Last long shots of a thrill seeking "human fly" were intercut with
closer shots of Lloyd taken on sets built atop neighboring buildings,
including the famous shot of him swinging from the arm of a large clock.1 0
Amusements
While the department store depicted in It could be in any city in the
United States, research confirms the recognition (of the logical point) that it
was shot in the Los Angeles area. Another sequence in the film that was shot
in Los Angeles, but standing in for a generalized (then-) m odern urban area
occurs when the couple have a date at the beach and adjacent amusement
park. The rather absurd-looking rides encourage physical intimacy in the
name of fun, a necessary aspect in the development of the plot here, but also
representative of a type of escape and inexpensive leisure activity (contrasted
in the film with the upscale restaurant the Ritz, where Clara Bow first
insinuates herself w ith the owner's son.) This was shot either in Long Beach
or Venice, but it could stand in for Coney Island or any num ber of
amusement parks that were a popular destination in the 1920s. The
amusement park appeared in a number of films in the twenties: for instance,
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a similar scene of revelry occurs in the canonical (though primarily non
location) city film The Crowd, where the amusement park also appears as a
site for courtship, and an escape to contrast with the demands of the
economic life of the city.1 1 By the late 1940s, though, the amusement park
appears as a phantasmagoric site: surreal, dangerous, horrific. In both The
Lady from Shanghai (1948) with the famous Hall of Mirrors shootout, and in
Woman on the Run (1950), each set in San Francisco, a penultimate chase
sequence involves a killer who hides out in an amusement park. Orson
Welles' character Irish tumbles down Crazy House chutes and past
distorting mirrors in a drugged state, before landing in the Hall of Mirrors,
which come crashing down in a hail of bullets; the final climax a
labyrinthine descent into Hell that stands in as metaphor of the protagonist's
journey through the film as a whole. In Woman on the Run, a woman afraid
of roller coasters is forced to repeatedly ride one amid the din of cackling
automated clowns and lurid lights while she watches her husband right
below, whom she mistakenly sent to meet his would-be murderer. In both
cases, the distorted sounds and images prove threatening rather than
playfully amusing as they did twenty years earlier. The later film was
directed by Welles partner Norman Foster, who had taken over as director of
the Welles project Journey into Fear (1942) (which still starred Orson); is it
merely coincidence that both films shot their San Francisco-based
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amusement parks at Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica within a couple of
years of each other?
By the 1970s the Pacific Ocean Park amusement zone in Santa Monica
lay decrepit and was tom down for development. In Charlton Heston's
debut, Dark City (1950), it appeared briefly, as the camera rides on a roller
coaster, a return to the cinema of attractions, a metaphor of the narrative ups
and downs of the thriller format, and in contrast to Lady from Shanghai and
Woman on the Run, it is a site for bonding of a tainted m an seeking
redemption and an innocent child. A similar role for this amusement park is
performed notably on film in 1966 in The Money Trap, a late black and white
noir full of past-their-prime stars (Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, Joseph
Cotten) that centers about a conflicted, corrupt detective spurred to crime by
a money-hungry trophy wife beyond his means, shot in and around Los
Angeles. A longish sequence involved detectives following a suspect taking
his young daughter to Pacific Ocean Park, starting with an unusual single
take camera-ride down the unusual (and oft-filmed) Angels Flight funicular
in downtown Los Angeles, followed by rides on the roller coasters of the
amusement park. Again, the tainted detective displays a moral sensitivity as
he does not want to cut short the girl's last moments w ith her father, whom
he has been estranged from in his flight from justice, before he is pinched.
The touch of hum anity the detectives evince here contrasts with the corrupt
heist they perpetrate in the film. The more mobile camera influenced by
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cinema verite provides a sense of freedom in a film otherwise within
character and narrative conventions. The 1973 thriller The Outside Man, a
Franco-American co-production directed by Jacques Deray and starring
French star Jean-Louis Trintingnant, availed itself of m uch local Venice
Beach color such as a car chase along the remaining canals, which included a
shootout in the ruins of Pacific Ocean Park. The amusement park (as
opposed to the theme park) had effectively lived and died on film. Of
course, the fairgrounds had offered one of the incubation sites for the
medium of cinema at its inception.
Showpeople, Company Town
An exception to the lack of a specific L.A. reference to the films
actually shot within the region in the period from the teens through the
thirties are the films about the film industry itself, which form a distinct sub
genre. In the early period, while these type of films might show actual
locations, and refer to them specifically, the vision is rigidly
conventionalized. Generally these take place on the studio lot, showing
some of the working areas like stages, make-up, props, and so on. When the
actual city is show n, it is usually in the form of a brief look at Hollywood
Boulevard, hailed as the playground for movie folk long after it ceased to be.
"Once the m ain thoroughfare of the motion-picture colony, Hollywood
Boulevard is today a rather run-down tourist alley, lined with curio shops,
used bookstores, hobby shops, motion-picture theaters, and mediocre
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stores." Carey McWilliams' 1946 description remains largely accurate more
than fifty years later; the recent large-scale development of a major shopping
center at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland above a new subway
station may or may not change this description.1 2 Still, in the 1920s and 30s
there were many studios nearby, and the Hollywood commercial zone
offered restaurants, agents' offices, and grand movie palaces that could stage
premieres such as Grauman's Chinese and the Pantages. A number of films
drew on this theme, often bearing the word "Hollywood" in the title for easy
recognition. Among them are King Vidor's silent Show People, which carries
on the mythologized "rags to riches" story of a small town nobody who can
make it big in Hollywood, which did indeed happen to a minute few, but the
myth spread through fan magazines stirring up a mass exodus of would-be
stars clamoring for work and thus easily exploitable for labor, prostitution,
and the like. (The dark side of the myth was attacked in the 1975 film The
D ay of the Locust, a period piece set in the early thirties, based on the novella
by Nathanael West).1 3 Other films in the genre include Hollywood Boulevard
(1936) which carried on the "stars on parade" theme, Going Hollywood (1931)
with Bing Crosby, set in a film studio, programmers like The Falcon in
Hollywood (1944), where the freelance detective solves a w hodunit on the
studio lot, the two versions of A Star is Born, as well as their precursor What
Price Hollywood? (1932), which demonstrates the pitfalls of success, Harold
Lloyd as the country bum pkin determined to become a movie star in M ovie
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Crazy (1932), an execrable Lewis and Martin film, Hollywood or Bust, which
concludes with a romp through the Paramount Studio lot, Sunset Boulevard
(which shows only brief glimpses of actual urban topography or
Paramount's studio lot, dwelling mostly on interiors), The Bad and the
Beautiful, and Singin' in the Rain, which entirely recreates an idealized
Hollywood of the late 1920s (including a premiere at Grauman's Chinese
Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard).1 4 Numerous short films of this period
offer similar tours of the back lot or streets of the stars, often as overt
publicity produced by and for the studios, including the independent Week
End in Hollywood [sic] (n.d., ca. 1945-6), Hollywood Wonderland (WB, 1946),
Musical Movieland (WB 1944), Screen Actors from "The Movies and You"
series (MGM, 1950), which purports to show "the real lives of the people of
our town," Hollywood Hobbies (MGM, 1939), A Trip Through a Hollywood
Studio (Vitagraph, 1934).
Later examples in this line of self-referential films of the movie
industry move from the cheery celebration characteristic of the prewar
period to the darker vision started with Sunset Boulevard, to more recent
critical visions of the industry. These include the 1970s period of darkened
retrospection, with The Last Tycoon joining The Day of the Locust in depicting
the darker edges of the heyday of film, while Paul M azursky's Alex in
Wonderland (1970), though set in modem age, joins The D ay of the Locust in
envisioning carnage on Hollywood Boulevard (also taken up less specifically
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in relation to the film industry, but at the same exact site, in Speed). Robert
Altman's The Player both celebrates and skewers the mores and ethos of the
film industry. All of these representations tend to focus primarily on the
back lot settings, and such stereotypical "Hollywood" locales as Hollywood
Boulevard, and do not figure Los Angeles outside of these self-referential
parameters.
Los Angeles: Return to Location
After a spell in the 1930s when the only cinematic representations of
Los Angeles were Hollywood backstage yams, there was a return to the use
of Los Angeles stories and actual locations. A number of factors influenced
this phenomenon: in terms of actual locations, there was the rise of
independent production companies coincident with the consent decrees
against the vertical integration of studio monopolies, and star countering of
the contract systems that studios used to hold power. Technological
innovations in film stock and lenses, some due in part because of wartime
needs, labor trouble affecting studio workers, and post-war material
shortages all contributed to a new receptivity on the part of motion picture
producers to film on location.1 5 Certainly the rise of a new type of story, later
termed noir by French critics, influenced by postwar disillusionment and the
hardboiled style of detective writing also played a part. Perhaps part of this
new prominence of Los Angeles can be attributed to the role it played in war
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time industry and mobilization, its growth and importance making it a larger
target in the national psyche.
Interestingly, most of the films that do invoke Los Angeles are noirish
crime thrillers, and many do specifically place themselves in Los Angeles in
opening establishing shots, even if some of the action that later takes place is
filmed in a studio.1 6 Cry Danger is typical in that it features the distinctive
City Hall Building in several opening shots, long the tallest building in Los
Angeles due to earthquake code requirements (as does Pushover and a
number of other crime melodramas of the period, later called noir, but
referred to at the time in trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood
Reporter as thrillers, psychological thrillers, or crime melodramas, or even
simply in the parlance of the industry trades as a "meller"17). This film,
which features Dick Powell as an ex-convict trying to make good returning
to L.A. who is watched by the cops to see if he knows where the significant
loot from his caper is stashed as he stays with his no-good girl, also opens
with another canonical marker, the palm-tree lined Spanish revival Union
Station, which was only finished in 1939, but served as the entry and egress
of many servicemen during the war, and was the main transportation hub in
and out of the city for almost two decades, until the interstate freeway
system and air travel became more viable competitors in the late 1950s.
(Union Station was also the film location and title of another 1949 film,
though it doesn't seem to position itself as specifically occurring in Los
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Angeles.) Cry Danger is also typical in that it locates its action within a short
radius around these two structures, that is a section of town encompassing
the Civic Center, the old downtown, Skid Row environs, and the fading
Victorian mansions become tenements on Bunker Hill. Which is to say, an
area of greatest density, historical sediment, transportation nodes,
recognizable landmarks, as well as the centers of police command and gritty
locales of cheap rooming houses, burlesque parlors, and dive bars that
would figure into this type of story. Much of the narrative revolves around a
trailer park near downtown (visible in the distance is a gasworks located
near the train yards just north of Union Station; the same gasworks is an
important site of a chase in This Gun For Hire, which also takes place largely
in L.A., and the same gasworks can be seen in an opening shot of Young Man
With a Horn), and one sojourn to bar run by a shady crime boss is apparently
on Bunker Hill. The film Abandoned, which revolves around finding a lost
sister whose death occurred while in the hands of clandestine baby brokers,
opens with the obelisk-like City Hall seen from several angles. Interestingly,
while the film repeatedly draws on unique Los Angeles locations, the
opening voice-over makes a more universal connection: "Tonight, whatever
the time, whatever the place, something will happen, in a city which may be
your hom e...this is the true-to-life story..." Abandoned also features a Bunker
Hill Turkish bath, and important narrative events happen at a vaguely
denoted "Paradise Hills" development, and also the oft-filmed Hall of Justice
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building, a large structure with tall columns on the top floors (later famous
as the site of the Charles Manson m urder trial, now empty though Sheriff
Lee Baca has plans to renovate it for his headquarters; it frequently merits a
stock shot appearance, as in a brief tilt-up in The Threat, or as seen in The
Indestructible Man).
Emblematic of this shift to the actual streets of Los Angeles is the film
He Walked By Night, a production of the independent studio Eagle-Lion,
which emerged from the consolidation of B film factory PRC—the Producers
Releasing Corp.—and the British distributor Rank in 1949, though soon
thereafter becoming part of United Artists. The film is a low-budget B
thriller, incorporating several trends of the day. The title is suitably noirish,
the lighting low key in the noir vein, and full of violence and brutality,
though the narrative is not noir in the sense of having a protagonist caught in
an existential dilemma. Rather, it is among the first in a line of policiers, of the
police-procedural type of film showing the methodical, scientific approach to
crime solving, focusing on the details of the intertwined network of police
work, from evidence gathering, communications, witness interviews; as
opposed to the rational deduction of a (typically private) sleuth. (But telling
as to commercial film necessities, there is inevitably a move to a
melodramatic focus on a detective and the criminal.) Telephone operators
put slips of paper on a conveyor belt, where radio dispatchers retrieve them
to deploy squad cars. When a cop is killed, the phone lines can be plugged
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directly to the dispatchers, who are linked to the cops who hear the reports
in their cars, while other motorcycles and cars race to leave the precinct.
This tropic montage of police communication can be seen as well in
Naked City, perhaps the first American policier, and is an element in a number
of crime films of the forties and fifties. In a major studio film , White Heat has
elements of the policier, especially in the use of radio telemetry to map the
progress of Jimmy Cagney's gang as they drive a vehicle with a hidden radio
transponder to rob a refinery. (The mapping described on radio follows a
path from downtown LA toward Long Beach, however the stock shots do
not conform to this description.) Several influences on the policier can be
seen: an increased scientism (paralleled in the 1950s by science fiction
grounded in science, such as radiation-spawned monsters, than early science
fiction), new models of policing, which in Los Angeles included the
development of a professionalized, paramilitary type policing based on high
level of training, radio communication and rapid vehicular response, with a
strong crackdown on petty corruption, and the rise of the semi-documentary
film, which lent itself to realism in the tracking of procedures. These can be
compared to the police drama of the 1930s, which typically involved stage
set production and a duel of personalities with a gang boss or other crook.
Often the police procedurals feature authoritarian narrative voice over to
link the threads of police action: Naked City and He Walked By Night both
feature this device. An interesting variation of the police procedural format
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set in Los Angeles is the MGM second feature Code Two (1953), which follows
three buddies who join the LAPD Academy to join the motorcycle squad.
The film is part melodrama, part police procedural, part a variant of the boot
camp film—and directly credits the Police Department and the Chief for
their cooperation, this at a time when the LAPD was making reforms and a
change to swift vehicular tactical response to patrol the ever-growing
expanses of the city.
He Walked By Night owes a lot to the 1948 Mark Hellinger production
for Universal, Naked City; which is notable both as a one of the first policiers,
but as an exemplary type of a production being shot entirely on location in
New York City, sometimes using a hidden camera for street scenes. A
number of factors come into play here: already in progress but further
spurred by the war, technological advances in faster film stock, coated lenses
that required less light, and to a lesser degree more mobile sound gear
allowed for filming away from the controlled environment of the studio
sound stage and back lot. Also, as the studio system itself felt the first
tensions against oligarchic rule in such overt demands on its power, such as
the consent decrees forcing the studios to divest themselves of the exhibition
arm of the theaters to break up vertical integration, and the rise of
independent production companies, production outside of the conventional,
industrialized production line began to emerge. Louis de Rochemont, the
producer behind the March of Time newsreel series, proved to be an
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innovator in this regard. After the war he produced for Twentieth Century
Fox such films as The House on 92n d Street, 13 Rue Madeleine, and Boomerang
using a realistic aesthetic and shot on location. Other films in this cycle
include Kiss of Death (which has a title card reading "All Scenes Shot on
Location in the Place that they took Place/' and Henry Hathaway's Northside
777. Perhaps another impetus is the extreme popularity of film in the
immediate postwar years, with a huge number of productions and
attendance in 1946 and 1947, with such demands being made upon existing
studio resources that outside sources needed to be explored. Edward
Dimendberg suggests that pressures on building materials from the postwar
housing construction boom also contributed to pressures that moved
production outside to the existing locations.1 8
He Walked By Night locates itself squarely in Los Angeles. The
opening shot is a stock footage shot of City Hall, similar to the opening of
television show Dragnet.1 9 The stentorian narrator gives an overview of the
city squarely in the tradition of L.A. documentaries:
This is Los Angeles, Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, as the
Spaniards named her—the fastest growing city in the nation. It has
been called a bunch of suburbs in search of a city, and its been called
the glamour capital of the world. A Mecca for tourists, a stopover for
transients, a target for gangsters, a haven for those fleeing the winter,
a home for the hard-working.
It is the city holding the hopes and dreams of over two million people.
It sprawls out horizontally over 452 square miles of valleys and
upland, of foothills and beaches. Because of that vast area, and
because of a population made up of people from every state of the
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Union, Los Angeles is the largest police beat in the country, and one of
the toughest.
The stock shots that provide visual description are the typical sort: the
sprawling flatlands seen from a rise in extreme long shot, some streets set as
a valley through taller buildings, framed by foliage, Union Station, the bay at
Avalon on Catalina Island, leading up to City Hall where the police
headquarters were then located.
He Walked By Night derives some of its strength from auteurist
considerations in that it was directed (uncredited) by Anthony Mann (who
took over the film from the credited Alfred Werker), and who directed other
powerful B films noir such as T-Men and Raw Deal for Eagle-Lion, later
becoming famous for directing Westerns, while the cinematographer on this
film was John Alton, who later won an Academy Award (for co-shooting the
color photography of An American In Paris), and who wrote an important
textbook on cinematography that was standard in film schools for years.2 0
The search for a killer culminates in a celebrated sequence shot in the storm
drains of Los Angeles, shot with single point lighting, with silhouetted
figures bobbing in the distance, or the only illumination deriving from
flashlights held by police officers as they run, the light reflecting off of the
cement walls, creating strong shadows. In some ways the lesser light lends
itself to the low-budget considerations of the independent B production: less
lights take less time to set up, and the shadows can cover cheap sets or
location setting, though the result can be evocative or Expressionistic. Night
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shooting is more economical for independent producers, as opposed to the
unionized studios, for pay was a flat rate rather than hefty overtime. The
scene in the storm drains is reminiscent of the famous chase through the
sewers of Vienna in The Third Man, although this film actually predates Carol
Reed's classic by a year. Confined, labyrinthine, base, the implied stench;
certainly the lower depths of these two films provide locations resonant with
the thematic nature of the criminals pursued, whether Orson Welles' Harry
Lime, the black marketeer who m urdered associates and watered down
drugs that gave meningitis to children, or the cold-blooded police killer
played by Richard Basehart.2 1 Also, it was almost a stock convention that
noir films of the period end with a chase through an unusual environment
(as opposed to today's thrillers which must have several chases throughout
the film). Besides such classics as Naked City, which ends on a New York
bridge, or The Lady From Shanghai, with its Crazy House, one can see this in
number of films situated in Los Angeles. This Gun For Hire ends with a chase
through a gasworks, Union Station through the eponymous train station,
Roadblock exhausts on a drive through the concrete Los Angeles riverbed,
White Heat explodes at a South Bay refinery, A ct of Violence gets physical in
the train yards east of downtown, the criminal in Down Three Dark Streets
goes down at the Hollywood sign, the remake of M ends in the Bradbury
Building2 2 , while the narrative of 711 Ocean Drive leaves Los Angeles and
ends up at Las Vegas and then Boulder (now Hoover) Dam (Charlton
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Heston's screen debut, Dark C ity (1950), also leaves Los Angeles for the
newly developing Las Vegas). The trope of the genre (whether described as
crime melodrama, thriller, or the retroactive designation of noir) mandates an
unusual location as a paradigmatic device, a setting for a thrilling conclusion
that gave incentive to find locations with strong visual elements that would
make an impact; as part of a chase less dialogue is involved, so the problems
of recording sound outdoors is mitigated.
A contemporaneous film made that draws on the streets of Los
Angeles, but in this case made for a major studio is the MGM release Act of
Violence, an early feature directed by Fred Zinneman. Ironically, the opening
shots depict silhouetted skyscrapers of New York, but the action soon moves
to L.A. Briefly, it concerns a veteran, Parkson, who was held as a prisoner of
war by the Germans, and who seeks vengeance on a fellow POW, Enley, an
officer who collaborated with the prison commandant in an attempted
prison break w ith the best intentions for his fellow prisoners, but which
instead lead to their deaths in a betrayal by the Germans. The chase leads to
streets around downtown Los Angeles, passing through the stairways and
tunnels of Bunker Hill, and among the cheap bars and skid row streets such
as East Fifth. Bunker Hill is frequent location in the films of this period; a hill
directly adjacent to the origins of the city in the old Plaza, reconstituted as a
tourist destination in the 1920s by a white booster as a remythologized
Mexican origination site as Olvera Street; as well as next to the civic center
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and the initial commercial core of office space and retail space. Originally
the site of lavish Victorian era mansions, by the 1940s the Bunker Hill
housing stock had fallen into disrepute and had become boarding houses for
immigrants, transients and the elderly. Life in this milieus was captured
distinctively in John Fante's novel Ask the D ust.7 3 The location proved useful
for filming, for the site offered unusual angles, long stairways, picturesque
but fading Victorian architecture, and the unusual funicular railway Angels
Flight. All of these features are put to use in A ct of Violence, as they are in
such films as Criss Cross, The Indestructible Man, N ight Has A Thousand Eyes,
Kiss M e Deadly. Later, Bunker Hill was slated for redevelopment, and in a
process that spanned over two decades properties were bought or
condemned, the hill lowered, and it became the crowning achievement of a
new downtown to the west of the original then-tall buildings, a site
skyscraper office space as well as a cultural center, w ith the Museum of
Modern Art, the performing arts Colburn School, and the Walt Disney Hall
rising up over a period of years.
Cinematographer Robert Surtees, who had a long career as a top
Hollywood cinematographer over several decades including the important
L.A. film The Graduate, commented on the challenges of shooting some of the
nighttime exteriors for A ct of Violence in an article in American
Cinematographer some months before the film's release.2 4
Much has been written lately about the trend towards realism in the
photographic treatment of the m odem "documentary type" motion
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picture play. Therefore it was with anticipation of doing something
unusual and different that I faced the assignment of photographing
the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, Act O f Violence, Here was a
cameraman's picture, an ideal story written by Robert Richards in
such a m anner that the Director of Photography could blend the best
in documentary technique with a more, dramatic approach than has
been possible in other pictures to date. The story was real and at the
same time more dramatic than the usual so-called m odem film.2 5
As Surtees alludes to in other words, this film provides a good example of
the tension in location photography between location as "the real," the
imprint of a pre-existing reality that lends verisimilitude or authenticity, (or
the lesser case of the convention where location serves as an indication of a
naturalized reality), versus the location used in an Expressionistic manner,
for dramatic architectural elements, shadows, patina, or at the level of the
composition in the frame. (The studio controlled sound stage or back lot
environment giving the impression of a real location is a separate case
deserving attention in separate project.) This tension highlights the different
categories of location filming. A location can serve as itself, as that particular
location, representing authentically the pro-filmic; or a location can serve as
some other particular location. Alternatively, a location can serve as an
"any-location," similar to Deleuze's conception of an "any-place whatever,"
without referring to a particular place endowed with a set of history and
properties; or a location can serve for expressive purpose (which is similar to
an any-location). From the earliest days of motion pictures one principle has
been that film production can occur anywhere, and made to stand in for
another place. A quote that has been attributed variously to Cecil B. DeMille,
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the Stem Brothers, and others has been "A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree,
shoot it in Griffith Park" Yet especially starting in the 1940s, there is a
movement to using locations to stand in for themselves. Many examples of
film noir crime dramas, almost all Italian neorealism and its successors such
as Antonioni, the French New Wave, and even many Hollywood films since
the 1950s have been shot in their depicted locales, especially when urban
themed.
An example of a shot exemplifying the dramatic and the real is the
shot of Enley running down an auto tunnel at night, clearly lending
punctuation to the lack of options he seems to have. In Act of Violence the use
of aging buildings on the dilapidated east side of downtown Los Angeles,
near Skid Row, contrasts with the use of architecture elsewhere in the film.
Enley, played by Van Heflin, is a builder of tract homes outside of the city
center, a harbinger of a new type of post-war development and suburban
expansion. Yet his own home, seen in interior and exterior shots, is an
architecturally significant large bungalow, probably built in the first or
second decade of the twentieth century in an outlying town in the region.
Parkson, his nemesis, starts his pursuit in a New York tenement. The
architectural styles represented in the locations reiterate character conflicts in
the narrative. Interestingly, significant architectural movements of the time
situated in Los Angeles, especially the modernism associated with architects
like Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Shindler did not enter
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motion pictures for some time. Only later did a "m odem " architecture
associated with high-end housing enter the cinema in such sixties era films
as The Money Trap and Lord Love A Duck, while the W right-designed Ennis-
Brown house has since become a favorite filming location.2 6
A canonic film about Los Angeles that exemplifies the tensions
between locations as place and location as having expressive signifying
properties is Kiss M e Deadly from 1955; which through its baroque qualities
has been declared by some to mark the end of the film noir period. Moved to
Los Angeles from the New York setting of the original pulp novel by
lowbrow meister Mickey Spillane, the film is notable for this discussion
because it represents a contemporary Los Angeles which is not reducible to a
down and out noir sensibility that could really take place anywhere, it uses a
range of actual locations that spread across a large geographical area as well
as through multiple social milieus, and also uses location cinematography
creatively to Expressionistic effect through lighting and composition. The
plot follows tough private eye Mike Hammer as he gets hooked into a search
for a mysterious box, pressured by a mob and by the cops, w ith side plots of
alluring women both victims and femmes fatales, of beatings, police
suspicion, culminating in the revelation of the box as a nuclear device. The
private detective formula, like the policier film, allows the character—and the
film narrative—entry to diverse social worlds. Hammer, played by Ralph
Meeker, moves smoothly between diverse milieus including a black boxing
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gym, Bunker Hill claptrap boarding houses including a dramatic shot of the
Angels Flight funicular cars passing overhead, an African-American cabaret,
a Greek-owned auto mechanic shop, a Calabasas filling station, the
Hollywood Athletic Club, his ultra-new concrete Westside apartment
building, an upscale pool party at a mansion, a Malibu beach house. Mickey
Spillane's hyperbolic verbosity is translated to the screen via visual stylistic
gymnastics and a level of brutality uncommon in films of the time.2 7 The
locations in this film form a map of L.A., a map more wide-ranging and
detailed through location cinematography than most representations of Los
Angeles to that date. The locations also work aesthetically to convey themes
and moral ambiguities explored in this film.2 8 Stairs menacingly encircle
inside dark cheap apartment buildings in a way that suggests a descent into
a labyrinth of depravity. A number of shots feature long stairways of Bunker
Hill, framed at a canted angle with strong nighttime chiaroscuro lighting,
shot to emphasize depth with a wide angle lens, the skewed angle
suggesting an ambiguous moral universe where Hammer, framed as the
protagonist and ostensible hero of the story, resorts to brutal violence or
cruelty both when needed, and often when not. Though some of the more
horrific violence occurs just off screen (the dangling legs of Christina as an
assailant lowers some pliers when her screaming ends), Hammer himself
seems to leer when putting the screws to an opponent, or when breaking the
treasured Caruso record of a minor informant who is slow to help out.2 9
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Victor Saville, the producer who had the rights to the Hammer series, put
out a low-budget follow-up to Kiss Me Deadly two years later, M y Gun is
Quick, featuring a different actor as a "new toned-down Mike Hammer, only
a half dozen or so killings in the solving of a m urder and only two or three
vicious beatings."3 0 Like its predecessor, the film moves about Southern
California, presenting some interestingly framed location shots set on Bunker
Hill and elsewhere as the picture "goes all the way from a Central Ave.
burlesque house to the San Pedro waterfront, to a posh beach home and back
to Central Ave.,"3 1 while "one of the more interesting segments in the film is
a chase along the Los Angeles freeways on a smog-free day yet."3 2 The latter
feature is one of the first examples of this iconic aspect to appear in film in an
important way; with only portions of this network having been constructed
to that date.3 3 Again, like its series predecessor it is notable in that it draws
on extensive location cinematography to reference specifically Los Angeles
sites in a way that enriches the narrative and comments (though less
effectively in this regard) on themes raised by the film.
An interesting film to discuss in relation to Kiss Me Deadly is by a
fellow director also known for his some over-the-top sensibilities, The
Crimson Kimono (1959) by Sam Fuller. This film is a remarkable document for
the time, as a major plot line revolves around an interracial love triangle,
involving a third generation Japanese-American cop and his white
partner/best friend, with the Asian-American getting the white girl in the
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end.3 4 While the pair work to solve the m urder of a burlesque dancer they
both fall for a collegiate art student who helps them, which tests their bonds
forged in a foxhole in Korea. The newly built Parker Center headquarters of
the Los Angeles Police Department, named for the influential police chief
who sponsored the change from a corrupt, Eastem-style department based
on patronage to a military style organization based on communication and
rapid vehicular response, not corrupt but with a tendency to brutal
expressions of force, lies narratively convenient to where most of the action
in the film takes place in the streets of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, an area
that was depopulated only a decade and half previously by the racist
internment policy of Japanese Americans during World W ar II. This area
and the era of internment was the site of the Fox feature Little Tokyo USA
(1942), a B double-bill slot filler that focuses on espionage efforts against
Japanese agents in this area, filled out with newsreel-style documentation of
actual displacements; the film showing the darker flip side of wartime
propaganda efforts of Hollywood that could be used in the rationalization of
racist policies. Crimson Kimono, by contrast, directly addresses issues of
interracial romance and is characterized by an almost ethnographic interest
in the insistent attention to local detail, filmed in the streets of the district
during the celebrations of Nisei Week.
A similar type of m apping as in Kiss Me Deadly was occurring at the
same time in the popular literary genre of the hard-boiled detective.
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Raymond Chandler's novels of Los Angeles that were written starting from
1939 to his death in 1959 take hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe through
various neighborhoods, from hard-bitten to high brow, old money to
nouveaux rich, across architectural landscapes noted with the discerning eye
of a man who makes his living by noting details. Interestingly, the movies
made from Chandler's books do not tackle the geography of Los Angeles in
as an engaging manner. The first film to be made from his novels was The
Falcon Takes Over (1942), a version of Farewell M y Lovely reset in a studio-
bound New York City and given over to RKO's more genteel amateur
detective The Falcon, and which was remade two years later with Dick
Powell as Philip Marlowe in L.A., but an L.A. created almost wholly on the
studio lot and retitled Murder, M y Sweet (ostensibly so that audiences
wouldn't think Powell was returning to his crooner roots).3 5 The same
source novel formed the more faithful adaptation starring Robert Mitchum
in 1975, which shared the title of the book, and followed in a vogue of period
pieces set in Los Angeles that appeared in the mid seventies (Chinatown, Day
of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Robert
Mitchum as Marlowe in the remakes Farewell M y Lovely and The Big Sleep;
interestingly, most of these films fall in one of two archetypal LA genres of
the film studio backstage or the private detective.) A parallel trend
immediately preceding this moment was the updating of the hard-boiled
detective in a m odem persona, such as the films based on Raymond
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Chandler's novels: Marlowe, starring James Gamer, set in a swinging L.A. of
the later 1960s, based on the novel Little Sister, and Robert Altman's The Long
Goodbye, with Elliot Gould as a somewhat bumbling antihero interpretation
of the private dick, a reformatting of generic conventions that the director
also undertook in this decade with his reframings of the war film (M*A*S*H)
and the Western (McCabe and M rs. Miller). A similar updating of the private
eye was in the form of Paul Newman in Harper which was based on Ross
MacDonald's investigator Lew Archer, who operated in a somewhat larger
section of southern California in a series of novels that stretched from the
border to especially Santa Barbara (Santa Theresa a favorite fictional name to
stand in for the home town of novelist Kevin Millar, who took the Ross
MacDonald pen name), which owe a debt to Chandler, but are every bit as
engaging and observant. Other adaptations of Chandler novels included The
Big Sleep and The Lady in the Lake, both rather studio bound even as they
acknowledge the setting of Los Angeles (the latter featuring the distracting
conceit of continuous first person point of view—literally—as the audience
only sees w hat Marlowe sees through his eyes, a gimmick also employed
through the eyes of Humphrey Bogart for the first part of Dark Passage). Of
course, Raymond Chandler had his own travails as a screenwriter in
Hollywood,3 6 receiving co-screenwriting credits on such classics as Double
Indemnity (oddly enough based on a story by fellow hard-boiled author
James M. Cain) and Strangers on a Train, and an Oscar nomination for his
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script from his own story for The Blue Dahlia, but only a few other minor
credits at a time that he found difficult.
Point Blank
With the 1960s a new type of film shot in L.A. arrived. Whereas
previously the predom inant types of films set in Los Angeles were the crime
film drawing on seedy locations and the film studio setting, a film like John
Boorman's Point Blank used the raw material of the cityscape in different
ways. While using found locations instead as backdrop for a vengeance plot,
the film does not use the locales just as mere backdrop that could stand for
any city, and not as landmarks that mark a received, touristic notion of the
city. Rather, in this film, in a manner first initiated in Kiss M e Deadly's
movement across social class and neighborhood, the film uses the physical
topographical Los Angeles in a way that begins to map the existing
geographical contours in an accurate way (though it is not fully
comprehensive).
The film, which is undergoing a renaissance of sorts in appreciation,3 7
is based on the book The Hunter3 8 by Richard Stark (pseudonym of the
prolific novelist Donald Westlake; Stark also the author of the source
novel— The Juggler—for Godard's Made in USA). It chronicles the single-
minded pursuit of Walker (Lee Marvin) for his share of $93,000 from a crime
caper gone bad in the abandoned Alcatraz prison (in the days before it was a
park with boat tours). Double-crossed by his best friend Mai Reece (and
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unwittingly his wife who later joins with Mai), shot and left for dead (the
source novel makes clear that his belt buckle deflects a fatal shot, while the
movie is unclear as to how he is spared, as it looks like he his shot multiple
times), he miraculously survives and methodically goes about exacting
revenge and seeking his funds. After he tracks down his wife for
explanation and information, she dies by sleeping pills. In the process of
seeking revenge on Mai and getting his money Walker takes apart a criminal
organization one rung at time, while he scours a set of Los Angeles locations
that do not fall into the typical sites; especially interesting in that the film
was moved to Los Angeles. The source novel is set in New York City and
the Farallon Islands off of San Francisco, and there were initial attempts to
set the film in San Francisco. While San Francisco has appeared in a number
of films,3 9 the decision was made to make the film in Los Angeles. In an
interview, director John Boorman—a young British director with one feature,
Having A W ild Weekend featuring the Dave Clark Five, and some
documentary credits—describes why he wanted Los Angeles as a setting.
But then, m any iconic Los Angeles films have been transferred to this setting
from the original source material: Point Blank, Kiss M e Deadly, Blade Runner.
What was the script originally like?
First of all, it was set in San Francisco. That was the first clash I had
with the studio. I'd never seen San Francisco. I came over and looked
at it, and as soon as I saw San Francisco, I knew I couldn't shoot the
picture there. It was completely against my concept. Now here was an
example of trying to talk with a studio about something that was
totally ephemeral. I mean, all I could say was that the colors, the
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pastels, the romantic nature of San Francisco were completely against
the feeling of w hat I wanted. I wanted something hard and cold and
bare and desolate. I wanted a setting for this m an's emptiness,
desolation, alienation, and San Francisco was romance.
Had you been to Los Angeles?
Oh yes. I knew this was the place. His situation was that he couldn't
respond emotional, he couldn't feel grief, or anything. And the
violence is an eruption because of loss of feeling. Because people can't
express feeling through traditional means, they go to violence as the
only way of releasing those pent-up feelings. This is what I was
trying to say in the picture and I felt the Los Angeles setting was
crucial.
Did you have trouble persuading them?
Yes. W hat worked in my favor was the fact that it would save about
$70,000 or $100,000 by shooting in Los Angeles as opposed to San
Francisco. It just so happened that that fell in my court. It could easily
have been the other way around, and then I probably would have lost
the battle. Actually, once I got going on the picture, the studio was
always with me. We only had trouble at the beginning, when they
were nervous and worried. I'd like to have spent more time on the
script.
When they saw the film , how did they feel about it?
They were very pleased. About halfway through my shooting period,
Blow-Up came out and had a big success, which was a great help to
me, because when I put the picture together it w asn't entirely explicit,
and since Blow-Up was their picture, they figured this m ust be the
contemporary style, so they didn't worry about it too much. No, they
were delighted with the film.4 0
A contemporary account of the geography of Los Angeles was by
Reyner Banham in his Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies.4 1 In this
work he accounts for the types of Los Angeles architecture based on the
prevailing geography, which can be summarized by four paradigms: the
hills, the beach, flatlands, and the freeway. In the film, Walker travels up the
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criminal syndicate known only as "the Organization/' as he tries to find his
double crossing friend Mai Reece, and his $93,000 share of the heist, he starts
with the contact "Big John" Stegman, a car dealer. Taking a new Chrysler
Imperial out for a test drive while they discuss Mai, Walker breaks the rules
of such an experience. He recklessly weaves through oncoming traffic, then
drives underneath the freeway. Where the freeways serve to connect spread
out neighborhoods of the city through a flow of traffic, even as they
physically demarcate different urban zones through their impenetrability,
Walker drives through the immense undergirders, the columns that support
the concrete expanses, countering the flow and movement that they seek to
engender. Relentlessly questioning Stegman for a lead, Walker plows the
new automobile into the concrete pylons as Stegman is thrown about the
vehicle, bleeding. Walker ends up destroying the car in w hat could be read
as rage against the aestheticization of the commodity as Big John's
commercial comes on the radio. In a m anner of speaking, Walker performs a
detoum em ent in the sense of the Situationists, turning an aspect of culture
against itself. This attack on the premises of a superficial, commodity-driven
society is exemplified elsewhere in the film with reference to cosmetics: his
wife peers into a distorting fish-eye make-up mirror that grotesquely renders
her face, she is seen in the mise en abyme of a beauty shop's windows wearing
a thick cold cream mask, while Walker destroys a rack of her lotions and
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potions that blend into an unusual psychedelic swirl, and later there is an
ironically juxtaposed Pond's Cold Creme commercial as Walker watches TV.
Two other defining features of the Los Angeles landscape that Reyner
Banham describes are the beach and foothills, and both feature in Point Blank.
The beach, and beach culture have worked to create an image of Los Angeles
that stresses physical fitness, narcissism, and an exaggerated attitude of "laid
back" blaseness that is parodied in later films set in L.A. In this seminal
effort Walker and his sister in law, whom he has recruited to help him to
which she assents for her own reasons, visit the Palisades Park in Santa
Monica, a quintessential tourist beach location. But Walker again turns
against the defined usage of an object, wrenching a telescope from its
moorings to view the penthouse suite of his rival Mai Reece (set in the
Huntley Hotel on Second Street in Santa Monica). The Organization's retreat
is set in the foothills, with the typical California accoutrements of swimming
pool (too cold) and landscaping (not enough water)~even though these do
not receive the attention from the staff that they require to pull off the
appearance of Southern California leisure. Compare this modem, wood-
paneled hilltop house (found at the top of Curson Avenue in the Hollywood
Hills) to Chinatown, where a staff of minority workers is required to keep the
estate running, and the plants still die due to lack of non-salt water. The
inside of the Organization's retreat is stocked with the latest labor saving and
technological devices, somewhat like Mike Hammer's bachelor
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accoutrements of answering machine and hi-fi in Kiss Me Deadly: the
intercom/ the stereo with reel to reel/ the panoply of kitchen devices that
Angie Dickinson turns on in a rage at the mute Walker. The devices help
eliminate the need for hum an intervention in cooking, entertaining, an
absence whose limitations are reflected in the browning plants and cold pool
that Organization bigwig Fairfax complains about, an emblem of
inhumanity.
The final aspect of Banham's tetralogy of geographical features that
characterize Southern California are the "flatlands" replete with an expanse
of grid-like streets and miles of housing, which is not as prominent a feature
of this city in this film, though there is a shot of an expansive gridded streets
of houses below Walker when he's in the Hollywood Hills. But what does
enter the film is a curious aspect of L.A., the concrete lined LA river. The
Army Corps of Engineers lined the riverbed with concrete in the 1940s as a
flood control provision, though for much of the year it is almost dry.4 2
Visually the river bed is striking, with vast stretches of concrete, steel
webbing in the bridges that cross, and a shallow trickle of water moving
down the center. The starkness, devoid of nature, perhaps serves to further
the theme of an absence of life, a theme that recurs in the film. (We are not
quite sure if the whole story is not in fact Walker's fantasy as he lies dying in
the cell.) Yet the LA river had been prominently featured in some films prior
to this, notably Roadblock (1951), where an insurance dick who pulled a scam
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is nabbed with his femme fatale in the concrete banks that offer no exit, and
in Them! (1954), as the staging ground to kill atomic-spawned giant ants that
have invaded L.A.'s sewers. Since then the river has become a favorite
location especially for car chases, as in Repo Man, Grease, Terminator 2, and
the remake of Gone In 60 Seconds among others.4 3 Certainly water has been an
important factor in shaping Los Angeles, as exemplified by the water
engineer William Mulholland who brought Owens Valley water to L.A. in
the teens, which provides the loose basis for Chinatown set two decades later.
In the film Walker is set up by a figure in the Organization, who sends
him to the river for the supposed payoff, only to have a sniper posted by a
bridge to pick him off (to this point Walker has proven ingenious in getting
to members of the Organization, and is both elusive and a threat). Walker
shoves the syndicate's equivalent of a mid-level executive down the spillway
into the river; flailing his arms and crying "NO!" is ineffectual, for the hired
gun nails him, then kills the underling who brought the bundle of fake
money. The sequence is framed in bright daylight, the figures overarched by
masses of concrete sculpted in large facets by the long lens. The shapes are
abstract and interesting in their own right, but add to a sense of alienation
fostered by the film, hinting at the unnaturalness of m an's efforts, of the
hubris and futility in trying to change the course of nature. The process of
finding such a range of evocative locations proved to be a challenge for the
young director, not only geographically, but bureaucratically:
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To make Point Blank, I had to first of all to establish the emotional
climate of each scene, then seek the appropriate location by helicopter.
People who have worked for years in Hollywood ask me where I
found all those locations. In fact, all I did was look, but I knew what I
was looking for. At which point, however, the system—Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer—intervened and said: "Tell us what you want and
w e ll find it for you. If you w ant a house, we have a department for
that sort of thing and itll find it for you. A photographer will take
photographs of ten different houses and you can choose the one you
want." That was of no use to me at all, since I couldn't know what I
was looking for until I saw and recognized it, and I certainly couldn't
describe it in advance. That's why they seldom use their own natural
environment. Everything is filtered through the "location
department" and its archives. They always use the same locations, the
ones they know to be practical because the police will facilitate
shooting by blocking off such and such a street. They prevented me
from finding locations by myself because the union was against it.
People were paid for that kind of thing. So I set off with seven people
at my heels in order to respect the union's rules. They followed me in
four separate cars. I drove my own, which was already contrary to
the rules: they have someone to drive you. My driver followed me.
Behind him came the photographer, the location manager, the
production manager and the assistants. I accelerated, I managed to
lose them, and at last, I was alone.4 4
In reframing the gangster film, Boorman self-consciously de-
ethnicizes the urban criminal, deliberating taking away the conventions of
the Irish, Jewish or Italian mobster, instead making the Organization full of
white businessmen. Continuing the parallel, one leader is contacted at a
political fundraiser, and the offices of the Organization are located in a
corporate tower. An example of International Modem, all steel and glass and
concrete, the building both epitomizes ideals of technological "Progress" and
the trium ph of commerce and capitalism, but thus also forms an indictment
of present conditions. As described rather breathily by one contemporary
commentator,
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In spite of the undigested gangster cliches, though, the film freezes the
deathlike look of the streamlined m odem city, and, through its
unsettling blend of satire and brutality, the link between antiseptic
glitter and destruction in our society. It illuminates the American city,
in the language of dream, not social document.4 5
Themes of contemporary alienation repeat in the film: the critique of
commodities as conveyed through the wrecking of the car and the
dehumanizing gadgets and appliances in the Organization's ultramodern
house that become literally disembodied when Angie Dickinson's voice (as
Chris the sister-in-law) suffuses empty rooms through intercom speakers;
the alienation of architecture in the office building, the barren river, a silent
young couple in a sleek burger joint; the critique of cosmetics; the way
people turn to pills as salve: Lynn, Chris, Carter. Walker is not able to collect
his money; one syndicate leader says when confronted "You threaten a
financial structure like this for $93,000? Let me tell you something about
corporations, and we're a corporation. We deal in millions but never see
cash....I've got about $11 in my pocket." Money is just an abstraction in the
political-economic system, an abstraction like the concrete masses of the
concrete river. In answer to a question "who has the money," an
Organization m an says "there's no one man"; while the business-man
looking Carter spouts platitudes like "profit is the only principle." These
themes are reinforced through the metaphor of the prison. Not only do the
opening and closing of the film take place in an empty, rusting Alcatraz and
the prison-like Civil War era brick fort Old Fort Point under the Golden Gate
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Bridge (the site where Jimmy Stewart's Scotty jumps in the San Francisco Bay
to rescue the mysterious "Mrs. Elster" who jumped in), while beds have bars
that resemble prison cells, and the office building is full of vertical lines. The
implication is that m odem commodity capitalism is a prison.
An interesting comparison to Point Blank is the 1942 film This Gun for
Hire, which launched Alan Ladd's career and solidified Veronica Lake's
rather brief and tragic role as a star. Both films involve a movement from
San Francisco to Los Angeles, both have as main characters violent, isolated
loners, who have a hard time dealing with women (but who do warm up
somewhat during the film), who have been betrayed by their criminal
partners, and who move up a chain of command of a corporatized, semi
legitimate organization. Both main characters employ a m se to get by the
elevators and security doors and get inside a penthouse suite; coincidentally,
the main m an of the organization in both is named "Brewster." Both feature
some interesting, huge locations (This Gun For Hire's gasworks, the concrete
river channel of Point Blank). But where the older film has a rather
straightforward point of view and narrative exposition, Point Blank is notable
for an elliptical dream logic, and a fragmented, somewhat subjective point of
view. The whole narrative may or may not be a dream as Walker lays dying
in the Alcatraz jail cell, in a manner like the Ambrose Bierce short story
Incident at Owl Creek, m ade into an Academy Award winning short in
France in 19614 6 where a man condemned to hang jumps free and escapes,
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eventually finding solace with a young woman at a plantation only to have it
revealed that this was a wish fulfillment in his final seconds. Perhaps
Walker, too, is fantasizing at his death; there are hints at this throughout the
film, as when Chris says to him "You really did die at Alcatraz, Walker,"
when her disembodied voice over the hillside house intercom says "why
don't you just lie down and die," or when a tourist boat passes the island
and the tour guide intones how no one has made it off the island alive. Even
his wife, w hen he confronts her after the Alcatraz incident, says to him in a
depressed, perhaps pill-induced monotone, "how good it m ust be, being
dead....Is it?," shortly before she takes an overdose of pills. Boorman
references this dream-like quality in the film:
The film as a medium is so close to the state of dreaming. Scott
Fitzgerald said that "Movies have taken away our dreams—of all
betrayals, that is the worst." I always think that watching films is very
like dreaming. There's a mystical quality that's very exciting. So I try
to make my films in a way that will touch the spectator's dream
world: to use areas of uncertainty, touching the twilight of people's
thoughts—because this is where communication takes place. [....] But
his [Walker's] revival after the shooting, in fact, provided no great
problem to the audience. With the blurring of images, and the girl's
voice over the action talking about the "impossibility" of escaping, the
film was pitched to a level of what I'd call possible fantasy. The film in
its entirety might have been a projection in M arvin's mind at the
moment of death.4 7
The elements of a fragmented, associational dream logic goes against
standard expositional narrative. At the outset of the film, the Alcatraz
double-cross is intercut with scenes of Mai and Walker meeting at some sort
of reunion (all men, perhaps a military unit or a fraternity, where they roll
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around drunkenly on the floor amid many legs in a frankly homoerotic
fashion) and the caper that nets them the disputed money. When Walker
confronts his wife, there is a weird flashback as she recalls how the couple
met; he falls asleep and recounts how he entered her apartment, grabbing
her and emptying his revolver into the bed in slow motion, with the change
that she falls to the ground in a premonition. When he wakes up his wife is
dead, having taken an overdose of pills (later, he flashes on the image of her
lying there w hen he sees his sister in law in bed). Walker stays in her
apartment, sees the mysterious figure of Yost, who gave him her address,
and when he turns around there is no furniture in the room—Walker just
crouches in a comer, desolate. Yet thereafter the room back to normal, as if
the preceding shot was a mindscape rather than actual occurrence.
When Walker eventually ends up with Chris, the Angie Dickinson
character who plays his sister in law, it happens after she hits him on the
head with a pool cue. They embrace, and end up in naked in bed in a
continuation of the embrace, but as they roll over, Chris turns into his wife
Lynn, then he turns into Mai Reece, then Lynn turns into Chris with Reece
(which happened, and allowed Walker to use her so he could confront Reece
in his impregnable redoubt), then returns to Chris and Walker. This ronde of
lovemaking articulates some of the complex interpersonal dynamics that
drive the characters, but also reinforces the uncanny dream logic that
structures much of the film; though by contrast, the scenes where Walker
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confronts the various levels of the Organization are set forth rather
straightforwardly, though an unsettled quality is garnered by a general lack
of establishing shots in the film, a strategy specifically intended by the
director.
Hollywood N ouvelle Vague
My films are always subjective. That's to say, I place the camera in
such a way as to show things from the point of view of the characters.
If Point Blank looked fragmented, that's because the Lee Marvin
character was a fractured man with a distorted view of the world. [....]
The fragmentation was necessary to give the character and the
situations ambiguity, to suggest another meaning beyond the
immediate plot. And this process of fragmentation began during the
preparation of the script, but it also continued and merged into the
process of making the film. [....] There are specific influences....the
elliptical cutting is from Resnais and especially the time-juggling of
Hiroshima, mon amour.4 8
Another influence would seem to be Antonioni, for the critique of
society's alienation, and the use of stark, clean m odem architecture to create
abstract compositions in the frame to further this critique (many examples
come to m ind especially from the trilogy of V A vventura, Eclisse and La Notte).
Thus an interesting parallel to the critique of contemporary society in Point
Blank is a film by another European director making his first American-based
film, Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Made just two years later,
Antonioni explores some of the same concerns, but rather than burying such
a critique amid a genre film, albeit one with New Wave influences, Zabriskie
Point takes the youth-based political underground and counterculture as the
specific focus of the film. Roundly panned by critics, and a box-office
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disaster for the budget that was employed, Zabriskie Point, while flawed, is
still of interest, perhaps more so with the passage of time so that the notes of
the specific American times do not ring untrue in as distracting a fashion.
Both films portray a street-level view of car culture in Los Angeles as a strip
(in the sense of Venturi, Scott and Brown in Learning From Las Vegas4 9 ) riot of
signage. In Point Blank Walker drives down a busy street with car dealers
and a proliferation of signs large and small by day and by night, reinforcing
the sense of alienation and the hailing of consumer goods, while one of the
prominent features of Zabriskie Point are the billboards flattened through the
telephoto lens for products from airlines to sodas to mayonnaise, an
undertaker's ad on a bus bench, as well as a montage of signs of industrial
companies. The large flat surfaces of billboards are augmented by a view of
the large mural at the Farmer John packing plant in the industrial section of
Vernon, which depicts in a somewhat naive style bucolic scenes of pigs in the
country, including a farmer carrying one away. The violence hinted
underneath the whimsical facade mirrors themes of violence just under the
surface in society that the film explores, both reactionary and revolutionary;
the act of "killing a pig" is what the young m an is accused of, (he did not do
so though he was ready to). At the end of the film, the posh m odem house
in the desert explodes depicted through unusual high speed cinematography
that slows down a series of commodities that float in the area, from clothes to
a lobster. It is not clear whether Darya actually plants a bomb to commit this
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destruction, for she looks back again and the house is still standing, but that
could be read as her denial and rationalization, but the dreamlike character
of this act, choreographed to shrieking early Pink Floyd music, resembles the
oneiric quality of Point Blank,
Released between Point Blank and Zabriskie Point was another film by a
European director, Jacques Demy's The Model Shop. Like these two other
films, The Model Shop explores the terrain of Los Angeles as it also performs a
critique of social values. In this case a young architect drops out of his job
and tours the city as he awaits his possible draft notice, looking for someone
to borrow money to keep his MG roadster from being repossessed. He meets
a woman in a "model shop," where men can take photographs of women
who pose (and more?) in dishabille-, she happens to be a world-weary
Frenchwoman, Lola (Anouk Aimee) featured in the Demy film Lola and
spoken of in Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He pursues her, she tells him of her life
as they spend one night together, then she leaves in the m orning and his car
is repossessed and he receives his draft notice. Nothing m uch happens, but
he does come to some moment of insight in the end. But w hat is fascinating
in this film is the way that it conducts a tour of Los Angeles. Locations
include his small house in Venice next to a churning oil pum p, the
newspaper office of the underground paper Open City, the large, shabby
Hollywood house of the rock band Spirit (who give him a loan), a pool hall
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at Fairfax and Santa Monica Boulevard, a gas station, a camera shop, and the
model shop itself. Director Jacques Demy says,
I wanted to document the city in The Model Shop, to do a kind of
documentary on Los Angeles....L. A. is the future; Paris is the
past....There is real poetry here. Its weird, fascinating, wild. I drive
around all day amazed by the colors, proportions and contrasts. It is
unique among all the cities of the world. It is a baroque place."5 0
The particular map of the city this film reproduces is the hip Westside of a
burgeoning youth culture that was reflected for instance in a vibrant rock
and roll scene centered on the Sunset Strip5 1 and the bohemian haunts of
Venice before gentrification, probably the same locus that Demy operated in
living in the city, which lends some credence to the "documentary"
intention. As an architect, the young man played by Gary Lockwood also
has a particular appreciation for the city. Talking to one of the members of
the rock band Spirit he confides his admiration for the city, which might
stand in for producer-writer-director Demy (known for his love affairs with
cities including Nantes, Cherbourg, Rochefort):
I was driving down Sunset and I turned on one of those roads that
leads up into the hills. I stopped at this place that overlooked the
whole city—it was fantastic...I suddenly felt exhilarated, I was really
moved by the whole geometry; its spirit of conception, harmony. It's
a fabulous city. I think some people claim its an ugly city, when its
really pure poetry—it just kills me. I wanted to build something right
then, create something, you know what I mean?
A film that also invokes an architect and the Venice area of Los
Angeles is the 1983 remake of Breathless, starring a hyperactively strutting
Richard Gere. Based rather literally on the Godard's New Wave classic A
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Bout de Souffle, the remake also seems to channel Zabriskie Point. The young
woman—who is characterized as an architecture student rather than the
journalist in Godard's original—is played by a French non-professional
actress, echoing the two amateurs that gave flat performances (presumably
by design) in the Antonioni film. A constant theme in Breathless is the use of
the murals as backdrops that are so prevalent in the Venice area, often
commentary on the action (using a large Mexican seascape on the side of a
restaurant, for instance, as the couple try to make a break for the border),
which echoes the billboards and Farmer John mural.5 2 The issue of
development is central to Zabriskie Point, as the Rod Taylor character
develops high desert resort-style housing (the promotional film about the
company's development using mannequins is creepily hilarious), while in
Breathless a central plot point occurs at the groundbreaking of a new
building.
Certainly there m ust have been personal as well as industry
incentives for celebrated European directors such as Demy and Antonioni to
bring their moviemaking skills to the heart of the American film industry,
and in the tradition of the French New Wave and Antonioni's personal style,
to use the actual fabric of the city as set and setting, which can account
perhaps, somewhat, for the attention to the actual city. But the new
sensibility that these auteurs bring in marks a different approach to Los
Angeles as it has been portrayed in film. There is m uch less emphasis on
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landmarks that denote areas of the city, but rather they use the existent city;
and as opposed to the silent era films or those films noir that do not reference
Los Angeles as Los Angeles, these films are clearly located in Los Angeles.
The areas that grab their attention are not "official" markers of the city, such
as City Hall or Union Station. Demy is draw n to the low rise roadside strip
development of Hollywood district and Venice, while Antonioni is grabbed
by billboards and signage, the industrial neighborhood of Vernon, the
murals of Farmer John packing plant. One coincidence is that some of these
maintain some interest in issues of real estate development or architecture.
Certainly Antonioni has maintained a career-long interest in architecture
implicitly or specifically (as in Sandro, the failed architect in L'Avventura),
and perhaps those films that pay attention to the city are more likely to
feature issues of development or architecture, and vice versa; but one factor
might also be the growth of the city and region.
One can see an attention to mapping in films that follow this moment
in time: some mark specific culture spheres, such as the South Central Los
Angeles of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep or the rather unexplored territory
of the South Bay that Quentin Tarentino assays (and where he grew up) in
Jackie Brown, others take specific neighborhoods bounded by landmarks,
such as Volcano concentrating at a point in Mid-City centered on the La Brea
Tar Pits (Miracle Mile also saw this as a centerpoint of destruction, via nuclear
ballistic missile; see Mike Davis for a history of the literary and filmic
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106
traditions that take part in the destruction of L.A.5 3 ) A film like John
Carpenter's Escape From LA also performs a mapping of the region, especially
centering on Beverly Hills, but the loopy sci-fi take is cartoonish and full of
received ideas.
A film that perhaps most directly conducts a m apping of Los Angeles
environs is the execrable Michael Douglas vehicle Falling Down.5 4 This film
offers a case study in false geographies, as well as a racist sensibility that
resides not only the disaffected main character, eventually shown to be
dangerously "crazy," but also cynically inhabits the film's point of view
generally. By false geography I mean that the lead character moves across a
map of the city, which is indexed both within the diegetic world as well as
through clear evidence of actual locations being shot. Yet he moves through
the city on foot, having abandoned his car in a freeway jam, as he has
reached his boiling point due to being a down-sized, middle-aged aerospace
worker, as well as having estranged his wife and daughter. His trek has him
engage in altercations with various minority ethnic groups, which are staged
so as to have the audience cheer for him. Yet his journey does not make
sense, it is not an accurate trajectory that a person could take from one place
to another. The geography m apped is not an accurate itinerary; and while
the vision of the neighborhoods traversed might be true to the racist "angry
white man" that the film cynically panders to, it is offensive in the cartoonish
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and sterotypical depictions of ethnic minorities (and thus inaccurate on this
count as well).
In summary, the issue of the cinematic representation of Los Angeles
in the period from the birth of film until to 1970 is shaped by several factors:
the increased development of the city and region of Southern California,
with spikes in the 1920s and during the war and in the post war period.
These shifts in economic importance as well as diverse publicity and
promotion that boosted the region as a destination contribute to an enhanced
national profile that would lead to the inevitable suitability of portraying the
city. This change was not immediate, for during the twenties, at a height in
the region's growth, there were only self-reflexive films about the film
industry. New York as setting was easily recognizable as well as a
convention; while many of the Hollywood types were from New York, both
studio executives and writers, many of whom were former newspapermen,
or came from the Broadway stage after the advent of sound. Of course, the
New York portrayed in the 1920s and 30s was largely recreated in the sound
stages and back lots of the Hollywood studios (an exception includes Harold
Lloyd's 1929 Speedy.) Two major shifts in the representation of Los Angeles
occur in the late 1940s and later 1960s. The rising national prominence can
be credited for making the setting of stories here acceptable, but changing
modes of production also play a role in the shift. Noir crime melodramas,
often created by independent producers, and in a climate of labor strife and
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materials shortages, along with increased sensitivities of film stock and
lenses looked to the actual streets as a more attractive filming location, and
the subject matter lent itself to this movement (perhaps a case can also be
made for a symptomatic reading that says the disruption of the war also
impinged on the subject matter, and thus location). In the 1960s another
change occurred, as again further disruptions in the studio system sent
producers to the streets, and an influx of European directors availed
themselves of the existing landscape to frame their stories of more subjective
alienation and search for meaning. Part of this process involves a greater
mapping of the geography of the urban landscape, though the position of a
type of urban flaneur, who moves through different types of building or
neighborhood. This process, while not comprehensive, forms a different
attitude to the position of the subject in the city than in earlier films, even
those that represent a location-photographed Los Angeles for what it is.
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End Notes: Chapter Two
1 For an exhaustive overview of the cinematic representation of N ew York City see
James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
2 John Bengtson, Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster
Keaton) Santa Monica Press, 2000). Keaton tended to use mud to cover street signs and
license plates to avoid confusion in his films, making Bengtson's effort even more amazing.
3 The High Sign (released 1921), The Balloonatic (1923).
4 Laurel and Hardy also took a turn above the streets of Los Angeles in Liberty (A Hal
Roach Production, released by MGM, 1929), where as two escaped convicts they end up
among the girders of a steel frame skyscraper under construction in downtown Los Angeles
(one can make out the angled intersection of Main and Broadway). Of course, Harold
Lloyd's original high-rise antics were for producer Hal Roach, and it is perhaps not
surprising that Roach would have his new comedy stars perform in such an environment.
5 Elinor Glyn's preamble title card in the film defines "IT": "IT is that quality
possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With 'IT' you win all
men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man. 'IT' can be a quality of the mind
as well as a physical attraction."
6 The shopgirl who inevitably rises from lowly origins to attract a man of means is a
somewhat prevalent early film type. A strikingly coincident example is the Mary Pickford
vehicle M y Best Girl, also released in 1927, which features "America's Sweetheart" as a
department store shopgirl who falls in love with a co-worker who turns out to be the
owner's son. Obviously, the gender and class implications that arise from this type of
narrative offer fruitful area for discussion.
7 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), as well as Friedberg.
8 Rudi Laermans, "Learning to Consume: Early Department Stores and the Shaping
of the Modern Consumer Culture (1860-1914)," Theory, Culture and Society vl0n4 (1993): 79-
102.
9 Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), section 4 [no
pagination].
1 0 See the expert documentary film Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, produced by Kevin
Brownlow and David Gill, for background on Lloyd’s secret for making his high rise films,
as well as general information on his life and career. See also Adela Rogers St. Johns, "How
Harold Lloyd Made 'Safety Last',"Photoplay Magazine (July 1923), 33. For discussion of the
working and leisure life of women in the early part of the twentieth century reference Kathy
Piess, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Tum-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). For discussion of the introduction of the
automobile into the developing urban fabric of Los Angeles see Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and
the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City Berkeley: (University of California Press, 1991).
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1 1 The Greta Garbo and Clark Gable starring Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise (1931) and
Tod Browning's Freaks feature what is more accurately a travelling carnival, which tend
toward the menacing rather than the clownish fun of the amusement parks. Coney Island
starred in a number of early short films including some with Roscoe"Fatty" Arbuckle and
Mabel Normand, and as described above, Buster Keaton filmed two shorts and part of one
feature at the amusement park at Venice, California.
1 2 Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land. Layton, Utah: Gibbs
Smith, 1946 [1973], 334.
1 3 See David James, "Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of 'Avant-Garde' Film in Los
Angeles," OCTOBER 90 (Fall 1999), 3-24.
1 4 The Chinese Theatre's forecourt is referenced as the site of premieres in numerous
films, including What Price Hollywood? and The D ay of the Locust.
1 5 On the phenomenon of the return to city streets in film noir see Paul Kerr, "Out of
What Past? Notes on the B film noir," in Film Noir Reader, Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds.
(New York: Limelight Press, 1996 [1979]), and William Lafferty, "A Reappraisal of the Semi-
Documentary in Hollywood, 1945-1948,"Velvet Light Trap 19 (1982).
1 6 Paul Arthur, "Los Angeles as the Scene of the Crime," Film Comment v32n4
(July/August 1996), 20-26.
1 7 As just one example, in a review of Roadblock, the Variety reviewer signing as "Brog.
" says of the concrete L.A. river bed where the final chase occurs is "a site fresh to such
meller antics,"in that witty, neologistic jargon characteristic of this trade paper. Weekly
Variety 25 Juy 1951 (from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences library clipping
file).
1 8 Edward Dimendberg, "Film Noir and Urban Space" Ph. D. dissertation, University
of California, Santa Cruz, 1992.
1 9 He Walked By Night actually features Jack Webb, Dragnet's Joe Friday, in a lesser role.
Dragnet certainly features many elements of this film, from the opening narration to the step
by step details of police procedure, though without the notable chiaroscuro lighting, as
television tends toward high key lighting. The film is discussed in Paul Kerr.
2 0 John Alton, Painting With Light (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995 [1949]).
2 1 The storm drains of L.A. also figure prominently as the site where gigantic ants bom
of radiation roam in the 1954 sci-fi Them! The sewers have long been a thematic location, for
instance the highly popular Eugene Sue, The Sewers of Paris, which is discussed in Peter
Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992.
2 2 The Bradbury building with its interesting open atrium and wrought iron elevators
has been a site of films, from The White Cliffs of Dover, D.O.A., the remake of M, the low-
budget horror film starring Lon Chaney, Jr., The Indestructible Man, the adaptation of
Raymond Chandler' Little Sister, Marlowe, and to the celebrated case of Blade Runner, among
others. For further discussion of this site see Edward Dimendberg, "From Berlin to Bunker
Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz Lang's and Joseph Losey's
M /'W ide Angle vl9n4 (October 1997): 62-93.
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2 3 John Fante, A sk the Dust. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.
2 4 Robert Surtees, "The Story of the Filming of A ct of Violence," American
Cinematographer (August 1948).
2 5 ibid.:
Naturally, such a story has more effect scenes, night exteriors, and interiors than the
average picture. Mood must be captured and maintained at all times. Yet utmost
care was taken that each scene, shot by shot, kept a continuity of atmosphere that
led into the following sequence. Also w e were careful not to go too dramatic in any
scene preceding a scene which called for great dramatic pitch. In other words, we
would not get hammy with the camera in scenes not requiring special treatment.
This left us something for punch when it was needed later. Time of day was
established by careful lighting, and for this extensive tests were made before the
picture was in production. The tough problems arose when w e started shooting
night exteriors in the downtown streets of Los Angeles. It was extremely difficult to
get background detail on the film when using only foreground action lighting.
Street lamps aided immensely in this problem. We sometimes fastened photofloods
to lamp posts a block away from where we were shooting and aided thus, some
very realistic night exteriors were obtained.
Shooting night sequences in a railroad yard proved a tough assignment because of
the mechanical difficulties of running cable feeders across rails and tracks to lamps.
At this location we had to get shots of an attempted suicide of a man jumping before
an oncoming train, with the locomotive headlight supposed to be the only light
source. Try this sometime. It was a challenging problem but it finally worked out
successfully. Later, an entire scene was made showing the lights from Pullman
coach windows flashing across the actors' faces. Such effects proved highly
dramatic on the screen, and they could not easily have been secured without
working with people who understand our difficulties and problems.
2 6 Scott Frank, "The Frame of Life: Mediating Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis-Brown
Residence," Spectator. Special Issue, "Street Smarts: Visual Media and the Urban
Imagination." Edited by Karen Voss (Fall/Winter 1997): 82-91.
2 7 A couple of moments of overt sexuality also prove arresting: when Hammer first
encounters Gabrielle/Lily Carver the shot is framed awkwardly to self-reflexively place the
gun in his crotch, and when a singer sings "Rather Have the Blues" in a bar she caresses a
quite phallic microphone.
2 8 As one contemporary film reviewer noted, "It contains many good things, including
some exciting camera angles by Ernest Laszlo on locations that feature the seamy side of Los
Angeles." Jack Moffitt, "Kiss M e Deadly Is Mixed Murder Yam," H ollywood Reporter 20 April
1955.
2 9 An interesting development with this film is the fact that the version of the film
shown for the last thirty-plus years, which ends with a nuclear conflagration engulfing the
beach house with Hammer inside, is apparently a truncated version. Research has
discovered (and is shown, for instance, in existing period trailers) that the original had Mike
Hammer and his girl Velda escaping to watch the house explode from the ocean surf. It
would appear that the changed ending might inform the reading of the film; the version
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previously shown before the latest restoration seems more apocalyptic and dark, though the
morally ambiguous Hammer is punished, which might have been the reason for the initial
truncation of the film, which might have been performed due to distributor pressure.
Having Hammer and Velda, survive, though is not necessarily positive, for one can imagine
the dangers of coming into proximity with a nuclear blast. See "Cult Classic Mystery: A
new video release of 'Kiss Me Deadly' includes the now-famous lost footage. But how it got
lost is still a riddle." Los Angeles Times 12 August, 1997, FI,10
3 0 James Pow ers, "White-Victor Pic Tough Crime Yarn/'Hollywood Reporter, 8 January
1957.
3 1 "Dual Bill Unfolds Tales of Greed and Violence,"L.A Times, 3 October 1957.
3 2 "Corpses Litter L.A. fre e w a y s,”Hollywood Citizen-News, 3 October 1957; both this
and the previous entry from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick
library dippings file.
3 3 Kiss Me Deadly actually mentions freeway construction, as a truck driver that Mike
Hammer interviews who had struck a man involved in the case mentions he was "driving
down Washington Boulevard, near where they're building that freeway." See also the film
Plunder Road (1958), which also features some interesting early use of the freeway in a film
setting.
3 4 A period review notes that "For the first time, an American film tells a story in
which a Japanese boy wins the white girl.[...J Shigeta's clean cut appearance will temper the
shock of the fadeout kiss and the ultimate Japanese-boy—American girl relationship." The
Crimson Kimono, "Product Digests Section," Motion Picture Herald, 12 September 1959.
3 5 A similar production history pattern occurred with another Chandler novel, The
High W indow , as it was made as Time to Kill (1942), the last in a series under the private eye
moniker Michael Shayne, which was later remade with Philip Marlowe as The Brasher
Doubloon (1947).
3 6 No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood. Please do not think I completely
despise it, because I don't.... But the overall picture, as the boys say, is of a
degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the
bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling
over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually
utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of
losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the
snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world. It is a great subject for a
novel— probably the greatest still untouched. But how to do it with a level mind,
that's the thing that baffles me. It is like one of these South American palace
revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms— only when the thing is
over the ragged dead men lie in rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that
this is not funny, this is the Roman circus, and damn near the end of a civilization.
Chandler to Alfred A. Knopf, Chairman Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 12 January, 1946, Raymond
Chandler Speaking, Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977), 126.
3 7 For instance, Point Blank was named to the LA Weekly's list of "Alternate 100"
important films in 2001.
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3 8 The Hunter also served as the source material for the execrable Mel Gibson film
Payback, which lost all of the social critique and dream logic of Point Blank, and was left
instead with violence, including an especially annoying ultra-violent Asian female helper
dressed in dominatrix gear. Made by Gibson's production company Icon, and directed by
first-time director Brian Helgeland (who received co-screenwriting credit on L.A.
Confidential), it seems that this might have been the case where no one could tell Gibson
when something is just bad during the production process. Richard Stark (Donald
Westlake), The Hunter (New York: Permabook) 1962.
3 9 Certainly Vertigo tops the list, but also such interesting and diverse films as Dark
Passage, Sudden Fear, D irty Harry, Bullitt, andWoman on the Run among many others feature
the city prominently. A film like The Maltese Falcon is set in San Francisco, but is wholly a
studio based film.
4 0 Quoted in Stephen Farber, "The Writer in American Films," Film Quarterly v21n4
(Summer '68), 5. It is interesting that the director says that he argued with the screenwriter
Alex Jacobs about the setting, for in a separate interview with the same Film Quarterly
interviewer, Jacobs expands on Los Angeles and its place in the film:
I think it quite possible that lots of people were repelled by the drive of the picture,
which is frenetic. We did it for a reason. Both of us were extraordinarily attracted by
Los Angeles—I still am —and w e both hated San Francisco, hated it in the sense that
it wasn't for our picture, and it was very much a touristy sort of town, a town sort of
on the asshole of America, it seemed to me. If you couldn’ t face the Middle West and
the West and what modem America is, you retreated to San Francisco and hung on
for your dear life. It's a very sweet sort of city, but it's obviously not America. I love
LA because it seems to me to be absolutely what America is, at least one aspect of
America, and it doesn’ t kid around, you know, you either take it or you don't take it.
Stephen Farber, "The Writer II: An Interview With Alexander Jacobs" Film Quarterly v22n2
(Winter 1968-69), 7.
4 1 Reyner Banham.
4 2 The L.A. River is a point of political contention, as some advocate greenbelting or
renaturalizing stretches of the river to support natural habitat and offer recreation. As it is
now, transients and others use the river for bathing, fishing, dumping trash and other
purposes. A regular sight on television during rainy season is firefighters practicing
swiftwater rescues, or children who have played too close to the banks and have been swept
in flailing for rescue lines as they tumble down the choppy swift current.
4 3 Prior to the lining of the riverbed with concrete in the 1940s by the Army Corps of
Engineers as a flood control provision, the river served in films in its wild state, in such
classics as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and Waterloo
Bridge (1931) [interestingly, each of these films remade multiple times], though as itself only
once in newsreels when it jumped banks near Universal Studios. See "Grandaddy of
Waters "New York Times, 28 July 1940. In the film version of Play It A s It Lays, the film
within a film "Angel Beach," is screened twice, and the opening shot involves the star Maria
as a motorcycle mama holding on to a guy on a rod as they ride down the concrete channel,
followed by a horde of others as part of the exploitative biker film mania of the late 1960s.
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4 4 Michel Ciment, John Boorman. Trans Gilbert Adair. (Boston: faber and faber, 1986
[French 1985]), 73.
4 5 Stephen Farber, "The Writer in American Films," 4.
4 6 French title La Riviere du Hibou, U.S. title An Occurrence at Owl Creek.
4 7 Quoted in Gordon Gow, "Playboy in a Monastery: John Boorman in an interview
with Gordon Gow," Films and Filming vl8n5 (February, 1972): 19-20.
4 8 Quoted in Michel Ciment, 19-20.
4 9 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas:
The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Rev. ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977).
5 0 Jacques Demy quoted in Susan J. Diamond, "The Umbrellas of Los Angeles," Los
Angeles Magazine (August, 1968).
5 1 The Sunset Strip has long been an entertainment zone outside the city limits of Los
Angeles and Beverly Hills from the days of such nightclubs as Ciro's and Mocambo to the
late sixties youth explosion. An unusual film is The Strip (1951), in which Mickey Rooney
plays a drummer at a nightclub and is mired in a noir ish dilemma, and features some
footage of the local scene; whereas a teen exploitation film like Riot on Sunset Strip (1967),
despite the title capitalizing on actual police riots, features only a few grainy shots of cops
and hippies on the prowl, and instead looks more like a television production.
5 2 A documentary film that comments on the Los Angeles mural scene and the
differences between the ethnic and artistic camps—Eastside and Venice— that especially
fluoresced in the 1970s is by Agnes Varda, M ur Murs (incidentally, she is Jacques Demy's
wife).
5 3 Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York:
Metropolitan Books/Henry Flolt, 1998). See chapter 6, "The Literary Destruction of Low
Angeles, which also covers films (273-355).
5 4 For a discussion of some of the social implications of this film consult Elana Zilberg,
"Falling Down in El Norte: Cultural Politics & Spatial Poetics of the ReLatinization of Los
Angeles," Wide Angle v20n3 (July 1998): 182-209.
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Chapter Three. Real Reel L.A.:
Documentary Types, 1918-1960
Theatrical films that do have empirical evidence of having been
filmed in the streets of Los Angeles through the 1930s do not represent a
specific Los Angeles, but rather a typical urban city interchangeable with
most any other; the importance is "City" rather than "Los Angeles." It was
only with noir films in the 1940s that Los Angeles was specifically addressed
as such in theatrical films. Given this lack of fictional representations outside
of "Hollywood" backstage stories, it is interesting, then, to look at film
representations that specifically attempt to document the City of Angels.
Documentary films date from this period and beyond; what is interesting is
that most examples until the latter part of the 1950s do not engage the city in
a dynamic filmic way in the manner of the city symphony films, but rather
use the film medium in its most basic illustrative form. But though they do
not push the form of the expression, they do document certain basic changes
in the city structure and perceptions of w hat is important. In the latter 1950s
some innovative documentary expressions of the city do emerge, at a time
when Los Angeles was beginning to assert itself more on a national and
international level.
In 1918 Ford Motor Company produced a film on Los Angeles as part
of its "A Visit to American Cities" under the short-lived Ford Educational
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Weekly newsreel program. Given the technical limitations and genre
conventions of this type of film at the time, one would expect a series of title
cards followed by illustrative single shot views from a fixed perspective, and
in this regard, the film does not disappoint. The film begins, however, with a
long and rather spectacular panning shot over downtown Los Angeles,
possibly from a location atop a building on Hill Street. This shot moves from
southeast to the north, revealing rows of buildings, the tropical greenery of
Pershing Square, then called Central Park, and ending abruptly looking up
Bunker Hill where the H ill Street Tunnel then existed (removed when
Bunker Hill was razed and lowered for skyscraper development in the
1960s). But after this panoramic view the film reverts to the standard title
card and illustration format, moving through a list of sights that defined the
city, including prominent structures such as the civic center buildings of Hall
of Records and the old courthouse (both soon to be redeveloped, like Clunes
Auditorium at the north end of Central Park), civic institutions such as
UCLA1 and the California Hospital, Broadway, "in the heart of the business
district," and the Bunker Hill transportation oddities of the Angel's Flight
funicular railway and the adjacent Third Street Tunnel.2 Later shots show
the large Scottish Rite Temple and the two-barreled Hill Street Tunnel that
traversed Bunker Hill from the South.
The Ford travelogue also notes some of the diversity present in Los
Angeles, visiting Chinatown and the Old Plaza, the historic core of the early
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Spanish settlement. The Chinatown depicted was the old community that
was uprooted for construction of the Union Station railroad terminus in the
1930s and moved several blocks north and west. This subculture is
presented with ethnic stereotyping typical of travelogues of that period "The
Chinaman has a chance of pursuing the even tenor of his way," referring also
to the tourist draws of food and knick-knacks in that quarter. Of course, no
reference is m ade to the historical or social conditions such as the race-based
Exclusion laws banning Chinese immigration when the film was made, or
the massacre of Chinese by whites in this same neighborhood several
decades earlier. The film notes the historic Mexican presence in the Old
Plaza (several years prior to the establishment of Olvera Street as a themed
tourist destination, sponsored by a white civic booster), and shows the Plaza
Church, but only as a passing gape.3
This film also depicts two of the important natural resources that
helped shape the development of the city: oil and water. Several years
earlier in 1913 William Mulholland as chief engineer and general manager
for the city-owned Bureau of Water Works and Supply had moved to extract
water from Owens Valley, 238 miles to the north, moving it along aqueducts
and through pum ping stations and large pipes over hills into the city. This
necessary resource allowed for an unprecedented expansion of the city in
this desert region, and was an engineering marvel at the time. Oil was an
important industry at the time, and remains so until this day, though with
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many former oil fields within the city limits paved over with development.
The Ford Motor Company also has an interest in portraying an industry so
intertwined with its own project.
A nod to a then-contemporary architectural trend occurs when a long
tracking shot down a new street passes a line of bungalow houses with
various types of facade, young palm trees lining the street. The film ends
with a return for the third time to "Broadway and the fashionable shopping
district." The repeated emphasis shows the primacy of this location as a
locus of activity. The high angle shot of the busy intersection at 7th Street is
undercranked, the resulting speeded-up motion emphasizing the movement
of automobiles through the vertical space of the high buildings. This self-
contained automobile access to centers of office work and retail shopping
from the privacy of a single family home is a defining m yth and ethos of Los
Angeles, and a perspective that Ford has an interest in emphasizing.
Interestingly, the flow of cars through the downtown space as fancifully
depicted here does not accurately portray trends at the time. According to
Scott Bottles, traffic downtown was rather congested, with streetcars, trucks,
and automobiles, competed with bicyclists and pedestrians for space, and the
resulting delays for streetcars proved an incentive for the flexibility of
automobiles.4
Other travelogue documentaries pass through similar territory. The
short Los Angeles: Wonder City of the West, from the series Fitzpatrick's
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TravelTalks, distributed by MGM, apparently dates from the 1930s. The
format draws upon the format of the travelogue lecture presented by
traveler-interlocutor, a format m ade wildly popular in the latter nineteenth
century by such luminaries on the lecture circuit as Robert Stoddard, and
moved from lantern slide to film in the long and famed career of Burton
Holmes.5 The film tends more to the colorful (and it is indeed in
Technicolor), starting with relatively new tourist attraction Olvera Street
(mispronounced "Ol-o-ver-o" by the authoritarian narrator), and features a
show of colorful California pottery. It does draw upon a trope seen in the
Ford educational film, as it employs a similar but differently placed pan
across the Civic Center and County Courthouse. But the intervening years
have seen morphological changes to the city, changes incorporated by the
term "Ford film": the automobile has become a presence that has affected
both retail and commercial development, and the film industry has
established firm roots and is a draw unto itself. The film depicts Wilshire
Boulevard and Bullocks Department Store, developments of the late 1920s
directly attributable to the Automobile Age. Wilshire Boulevard itself, one of
the main boulevards in the city which stretches from Downtown to the
Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, and passes through some important
commercial and cultural districts—Miracle Mile, Museum Row, Beverly
Hills, W estwood— was only completed when the final section through
Westlake Park (now MacArthur Park), a mile west of Downtown, was filled
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in 1934. While parts that would eventually comprise Wilshire boulevard
were set out in the 1870s in Santa Monica, and in the 1880s between Beverly
Hills and the future Westwood as well as near downtown, the section just
west of Westlake Park had been set up for development into grand houses
for the elite in a park-like setting, away from the bustle of the commercial
center. The park w ith its large lake presumably provided a buffer against
traffic circulation and commercialization. However, by the 1920s another
developer, A.W. Ross, had been developing a stretch in the middle portion of
the seventeen mile span with the automobile in mind. The areas known as
"Miracle Mile" and the overlapping "Fifth Avenue of the West" brought
intensive commercial development to a linear, narrow corridor.
Characteristic of this development was the building of the Bullocks Wilshire
Department Store in 1928, an Art Deco architectural landmark (recently
converted into the library for the Southwest Law School), designed with the
automobile in mind. The main entrance was through a rear porte cochere,
where parking was also available—both groundbreaking features. It was the
first major commercial development outside of downtown, and the base-
and-tower style of architecture was reflected in many other commercial
buildings that were erected in the latel920s.6
This film also depicts such tourist destinations as Hollywood
Boulevard with Grauman's Chinese Theater, and later offers a quick slide
show of the various major film studio gates, with a brief tour of MGM's lot, a
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reenactment of the Lumiere Brothers' Workers Leaving a Factory with the
workers of Walt Disney Studios (when it was located at Hyperion Avenue
and Griffith Park Boulevard), a meeting with Walt himself, and a dance
troupe dress rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl. The conjunction of an
insistence on the importance of the boulevards that radiate away from
downtown, and the self-reflexive attention to the relatively new industry of
film production index a change in the perception as well as growth of the
city.
Southern California: Indigenous Architecture
Another brief topic of this short film, Los Angeles: Wonder City of the
West, and a recurrent popular theme for films of Los Angles is the depiction
of vernacular architecture. In the nineteen twenties and thirties there was an
explosion of fanciful buildings, a few of which have survived, which lend
themselves both to film and to a stereotyping of Los Angeles as fun and
superficial. Certainly the Brown Derby, in the shape of a hat, became famous
in movie lore as meeting-ground and watering hole for stars and the
firmament that revolved around them (the original hat structure preserved
rather incongruously through ordinance on top of a mini-mall erected in its
stead, while the more famous and longer-lasting Hollywood Boulevard
branch featured in I Love Lucy fell to economic deterioration of that famous
street, a situation that is now picking up.) Others still exist and can be seen
in recent films, such as the hot-dog shaped Tail o' the Pup hot dog stand in
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L.A. Story, or the large doughnut that graces Randy's donuts near the airport
in the 1983 remake of Breathless set in Los Angeles. A 1939 MGM short,
Hollywood Hobbies, directed by George Sidney (who later became a
distinguished feature director), pokes fun at the phenomena and plays off of
the travelogue conventions of a narrator pontificating over varied shots.
"Hollywood, magic land of make-believe, the world's film capital....Our
purpose is to show you the true Hollywood, its heartbeat, its people, its
pastimes. Typical of Hollywood is its beautiful shops and places of business
know for their architectural elegance." The "beautiful shops" shown are the
Tail o' the Pup hot dog stand, a giant coffee cup, and an awkwardly shaped
Egyptian Sphinx.
While Los Angeles did not invent this type of architecture, several
factors converge to make fantastic signage and architecture emblematic of
the area: the development of an automobile culture that engendered a less
dense construction and created a different visual scale for signage, mild
weather that would not stress the flimsy construction materials that were
often merely stucco and chicken wire, a more tolerant and expressive
environment, as characterized by the numerous religious movements that
established in Southern California in the early part of the century (often in
themed buildings); and, notably, the prevalence of the film industry that
itself created exotic locales and big ideas.7
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The role of the film industry is sometimes cited as an influence on the
profusion of diverse architectural styles that fluoresced in the 1920s and 30s
(interestingly coinciding with the rise of the studios and the popularity of the
cinema as entertainment, and the incredible growth of the city Los Angeles
and surrounding region): in addition to the conservative impulses of a
nation-wide Colonial Revival following World War I, Southern California
witnessed a boom in various Spanish Revivals, medieval castles, Tudor,
Norman, Egyptian, even "Hansel and Gretel" fairy-tale houses among other
exotic styles.
But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only
dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses,
Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples,
Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these
styles that lined the slopes of the canyon. [...]
On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with
tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a highly colored
shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again he
was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn't laugh. Their
desire to startle was so eager and guileless.8
Nathanael West, himself a screenwriter toiling in Hollywood, lampoons this
profusion of architectural style and the mindset engineering the
phenomenon in Los Angeles in his The Day of the Locust, a savage critique of
the film industry and the mass psychology that embraces its product. The
novella was turned into a haunting 1975 film directed by John Schlesinger
and starring Donald Sutherland. The film actually uses period architecture
in an interesting way, but in a different manner than the quote here. A good
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deal of the film revolves around the home life of Tod Hackett, who lives in a
Hollywood bungalow court. This is a type of construction indigenous to the
Los Angeles region, a collection of miniature versions of the bungalow style
architecture that grew up in Southern California and elsewhere, first in
grand houses like the Gamble House in Pasadena designed by the firm of
Green and Greene, which then filtered down to affordable tract homes or
off-the-shelf designs that could be built by a builder to order for on spec.
The bungalow court took this last stage of the individual house and out
several around a court, granting a renter the trappings of one's own home
with a patch of yard and separation from the neighbor's house. Many of
those transient folks who came to Hollywood in the twenties and thirties
seeking fame and fortune resided in these type of dwelling, as does Tod
Hackett and his motley crew of the Hollywood fringe in the film version of
The Day of the Locust. Interestingly, in the 1932 film about Hollywood
hopefuls, Going Hollywood, the seeker Marion Davies does indeed find a
shared apartment in a bungalow court, surrounded by a passel of reveling
young workers in the Hollywood factories. The Day of the Locust also refers to
High Art architectural traditions in the use of the Frank Lloyd Wright
designed Ennis-Brown House in the Hollywood Hills as the home of the
studio head, with its Mayan-influenced motif of locally-made designed
cement bricks and square forms. (The house has appeared in a number of
films, including most famously as Deckard's home in Blade Runner.9 )
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Interestingly, a sign of "postmodernism" is a pastiche of architectural
periods and styles, both within a single building and within an area. Yet Los
Angeles has endured several periods of architectural diversity that recycles
the past. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw large French
Chateaux, Italianate mansions in the Beaux-Arts tradition, Moorish, an
indigenized "Spanish," even Abbott Kinney's folly, a whole themed
development named after and based on Venice, Italy. This first expression of
an exoticizing tendency primarily encompassed large structures setting apart
the upper classes; though the so-called Spanish style based on a revival of the
Mission style based on the romanticizing of local history such as the Helen
Hunt Jackson's mythic Ramona, and the efforts of local arts boosters such as
Charles Fletcher Lummis, could be seen in all types of public buildings and
more modest residences as well, while another tendency was to decorate
Queen Anne houses that were actually aimed at a middle class audience
with diverse stylistic decoration, including Moorish, Italianate, Tudor half
timbering, and Spanish touches mixed within the predom inant Victorian
structure. Such waves of architectural recycling call into question the
primacy of pastiche as a defining element of a "postmodern" era, while
similar phenomena of borrowing from earlier styles can be seen in a variety
of media, such as the use of Victorian melodrama in early narrative film.
Yet West is right to link the architectural borrowing of the 1920s and
thirties in Los Angeles to the Hollywood film industry, for several reasons.
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The popularity of films established standards for what a Gothic castle,
Moorish palace, or French Chateau would look like; and the visual economy
that the director required to communicate with his audience (and to control
production costs) lead to a shorthand of elements that signified a particular
style, and which influenced local home building. The movie studios
themselves were often constructed in period style, as can be seen by a drive
in Culver City by the old Ince Studios (later the Selznick studio; now a part
of Sony) which resembles a Southern Plantation; Charlie Chaplin's former
studio on La Brea, most recently the site of A&M Records is in a half-
timbered English style, while the old Warner Bros, studio on Sunset (now
home to Tribune Networks' Channel 5 KTLA) features classic columns), and
often the back lots extended into the community, as witnessed by D.W.
Griffith's massive Babylonian sets for Intolerance which stood for a number of
years at the comer of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards in East Hollywood.
Another relationship of Hollywood to the profusion of architectural styles
can be seen in the huge publicity machine that promoted stars and their
lifestyles and homes in fan magazines and newsreels. As Merry Ovnick
notes in her insightful Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow, movie stars were
often nouveau riche, and in taking over existing higher end housing stock,
they occupied Tudor and Beaux Arts homes built at the turn of the century.
When their lives became highly publicized, a wave of more modest Tudor
and Beaux Arts were sold in the 1920s all over the country, but also in Los
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Angeles. W hen they built houses, they assimilated the styles that were
perceived as "high class," and then the more modest developments knocked
off both the originals and the stars' new homes.1 0
An interesting example of a film that directly promotes real estate in
Los Angeles is a silent short from around 1929 promoting the real estate
offerings of ARO realty, entitled in a 1970s reprinting by Glenn Photo as
Progress in Los Angeles. The film promotes primarily commercial but also
some residential development, employing several simple arguments that
work in a combination of the visual examples, animated maps, and
intertitles. The theme is summed up by the culminating title: "The Streams
of Progress work only for those along their banks. All ARO properties are
well located." Commercial development and transit improvements are
shown that prove this point for various ARO properties. For commercial
properties, progress is cited through notable landmark buildings or crude
comparisons of before and after to depict bustling current conditions, and
then noting the proximity of the ARO properties. Residential properties are
emphasized as great for kids, or play to the artistic impulses of the wife. But
through the selection of areas that one gets a sense of the vibrant changes
that were taking place in the 1920s. Many of the areas represented in the
other travelogue documentaries make an appearance: Wilshire Boulevard is
touted as the "the main artery to the exclusive residential sections," as shown
via a map that traces the route Wilshire, and the assertion that "The
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boulevard is now rapidly changing to business" is conveyed through a crude
comparison of a still shot labeled "1920" of residential homes with palm
trees contrasted w ith Spanish-style commercial buildings, more palms, and
autos. The comparison portrayed does not seem accurate juxtaposition, but
the premise conveyed of Wilshire's growth does, as confirmed by the
representation of the iconic new Bullocks department store, showing both
the street-front Art Deco fagade and the porte cochere m ain entrance with
automobile pull-in from the innovative rear parking lot, presaging a new
vehicular mobility that flourished in Los Angeles and spread beyond. Of
course, near this and other prominent buildings (such as the former Sheraton
Townhouse and a upscale apartment building) quickly assayed, an ARO
property is located one block north, a comer drug store and other small
shops with apartments on the second floor (an efficient style of development
that maximizes diurnal cycles of use and integrates commercial and
residential uses, but which was largely zoned out of future development or
fell out of favor, though combination commercial/residential developments
are making a comeback in certain architectural quarters, and in such
prominent developments as the Galleria Paseo in Pasadena.) Just west of
here the Ambassador Hotel is viewed from the air, and while title cards note
that it was built on a hill by a swamp in 1918, ( an empty landscape of 1916 is
shown to illustrate) it is now a prominent destination on a large lot, with
another ARO dm gstore nearby.1 1
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Hollywood the district has a special attraction for ARO, for
"Hollywood as developed more than any other part of L.A.," as shown by a
comparison of a 1925 photo of bungalow houses compared to a bustling
view of a commercial street, and such material ambitions as an upscale
apartment building with Moorish arches viewed from several angles "have
materially improved the value of four ARO properties." The intersection of
Hollywood and Vine, through fan magazines designated as the center of
Hollywood (a reputation that it retained in tourists' eyes long after it ever
served such a function), is shown in a 1905 photo of a bucolic tree-lined lane
compared to the m odem street with the Taft Building of offices, automobiles,
and pedestrians. From the roof of a nearby ARO property "the skyline of
Hollywood Boulevard looks like NYC," which is natural for "It is declared
that Vine Street will be the 5th Avenue of Hollywood."
Other areas of interest are assayed: Westwood near the new UCLA
campus, Santa Monica with its beaches, and the industrial areas of Vemon
Avenue and the new thoroughfares stretching south to the sea (good
commercial property areas). Sunset Park near Santa Monica is an ARO
residential subdivision "Ideally located for homebuilders." Among these
new dwellings with young saplings out front and limited landscaping one
finds the profusion of architectural style: a Monterey revival with attached
wooden balcony, one with hints of Norman, several modest Spanish style
houses with tiled roofs (one has a faux well in back; the place is described as
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"an artist's home" (and she is there in ethnic dress). The neighborhood
portrayed—the saplings and clean lines of newly built housing a ubiquitous
sight in 1920s Southern California, as the area underw ent a housing
boom—resembles the Laurel and Hardy short Big Business, where they sell
Christmas trees from their automobile. A new homeowner refuses the
merchants, and in the ensuing battle a new house gets destroyed.
In these examples of documentary L.A., the film is conceived as
merely a passive transmitter of existing state of development. Most of the
shots aren't "cinematic" per se, but rather function as stills in a slide show
lecture, though they do convey information about architecture, and some
neighborhood details.
The City Documentary: Alternatives to the Travelogue
These models of the Los Angeles documentary form examples of an
early but enduring style of documentary, the travelogue or illustrated
lecture. The simplest are like those folding postcards that cascade a series of
views when opened. Yet, throughout the period that these films provided
"objective" depictions of Los Angeles, several dynamic and more complex
strands of documentary filmmaking were at work within other urban
contexts. A paradigmatic case can be seen with the film The City, made
under the auspices of the American Institute of Planners in 1939,
underwritten by a Carnegie grant, for the New York W orld's Fair, where it
was shown in the Theatre of the Science and Education Building. The film
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falls in the vein of Griersonian documentary of the thirties and its American
cousins, with an authoritative voiceover commentary, and a structure based
on showing a social problem, then the rational solution that is being "sold."
Indeed, the principal forces behind the film represent the leading edge of
American documentary production in the thirties. The original treatment
was written by Pare Lorentz, who had recently wrote and directed two
important and highly influential government sponsored documentaries, The
Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), about the New Deal's efforts to solve the
plight of dust bowl farmers, and The River (1937), which detailed the effects
of soil erosion in the Mississippi River valley. Each feature film combined
dramatic imagery with poetic and lyrical passages of narration, score (by
noted contemporary American composer Virgil Thomson) and
cinematography to illustrate the issue under contention; and were shown in
both theaters and non-theatrical engagements, despite protests from
Hollywood of government sponsored competition.1 2 Co-directors of The City
Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke emerged from this fruitful ground of
propagandistic filmmaking. They had collaborated on a short Hands (Pathe,
1934) that concentrated on hands to illustrate the relief efforts of the Works
Progress Administration. The film was based within a movement of
progressive social intent initially fostered by the loose-knit Film and Photo
Leagues, which later became solidified in the leftist non-profit production
company Frontier Films. Ralph Steiner had made some abstract films in the
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1920s (H2 0 ), co-shot The Plow That Broke the Plains, and for Frontier Films
shot People of the Cumberland (1938), which documented the efforts of the
Highlander Folk School to unionize Cumberland M ountain People (another
progressive Frontier Films was Native Land, which explored racially-based
civil rights violations through dramatizations). Willard Van Dyke started as
a still photographer (he spent several years with Edward Weston) and after a
short film about self-help cooperatives in the Bay Area he was one of three
cameramen on The River. (Years later he would make acclaimed
documentaries for television, and he was head of the M useum of M odem Art
Film Department from 1965-1973; earlier he had been a producer for the
Office of War Information during World War II, and he was co-director with
Shirley Clarke of the 1958 documentary short Skyscraper mentioned
elsewhere in this work.)1 3 The model successfully deployed in the two Pare
Lorentz films that they had worked on was evident in The City. A lively
score from a major American composer, in this case the first film composition
for Aaron Copland accents but does not simply underline or emphasize the
visual or narrative points. The film's narration moves from authoritative
argument to lyrical paeans, a Whitmanesque lean used in The River.
The film hearkens back to an idealized American town, with people
living close to the land and in intrinsic democratic principles and
community. The advent of industrialization, announced through a series of
striking images of sparks and molten metal in an otherwise darkened
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foundry1 4 , leads to the ills of the steel mill town life: depressed living
conditions as evinced by the company-town row houses, dirt paths, hand-
pumped water, coal-fired stoves, dirty laundry flapping in the breeze, and
endless smoke belching from smokestacks. "Smoke makes prosperity here,
they say, even if you choke on it." Smokestacks give w ay to their logical
purpose, the steel-framed skyscrapers of the city. Well-composed abstract
shots of skyscrapers reduce concrete monoliths to slivers of light in a
darkened canyon. One shot has four building tops separated by fingers of
sky, shot from below, which give way to a camera tilt down the vertical axis
of a building set at an oblique angle, a grid of the horizontal rows of
windows stacked one on another that at street level reveals tiny figures of
humans, much smaller in scale than the immense structures (shades of a
New York film precursor, Manhatta). This grid, repeated in several flat,
frontal shots, compartmentalizes the dehumanized m an who is a number,
subject of and subject to business machines (typewriters, adding machines),
one of the m any who become anonymous in the sea of people shown
coursing through the narrow streets between the tall buildings, their bodies
fragmented by the camera into pieces. The secretarial pool, a well-ordered
matrix of desks upon desks in a large room, the open plan office, echoes a
famous shot in The Crowd that expresses similar themes (there with a famous
shot up a miniature of the skyscraper and through a window into the room
of desks), a shot repeated in such later films about individual expression in a
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bureaucratized corporate environment as Billy W ilder's The Apartment and
Jacques Tati's Playtime, or Orson Welles' The Trial. The unplanned
overgrowth of this metropolis, "a spectacle of hum an power, immense but
misapplied, disorder turned to steel and stone," leads to m an being the
servant of machines, of people becoming numbers who "count the seconds
and lose the days." Kids fashion makeshift play in the debris-strewn streets
in scenes reminiscent of the urban photography and film documentaries of
Helen Levitt (such as In the Street, a 1952 silent short she m ade with Janice
Loeb and James Agee), but they must dodge cars and sleeping drunks, and
"Danger" signs prefigure the call of the ambulance. Baseball players step
aside for cars, and threaten to break windows; youths swim in the fouled
East River. Amidst the busy streets the fire department responds to a call.
In a celebrated sequence the masses stop to eat, augured by a horse
immersed in a feedbag. People chomp hot dogs on the street, then are
shown in a diner, ordering in a voice montage that echoes certain
experiments in British documentaries and radio work, while the people are
intercut w ith the procedures of making a sandwich, and the rhythmic
repetitive editing of an automatic pancake batter-squirter and flipper,
multiple-slice toaster, and cups under a coffee urn. The effect is captivating,
an accomplishment of sound and picture editing. The sequence adds to the
themes of overcrowded city life, of m an at the service of machines, but the
vibrant confidence instead accomplishes a celebration of the logistical
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achievement in efficiently catering to the populace. The crowded, dangerous
nature of the city is again stressed in a the following comic sequence of a
man trying to cross a busy street, he advances, retreats, dodges, and finally
achieves his goal; following shots of others trapped on m edian islands are
not as fortunate, intercut somewhat ominously with hospital vocal montage
and views of a clinic. The seas of people traversing the streets lead to a
segment of taxicabs stuck in traffic, meter costs mounting, a whirl of
imperative traffic signs, which leads eventually to empty dow n streets and
completely stopped traffic on the expressway out of town, a traffic jam
unrivalled in cinema until Godard's Weekend.
The film resembles many in the city symphony film tradition as
epitomized by Berlin, Symphony of a Great City and Man with a Movie Camera,
as it repeats iconographic, stylistic and technical elements. A car crash, fire
department, masses of people, transportation, buildings, people eating,
recreation, diurnal round, abstraction through composition, rhythmic
editing, use of hidden camera, the camera mounted on a vehicle. While
meant to be the example of the downsides of overcrowded city life, the
effective visual compositions and expert editing instead render the larger
segment within the film as a celebration of city life. Busy, yes, and crowded;
but full of opportunity, of chance encounter, of stimulation.
These qualities of possibility that the old, crowded city offered seem
lacking in the alternative urbanism that the filmmakers propose in the last
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part of the film. A large dam creating electrical energy, a sleek DC-3 airliner,
a diesel train are products of science and technology that will allow the
freedom of m ankind from older forms of development, and transition to the
new forms of collective life envisioned. The airliner's overflight allows aerial
views of the new type of smaller cities linked by networks of highways.
Science takes flight at last for hum an goals. This new age builds a
better kind of city, close to the soil once more. As molded to our
hum an wants as planes are shaped for speed, new cities take form,
green cities. They are built into the countryside, they're ringed with
trees and fields and gardens. New cities are not allowed to grow and
overcrowd beyond the size that make them fit for living in. The new
city is organized to make cooperation possible between machines,
m an and nature. Each has its place. The sun and air and open green
are part of the design. Safe streets and quiet neighborhoods are not
just matters of good luck, they're woven into the pattern and stay
there.
The new type of development espoused has clean lines of architecture, some
of the buildings embracing a then-current (though beginning to wane)
Streamline Modeme style of sleek lines and aerodynamic curvature that
reflects the qualities of speed and technology that are used to open this
episode of the film; new factory buildings exhibit a Bauhaus design
influence, similar to the work of industrial architect Albert Kahn, with many
windows. "The buildings themselves welcome m an's oldest doctors, fresh
air, the sun, and cleanliness." Kids play in designed playgrounds and ball
fields, and swim in clean lakes. Perhaps most interesting in this construction
is the "community" aspect this type of urbanization offers. "This kind of city
spells 'cooperation', wherever doing things together means cheapness or
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efficiency, or better living... .Never letting the cities grow too big to
manage... .In smaller cities, planned for living, we live in a bigger world."
The face to face encounters that follow allow for the kind of public life
embodied at the beginning of the film in the New England town.
Unfortunately, despite the cloying turn of the music, the new town does not
look as interesting a place to inhabit; though the emphasis on safe and
secure child-rearing and the fresh air are strong suits. And while the film
critiques the bureaucratization of the subject in the city, it is as if that would
mysteriously disappear in the new form of more dispersed, lower density
development.
An interesting comparison to the planning imperative of The City lies
in the roughly contemporaneous British film, Housing Problems (Elton &
Anstey, 1935).
The title of the film suggests, and throughout m uch of its length the film's
imagery purports to be a muckraking investigation of depressed conditions.
Tightly framed shots of squalor illustrate an authoritative voiceover
narration that describes dilapidation, unhygienic conditions, claustrophobia,
vermin. The shots help support the narration: they are tightly framed,
emphasizing the constriction of the slums, they are dark, they explicitly point
out particular problems such as holes in the walls (or insects). In contrast, the
model housing units proposed as replacement to the inhumane conditions
are filmed in bright surroundings, they are clean and modem. And while the
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film does illuminate intolerable living quarters in a way that was probably
not done before, the film strikes one as insincere. The way the tone of the
narrator's voice shifts into glowing PR-ese as he describes the benefits of the
model flats is manipulative, that of an unctuous salesman. And the shift from
documenting the horrors of the slums to Presto! THE ANSWER: new
housing blocks also seems contrived. The "answer" was already planned,
sponsored by concrete conglomerates and other corporations, now they need
to sell it to people who will be dislocated during the transition.
Perhaps some of my cynicism stems from the benefit of hindsight; a
viewer bred on the manipulative salesmanship of TV who sees through the
less sophisticated techniques of these early attempts at "propaganda," and
who sees w hat the public housing of the middle century has become. The
rows of windows in the flat models hint at a monotonous conformity, of the
worker's home life as yet another cog in the wheel of a rational, technical
Industrial Britain. Little did they realize the oppressive places they would
become: drab, derelict, breeding grounds of crime. Housing Problems offers a
good example of the Griersonian dictum that the hammer which shapes
society is more important than the mirror which merely reflects it. The film
was made for rather transparent (at least to this viewer afforded critical
distance) instrumental purposes. It is not surprising that the film was
sponsored by the gas company—they stand to benefit rather handsomely
when the legions of new public housing flats are equipped with gas. And to
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their credit, the filmmakers probably thought they were doing society a favor
by helping "progress" advance; they were of the socialist bent that decried
inhuman conditions of the oppressed, and saw technological innovation as a
way out. Thus, (with government money) they m ade a film that would help
the underclass feel like they were receiving attention and a part of the nation,
and also prepare them for the impending destruction of their old
neighborhoods. It also gave the privileged classes a sense of moral
well-being and righteousness, and justified the government investment.
One notable feature of this piece is the nascent use of location synch
sound. The interviews bring an authentic flavor, a sense of realness to the
piece that make the argument against the slum conditions much stronger
than the images and Oxbridge narration alone would. Sure, the people seem
a bit self-consciousness, on their best behavior as they address the imagined
viewer (or is it just the representatives of the government behind the camera
that they see?). Yet their words give the testimony of lived experience, not
the outrage of do-good representatives of the upper middle class. They
possess dignity and sense of self-worth, even of class consciousness. And
capturing them in their surroundings makes them feel comfortable, and
offers visual evidence of their complaint.
But The City, while marking a new approach to the planning of
communities, it also marks a high point in a type of documentary
filmmaking that describes the city. Even though no specific city is named
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(though some euphemisms like "Gotham" for New York are mentioned), the
referent in the middle section of the film is clearly New York, and the
cinematic technique for portraying a slice of this film is at a much more
advanced state than the several documentary examples attempting to
present Los Angeles, drawing on the American documentary tradition of the
Pare Lorentz films, city symphony techniques, and dynamic approaches to
cinematography, sound design, score, and visual montage.
The Savage Eye
A different and unique approach to Los Angeles that emerged from
the same documentary tradition as The C ity, but which varies greatly in style
and tone, can be found in the unusual 1959 short feature The Savage Eye, co
directed by Joseph Strick (who produced), Ben M addow (credited as writer),
and Sidney Meyers, all of whom have connections to the American
documentary movement of the thirties. Sidney Meyers co-directed with Jay
Leyda People of the Cumberland for the leftist Frontier Films, which Ralph
Steiner had shot, and edited (again with Leyda) for Frontier under a
pseudonym China Strikes Back, a controversial film which introduced Mao to
a Western audience in his struggle for against Chiang Kai Shek. His The
Quiet One won the documentary award at the Venice Film Festival in 1949.
Ben Maddow also worked for the loose-knit Frontier Films, where he was a
co-screenwriter (under the pseudonym David Wolff) for the landmark film
about civil rights violations in the United States, Native Land. Other notable
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accomplishments included co-writing the landmark noir caper film The
Asphalt Jungle (1950), and served as an uncredited writer on the short-lived
leftist newsreel series in the fifties "The World Today." Joseph Strick was a
generation younger, and made his first short film M uscle Beach in 1948 about
the physical culture scene at Venice Beach, California, w ith Irving Lemer.
(Years later Strick would receive an Oscar for his Interviews with M ai Lai
Veterans [1970]; he also produced, directed and co-wrote Ulysses.) Irving
Lemer served as technical adviser on The Savage Eye; he had earlier worked
with Willard Van Dyke, in addition to directing several well-made low-
budget crime thrillers in the fifties, working at several jobs on the edges of
the film industry (second-unit director and associate editor on Kubrick's
Spartacus) as well as serving on the USC cinema school faculty. Together
they made a film over the span of several years that explored areas of Los
Angeles previously unseen on the film screen. Shot by an impressive group,
including renowned still photographer Helen Levitt and Haskell Wexler,
who had made industrial films for ten years before working on this film, and
who went on to make a name for himself as one of the most sought-after
directors of photography in Hollywood, (winning an Academy Award for
Bound for Glory, and directing Medium Cool) though he now disavows this
early effort1 5 . Other noteworthy contributors include a score by Leonard
Rosenman, who studied under Arnold Schoenberg and composed for such
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films as East of Eden, Rebel W ithout a Cause, The Cobweb and Edge of the City
prior to working on this feature.
The film follows a recent divorcee who arrives in L.A. to find her
identity and make a new life for herself, living upon twice-monthly alimony
checks. The film is constructed in a semi-documentary form, shot completely
without synchronized sound. Barbara Baxley plays the m ain character, Judy
McGuire, who carries on a stream of consciousness internal monologue and
verbal exchange with an unseen interlocutor, played by Gary Merrill, listed
as "The Poet" in the credits, but who describes himself to Judy as "your
angel, your double, that bio-dreamer, your conscience, your God, your
ghost." Their exchanges about her condition—
both her inner state and what she is doing—is juxtaposed w ith documentary
shots, many apparently with a hidden camera (in the tradition of such city
films as The City, The Naked City, and Berlin, Symphony of a Great City)
primarily of the seamier sides of Los Angeles life, occasionally intercut with
sequences of Baxley acting out what is being described. As a whole the film
follows the city symphony tradition of the diurnal round, in this case a
daytime, arrival, nightfall and awakening, another day, a Walpurgis night on
New Year's Eve, followed by another day that may last literally forever.
However, these are not necessarily a literal period of days, as the span of
more time is suggested, but the pattern of day and night does provide some
structure. As she struggles to stabilize her life, "waiting out the year of
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divorce/' we see various the camera shows the visual landscape of Los
Angeles, the rougher edges that she herself explores w ith a "savage eye" that
is directed both externally and internally. The eye directed at the people and
landscape is truly savage, satirical and critical in w hat it chooses to eviscerate
and in the manner it does. Perhaps motivated by Judy's own negativity
given her life condition, ordinary scenes, such as the multiple greetings at the
airport that surround Baxley's own arrival to L.A., seem to focus on precisely
those people who would not be found in a Hollywood film—overweight or
elderly people, those with too m uch makeup, odd sunglasses, wearing funny
or ill-fitting clothes. (A similar critique of class and social mores through
selection appears in Vigo's A propos de Nice.)
One strand of examination stems from the blows to Judy's ego from
the divorce (helped, as we learn, by her husband's affair), as she and her
alter-ego Gary Merrill reflect on beauty and self-image. A close-up of a false
eyelash being peeled off hints at the disjuncture between the authentic being
and the steps taken to meet external expectations. Various shots follow an
all-female yoga class and the many women at a beauty salon, the
compositions approaching the surreal (a woman doing a headstand, another
doing a headstand but shot with the camera upside down, yet the pressures
of her weight and gravity on her face rendering the image uncanny). In the
beauty salon a line of older women sit under dryers, while another line of
women sitting under the massive devices, their faces examined one by one,
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the last face instead the cover of Vogue held in front of a reader. At a
reducing parlor various rotating drums, rollers and vibrating straps
comically point out the droller aspects of the collision of social pressures and
personal insecurity. A woman has her legs spread, her inner thighs rolled
somewhat provocatively by a rotating drum , again a magazine cover of a
busty lass with a pretty face standing in for the wom an in the flesh, a game
of exquisite corpse being played within the frame. We go into a real
operating room to see a rhinoplasty operation, with a hammer and nail being
used to break up the cartilage on the sedated patient, followed by the
noticeable postoperative result. The critique of a commodity approach to
image creation continues, finding Judy in a department store, vying for hats
with a diverse group of women. A group of mannequins in a store window
(later described as "poor effigies of myself") are proclaimed by the unseen
male voice "these are your deities, bargain saints, the infinite mercy of papier-
mache/' the shot reminiscent of the department store vitrine as a marker of
modernism, the intersection of spectacle and capitalism, the consumption of
signifiers. A famous example of this type of image can be seen in the Eduard
Atget photo, Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, Paris, 1912, which depicts a
number of corsets displayed on mannequin torsos (an image celebrated by
the Surrealists in the 1920s); while good examples in film include Ruttmann's
Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Fritz Lang's M, where the child murderer
takes a victim pausing to take in the delights of a store, and Luis Bunuel's Los
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Olvidados which pays homage to this scene, the pedophile taking his victim
from of a plate glass store window, as we watch the scene from behind the
glass.1 6 Later Judy's attention to the issue, " I must be false before I can be
real" she muses while severely injured in the hospital, the storefront
mannequins juxtaposed to scenes from a sloppy transvestite party.
Expectations of feminine beauty are critiqued again through a visit to
a burlesque house, where our protagonist is taken on a date; she feels
inadequate compared to the strippers' pulchritude, their "monstrous, stupid,
double features," "women created by men." Interestingly, the burlesque
show is a recurring icon of Los Angeles in films of the 1940s through the 60s.
Situated in the old skid row area of Main Street in downtown L.A., with a
more upscale scene established on the Sunset Strip, the burlesque show plays
a more than passing role in a number of films including Scene of the Crime
(1949), Armored Car Robbery (1950), M y Gun is Quick (1957), The Crimson
Kimono (1959), Hollywood After Dark (1965), Hollywood World of Flesh (an
exploitation "documentary" from 1965), The Graduate (1967), Marlowe (1969),
and The Outside Man (1973), while Jacques Demy's Model Shop (1968) has the
variation of the storefront where one can rent a camera and take pictures of a
model in various states of undress (also depicted in Hollywood World of Flesh).
The Savage Eye documents other aspects of Los Angeles w ith a candid
critical perspective, using a hidden camera, long lens, and other strategies of
surreptitious filming to witness the unofficial side of city life. Bar life,
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including drunken pickup attempts, a poker hall, the contact "sports" of
professional wrestling and roller derby, each with their manic fans, freeways
and auto scrap yards, exotic pets such as large birds, monkeys and wild cats
as well as a pet cemetery, a New Year's Eve party, various car crashes and
their victims, drunken derelicts crawling, elderly people eating alone in a
diner, a shrouded body hoisted onto a gumey, shadowy figures on darkened
neon-lit streets, standing in front of an appliance store w ith multiple
television sets each turned to a different channel. Through the voiceover we
learn that Judy dates, staying "technically pure," but finally giving in after
the New Year's party, mechanically having sex "I turned off a key in my
head."
Afterward she feels defiled, showering twice, cleaning the bathroom, then
the car while the images give us the unusual perspective from inside the car,
passing through a car wash. "I've got a sin that w on't wash off, the slime of
loveless love" (which her conscience labels "masturbation by proxy"). Her
unrest takes her to a faith healing meeting, where a pastor and minions hear
a succession of physical complaints from a line of elderly folks, while the
pastor lays his hands on and gives a prayer. Some of the patients become
occupied by the Holy Ghost, and talk in tongues, others smile beatifically. It
is the only sequence in the film with synchronous sound, and the longest
continuous sequence; as an anthropological document it proves fascinating.
Judy becomes repelled by the scene, and drives off riskily, only to have a an
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auto accident. In the hospital she has dreams and reminiscences of her
childhood, eventually choosing life over death at film's end, and
internalizing a less critical stance toward her fellow humans.
In terms of the film structure, the film has an unusual structure that
complicates the definition of the form. Many reviews call it a "semi
documentary," though it is not a semi-documentary in the conventional
sense of a police procedural film noir; but it does use some documentary or
reportorial footage of unstaged street scenes. Yet the point of view is more
of dramatic narrative; through a fictional character, the film footage
sometimes illustrates what she experiences or observes, at other times is the
embodiment of what she thinks. At other times the male voice of her
conscience provides authorial commentary that may or may not be her
experience, or past experience; it is not even clear if his voice is internal or
external to her.
While a strong achievement, and the winner of awards on the
international festival circuit ( received award at Edinburgh, also shown at
Venice and Mannheim; received Britain's Robert Flaherty award), it also
received strong critical acclaim, but limited release as an independent.1 7 It is
interesting that some contemporary reviews—notably New York critics—
indicated that while shot in the street of Los Angeles, the scenes represented
could be in any large U.S. city.1 8 I would argue that m any of the themes
embody Los Angeles stereotypes: Southern California was one of the
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pioneers in establishing yoga in the United States, as the Self-Realization
Fellowship was founded in Los Angeles in 1925, and from 1947 Indra Devi
had taught yoga to the stars; and while not an accurate comparison, to some
yogic practice might fit in with the long-standing tradition of religious
faddism in Southern California, which includes Theosophism and one of the
first media evangelists, Aimee Semple MacPherson (the faith healing toward
the end of The Savage Eye also fits into this line of L.A.-ness). An emphasis on
cosmetic beauty and even cosmetic surgery, and physical training also fit
into a line of practice that includes Physical Culturism of the 1920s, and the
type of body-building featured in co-director Joseph Strick's own short
Muscle Beach; tendencies that can be traced in part to a climate that allows
more display of the body. No specific sites of LA are
referenced—Hollywood, City Hall, Griffith Observatory. Yet certainly the
scenes of exotic pets, pet cemeteries, and a special attention to automobiles
and the freeway all seem very tied to conceptions about the city, though they
are not necessarily exclusive to this location. As noted, the burlesque
elements crop up frequently in depictions of L.A. in this period; while the
bars and drunks represent rather universal darker sides of society.
This film emerges at a critical time in the history of documentary, and
of the depiction of Los Angeles as well. In the late 1950s there were new
movements in a variety of countries to make documentary less stodgy and
preachy, more organic and alive. In Britain, for instance, Karel Reisz and
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Lindsay Anderson spearheaded the Free Cinema movement of documentary
shorts, and in a film like Momma Don't Allow (1955) about jitterbug dancing,
there is a freedom of movement and of subject matter, shooting handheld
with post-synched sound like much of The Savage Eye. The National Film
Board of Canada was also making innovative new documentaries, as were
Drew and Associates in the United States. In France, Jean Rouch was taking
new approaches to documentary form, after making rather straight
ethnographic documents of African life, by using role playing and "acted"
performances of his African "subjects," or more accurately, collaborators.
His work lead to the institution, with the assistance of Canadian Michel
Brault, of the synchronous sound film camera (also created independently in
the U.S. by Robert Drew), which allowed a closer approach to Vertov's
dream of FILM TRUTH . The French New Wave was beginning, using new
found synch-sound technology, or as in Godard's Breathless, considerable
footage shot silent, with dialogue and sound effects post-dubbed or simply
eschewed for music. John Cassavettes was inauguring a new independent
U.S. cinema with Shadows, shot on the streets of New York City with non
synch sound in a manner similar to The Savage Eye, though with more of an
emphasis on dramatic narrative and less on documentary reportage.
But in this period of change before the synchronous-sound apparatus
was created to allow a new form of documentary film, The Savage Eye was an
innovative approach to using images of Los Angeles as a raw material to
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explore life in this environment as it existed and was not otherwise
represented. A similar approach can be seen in The Exiles, also a non-synch
sound docudrama filmed on location in the streets of Los Angeles in 1960. In
this case the milieu is the world of urbanized Native Americans, who live on
the edges of downtown, hustling an existence that thrives on a Beat-type
search for "kicks." The non-actors "play" characters not that removed from
their own experience, much like Jean Rouch's contemporaneous
collaborative ethnographies like Jaguar and Moi, Un Noir. The interior
voiceovers share the same narrative status as in The Savage Eye, where pauses
allow characters to mentally narrate, to engage in a monologue about their
existence, over pictures of themselves in their environment: a colorful world
of Skid Row bars and downtown environs by night, along with a party on
"Hill X," which is actually Chavez Ravine immediately prior to destruction
of a nearby long-time barrio for the construction of Dodger Stadium, in a
land give away to lure big league baseball to the West Coast. The film was
the project of a number of recent graduates and current students of the
Cinema School of the University of Southern California, drawing on the
resources of the school to make a calling card for the film industry. Like The
Savage Eye, it shows a fresh approach to film form and to un-represented
environs at a time when the documentary (and cinema as a whole—witness
the French New Wave, and the decline of the old Hollywood studios)—was
undergoing fundamental shifts.
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End Notes: Chapter Three
1 Note that UCLA was located at a site on Vermont Avenue, near where Los Angeles
Community College is, having been there for a few years as a branch of the State Normal
School. The legislation creating UCLA was signed May 23,1919, ten years before the
Westwood Campus was occupied, and a year after the copyright date of this film. The push
to create such a branch of the Berkeley institution must have been rather sure at the time this
film was produced. Michael Kowalski kindly provided a copy of this film and the Los
Angeles: City of Destiny discussed later.
2 These two structures reappear in a number of films as they, especially Angels Flight,
are iconographic talismans of Los Angeles. The two counterweighted funicular cars look
odd as they scale Bunker Hill to the rooming houses on its crest, and the tunnel passes
through the hill allowing automobile traffic a way through the geography that otherwise
blocks the civic center and the downtown business district. The short railway was installed
in 1901 and ran until 1969, when it was put into storage awaiting reinstallation after the
mega-development of Bunker Hill. However, the railway was not reinstalled until 1996 a
half-block further south, in an open environment that lacked much of the character that the
original did, which sat on top of the Third Street tunnel and ran by a number of buildings.
A tragic accident killed a rider when a cable slipped 2 /1 /0 1 , leading to the possibly
permanent closure of the railway. Angels Flight appears in films such as Criss Cross (1947),
in passing in the Edward G. Robinson starring Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), the 1951
remake of M, rather dramatically in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Indestructible Man (1956),
which features numerous L.A. locations, and in an unusual mobile camera shot in The Money
Trap (1965), where the camera gets in the car and rides down the hill. A low-budget
exploitation film was titled Angels Flight in 1965, and features the railway and environs for a
noirish murder story; it was not released at the time, but a version of it was shown on local
public television station KCET in the early 1990s. The railway makes for an unusual,
interesting composition; and at least for locals it does serve as a marker of Los Angeles,
though I am not sure of that resonance for the rest of the country.
3 A similar travelogue film of Los Angeles from 1910 is discussed by Jennifer Peterson
in an article, "Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction":
The 1912 IMP film Los Angeles opens and closes with two conventional travelogue
shots: the busy urban street scene and the picturesque waterside sunset. Between
these two conventional brackets, however, w e see a long sequence in a local park
that details the alligators and ostriches living there - hardly a native fauna! Dozens
of small alligators swarm in and out of a pond as the camera pans across it, and a
few shots later w e see large ostriches running to and from the camera. These
animals (actually native to the southeastern United States and Africa, respectively)
lend an air of surplus exoticism to Los Angeles, a city just beginning a long period of
rapid growth in the early 1910s. The film strives relentlessly to make its subject
picturesque: it also features a shot of "the fastest trolley car in the world" and an
extreme long-shot panorama of the yet remarkably undeveloped city. Even the
film's tinting in blue, orange, pink, yellow, and red weighs in to construct the most
exciting vision of Los Angeles possible. Scenes of the extraordinary - alligators,
ostriches, high-speed trolley cars - are presented as the everyday in Los Angeles;
exotic fantasy is predicated on geographic difference. The film has a distinctly
promotional feeling, and although it would not have had this meaning for every
audience (particularly for European audiences), it functions as an advertisement for
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Los Angeles, which was being aggressively marketed at the time to the rest of the
United States as a prime location for tourism and real estate.
Jennifer Peterson, "'Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction': Travelogues from the 1910s at the
Nederlands Filmmuseum" in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, Daan
Hertogs & Nico De Klerk, eds. (Amsterdam: Stichtung Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 75-
76.
4 Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modem City.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
5 See X. Theodore Barber, "The roots of travel cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton
Holmes and the nineteenth-century illustrated travel lecture," Film History v5 (1993), 68-84.
6 See Douglas R. Suisman's delightfully compact Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays
of the Body Public (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, 1989), especially
pp 23-30,49-56.
"Give me the money."
The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain pounded
above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock's green-tinged tower was far above
us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping city. Her black-gloved hand
reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count under the light of the
dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She
leaned towards me.
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, in The Raymond Chandler Omnibus (New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1969 [1939]).
1 Jim Heiman provides a good discussion of the phenomenon in his copiously
illustrated California Crazy & Beyond, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001.
8 Nathanael West, "The Day of the Locust," Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
New York: N ew Directions, 1969 [1933], 61.
Ever the excellent observer of the development of Los Angeles, Carey McWilliams also
comments on the relationship of the movies to local architecture.
The movies have unquestionably affected the appearance of the region. "They may
be blamed," writes Richard Neutra, "for many phenomena in this landscape such as:
half-timbered English peasant cottages, French provincial and 'mission-bell' adobes,
Arabian minarets, Georgian mansion on 50 by 120 foot lots with 'mexican Ranchos'
adjoining them on sites of the same size." The interiors reflect the same movie-
inspired eclectic confusion: modemistically pattered wallpaper, adzed and exposed
ceiling beams, norman fireplaces, machine-made Persian rugs, cheap Chippendale
imitations, and an array of "pickings and tidbits from all historical and geographical
latitudes and longitudes." These buildings are not constructed as they appear to be,
but are built like sets, with two by fours covered with black paper, chickenwire, and
brittle plaster or occasionally brick veneer, and are covered with "a multitude of
synthetically colored roofing materials." Much of the construction resembles, or
actually copies, the type of construction used in the making of sets, that is, buildings
are built for a momentary effect and completely lack a sense of time or permanence.
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Nearly every visitor to the region has commented on its resemblance to a motion-
picture set. "The city seems/' writes Paul Schrecker, "not like a real city resulting
from natural growth, but like an agglomeration of many variegated movie sets,
which stand alongside one another but have no connection to one another."
McWilliams, 344.
9 For a discussion of the Ennis-Brown house in film see Scott Frank.
1 0 Much of this discussion of architectural diversity is informed by Merry Ovnick, Los
Angeles: The End of the Rainbow Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1994, especially pp 108-120 and
166-177. See also Paul Gleye, The Architecture of Los Angeles Los Angeles: The Knapp Press,
1981; Charles Moore, Peter Becker and Regula Campbell Los Angeles: The City Observed. A
Guide to Its Architecture and Landscapes Santa Monica: Hennessy + Ingalls, 1998 [reprint of
1984 volume]; David Gebhard and Robert Winter, Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide
Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1994.
1 1 A site of history, its once-celebrity filled nightclub Cocoanut Grove was of course
where Robert Kennedy was shot. Times change, local property values declined, and the
property has been vacant for a number of years, caught in a struggle between Donald
Trump's stated plan to build the world's tallest skyscraper on the site, the L.A. Unified
School District's desire to use the large parcel for a much-needed high school, and historical
preservationists' desire to keep the building intact. Empty, it serves as the site of occasional
film shoots, and experimental filmmaker Pat O'Neill has been working on a project within
its hallways.
1 2 For a good brief description of Pare Lorentz's short career and the tribulations of
filming The Plow That Broke the Plains, and The River see Erik Bamouw Documentary: A History
of the Non-Fiction Film rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 113-121.
1 3 See Willard Van Dyke "The Interpretive Camera in Documentary Films" [originally
published in Hollywood Quarterly v ln 4 1946] and Harrison Engle "Thirty Years of Social
Inquiry: An Interview with Willard Van Dyke" [originally published in Film Comment v3n2
(Spring 1965)], both collected in Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Meran
Barsam, New York: Dutton, 1976.
1 4 The environment of the forge presents an intrinsically visually interesting setting for
cinematography: for instance, Eisenstein uses a similar setting in The General Line/Old and
New.
1 5 At least he did to me personally at a conference held by the UCLA Film and
Television Archive. Yet in the Ben Maddow papers held at University of California,
Riverside, there is correspondence from Wexler asking if The Savage Eye is available on
videotape, and if he could have a copy, since he shot it. Haskell Wexler, Letter to Ben
Maddow, 25 January 1989, Ben Maddow Archive (box 10, folder 15), Special Collections
Library, University of California, Riverside.
1 6 See Friedberg. On M , see Ed Dimendberg, "From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban
Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz Lang's and Joseph Losey's M."
1 7 Noted film history commentator Lewis Jacobs had high praise:
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The theme of alienation also governed The Savage Eye (1959), a documentary shot in
Los Angeles by Sidney Meyers, Ben Maddow, and Joseph Stride. Its story moved on
two levels: A subjective one—the "savage eye" of the protagonist, a recent divorcee
who has drifted into an aimless existence in a world of drifters; and an objective
one—a violent, intense, bitter, and often pathetic view of the raw underside of a
modem city inhabited by sleazy promoters, strippers, addicts, transvestites, and
faith-healers.
The relationship between character and milieu was expressed through an interaction
that juxtaposed the personal and social symptoms of dissociation. The girl's urgent
need for self-integrity, mired in feelings of confusion, isolation, and inhibition, was
significantly placed in a setting of spiritual poverty and brutality. The effort by the
girl to rationalize and accept the false appearance of personal love failed. This led to
attempted self-destruction—cause and consequence of a divided self succumbing
helplessly to the forces that acted upon her.
The Savage Eye brought together all the isolated insights of city films made before
and, in combining them with a deeper and more coherent social vision, became
perhaps the best American example of a more profound kind of city film. At the
Edinburgh Film Festival the film created such a sensation that, instead of being
shown only once, it had to be repeated eight times.
Lewis Jacobs, "The Turn Toward Conservatism" in The Documentary Tradition. From Nanook
to Woodstock, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971), 278-279.
1 8 Reviews of The Savage Eye range from local L.A. papers, the industry trades, to
national magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Most were positive about the unusual take,
and especially positive about the photography, while some demurred on the screenplay, the
poetic interior dialogue; many noted the dark and even disgusting nature of some of the
imagery (I doubt that the effect is as striking to our jaded sensibilities some decades later.)
One critic termed it "grimly Hogarthian,"while the critic for Esquire called Judy's attempt to
avoid the kiss of her paramour "one of the most revolting sequences I have seen in years."
Jonas Mekas hailed it as "a tour-de-force lesson in camera-eye technique." "The most
unusual film currently in first-run theaters." L.E.R., "'The Savage Eye': L.A. is Setting for
Realistic Photoplay /'Hollywood Citizen-News 23 July 1960. "In a new, dynamic kind of
photographic impressionism, the camera's eye sees and records various phases and degrees
of psychological and physical loneliness and torment in a great city, with strident emphasis
on man's cruelty, ignorance, superstition, inhumanity and bestiality. In several sequences in
Skid Row and back-alley dives, it is enough to turn your stomach." Cue, 11 June 1960.
Interestingly, N ew York critics tended to discount the specific L.A. context of the film; "site
of most of the shooting is Los Angeles, but it could have been made almost anywhere, and
purposely, no effort has been made to establish a specific locale" [Hawk., "Venice Films.
The Savage E ye," New York Times 16 September 1959.]; "while the film was shot in Los
Angeles, where an old friend is somebody you met a week ago Friday, it does not pertain
only to the denizens of that particular and widespread community, several of whom are
shown on the screen along with the professional actors." [John McCarten, "No Rose-
Colored Glasses,"New Yorker, 18 June I960].
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Chapter Four. Subjectivity and the Los Angeles
Freeway: Negotiating Postmodern Urban Space
Thus the only tissue of the city is that of the freeways, a vehicular, or
rather an incessant transurbanistic, tissue, the extraordinary spectacle
of these thousands of cars moving at the same speed, in both direct
ions, headlights full on in broad daylight, on the Ventura Freeway,
coming from nowhere, going nowhere: an immense collective act,
rolling along, ceaselessly unrolling, without aggression, without
objectives—transferential sociality, doubtless the only kind in a hyper-
real, technological, soft-mobile era, exhausting itself in surfaces,
networks, and soft technologies. No elevator or subway in Los
Angeles. No verticality or underground, no intimacy or collectivity,
no streets or facades, no center or monuments: a fantastic space, a
spectral and discontinuous succession of all the various functions, of
all signs with no hierarchical ordering—an extravaganza of
indifference, extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces—the power of
pure open space, the kind you find in the deserts.
Jean Baudrillard, America1
In his monumental, uncompleted Arcades project Walter Benjamin
explored the nature of the m odem urban experience as it developed in
European cities in the mid-nineteenth century (Benjamin, Buck-Morss). In
Paris, the old quarter system of urban form consisting of dense, mixed-use
residential, entertainment, and workplaces was transformed under the
authority of Baron von Haussmann into a city of broad avenues, with
separated zones for residences, leisure activities and work. Covered
pedestrian walkways lined by shops and cafes— the Arcades— shifted the
locus of public activity from the street, which was increasingly dominated by
wheeled transport. The Arcades, created with emergent building
technologies such as steel framed construction (a by-product of the railroad),
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also shaped new forms of social life, as they became sites for mass consumer
activity m arked by advertising. Benjamin identifies in this historical moment
the advent of a new form of subjectivity, as exemplified by the figure of the
flaneur who strolls among the crowd in a state of distraction, surveying the
cityscape w ith his mobilized gaze.
Benjamin's depiction of a new type of subjectivity arising in response
to the social conditions which it inhabits proves useful in understanding the
nature of consciousness in today's urban setting. Anne Friedberg, for
instance, charts the role of flaneurism in the contemporary shopping mall.
But the nature of urban space today differs to a great degree from the Paris of
the Second Empire which Benjamin studied. Especially in the case of Los
Angeles, the nature of the built environment in large part precludes the type
of walking that Benjamin viewed as the essence of the flaneur's practice.
Distances are vast, and except in a few densely populated areas catering to
recent immigrants, the urban design is set up to accommodate an automobile
culture.
This chapter, then, examines that exemplary synechdochic symbol of
Los Angeles, the freeway, and its role in the shaping of contemporary
subjectivity. Where Benjamin saw the transformation of the Paris of the mid
eighteenth century as the pivotal movement in the emergence of the
"modem" subject, Jean Baudrillard and Margaret Morse interpret the
freeway as part of the postmodern, both a symptom of and contribution to a
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"hyperreality" of illusory surfaces, devoid of space.2 But rather than further
disembody this vast network by reducing it to the level of illusory surfaces,
this chapter attempts to contextualize the freeway as a phenomenon, both
historically and as currently experienced. Thus, I consider issues of
spatialization related to an urban form traversed by high-speed roadways, a
field which incorporates both the type of subjective cognitive mapping
experienced by drivers negotiating urban space arrayed around the freeway,
and the type of ideology inherently embodied within the system by planners
and political figures that guided its construction. The chapter concludes with
a look at the potentially liberatory or resistant uses of freeway driving that
might operate against hegemonic tendencies. But this journey begins with a
detour through the historical developments leading to the construction of the
freeway system, which possess implications for the ideological value they
contain.
Freeway History: Tracks and Tracts3
To the typical user today, the Los Angeles freeway system might be
taken for granted, an enduring feature of the urban landscape. But the
freeway has a distinct history, with most of the roadway having been
constructed in the last forty years. Yet, the social and political forces that
ultimately gave rise to the freeway stem from an earlier period of Los
Angeles history.
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The Spanish Pueblo of Los Angeles dates to 1781, but growth in the
region accelerated only with the introduction of the railroad in 1868. The
decades of the seventies and eighties saw competition between the Santa Fe
and Southern Pacific rail companies, with lines stretching from downtown to
the port at Wilmington, Santa Monica, Anaheim, San Bemadino, and San
Fernando, initially serving agricultural enterprises. This infrastructure
spawned m any of the communities that exist today— Whittier, Fullerton,
Buena Park, El Monte, Hawthorne, Hollywood, to name but a few— and soon
facilitated one of the first in a series of real estate booms in the mid 1880s. By
1905 there was a direct intercontinental route to Los Angeles.
In 1901 the Pacific Electric Railway was organized, which eventually
grew into the largest interurban electric rail service in the country; there was
also a separate narrow gauge track downtown. The interurban rail system
served as an arm of real estate development: for instance, Henry
Huntington, the rail baron who founded Pacific Electric, would buy land to
develop and then run a line through it to connect to the business and retail
center downtown. Other developers would grant cash or land concessions to
obtain a favorable rail line. Interestingly, the role this public transit played
in development was far more lucrative than its potential for transportation
revenues. These interurban lines generally paralleled the radial routes
already established by the steam railroads, filling in gaps across the region,
and lead directly to the founding of such communities as Venice and
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Glendale. Another immigration boom, comprised in large part by rather
well-off farmers uprooting from the Midwest, filled these new outlying
developments in a mass movement in the late teens and twenties.
A significant result of the electric rail system, following upon the
steam rail lines, was the dispersal of population growth across the
Southland, as opposed to a concentrated urban core which characterized
many Eastern cities. Land was plentiful, and thus the city did not experience
the type of densely vertical development found in such cities as Chicago,
New York, or even San Francisco. As a relatively young metropolitan region
it did not require the same physical proximity of inhabitants, relying on new
transportation and communication technologies to facilitate smooth
functioning.
By the early 1920s the Los Angeles basin had become an automotive
region as well~in 1925 Los Angeles had one car to every 2.8 persons,
compared to the closest competing city, Detroit, at 4.4.4 Several factors
contributed to this development: the mild climate was easy on both car and
driver, and the newcomers to the area were relatively affluent. This period
coincided w ith the boom in auto production that followed the introduction
of Henry Ford's assembly line in 1913, which made automobile ownership
affordable for more people. But the rapid growth of automobile use in the
Southland was also due in part to the earlier success of the railroads and
interurban electric lines in developing the area: the spread out nature of the
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new dispersed communities made automotive use convenient, often along
the same rights of way as the interurban trains (which the electric rail
companies were required to pave and maintain). And as automotive traffic
competed with rail transportation on crowded rights-of-way the resulting
congestion paradoxically hurt the electric trains' business, for journeys took
longer.
Several events mark the mid '20s as the full-fledged arrival of the
automobile era in Los Angeles. In 1925 a proposal to construct four miles of
elevated train tracks in downtown with two passenger terminals to be shared
by commuter and conventional passenger rail lines (a plan designed to avoid
the congested grade crossings, and to draw upon the resources of the
wealthy railroads) was supported by downtown interests but opposed by the
LA Times (which raised the specter of an ugly Eastern city), and by a
majority of voters. In 1927 work began on Miracle Mile, w hat Reyner
Banham calls "the first real monument of the Motor Age,”5 a stretch of
Wilshire Boulevard incorporating large department stores that were
formerly located downtown, designed specifically for a driving public with
parking lots and entrances in the rear. Though Wilshire itself was not
completed eastward to Downtown until 1934, the new development served
affluent, car-driving citizens of Beverly Hills and Hollywood who formerly
had to shop downtown (with its attendant congestion and lack of parking).
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This was the beginning of a movement away from the core-periphery model
of urban form, which the freedom of the automobile allowed.
The mid-twenties also saw the first official response to the automobile
in a planning document. A panel of three distinguished planners submitted
A Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles in 1924 as a response to the
increasing problems of congestion, especially downtown. Besides widening
existing roadways where possible, their proposals included differentiating
roads for various types of traffic: major radial thoroughfares between centers
as well as bypassing centers, parkways for pleasure driving, and minor
roads. For the major arteries the report recommended m any of the features
now associated with freeways, such as grade separations to avoid cross
traffic; and in an appendix the following forward-looking proposition is
found, "a complete separation of roadway may become advisable and for this
purpose a continuous elevated highway, with approach ramps from side
streets, is suggested."6
Action was not taken on the more visionary elements of this plan at
the time, though a system of regional highways that paralleled the rail routes
did develop through the thirties, at first in rural areas, then in urban districts,
spurred on by state public works money intended to stimulate Depression-
ravaged areas. By the late thirties several policy papers were developed that
coined and legally defined the term "freeway" (divided highway with grade
separations, limited access restricted by law, access ramps), but the concept
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as envisioned then also included the idea of the parkw ay-a park-like scenic
area traversed by a winding road that provides an aesthetic experience for
the driver and passengers, which were a feature on the East Coast since the
middle of the previous century. Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, opened in 1933,
offered a model that incorporated the mixed elements of freeway and
parkway. This proved to be the design developed for the first freeway
constructed in Southern California, the Arroyo-Seco Parkway from Pasadena
to the Figueroa Street grade crossing at Elysian Park, completed in 1940 (later
continued through downtown, now called the Pasadena freeway). Because
of those early efforts at accommodating parkway features on a freeway
route, driving on the Pasadena Freeway today can be an exhilarating or
terrifying experience, for the narrow lanes, tight turns, and extremely short
access ramps (that require accelerating to freeway speed from a complete
stop in the face of oncoming traffic, or decelerating to negotiate a hairpin
turn in the space of a hundred feet, again in traffic) make extraordinary
demands of one's driving skills. Problems discovered from the use of this
freeway were incorporated into the freeways constructed in the post-war
period, which substituted a more utilitarian concept of roadside plantings on
relatively straight routes for the winding parkway approach.
The immediate post-war period saw the official birth of the freeway
system: in 1947 the State Legislature approved the Collier-Bums Act which
raised freeway construction revenues through an increased gas tax, as
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opposed to the toll roads being built in the East. The proposed routes were
along many of the same corridors served in turn by the railroads, then the
electric trains and highways. Part of this has to do w ith the geography of
Southern California: these routes correspond to passes through mountains
and foothills, and along rivers. Also, once development started along one of
these routes, succeeding development tended to follow the initial path:
transportation right of ways are already established, existing communities
need to be served. Banham calls this pattern of development of Southern
California "the transportation palimpsest," as new layers of technology are
built atop previous stages of transportation. In a location such as the area
just north of the Interstate 5/110 Freeway juncture one can see several layers
of this transportation archeology side by side: the Los Angeles River, the
Santa Fe rail yard, Riverside Drive / Figueroa Street, and the freeway.
In 1948 Downtown power interests were dealt a blow when their plan
for mass rail transit to be included in freeway development right of ways (to
preserve the importance of a downtown hub) was defeated in the City
Council by a coalition of suburban and Westside interests (including strong
realtor and savings and loan lobbies), which signaled the shifting of power
away from old downtown elites to the new peripheries that relied upon the
car for non-radial transportation. This process mirrored a whole post-war
transformation of the region under the Federal government's Keynesian
monetary policies, characterized by cheap loans for inexpensive, mass-
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produced single family homes. "Rising personal incomes emphasized the
role of the family as a consumer economy and were met by multiple
strategies to sell community and access to nature as commodities."7
Like the previous real estate booms that revolved around emergent
regional transportation technologies— the railroad in the 1880s, the electric
train in the teens and twenties— the freeway system helped drive a
population expansion, as tract home developments sprung up on former
farm and orchard land near the new freeways. The first legs of the system
built in the '50s approximated the radial routes from downtown that had
been seen with both the steam and electric interurban trains: the Santa Ana
freeway to Orange County, the San Bernardino, the Hollywood freeway,
most of the Harbor and Long Beach freeways. Later, w ith money from the
Federal government provided under the National System of Interstate and
Defense Highways (1956) and from the California Freeway and Expressway
System (1959), further development of the freeway system ensued,
completing earlier routes and establishing peripheral connecting freeways.
As a report compiled in conjunction with the latter legislative act states, the
reasons given were economic, and had to do with the growth of the state.
Most of the present road and street system, developed to serve a
relatively small population depending largely on agriculture and local
trade, is no longer adequate for the needs of the present and future
diversified and greatly expanded economy. Land is rapidly being
converted to high-value uses. Traffic has reached such proportions
that large numbers of personal and commercial vehicles are traveling
longer distances for business and other reasons....No longer is it
possible to serve such traffic on the same facilities that provide land
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service to abutting property. Such conflicts of interest produce the
slowdowns, the highway accidents and fatalities, and the traffic
congestion that blight expansion.8
It is interesting that the role of the freeway itself in increasing land values,
stimulating development and consequent congestion is conveniently
overlooked, even though documents from the 50s show traffic jams of the
sort encountered today. Rather, the freeway is seen as a progressive urban
formation that advantageously links spatially dispersed sites for more
efficient and economic growth.
Freeway construction ensued through the sixties until the early
seventies, when the planned system neared completion, and when
construction costs grew. The process was not without controversy, as
homeowner groups resisted the mass use of eminent domain and the
bisecting of neighborhoods, leaving cul-de-sacs instead of through streets.
However, the projects through built environments generally transformed
lower-income neighborhoods, with less political clout to resist the massive
construction undertaken for the "greater social good." This was at the same
time that rail based public transit was retired in Los Angeles in the early
sixties, to be expensively awakened only recently.9 Though costly, several
additional freeway projects have been undertaken of late, such as the
Century Freeway to the airport (financed 92% by the Federal government).
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The Promise of the Freeway: Utopian or Alienating?
As the preceding discussion suggests, the development of the freeway
system stems from a particular history that was shaped in large part by
geography and early development patterns, but also entailed at certain
moments contestations of what the future of the city and region would look
like. These political struggles generally involved economic interests that
would benefit from either a more traditional strong downtown core
surrounded by bedroom communities served by public transit, arrayed
against groups that preferred decentralized work and retail sites, with the
automobile as major factor in shaping development. At issue were questions
of the nature of urban experience, which is an ideological problem. And
perhaps because of the perceived freedom and spontaneity that an
automobile culture offers, the public or their political representatives have
resisted mass transit proposals several times in the last seventy years, up
until the recent investment in current light rail and subway projects. This
latter development may be seen as a result of the success of the automobile
age: its popularity has led to increased congestion, diminishing the very
freedom that it once offered, not to mention the health issue of smog, which
taints the desirable climate that drew many to Southern California.
But is the nature of urban life centered on automobile freedom really
utopian and liberatory? In many ways the type of culture that the
automobile engineered might be seen as the American Dream: the single
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family home as a bastion of privacy and "family values/' the auto as
transportation upon spontaneous demand, offering both choice in
destination and (for braver souls) the thrill of speed as escape; as opposed to
the vertical crowding, dirt and bustle of an older model of city (though the
single family home in the Los Angeles region was initially a product of the
interurban electric trains, spacious tracts of land, and ambitious developers).
Critics stress that the model of suburban community is not a true
community, but a crucible for conformity and ethnic homogeneity; a place
for shallow re-creation after work to prepare for the next day. Other effects
of the automobile include poisonous smog, a dependence on fossil fuel that
must be extracted at risk to the environment or purchased from sometimes
troublesome foreign sources, and paralyzing traffic congestion as
unrestricted growth impairs the ability of the freeway system that creates the
possibility for the growth to occur. But since the system is firmly
established, a fixture in the urban geography, one m ight examine the type of
subjectivity that using the freeway engenders, and the sorts of practices that
can operate on the freeway.
Freeway Subjectivity
The younger Karl Marx wrote that "the forming of the five senses is a
labor of the active history of the world down to the present."1 0 One can see
how this works in specific cases: for instance, once people labored in
agriculture according to natural rhythms of sun-up, the cock's crow, high
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noon. Yet, with the invention of inexpensive timepieces and especially the
train schedule in the middle of the nineteenth century, a universal time
emerged, and people started to reckon minutes. Today we organize blocks
of time according to television schedules and class meeting times, and
internalize important distinctions of a few gradated minutes. Another
example of the forming of the senses would be the m odem tendency toward
the primacy of the visual, which Benjamin attributes to the mid-eighteenth
century and the "phantasmagoria" of advertising and the public spectacle of
the crowd in the arcades, as well as (following Simmel) the new forms of
public transport which crowded people into trams where they could gaze
distractedly at the surroundings outside, but were not encouraged to
converse with the anonymous fellow travelers.
What impact, then, does the daily experience of traversing the
freeway have on the formation of the hum an senses? In this environment the
auto becomes an extension of the hum an body, a bulky but powerful
prosthesis: instead of moving one's legs and feet in ambulatory propulsion,
one makes minor muscular movements that result in adjustments of vector
and velocity to a ton of steel and glass gliding through space at sixty miles
per hour. A driver experiences a conquest of space through speed and
control, but gives up, at least for the drive, one's conventional sense of
corporeality. The type of attention and reaction one gives to the immediate
environment differs from the street walker, for this awareness is mediated by
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a glass windscreen, and shaped by the speed of movement past objects. As
opposed to the disinterested gaze of the flaneur, the freeway driver must
allocate a measure of attention to the demands of navigation and executing
maneuvers that literally risk one's life at every second. Yet, in an intriguing
document from 1964, the urban planners Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer stress
the special pleasures and experience that driving can provide, given
roadways constructed with the aesthetic dimension in mind.
One of the strongest visual sensations is a relation of scale between an
observer and a large environment, a feeling of adequacy when con
fronted by a vast space: that even in the m idst of such a world one is
big enough, powerful enough, identifiable enough. In this regard, the
automobile, with its speed and personal control, m ay be a way of
establishing such a sense at a new level. At the very least, it begins to
neutralize the disparity in size between a m an and a city.1 1
Their monograph is an effort to have an aesthetic component included in the
extensive expressway construction of that era. Their principle objectives
include:
[T]o present the viewer with a rich, coherent sequential form, a form
which has continuity and rhythm and development, which provides
contrasts, well-joined transitions, and a moving balance....[T]o clarify
and strengthen the driver's image of the environment, to give him a
picture which is well-structured, distinct, and as far-ranging as
possible. He should be able to locate himself, the road, and the major
features of the landscape, to recognize those features with surety, and
to sense how he is moving by or approaching them....[T]o deepen the
observer's grasp of the meaning of his environment: to give him an
understanding of the use, history, nature, or symbolism of the
highway and its surrounding landscape. The roadside should be a
fascinating book to read on the run.1 2
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The authors give extensive examples of how these goals can be attained
through route selection and road design, yet they note regretfully that most
design "aspires to nothing more than an absence of irritation." Thus the
fullest possible experience of urban expressway driving is lost when design
is constrained by the strictest limitations of cost or impact on the
surrounding community. But even when not the optimum, the authors
detail a specifically automotive perception of the surrounding urban
landscape.
The driver's relation to other people is also quite different from the
denizens of an earlier urban form: glances are fleeting, and sustained
communication virtually impossible; there is no "rubbing of shoulders." The
freeway is a public space, open to all (at least those w ith the means for an
automobile); yet the type of experience it engenders is intensely private: a
time alone with one's thoughts (or neuroses), feeling the rapport one
encounters with the demands of the road, perhaps monitoring, like others in
the next vehicle, the coordinating function of radio. Los Angeles is the
premium radio market, precisely because of the driving culture. But, much
like the separate communities that have been established and served by the
mobilizing function of the freeway, the radio works to identify and
demarcate distinctive audiences (whose members are "hailed," and identify
themselves in a particular social formation); a construction of social groups
that separates individuals.
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Mapping and Urban Space
Perhaps the most interesting and powerful development the freeway
has on contemporary Angeleno subjectivity is in the area of the perception of
space. To a great degree, one has little conception of the actual space one
traverses in driving the freeway of Los Angeles. This results in part from the
demands of the road on one's attention, but as Kevin Lynch et. al. have
argued, the experience of negotiating roads designed w ith the driving
experience in m ind can entail an aesthetic appreciation of the urban
landscape. However, in Los Angeles the freeway often means a straight
ribbon of concrete that stands high above the surrounding flatlands, or sits
depressed w ithin the surrounding urban geography, encased by banks of
plantings or acoustical masonry. In ameliorating the incessant effects of the
freeway on the surrounding community the traffic engineers have created a
dislocating experience for the freeway user. It is only in unusually built up
parts of the city, such as downtown, that one is afforded a rich spatial
experience from the freeway, or along anachronistic stretches of the system
like the parkway design of the Pasadena freeway. Otherwise, one has the
feeling of motion, but no sense of the surrounding community. One enters
the system from a known location, and proceeds to a destination, but the
intermediary space does not exist except as time passed. One reckons one's
passage by time elapsed, or by internal freeway references— a specific exit, an
interchange— not by coordination to the physical geography of the city. The
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type of cognitive mapping of the city that an individual performs is at the
level of an itinerary rather than a coordinated grid or topographic view. It is
an internalized m ap formed by a closed system of codes: freeway
numbers / names, choices (of routes, w ith cardinal direction as listed by signs;
of sequential exit options). This resembles the early maps of coastal
European seamen, pre-Mercator, pre-globe: a series of features arranged
along a coast, not to a precise grid scale, but useful for a particular purpose.
Further, a typical driver's knowledge of this symbolic system is also limited
to a set of frequent destinations; there are certain portions of the system that
one simply does not travel. To borrow a term from the Situationists, one
possesses a psychogeography of certain neighborhoods in the city, and
knows how to access them from the system; yet the overall order of the city
remains unclear.
Two writers that have explored the relationship of cartography to the
postmodern condition are David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. In The
Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey traces the development of map-
making from the early itineraries and views of the city as experienced by
individual subjects, to the introduction of a grid system in the 1400s, and
projections that did not contain a view that could actually be seen by
anybody, but were distanced, "objective." These developments marked an
increasingly rationalized conception of space, viewed as usable, abstract,
capable of domination, which was convenient for the Enlightenment project,
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and was in keeping with Newtonian conceptions of objects in space, and of
the role of the individual in society. This subjugation of space also worked
admirably for the division and parceling of land for sale and development.
Elements of this movement still informed modernist architecture and urban
planning (such as Le Corbusier's apartment towers), which rationalized
social space--and it can be seen in the creation of the freeway system that
served both to conquer the space between existing communities, and to aid
in the exploitation of non-populated tracts, as grid community layouts
followed the freeway (and still do in Antelope Valley). In the conquest of
space, new kinds of space are produced; the new space of, for instance, the
freeway— a process possible only under particular views and conceptions of
space.
Fredric Jameson also invokes the history of cartography, and sees the
movement from nautical itineraries to sea charts based on navigational
instruments to m ap projections and globes as the m ovement from a subject
centered, experiential view of the world to a recognition of the subject in
relation to a totality, to finally a level of representational codes.1 3 He then
places these various types of mapping into "social space" as articulated by
Althusser's conception of ideology, for a rift exists between the individual
subject's experiential conception of its place in the decentered world of
multinational capitalism (ideology), as opposed to the view offered by
Marxist "science." Jameson then proposes a renewed effort at the
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representational level to map the individual's place in the world economic
system, and overcome the seeming gap between ideology and science.
While this formulation attempts to reconcile a seeming split in the
subject's lived experience to the objective conditions by reintroducing to the
Althusserian model the Lacanian tripartite structure which it originally drew
from, it seems that the particular choice of model that Jameson employs
poses some special problems. Consider Harvey's discussion of the role the
objective, rational order of a new type of cartography that arises with the
Enlightenment project plays in preparing space for conquest— and imagining
or positioning ("hailing") subjects to occupy this constructed space. It seems
that Jameson uses a model of mapping that itself actually demarcates and
constructs the subject in a web of power relations even as it purports to map
his or her position with relation to international capital formations in a
gesture at liberation. The discursive technology works to enmesh the subject
(or even create it); similar to Foucault's analysis of the construction of
deviancy. Perhaps the difference is that by discussing multinational
corporate entities one is no longer talking about space in the received sense;
that as a product of a time-space compression created by technological
advances in communication and travel (Harvey), the idea of "space" is more
at relations between capital flows and sites of lived life. In his call for a new
attention to the representational mapping of the subject in relation to capital,
Jameson is describing a destruction of conventional notions of space, and the
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introduction of a new type of "space" defined by capital. Again, in the effort
to conquer space, new types of space are created. (One place to begin to
trace Jameson's operation is in the way people drive Japanese-built cars
along the freeway to office or industrial parks owned by foreign investors.)
In his essay "Simulacra and Simulations," Jean Baudrillard discusses
Borges' short story where an empire's cartographers create a m ap so
extensive and detailed that it covers the entire territory, eventually rotting
and fraying in isolated places after the collapse of the Empire. Baudrillard
inverts this fable to present his concept of simulations:
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth,
it is the m ap that precedes the territory-precession of sim ulacra-it is
the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable
, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across
the map.1 4
The contemporary world is no longer governed by conventional
representation; images do not represent, or attem pt an appearance of reality,
but are instead on the order of simulations, imaginary, not connected to a
reality somehow "behind" the image. Thus, Los Angeles is "a town whose
mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal
circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or
dimensions."1 5 "Los Angeles" is precisely the proliferation of images about
L.A.
This latter vision of Los Angeles may indeed portray the city that the
freeway driver experiences, a series of locations that one can access (with
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greater or lesser investments of time) from the confines of one's corporal
immobility in the driver's seat via the freeway system. It is almost like sitting
in front of a computer terminal, with the ability to access different screens.
One selects a destination, and punches into it. Elsewhere Baudrillard writes
in similar terms:
No more fantasies of power, speed and appropriation linked to the
object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage:
mastery, control and command, an optimalization of the play of
possibilities offered by car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as
object of psychological sanctuary. The subject himself, suddenly
transformed, becomes a computer at the wheel, not a drunken
demiurge of power. The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its
dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a
televised screen (instead of a live-in projectile as it was before).1 6
Baudrillard implies that humans have given up a previous form of ego-
centered subjectivity for an immersion of the self in the apparatuses of
technology and the proliferation of images and simulations. He does not
really provide a causal explanation for the progression from representation
to simulation, though I think Harvey's discussion of time-space compression
offers insight into this phenomenon— as technology reduces distances in both
space and time, w hat is left are no longer the Newtonian (or Saussurian, for
that matter) objects of an intermediary space, but the images and symbolic
networks that the devices of communications and media promulgate.1 7 Yet,
if we accept Baudrillard's model of the subject's relation to the codes that
replace the real (that no longer exists) as metaphysical in implication, as
opposed to being a useful description of heuristic value, a tone of pessimism
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is bound to prevail. Space disappears, subjects disappear, agency
disappears; only codes creating imaginary simulations remain. While I hope
I am not holding desperately onto illusory formations, it seems that it is
somewhat prem ature to dismiss subjects in experienced space.
Potential Resistances: Affirmation of the Subject
In the section "Spatial Practices" from his book The Practice of Everyday
Life, Michel de Certeau examines ways that individual subjects appropriate
the urban geography to their own uses.1 8 He compares the existing order of
the city to the structure of language; and in a manner similar to the user of
speech, a walker in the city activates the system selectively, so that the act of
walking then becomes analogous to a speech act. Just as language is
considered by grammarians and linguists to be their special provenance,
with correct modes of usage and detailed taxonomies, the city is organized
and constructed by the discourse and geometries of urban planners,
architects, city officials. Yet individual speakers do not necessarily heed the
proper usage, and even play with language in ways that resist dominant
hegemonic values. So, de Certeau suggests, do walkers in their usage of the
city, which opens up the possibility of walking practices that resist and
subvert intended usages.
The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no
matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can
take place only within them) nor in conformity w ith them (it does not
receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities
within them.1 9
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This formulation of the relation between subjects and built space offers some
intriguing avenues of thought with regard to freeways. If one transports de
Certeau’ s "rhetorics of walking" to Los Angeles and examines a "rhetorics of
driving/' does a resistant potential exist? To accomplish this project one
would need to ascertain the "proper" use of the freeway as an institution
inflected by ideology.
Several manifestations of hegemonic ideology come to mind: one level
lies in the conventional destinations that interpellate or hail the driver:
commuting, shopping. Ideology also seems apparent in the type of social
being that is created: separated from other individuals, distanced from
random encounters, not intermingling with a diverse populace of various
social classes and ethnic groups. Despite the hype of Los Angeles as a
multicultural metropolitan area, the different groups do not often mix, but
are established as separate communities w ith discrete boundaries (witness
the rise of exclusive gated developments)— and often a freeway constitutes a
"natural" boundary. The freeway allows one to leapfrog over intervening
districts, sparing the need for social encounters w ith people of a different
station or outlook. And the freeway layout necessitates an auto, which
effectively sutures an individual into vast webs of industrial organization:
the huge industries of automobile manufacture, petroleum extraction and
refining, insurance— the monetary requirements dem anding a certain level of
means, as opposed to the dignified impoverishment that Baudelaire could
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carry off. It seems that the prehistory of the freeway has also invested an
implicit ideology in the system: intimations of Manifest Destiny, westward
expansion into limitless space, growth determined by real estate speculation
rather than an outgrowth of local industry; later, the alluring myth of
individual mobility against the inconvenience of collective efforts in
transportation and housing. It is interesting to trace the links between the
role of the automobile in the development of Southern California and the
construction of the driving subjectivity, and the simultaneous development
of Fordist production which increasingly rationalized the workplace and
shaped a new strain of industrial worker. The freeway network is also coded
by virtue of the economic decisions inherent in its planning and construction,
which can be read from the routes and the aesthetic (with implications for
the relation of individual to domestic space, work, and social life in the urban
fabric). Perhaps hegemonic ideology can be found also in the discourse of
traffic engineers, or rather in what they leave unsaid.
Given this highly-inflected physical structure that nevertheless
probably appears neutral to most users, w hat constitutes resistance in this
sphere? I will trace here two possible forms of resistant use, though they are
not intended as exhaustive. One tactic would be to borrow from the
Situationists their investigations of the urban landscape: the aimless, drifting
exploration of the derive that subverts the demands and expectations of
quotidian routes and destinations in an attempt to construct a picture of the
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larger whole, to be written up as "psychogeographies" that characterize the
areas investigated in this manner. In the case of the automobile derive in an
automotive town, one m ust perform the journey in the m anner that the car
suggests: exploring the road itself; but also its intersection with the city
organism--out of the way off ramps, different destinations. If one merely
stays in the car the whole time, one "derives," but through the distanciation
of the intervening glass and steel. Perhaps this is only appropriate given the
situation, this particular automotive city. Another strategy would be to
conduct this type of exploration, but also dismounting on occasion,
reinvesting physical space with the body, not condemning oneself to be as a
tourist "experiencing" Los Angeles from the safety of a tour-bus (although
the derive does seem to have parallels to certain types of touristing).
The other resistant tactic entails the experience of driving for its own
sake, for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of speed and m ovement in opposition
to the goal-oriented, rationalized usage (statistical, alienated) that the system
suggests is normal. In Joan Didion's novel Play It as It Lays, the alienated
protagonist Maria experiences her strongest sense of cohesion and peace
while driving.
Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the
interchange where the successful passage from the Hollywood onto
the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On
the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the
beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept
dreamlessly.2 0
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The appropriation of the freeway then becomes an aesthetic gesture, not a
utilitarian function; an expenditure that does not produce somehow (by
serving labor or consumption) for the dominant institutions (except of course
the participation in the automotive industrial nexus, which is perhaps quite
considerable). Brodsly also sees an aesthetic dimension of freeway driving,
but rather in the recognition by the driver of the role they partake of in using
the structure.
Each exit ram p offers a different visual as well as kinesthetic
sensation. The interchange is like a mobile in a situation where the
observer is the moving object. It is the experience of an effortlessly
choreographed dance, with each car both performing and observing
the total movement and the freeway architecture providing the
carefully integrated setting.2 1
While similar to Maria's pleasure in manipulating the built environment, this
particular phrasing sounds closer to w hat de Certeau would consider the
"proper" function of the system as intended by the designers. But since the
late 50s the effects of design are to make invisible the act of driving-a
properly designed ramp or interchange should allow a driver to remove
their hands from the wheel if they assume the recommended speed-Brodsly
instead takes the driving act more self-consciously. Perhaps an even more
appropriative use is to flaunt the road signs, take interchanges at speeds
above those recommended, until the tires screech— not take pleasure in
submitting to the vast engineering feat, but testing the limits of the system,
transgressing conventional expectations (and risking injury or death) for
thrills.
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De Certeau has undergone a reappreciation among certain
Anglophone critical circles (this volume was originally published in France
in 1974), perhaps in part because this work gives speakers, readers, users of
the system a power in determining the "reading" of the text they perform. In
a way his project resembles Hebdige's study of the appropriation of fashion
elements into a resistant ensemble by British punks, or Fiske's version of the
power of television viewers to construct alternative and even subversive
readings of hegemonically encoded texts (both of which draw heavily on
Barthes). These types of critical models are seductive, for they offer
optimism in the face of a powerful hegemonic system. But I think that the
confidence invested in "typical" readers is often overly optimistic; indeed,
Fiske places so much faith in readers' ability to mobilize alternative readings
that hegemonic meanings would seem to have no power at all. I think a
similar caution should be exercised in the case of "resistant freeway users." I
see that an aesthetic attention to driving qua driving could be construed as
powerfully recuperative for certain dominant forces. Thus, while
recognizing some potential in seeing the freeway experience wrested from its
dominant, intended functions, I view the Situationist tactic of the derive as
being more profound in its resistant thrust, because it crosses boundaries,
opens up the city to new possibilities, resists conventional charting of
destinations and proper places, and attempts to provide a more integrated
understanding of the social condition.
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Paul Virilio, in a series of books and essays, has linked the emergence
of new subjectivities w ith vehicular, imaging, and military technologies.
An early expression of these themes comes in the essay "La dromosopie, ou
l'ivresse des grandeurs," which articulates the ct of driving is an expression
of energy onto the environment, which is mediated through the driver's
vision through the windshield and dashboard.2 2
In this driving fascination begins a double game of lining up the
inside and the outside of the car. With the help of the steering wheel
and the accelerator pedal, the author-composer of the trip will in
effect arrange a series of speed pictures, which will playfully sneak up
on the transparent screen of the windshield. With the monotonous
unfolding of roadside scenes, each object perceived in an advancing
depth of field already identifies itself at that instant with a deferred
crash.2 3
The effervescent language he uses could be an appropriate
exemplicfication of the newly internalized speed, or possibly implies an
energetic embrace of this new form of the hum an subject. But while not at all
nostalgic for a lost whole form of humanity, the larger thrust of his project
cautions against the larger militaristic ends that such trends inevitably
further.
Walter Benjamin saw in the Arcades a "dialectical image," a new form
of urban design that spawned a new subjectivity, which proved to be
alienating, yet also provided a model for a movement away from alienation.
Perhaps the Los Angeles freeway system can prove to be a dialectical image
for our time; part of a newly mobilized type of subjectivity (that might also
bear the imprint of the television screen or computer window), yet also
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providing a way out from the hegemonic binds that lie w ithin it. This
movement toward liberation can only come through use of the freeway, but
not a conventionally received usage— though the actual mechanism would
seem to necessarily be part of a social movement. But the freeway might not
be able to wait for these developments. The transportation technologies that
preceded the freeway each maintained dominance for several decades;
perhaps the freeway, too, will soon be superceded (by electronic
communication?)— occasioning yet a new form of subjectivity. (One of the
more ominous possibilities foreshadowed by the stretches of freeway
destroyed or dismantled in the San Francisco Bay area after the 1989 San
Francisco Earthquake; however, the damaged sections of Los Angeles
freeway damaged in the 1994 earthquake were quickly rebuilt.
Los Angeles Freeway as Cinematic Subject
An interesting fact is that despite the relevance of the freeway as an
existential fact of life in Los Angeles, and the importance of the freeway
structures and system in developing areas, linking neighborhoods and
regions, and in impacting the landscape of the city, the freeway by and large
does not play an important role in the cinematic representation of Los
Angeles. I see films that do feature the freeway in a more than passing way
to fall into five categories: speculative/ didactic, metafilmic, symptomatic,
experiential, and the architectural. These categories encapsulate both the
subject matter of the film, the approach to the freeway as urban geography,
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as well as are periodized and located within film movements. The act of
trying to representing the freeway cinematically is highly contextualized,
and not just a location that is mined.
Speculative / didactic encompasses films from the beginning stages of
the freeway system, films meant to set forth the idea of fast, dedicated traffic
lanes; or to train drivers how to use them. The former type includes such
films as those at the 1939 W orld's Fair in New York City, The City (discussed
elsewhere in this volume) and To New Horizons, which showed Norman Bel
Geddes' Futurama exhibit for General Motors. Both films involved
miniatures that depict futuristic expressways of moving traffic and new
urban forms that these expressways connect (The City with a model of a
decentered form of new small town, incorporating sleek new technology
rather than older, dirty industry; Futurama a new form of dense, high-rise
city, patterned more like the immense skyscrapers in the international
modernism of Le Corbusier.)2 4 Didactic films include driver's education
films (though most deal with street handling of a motor car, some do specify
freeway driving), and films such as Goofy's Freeway Trouble (1965), a Disney
short that employs a mix of aerial freeway photography and animation of a
Goofy embodying types of bad drivers to point out good driving behavior on
the new motorways. The advice is rather common sense, such as inspect the
car, don't drink and drive, get rest before driving; but the attitude taken
seems to imply that such common sense is not necessarily heeded by casual
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drivers, and the new faster freeways need special care. Perhaps one venue
for this was in driver training courses; certainly the subject matter and the
overhead freeway shots suggest the Autopia ride at Disneyland, itself the
beneficiary of placement nest to one of the earliest freeways.
The symptomatic freeway films share certain qualities: These are low
budget films shot in the latter 1950s, which use the new freeway as a new
location to shoot upon, and which use the mobility afforded by this new
system as a m etaphor for character concerns as well as larger social issues
such as Cold War paranoia. Plunder Road, a low budget caper film involves
melting gold bullion into a bum per that is painted over; the jig is up when
the chase hits a traffic jam on a new freeway, and a character falls off the
elevated roadway to his death. City of Fear revolves about a container of
radioactive material on the loose in a decentered Los Angeles, while the
police with Geiger counters m ounted on squad cars map and clear the
streets. M y Gun Is Quick, featuring Mickey Spillane's detective Mike Hammer
of Kiss Me Deadly, uses a freeway chase as both the use of a new feature of
the urban landscape, but also indicative of the flashy detective's style
through his automobile, and the mobility that the detective relies upon to
move from the Skid Row burlesque strip to upscale beach housing; it also
entailed a change of venue from New York to Los Angeles. Edward
Dimendberg has discussed Plunder Road and City of Fear as representative of
his ongoing study of what he calls centrifugal movement of urbanism after
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the war.2 5 I would also stress that production considerations play into these
types of representations: low budget, independent productions sought
stories that could be shot without elaborate sets and sound stages; B noirish
thrillers allowed for quick location photography, little need for lighting and
less emphasis on sound recording for dialogue, wardrobe, makeup, and
other costly elements of the production process. Los Angeles increasingly
becomes a natural location for such endeavors, as the film industry was
situated there, and location film was easier there for independents. While
New York and New Jersey were important sites for film production in the
earliest days of motion pictures, and enjoyed a resurgence from the latter
1950s on, the exigencies of production entailed that these were efforts of the
major studios.
What I call a meta-filmic approach to the freeway can be seen in the
works of avant-garde filmmakers grappling with the intersection of freeway
and film. Two examples can be seen as poles of this approach: Gary
Beydler's Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974) and Jon Jost's Angel City (1976).
Pasadena Freeway Stills comes at the end of the high period of structural
filmmaking, when usually individual, "experimental" or "underground"
filmmakers used myriad techniques to test the boundaries of the medium,
whether through found footage appropriation, appreciation of film stock
grain, explorations of the effects of lenses, testing the effects of the long take,
or playing with the stop motion nature of individual still images formed into
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a chain of moving pictures. Beydler's film falls into the last category, as he
breaks down a drive through the old Figueroa Street tunnels, massive WPA
works cutting through the hillside near Dodger Stadium and Chinatown,
that quickly became part of the first freeway in Los Angeles, the Arroyo
Parkway, which later became the Pasadena Freeway. The film is framed as
still photographs, held up in front of the filmmaker as if snapshots. The
shots are held up individually, slowly at first, as the filmmaker grabs
individual pictures to hold. They are held up increasingly faster, eventually
blurring into the motion of cinematic projection, showing the movement
through the series of tunnels. Eventually they slow down again and stop,
bringing the picture back to the individual image framed by the individual
filmmaker. Thus, the film interrogates film as a medium, especially the
quality of cutting the physical world into slices of time as caught in reflected
light., which when recombined at 24 frames per second performs an
integration as in calculus that recreates the physical space; but it is also about
the social space that the camera-eye interrogates, the social environment that
the film-object is dropped into.2 6
Angel City is a complex meditation on the city of Los Angeles,
celebrity stardom, and the nature of cinema explored through complex
formal techniques as told through a reworking of the private detective film.
One sequence of the film is a continuous take shot apparently from a camera
mounted on the hood of a car which traverses several freeways near
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downtown. The soundtrack moves between a poem recited by Jost about
Los Angeles, contrasted w ith an authoritative narrator dryly reciting
statistical figures about the city, from traffic statistics to crime rates to
pounds of foodstuffs consumed to gross weights of metals used in industry
to political party affiliations, to, incongruously, cutting in and out as if
tuning the radio of the hit song "Lyin' Eyes" by the L.A.-based pop-rock
band the Eagles, who were riding a wave of popularity at the time of the
film. In the same way that the film features a private detective attempting to
solve the apparent suicide of a prominent actress, the film attempts to
discover the nature of the city of Los Angeles through the differing registers
of poetry, statistics, and visual transcription. The sequence reminds one of
the contemporaneous film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, History
Lessons, which also meditates on the complex nature of a city, in that case
Rome at the time of the Caesars. There, between conversations set in Roman
times about complex relationships of class struggle, mercantile and political
considerations are juxtaposed to three long ten minute takes composed
solely of a m an driving a sports car down the streets of 1970s Rome to
ambient street sounds, along the same streets that two thousand years earlier
were the sites of the discussion. Part of the consideration here is that for
filmmakers consciously setting themselves against the escapist suturing of
commercial narrative cinema rely on techniques that distance the viewer,
forcing them to grapple with the issues being presented (in the case of
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History Lessons it is literally "Brechtian," in part because the film is based on
a fragment of a novel by Bertolt Brecht). Another consideration is that
filmmakers trying to achieve such aims do not have the budgets available to
them that the major studios have, so that a long sequence using one roll of
film that takes up more than ten percent of a film's running time is cost
efficient. But certainly the movement through space of the camera also raises
issues about the nature of pre-existing social and architectural space, how it
is traversed, and the nature of the film medium that showing continuous
tim e/space through the long take is less natural to a viewer than the
synthesized time and space constructed through editing and subject
identificatory techniques, and it prefigures video's limitless roll of tape.
(Although the plan sequence discussed by Bazin, such as the long take at the
beginning of Welles' Touch of Evil, incorporates a type of montage through
camera repositioning and staging of actors, literally creating new shots
within a continuous take, which is substantively different than the long takes
through an existing city in Angel City and History Lessons).2 7
A fourth category that reflects cinematic approaches to the
phenomenon of the freeway is an experiential approach. Here, movies adapt
to the existing phenomenon of the freeway, and address how it affects
individuals, either mentally, physically, or as a plot device. Several types
within this group can be identified: one is a mainstream approach to how
the freeway has an effect on characters. In L.A. Story, Steve Martin
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daydreams while on his daily commute; the traffic message boards spell out
specific messages for him, pertinent to his love life. A type of time-lapse
effect on long shots of the freeway at night reveal the stream of traffic as a
continuous stream of read and white, the headlights and taillights providing
an atmospheric chapter stop. Here the freeway is a fact of daily life, but also
offering the possibility of fantastic intervention. In Falling Down, it is a
freeway tie-up that sets off Michael Douglas' pent up rage at losing his job,
losing his child to his estranged wife, losing his tolerance for the cultural
diversity that shapes the city he sees. Later he takes his reservoir of rage
against projects that would ameliorate the traffic tie up he endured, as he
gets angry at a subway construction project, and fires a rocket-propelled
explosive at new freeway construction. The freeway is again a fact of life,
but viewed as a negative rather than the possibilities for escape seen in LA .
Story.
A different approach to the everyday quality of the freeway as an
existing institution is seen in the late twentieth century thriller, often placing
users in a situation that goes against all conventions and responsibilities of
road behavior for excitement. To Live and Die in L.A. offers the example of
driving the wrong way in traffic lanes, against oncoming traffic, which
proves exciting and leaves accidents in the wake. (The film is by William
Friedkin, who staged one of the more famous auto chase sequences under
the Third Avenue elevated train in New York shortly before it was tom
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down in The French Connection.) Speed exploits the possibilities of having a
bomb on a bus driven by an unskilled female bus driver, w ith the bomb set
to go off if the bus slows at all, including the jumping of a gap on a ramp
under construction. Here cinema exploits the haptic qualities of the medium,
hearkening back to the early cinematic phenomenon of Hale's Tours, where
the audience was put in the position of motion through the use of a
mobilized camera that gave the effect of movement. The attempts at virtual
immersion of that day, including wind effects and vibration as if on a track
have been succeeded today by the immersive nature of overbearing music,
which has a suturing quality, and by use of rapid editing and the cross
cutting innovated by D.W. Griffith to create suspense. Other recent films are
based largely around such kinetic qualities of movement, as in the studio
remake of the 1970s independent car theft film Gone in Sixty Seconds. Such
efforts are increasingly cross-marketed with such attractions as immersive
thrill rides and video games, both leisure activities which seek to instill a
sense of virtual movement.
A less spectacular example of the use of the freeway as experiential
construct occurs in The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman is upset that family
pressures force him to take the daughter of his lover Mrs. Robinson on a
date; Mrs. Robinson has expressly forbidden this. In order to set a bad
impression, he speeds down the freeway dangerously (later taking her to a
tassel-twirling burlesque show before finally relenting and getting to know
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193
her). The filming of this scene, like so much in this film, is visually
interesting and alive. Robert Surtees, quoted elsewhere in this volume for
his notes on Act of Violence twenty years prior, comments on the filming of
The Graduate, which utilized a grab bag of cinematic techniques. "I am not
saying for a m inute that w hat we did photographically was original. I am
saying that we did more things in this picture than I ever did in one film." A
discussion of the actual mechanics of filming what is a rather short sequence
out of the entire film shows the complexities inherent in getting a shot,
especially in a freeway environment at night.
One day Mike [Nichols, the director] said w ith non-chalance,
"We're going to do that shot where Dusty and the girl are driving
down the freeway and he's zigging and zagging in and out of traffic
trying to scare her. We'll shoot it at night."
"Mike," I said, "How are you going to do it? They're not going
to let you shoot on the freeway at night."
Mike is a great m an for keeping his cool. He said quietly,
"Well it's in the script so we'll have to do it."
Now the number one thing for the cameraman is to try to fit on
the screen w hat the directory see and is thinking about and what he
wants. In this case it was up to me to have the technical knowledge to
do the job. And sometimes it helps to have friends in the right places.
The next day I called a friend of mine in the highway department and
explained my problem. He said there was a section of freeway about
a mile long which was all paved but not yet open and that we could
use it. I got old of Mike and told him I knew of a stretch of freeway
we could borrow.
But this only solved one problem. It was to be a night shot—a
mile run down the freeway. We had about seventy-five of our own
cars on hand, but how can I light a mile long expanse of highway? It's
impossible.
Normally we do a shot like this in process. But not Mike. He
refused to use an inch of process.
Well, we took the trunk lid off the sports car, fastened an
Arriflex back there—behind the actors. I took real little lights and put
them in the dashboard to hit back at them. And I put airplane landing
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lights in the headlights of the car. With special batteries they really lit
up the road from side to side. Then I put two cars alongside with the
same kind of headlights. When all was ready, we turned the camera
on (there was no operator), the car took off on its wild ride down the
freeway. We even picked up headlights across the freeway, which
was open for cars going the other way. We m ade the run three or four
times, but that's all we shot. Mike felt the ride said w hat he wanted to
say, caught the mood of the moment. He had not interest in shooting
reverse shots, odd angles, close-ups or anything else. Not him. He
wants each shot to capture and express a mood, a feeling, an emotion,
and once it does that he is satisfied. That's w hy I say he uses the
camera emotionally.2 8
The considerations involved in setting up w hat proves to be a rather
short sequence in the overall film highlights why it is difficult to filmically
convey the experience of driving the freeway. The director's avoidance of the
conventional but often unconvincing process shot illustrates an important
nexus of the built environment and filmic representation.
A film like Play It As It Lays should be freeway based, as the source
novel makes m uch of the experience of driving aimlessly on the freeway, but
rather little of the freeway is actually used in the film version. One sequence
has her driving on the freeway. When she gets a flat, she cheerfully changes
the tire herself, telling a motorcycle patrolman (whose look is reminiscent of
the menacing cop in Psycho) who asks her "You really like the freeway,
huh?": "It makes you feel as if they meant something really, really wild
when they built it. It makes you feel as if you might find out the reason." An
interesting theme that reverberates in the novel is reduced to a single verbal
encounter; though later in the film increasingly distant shots aerial shots of
her car moving down the freeway reflect the emotional distance she
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experiences in her life as her personal and professional relationships
crumble.
Perhaps the strangest cinematic interpretation of the experience of
freeway driving also pales compared to its source novel: Crash. While the
1973 novel is set in a vague near future on the outskirts of London, the 1996
film is set in a m odem unspecified city; while filmed in Toronto, the concrete
pylons and gray lanes could be Los Angeles. The film lacks the interesting
play of language that can juxtapose discourses, so that the listing of
traumatic injuries can be likened to the erotic, literally embodying themes
presented in the language used to express them; the film relies on a "literal"
presentation, which struck audiences as horrifying or cheesy depending on
the level of distance they could read the material from. I think it is an
interesting attem pt but a flawed film by a good and ambitious director that
does not do justice to the source material.2 9
The final category of the L.A. freeway in film is rather simple, what I
call term the architectural. The large concrete monoliths of the freeway
overpasses are impressive feats of engineering, and make for visually
interesting shots. City of Industry, for example, is a mid-nineties caper film
firmly within the genre—Harvey Keitel is drawn back into service for one
more take, and the aftermath of the deal gone bad, as well as issues of honor,
loyalty, and revenge are prominent. The City of the title is clearly Los
Angeles, as we see the skyline after the opening credits and music ends;
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while the caper is set in Palm Springs (Greater Southern California),
significant action occurs in San Pedro, Chinatown, and the actual City of
Industry east of L.A. The film has an opening title sequence of a camera
smoothly tilting, and panning as the vehicle mount speeds through rather
empty freeways, emphasizing the gray of the pavement and the structural
supports, concentrating on the immense overpasses of the newly built 105
freeway interchange with the older 110. The structures are similar to the
work of Catherine Opie's series of freeway interchanges that isolate the
structures against a gray sky, printed as small prints in sepia tones that
evoke nineteenth century landscape photography. Devoid of context or
social use, the structure is reduced to the level of sheer monument, even just
an abstract shape in a series of similar prints. Later in City of Industry the
injured Keitel is transported through the same freeways, a little more
choppy, less fluid, but still more of a sense of movement through a concrete
maze than is presented in most films. The French—U.S. co-production The
Outside Man has a title sequence that begins with an extended aerial shot of
downtown Los Angeles (amazingly low rise, before the 1980s building boom
fueled by tax benefits and foreign, especially Japanese, capital) set to a very
70s funk inspired pop song that actually summarizes the film, which moves
in a continuous take over the then-new Bunker Hill redevelopment (Dorothy
Chandler, the Ahmanson Theater), the first in an ongoing series of phases of
changing the hill from the ramshackle hotels and rooming houses for the
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transient and elderly to a new cultural center with business towers. The shot
continues to a sustained overhead view of the four-level freeway interchange
with its cloverleaves. Again, the shot uses found engineering feats as
abstract shape, but also reveals an aerial view in the tradition of the bird's-
eye-view of painting and earlier cartography that sets the city of Los Angeles
out for viewing; it also gives the sense of the immense city that the "outside
man" Jean-Louis Trintignant must traverse as the hit m an from France
becomes a local target in a double-cross set-up.
My five categories of films that significantly engage the freeway break
down into time periods and film movements for the most part, which
indicates that part of the way that cinema draws on this significant feature of
Los Angeles urban topography is conditioned by the needs and capabilities
particular to when the films are made. The didactic and speculative films by
necessity begin at an early stage in the development of the new form of
transportation. Independently produced B films of the 1950s by necessity
were moving to locations, and the new features of the landscape such as the
freeway would naturally appear in some; and they reflected social currents
in a symptomatic way when viewed as a corpus of work. The film avant-
garde has its own history shaped by considerations of a social, technological,
and institutional nature; within these reasons can be found explanations for
the seeming coincidence of turning to the freeway as a theme at this
particular m oment in the 1970s. Perhaps the least defined by period or
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movement are the categories of architectural element and the experiential
nature of the freeway. Perhaps these are simply natural subjects for
cinematic representation; the freeway as structure simply an extension of
buildings as offering abstract masses and forms, the life in the automobile
simply part of everyday life. Yet the cinema does not seem to adequately
address these in depth, particularly in the latter. Perhaps the difficulties of
conveying the experience of the strapped in vectoring of one's own vehicular
prosthesis make it significant examples scarce. Perhaps it says something
about the nature of cinema, especially commercial cinema of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that everyday life is not
necessarily a source for filmic representation, but rather the extraordinary is
what gets translated to screen.
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End Notes: Chapter Four
1 Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso/ 1989), 125.
2 This particular inquiry is indebted in part to Margaret Morse's essay "An Ontology
of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, The Mall, and Television," in Logics of Television, ed.
Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1990), 193-221. When I first began this
project I had not seen this article, but was exploring the subject through some of the same
sources (Benjamin, de Certeau, Baudrillard). However, her article did steer me to the
substantive historical work of Brodsly. I take exception to some of Morse's conclusions: I do
not see a necessary homology between the distraction experienced by the freeway driver
and the user of the mall and television viewer: while they are all elements of the current
postmodern, consumerist state of cultural affairs, I think her model overstates the
resemblances. I also disagree with her characterization of the freeway as a "miniature,"
therefore safe. While the freeway can provide hours of distracted driving that is already
known in character, there is a dark side of accidents, drunken or aggressive drivers, the
specter of freeway shootings. Also, while her project is centered on current subjectivity, it
does not provide much of a historical context.
3 This summary of Los Angeles transportation history informed by Scott Bottles,
David Brodsly, L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981); Mike Davis, City of Quartz, and Reyner Banham, as well as perusal of various
California State documents.
4 Brodsly, 91.
5 Banham, 84.
6 Brodsly, 88.
7 David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985), 266.
8 California Department of Public Works, Division of Highways. The California
Freeway System: A Report to the Joint Interim Committee on Highway Problems of the California
Legislature (September 1958), 16.
9 Some quarters have made much of the fact that some of the last concerns to own
both the electric interurban lines and the downtown narrow gauge rail system included
coalition of GM, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone, or parties tied to them. Indeed,
under the ownership of these companies the transportation systems shut down some routes
and went to buses. However, it was only after a public agency, the LA County
Transportation Commission, took over operations that the rail system were entirely shut
down. (The same commission is involved in current charges of unfair bid rigging in the case
of the cost-overrun plagued Green Line.) Bordsly claims that the rail systems were
inefficient and uneconomical, and that similar operations were being conducted in other
cities with mass transit systems under different ownership (93f). Indeed, at the time gas was
cheap, and the car was enjoying a mythical stature. It is perhaps easy to fault in retrospect
the investment in rubber-tired transportation at the expense of noble rail transit. While not
the provenance of this article, these issues deserve further consideration, especially in light
of the current expensive effort to reintroduce mass public rail transport in Los Angeles.
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1 0 Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," in The Marx-Engels
Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 89.
1 1 Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer, View From the Road
(Cambridge: M assachusetts Institute of Technology Press,1964), 13.
1 2 ibid. 18.
1 3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Chapel Hill:
Duke University Press, 1991), 52.
1 4 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Ed. Mark Poster. Trans. Jacques Mourrain.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166.
1 5 ibid. 172.
1 6 Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication" in The Anti-Aesthetic, Ed. Hal
Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay P, 1983), 127.
1 7 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell,
1989), 240f.
1 8 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
1 9 ibid. 101.
2 0 Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978 [1970]), 14.
2 1 ibid. 50.
2 2 Paul Virilio, "Dromoscopy, or the Ecstasy of Enormities," translated by Edward
O'Neill, Wide Angle v20 n3 (July 1998): 10-22. Originally published in 1982. my thanks to
Daniel Dayan for suggesting I look up this article when beginning this research, and helping
put me in touch with Virilio to obtain permission to have tire article translated when I
included it in an issue of Wide Angle that I was editing.
2 3 ibid, 12-13.
2 4 Another example of such films would be the compilation of such films in the
Reichsautobahn by Hartmut Bitomsky (BRD 1985).
2 5 Edward Dimendberg has discussed Plunder Road and City of Fear as part of his
ongoing study of what he calls centrifugal movement of urbanism after the war; He looks at
Plunder Road in "The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity,"OCTOBER
73 (Summer 1995): 91-137, which also looks at the Futurama exhibit and Reichsautobahn-, City
of Fear is analyzed in "City of Fear: Defensive Dispersal and the End of Film Noir,"ANY
[Architecture N ew York] 18 (1997): 14-17.
2 5 David James, "Four Films of Gary Beydler," new magazine 22 [Beyond Baroque
Foundation, Venice, CA], (May, 1977): 22-24.
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2 7 A transcription ofthe often difficult to find film History Lessons, with an itinerary of
the streets traversed is in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, "Scenarios of History
Lessons and Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematograph Scene,”
Screen v l7 n l (Spring 1976): 54-83.
2 8 Bob [Robert] Surtees, "Using the Camera Emotionally "Action (September/October
1967): 20-23. See also Richard Sylbert, "Designing Los Angeles: An Interview with Richard
Sylbert, " interview by Robert Carringer, Wide Angle v20n3 (July 1998): 97-131, for other
insights from the production designer of The Graduate, as w ell as a different ego position on
the creation of the visual design of this important film as w ell as several other landmark Los
Angeles films such as Chinatown.
2 9 J.G. Ballard, Crash, (New York: The Noonday Press, 1994 [1973]); Iain Sinclair has a
detailed discussion of the book, its themes, and the various attempts to film it, Iain Sinclair,
Crash, (London: BFI Publishing, 1999).
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Chapter Five. Fractured Spaces/The City in Conflict
Thus far the discussion of the intersection of film and urban space has
primarily centered on how space is translated into the two-dimensional film
frame, though the particular nature of the space of the film frame itself is also
a necessary part of the overall project: the relation to other art forms, the use
of off-screen space, the film frame viewed as a "mindscreen" reflecting
subjective processes,1 or as a window onto the world. However, beyond the
special considerations pertaining to the film apparatus and how it re-creates,
translates, expresses space, other questions of representation remain. These
issues discussed so far have revolved around the depiction of surfaces and
volumes. How then does film represent the historical sedimentation of the
city, or contestations to lay claim or define one's experience of the experience
of the city? How is space contested (including symbolically) and what issues
arise in representing these contested terrains? In a book or article a social
theorist can refer to the embedded strata of different time periods with their
various political, economic and spatial considerations that can be seen by
moving through the city. But do film and other media have the same ability
to juxtapose such observations? In this chapter I will look at the city in social
turmoil, and issues revolving around representation of fractious social
elements and competing ideologies that are played out in geographic space.
I identify two theoretical paradigms that can be brought to bear to analyze
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how media products address fractured or contested cities: through a
multiplicity of voices, as described in Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia; and
through application of Donna Haraway's notion of the multiply constituted
cyborg subject. Several locations offer sites for these explorations: London's
topography undergoing shifts of power and use in the 1980s, especially as
depicted in Sammie and Rosie Get Laid, and the related documentaries of the
time Handsworth Songs and Twilight City; revolutionary Havana described
retrospectively several years in Memories of Underdevelopmen t, the remarkable
upheaval leading to overthrow of the Stalinist dictatorship in Romania,
witnessed through documents on the compilation documentary Videograms
ofthe Revolution; and the urban unrest variously described as "riots" or
"rebellion" depending on one's political point of view as seen in live
television coverage of the events in Los Angeles following the verdicts in the
trial of the police officers in the Rodney King beating.
The Stephen Frears film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (UK; Stephen
Frears, 1987) presents a complex view of urban space. Set during the Brixton
riots, the film foregrounds issues of urban contestation, as working class
youths, primarily but not exclusively black, riot after the killing of an
innocent woman by police. The couple of the title live in a ghetto
neighborhood of London wracked by riots. Educated, liberal, and middle
class (she’ s a social worker, he’ s an accountant), they choose to live in the
inner city for the flavor and local culture. Sammy tells his father, a political
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figure newly arrived from Pakistan, "Leonardo da Vinci w ould have lived in
the inner city...because the city is a mass of fascination." Despite sympathies
with their underclass neighbors, this couple are clearly gentrifiers, who
partake of a different set of cultural signifiers. In Pierre Bourdieu's terms,
they have more cultural capital,-2 though I would prefer to say they have a
different cultural capital— the ubiquitous dance hall reggae sounds that fill
the streets is evidence of a healthy level of cultural consumption, though not
of the Virginia Woolf sort that Rosie favors. One can read several layers of
urban development in their South London neighborhood: the original
nineteenth century workers' housing; the use befallen to the dilapidated
neighborhood by the 1980s, crowded with blacks and poor whites; the
artistic and politically committed friends of Rosie who also inhabit and thus
implicitly help gentrify the neighborhood; and during the unrest, we witness
a conversation between a Tory MP and a developer about the potential
profits to be gained from clearing the neighborhood.
With social turmoil as a backdrop, the film explores personal issues
between the m ain characters Sammy, his father Rafi, and his open-marriage
wife Rosie. As well, the film continually explores issues of urban space both
explicitly and implicitly. Even brief asides and minor details pertain to
contested space. Sammy's lover, an American photographer, lives in a loft in
the Docklands, the controversial site of a giant dispersion of a working-class
community to facilitate the redevelopment of a massive upscale office and
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residential scheme, which has since foundered. This— and other nodes of
local knowledge— would not necessarily or even likely be known by a viewer
outside of England. For these spectators the film relies upon the
interpersonal trajectories of the characters to provide the substance, the plot,
the meaning. But within the constructed world of the film the references are
carefully thought out and rich in implication about spatial practice. When
Rafi with his erstwhile black guide "Victoria" goes to meet his (white) college
sweetheart out in the geographically separated, well-to-do suburbs, (far from
the turmoil of his son's neighborhood) people do not recognize that they are
there, they ignore the presence of two people of color. Victoria lives in a
bohemian squatter's encampment under a bridge, but after we witness the
collusion of an MP and a developer, they are brutally thrown off the site for
development. Sammy and Rosie choose to live in the inner city for its
vitality as well as a sense of camaraderie with the oppressed (a sentiment
Rosie still shares, while the solipsistic Sammy seems to have outgrown this
collegiate phase), but another name for this is gentrification, with themselves
and their various artist friends (though she's a social worker, he’ s an
accountant) part of a process that frequently leads to the "rehabilitation" of
inner-city districts that then rise in value and subsequently displace the often
minority and poor residents.
The London mapped out by this film is interlaced by multiple
networks of power and knowledge that revolve around issues of ethnicity,
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class, sexuality, and political orientation, a view that disputes received
notions of a homogenous, happily class-bound society propounded by many
films. One scene that reveals a particular class constitution of one's view of
London occurs when Rafi badgers his son about leaving the squalid, violent
urban streets, and asks Sammy w hat he likes about London. In response
Sammy lapses into a sentimental, contemplative mode and inventories a
weekend's possibilities in the city as his thoughts materialize on the screen:
walking along the Thames, in a bookstore browsing for books by women
authors, going to the theater or underground cabaret, or perhaps a lecture on
semiotics at the ICA. These activities appeal to a certain social fraction that
possess, in Bourdieu's terms, a certain mixture of cultural capital as well as
certain mid-level economic means. The appeals of the city are not universal,
but these specific attractions are uniquely of the metropolis. Sammy finishes
"Neither of us are Englanders, you see. We're both Londoners."
Sammy and Rosie constructs its depiction of urban space through a
complex intercutting of different milieus. Space is not moved through so
much in this film (except perhaps via the Underground, which makes for a
static shot) as instead a patchwork of localities are stitched together. The
space is indexed through layers of markers and signs relating to different
subculture's dress, music (dancehall reggae a persistent marker of the
Caribbean street) the weathering of the brick, even inflections of accent.3 The
large ensemble cast allows diverse areas and social positions to be thrust
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against each other to accentuate the points of contention. While the details
and intricacies of this film are specifically of London, some of the social
dynamics at play m ay be observed in other Western cities, for instance Los
Angeles or New York. Presumably this method of weaving together diverse,
contested social spaces could be applied to other large cities, though the
rigors of commercial structures and the star system mitigate somewhat
against large casts in industrial production (Altman's The Player an
exception)--the freedom of Channel Four funding perhaps allowing for a
little leeway in this instance. Inasmuch as mainstream production for
commercial and ideological reasons has tended in the past to perpetuate
myths about homogeneity and downplayed the stressing of difference that
abounds in Sammy and Rosie, this type of representation seems highly
situated historically, at a time when the pressures of difference helped to
create an environment to finish such a film.
Spatial Identity
For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual
displacement of its irredeemably plural m odem space, bounded by
different, even hostile nations, into a signifying space that is archaic
and mythical, paradoxically representing the nation's modern
territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism."4
In his article "DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the
m odem nation," Homi Bhabha invokes the work of Benedict Anderson and
other historians to articulate how "'imagined communities' are given
essentialist identities" in the process of narrativizing the "national." The
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work of ideology typically smoothes over the heterogeneous nature of the
communities and people that fall within the limits of "the nation/' a gesture
with a long history in the countries of the West, and now emerging as an
issue in postcolonial contexts. Thus, expressions of the nation tend to reify
unitary and traditional conceptions of identity, often through mythic or
stereotypical formulations of "the people." Yet, alternative strategies of
conceptualizing "the national" are gaining currency, in part as postcolonial
intellectuals seek to articulate the multiplicitous nature of the communities
subsumed under national identity, both in developing countries and in the
countries of the developed West. These issues surrounding "the national"
have a particular importance for film studies, which in the past has easily
classified "National Cinemas" as a natural and convenient paradigm for
study and pedagogy, a move that perhaps implies a complicity with
distortive and homogenizing conceptions of how film texts negotiate with
the idea of the national.
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid examines issues of national identity and the
relation of the individual to this formation amid the post-Empire
retrenchments of Thatcher's Britain seething with urban rebellion by
disenfranchised groups. The film explodes the m yth of a homogenous Britain
based on Victorian values, the latter an aesthetic strategy that enjoyed some
popularity in the 1980s as an escapist fantasy. The film takes place in a
predominantly black ghetto of London during civil unrest sparked by the
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shooting of a black woman by police, based upon an actual incident. Sammy
is an accountant with yuppie tastes, the long estranged son of a prominent
former Pakistani government official, Rafi, who comes to visit to renew this
relationship, to unload money he smuggled out of the country, and to avoid
death threats at home. Rosie is a social worker with strong feminist views,
the "downwardly mobile" daughter of a bigoted nouveaux-riches father.
Each also entertains a lover, for their relationship is based on the motto
"freedom plus commitment"; though one senses Sammy's adoration of Rosie,
she cannot simply accede to the mothering role she would inevitably play for
him. For her, "jealousy is wickeder than adultery." Rafi's entrance to the
household sparks considerations of personal ethics in relation to the political:
a charming, genial man, he is reputed to have sanctioned unsavory policies
while in the Pakistani government. The tensions between familial
responsibility to a charming kin (who intends to divest money on the couple
to get them out of a bad area and provide grandchildren) and the moral
imperative not to condone the use of torture and m urder as political tools
threatens to split the household.
The film emphasizes the multiple constituencies that comprise
modem urban British society in the selection of characters and neighborhood
(though the full range of society is marked by the absence of the more
rightist members and notably the absence of white males). Differences in
ethnicity, nationality (these two not reducible), gender, sexual orientation,
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age, class, educational background are all highlighted by the varied cast of
characters, which comprise a selection outside the stereotypical depictions of
British society. These various levels of difference, of social positionality, lead
to different insights, philosophies of life, political goals. Much of the film is
staged through dialogues between competing social or political positions.
While eating dinner in a rather upscale restaurant Rosie confronts Rafi with
questions about atrocities during his regime. Rosie and Rafi trade
perspectives in an almost opera-like exchange of oratory as wandering
violinists feverishly climax in an effort to calm the discussion:
"I wanted to know what its like to kill, to maim, to torture, and
what did you do in the evenings?"
"You've never suffered; you've never had to make hard
political decisions."
"Yes I have, every day in my work."
"You're only concerned with homosexuals and women!
They're luxuries that rich oppressors can afford. We were concerned
with poverty, imperialism and feudalism, real issues that bum
people!"
"We're only asking what its like to destroy another human's
life!"
"A m an who sacrifices others for the benefit of the whole is in a
terrible position, but he's essential. Even you know that. I come from
a land ground into the dust by two hundred years of imperialism.
The Western dominators— and you reproach us for the methods that
you taught us? I help people for their own good; and damage others
for the same reason. Just like you in your feeble profession."
In this instance each participant privileges their own position, asserting that
they occupy a high moral ground. Though constructed as a dialogue, each
character recognizes only their own position; to use Barthes' phrase it is the
idiolect, or specific language of a particularly positioned social class that is
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articulated in each case. Rafi sees his tenure in public life, in which he was
distanced from the more horrific applications of power, as a necessary and
honorable role leading a nation out of domination. Rosie sees questions of
morality in absolutes that involve ethical decisions in living one's private life-
-like not allowing Sammy to take his father's tainted money. But these
subjective positions are not necessarily strictly adhered to continuously.
Rosie later rescues Rafi from a similar grilling about to be administered by
Rani and Vivian at the party--"! don't hate him." Sammy vacillates between
accepting his father's money with hopes of moving to a safe, suburban
family life, and rejecting it in the service of moral scruples promoted by his
companion. And Rafi endures visions of a representative victim from his
past. The supporting characters contribute to the repudiation of
conventional notions of "respectable" Victorian morality and assumed social
homogeneity: among Rosie's feminist circle are an interracial lesbian couple,
Vivian who is black and Rani who is (South) Asian, and the most
uncompromised character is Victoria, a black m an that lives in a trailer in a
homeless encampment, who befriends Rafi during a street altercation and
later enjoys a sexual fling with Rosie. Thus, the main characters are all
shown as being precisely what a normativizing narrative of the essence of
Britannia would not have them be; sexually and racially diverse. And these
are not all positive portrayals, a superficial overturning of the ignored in
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British, but sets the participants as having blindnesses, self-centeredness,
particular agendas.
The range of competing social positions in the film render this a
useful opportunity to consider Bakhtin's analysis of dialogization and
heteroglossia in the novel. Bakhtin argues for a closer look at the social facts
of discourse and language per se, which only occurs within a social field,
between social agents.
This area of study will include the specific phenomena that are
present in discourse and that are determined inside a single language
(the primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other "social languages"
within a single national language and finally amid different national
languages w ith the same culture, that is, the same socio-ideological
conceptual horizon.5
Bakhtin is specifically concerned here with the nature of novelistic discourse,
which he argues is based as a medium on the deployment of heteroglossias
or multiply inflected languages against each other; as against the scholarly
tendencies of his day which stressed the monologic language of poetic
discourse. Yet the principles of the dialogic nature of language and its use
within a field of multiple social languages are not limited to novelistic
discourse, but are indeed a precondition for it. The word used by a subject
itself is internally dialogized as a condition of existence; it emerges out of
discourse in a social context, and is directed outward from a speaker,
implicitly demanding a response (even in a monologue there is an imaginary
respondent structuring the utterance.)
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The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and
tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements and
accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with
some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all
this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its
semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire
stylistic profile.6
Similar to the situation of the individual dialogized word, various languages
specific to social class, profession, and experience emerge within the sphere
of the national language, intersecting and informing each other, yet
competing and marking boundaries within the national (as do national
languages within an overall cultural horizon such as "Europe"). These social
languages are created within the emergence of social struggle and growth,
and contribute to an organic, changing language, yet nevertheless retain
sedimentations from previous historical formations and struggles.
Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly
unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a m ultitude
of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems; within these
various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language
filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its
own different sound.7
The novel as a genre is characterized by the appropriation and use of
various social languages within a society.
The social and historical voices populating language, all its words and
all its forms, which provide language with its particular concrete
conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a structured
stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological
position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch.8
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Sammy and Rosie Get Laid would seem to perform a similar type of
arrangement of heteroglossias. Rather than maintain a unity of voice or
position, the film actively juxtaposes different points of view formed from
lived experience within different constituting loci of class, gender, ethnic
positions. These different positions are allowed to contest, to air themselves
out, often in the form of conversational exchanges of different "social
languages" grounded in specifically situated individuals encompassing
different points of view as constituted in society.
Yet the constitution of individual subjectivities is itself a site of
multiple social forces. Subjectivity is shown to be a contradictory and
complex formation, with competing discursive claims inhabiting individuals.
At times the expression of high minded morality seems based in part on
personal interests: for instance, in exposing Rafi's past, Rosie's lesbian friends
Rani and Vivian seem as interested in prying Rosie away from Sammy as in
trying to exert a moral counterweight to Rafi's presence. Rosie's outburst in
the restaurant at atrocities during Rafi’ s reign comes immediately after Rafi
berates her for "talking like a damned dyke," as if partially motivated as a
response on a personal as well as political level. And individuals'
subjectivity are constituted through competing sites of identification: Rafi is
Pakistani, yet speaks with an educated British accent and returns to his
"beloved London." Upon viewing his son's agitated neighborhood Rafi
expresses anguish that Britain could fall to the level of street riots, a
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decidedly "uncivilized" situation. Yet in the company of his sweetheart
Alice, who comes from respectable British colonial stock, Rafi extols those
involved in the revolt, "I like rebels and defiance." In this interpersonal
context the statement might be seen as a type of provocation, after all, he
"threw anticolonial stones" against her family's house before he ever met her.
Alice reminds him that he "shot his own rioters dead in the street."
The film repeatedly foregrounds issues of identity. After the
argument in the restaurant, Rafi and Rosie carry on their exchange on the
walk to the car. "Be careful what you say to me in the future, little girl-
Remember who I am, and show some respect." "Who are you Rafi? Who?"
Sammy steps in, "He's my father, Rosie." Again, the issue of identity is
multiply situated, incorporating a struggle between conceptions located in
the opposition of public and private capacities, between social languages that
stem from different positions: the pompous self-assertions of the politician
with an internalized attitude of dismissal of women, the outraged stance of
the committed "right on" (the British equivalent of "politically correct")
woman who asks Rafi to examine the hidden hum an cost of his good life, the
pleading of the son/husband caught in the middle who m ust negotiate both
positions in the private sphere. Even names are revealed as situated, the
bridge between public and private personae, between different fields of
social languages. Victoria introduces himself to Rafi on the train: "My name
is Danny. People that like me call me Victoria. People that don’ t like me call
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me jerk-off." The name Victoria resonates with a parodic take on the
aspirations to Empire that helped situate Danny as a British subject, and on
rigid markers of gender difference. Rosie admits that after leaving her
bigoted father, "I changed my name, and became myself."
By highlighting the multiple determinations at work in an individual
subject, the film provides an example of hybridization of different fields of
language (and hence different social forces or positions). Yet for Bakhtin
hybridization occurs in a novelistic discourse as a double-voiced utterance;
"A mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance
[....jseparated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by
some other factor."9 In this film— aside from the acerbic irony that often
characterizes Sammy's comments--the characters do not exactly express
double-voicedness within individual utterances, but rather in separate
statements that contradict or inflect previous formulations. This still
provides an example how an individual appropriates different intersecting
discourses with claims upon them, but should perhaps be distinguished
from the specific technical use of the term employed by Bakhtin. The
concept of hybridization nevertheless maintains a usefulness for looking at a
field of social relations rather than an illusory homogenous conception of
national or individual unity.
It can be useful to juxtapose Sammie And Rosie Get Laid to two
experimental documentaries that creatively interrogate m any of the same
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issues, Twilight City (1989) and Handsworth Songs (1986), both produced by
the Black Audio Film Collective. Each draws upon a variety of sources, older
archival materials, recent broadcast news, taped interviews, interesting
imagery, and unusual electronic score. Twilight City is a meditation on
London at the end of the 1980s, on the confrontation between established
communities and the imperatives of Capital that abstracts the space for
redevelopment, and the subjective experience of people from marginalized
groups—black, Asian, gay, working class—reacting to the aggressions of
Thatcherite Britain. The film especially focuses on the transformation of the
area known as the Isle of Dogs and The Docklands, where in a massive
enterprise zone was instituting a wholesale redevelopment. One strength of
the film is the use of various interviews, including noted intellectuals such as
Homi Bhaba and Paul Gilroy. Gilroy, for instance, notes the process of
spatial internalization that occurs when learning to negotiate the city, and
how that m ap is no longer applicable to his understanding of The Docklands:
As a child growing up in that time, you soon learn, of necessity learn,
that there are parts of the city that you can go, in safety, and that there
are parts that you m ust avoid and gradually you incorporate that kind
of map into your own movements around the city. ...Now that map,
that pattern of development, is something which is no longer useful to
me.
He also offers an astute observation of the way that different groups compete
for social space:
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This is a city which, like many of the other once-great cities of the
over-developed world, has been decentered in its most radical way,
fragmented so that it isn't just a matter of different discrete
communities inhabiting different parts of the city and filing out the
parts of that city with their own cultures, but inhabiting those spaces
in a way which is mutually antagonistic, which is fortified, and
together w ith that fortification you also find an extraordinary change
in which people are able to inhabit the same space—remain physically
proximate, but live in different worlds.
Handsworth Songs follows up this type of analysis in a concrete way, focusing
on the spate of riots that erupted in 1985 (and the setting for Sammie and Rosie
Get Laid). In each case police force applied in the black community resulted
in violence, in the Handsworth section of Birmingham, Britain's second-
largest city, as well as in the London districts of Brixton and Tottenham. The
film draws upon first-person accounts, news coverage, as well as historical
situating of how black communities arose in England as a result of the forces
of Empire and decolonization; but film also employs aestheticizing
tendencies of disparate footage and odd electronic music to distance and
frame the material.
Another film that foregrounds issues of the multiple constructions of
subjective identity in a turbulent political context is Memories of
Underdevelopmen f; however, the aesthetic strategies of this film differ
considerably from Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. A s opposed to the ensemble
cast of Sammy and Rosie, Memories concentrates on the predicament of a single
individual, Sergio, a decidedly bourgeois writer who is coming to grips with
the profound changes in Cuban society in the aftermath of the Cuban
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revolution. The film is set just after the Bay of Pigs counter-revolutionary
invasion, during the Cuban missile crisis (a period six years preceding the
production of the film) as Sergio struggles with what his role in the new
Cuban society will be. He cannot simply escape to Florida as do his parents
and his ex-wife. But he feels a sense of loss and alienation in the new Cuba;
by class and education he identifies with Europe, while the image of the
underdeveloped tropics that he fleetingly experiences in the streets point to
the dark side of the bourgeois, Europeanized exploitation that fueled his
existence. His existence is rather parasitical; he lives in the top floor of a
luxurious apartment tower off of rental income allowed by the government
for a several year period before complete nationalization; the family
furniture store is already taken. At the same time he feels he has no place in
the new society, his distanced intellectualism useless in the changed
environment.
Words devour words and they leave you in the clouds. A thousand
miles away. How does one get rid of underdevelopment? It's more
difficult each day. It marks everything. Everything. What are you
doing down there Sergio? What does all this mean? You have
nothing to do with them. You are alone.
His alienation from events is literally represented as he scans the city from a
telescope on his balcony, the optical flattening and vignetting of the view
through the lens reiterating his voyeuristic distance from the real events
overtaking the country outside his momentarily secure (ivory) tower refuge.
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Rather than the accumulative moments of character depiction in
diegetic scenes that propel the plot and construct personas in Sammy and
Rosie Get Laid, Aleas' film employs implicit and explicit techniques of
identification with Sergio. Much of the verbal presentation in the film
consists of his interior monologue, presumably extracts from the diary he
vows to write at the beginning of the film, delivered in a philosophic,
pensive tone. Often the camera assumes his subjective POV, as through the
telescope. Hand-held camera that accompanies him on the street lends an
identificatory flavor even when he is within the frame, as opposed to
showing what he sees. Sergio frequently falls into reveries of memory or
fantasy, which are specifically coded: slow fluid pans and dissolves, fade to
white, soft focus for earlier memories (compared to the sharply delineated
high contrast footage of most of the film "present"); quick-paced editing of
stills or short shots of his lustful designs on his maid, or extravagantly slow
motion as he places himself in the position of her Baptist preacher during her
first baptism, lowering her body seductively into the river. As these
sequences clearly illustrate his mental processes, the development of his
character occurs through a much more subjective orientation compared to
the exteriority of the figures in Sammy and Rosie, and the spectator's entry
into the film occurs through a more consistent, sustained identification with
Sergio. This is not to suggest that identification does not occur in the Frears
film, but the sites of identification are more fleeting and objective (based on
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outward presentation rather than subjective insight), and one's entry into the
film happens much more through experiencing the juxtaposition of
competing value claims.
Dialogization between characters is much less an organizing principle
in Memories, though examples do occur. Sergio confronts the arrogant,
reactionary views of his friend Pablo; and he struggles with the different
outlook of Elena, the sixteen year old working-class girl he seduces. Sergio
himself can be said to be in the process of internally resolving differing
affiliations as he struggles with European tastes and values while remaining
committed to his country, though not necessarily as a revolutionary. But the
principle area of dialogization occurs through film style. In an effervescent
collage style reminiscent of early Godard, Aleas juxtaposes numerous
different film styles and sources. Besides the memory and fantasy alluded to
the film employs cinema-verite style footage, some seemingly "authentic"
and others staged with Sergio, hidden camera, newsreels, television coverage
of Kennedy's address on the Cuban missile crisis and Fidel's response as well
as a Marilyn movie, documentary still photographs, still photographs of
Sergio's life history, the hampered camera covering a crowded roundtable
literary discussion, and carefully composed tableaux in the Hemingway
museum. In one instance he listens, annoyed, to Pablo spouting about the
Bay of Pigs. Sergio interrupts him by picking up a book, but instead of
reading there is extensive presentation of newsreel coverage of the trials of
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some captured counter-revolutionaries, w ith voiceover commentary
analyzing why different members of various social station participated, and
how they attempted to distance themselves from responsibility. The excerpt
itself presents a dialogized situation of the invasion participants defending
their actions against accusers from the people, yet the staging of the
discussion between Pablo and Sergio is itself dialogized, as is the disparity in
film styles that contrasts Sergio's bourgeois sensibility elsewhere in the film
(with more conventional approaches to narrative camerawork) w ith his
attempts to provide an analytic perspective on a momentous historical event
for the nascent nation.
The same level of stylistic diversity does not appear in Sammy and
Rosie Get Laid. Significant examples of variety and innovation erupt at
moments, as when Sammy describes to his father w hy he likes London: as he
narrates a possible Saturday outing of riverside walk, bookstore browsing,
semiotics lecture and the theater the sweet flute theme from the score rises,
and the shots literally illustrate Sammy's reverie in the subjunctive. This is
one of the few moments in the film of an overtly subjective mode; Rafi's
encounters with a ghost that dissolves into mid-air is another. Perhaps the
most disruptive moment occurs after the party for Rafi, where three
interracial, adulterous couples make love to the sounds of a Jamaican group
attired in Empire costumes who suddenly appear singing the Motown hit
"My Girl." (In fact, throughout the film music plays a role in another
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Bakhtinian context, that of the camivalesque.) At the climatic moment the
frame bursts into a three tiered split screen of the couples in bed. But despite
these moments of stylistic excess, the bulk of the film is presented within a
certain consistent register and coherent aestheticized plan (such as the
recurring device of a close-up in the foreground and a long shot of another
character in the background). Marked by little subjective POV, the film
maintains a level of objectivity toward the events before the camera; but this
objectivity is stylized as opposed to specifically realistic, as evidenced by the
homeless encampment which is too clean, too colorful, too young and
energetic for a realistic depiction. Paradoxically, though Memories is more
specifically aligned with Sergio's subjective processes, the street scenes seem
quite real. This is perhaps an effect of reading codes associated with the
hand-held, cinema verite style, but informed as well by the fact of location
shooting and the post-revolutionary Cuban tradition of documentary
filmmaking.
These differences in the relative stances of objectivity in narrative style
parallel the contrasting approaches to reflexivity. Sammy and Rosie rarely
calls attention to the filmmaking process overtly in keeping with the stylized
but objective narrating position. Perhaps some of the non-traditional editing
choices, like cutting from a black woman just shot dead by police to a white
woman's naked buttocks, call attention to the breaking of codes that pervade
the film thematically, but the film generally does not explicitly foreground
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its constructed nature. Memories, though, does recognize its own
constructedness. At the literary roundtable one of the participants is
Edmund Desnoes, the author of the book on which the screenplay was based
(and a critical American respondent in the audience wrote the foreword to
the English translation). And at one point the film launches unexpectedly
into short, repeated clips of couples writhing in passion and partially clad
women. Then the lights come on and it is revealed that Sergio and Elena are
visiting his director friend at ICAIC, and that these clips were the censors'
excisions under Bautista. Sergio's friend is actually the director of Memories,
Aleas; when he says that he will use these clips in a collage-type film the joke
is obvious. (The identical conceit was used without apparent reference to
this film in the later Italian film Cinema Paradiso.) The extensive use of other
media also foreground the constructedness of the film, while in Sammy and
Rosie the only alternate media is tape recorded comments at the very
beginning of the film of Margaret Thatcher at a dinner blithely stating that
the next day they need to go and work hard to clean up the inner cities.
Despite the fact that both of these films are dealing with questions of
the individual subject in relation to national identity at critical historical
moments, they approach the issues of history and memory in different ways.
Memories makes frequent reference to events in the (film's) recent past: the
Revolution, the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's missile quarantine. Sergio reflects on
his position in the emerging Cuban society shaped by these events, and there
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is a subtext about the historical conditions leading to the revolution. And
much of the film is structured around his memories of the privileged life he
had growing up: parochial school, visiting prostitutes as a teenager, first love
(with a European woman). Sammie and Rosie, on the other hand, while firmly
situated within Thatcherism and race riots, does not call attention to the
specific historical events to the same degree. The focus is rather on the
diverse identities that comprise Britain, as opposed to the hegemonic
discourse that would have them all white and m iddle class. There is some
attention to analysis of the political situation, as with the portrayal of the
developer and politician lurking around the disturbances, plotting to claim
the neighborhood for development against the interests of the community
living there. But this is peripheral to the main thrust of the story, which
concentrates on the presentation of the diversely constituted ensemble cast.
Thus, while both films share many of the same concerns, the formal
approaches vary greatly, beyond the superficial differences of color versus
black and white, of ensemble cast versus subjective protagonist. This reflects
on the historical specificities of the two situations: Alea was working within
a relatively new filmmaking system in post-revolutionary Cuba, and
drawing upon the strengths already forged in that filmmaking community,
especially documentary; and a decided Godardian influence at the height of
his worldwide impact. Frears was working in an independent situation in a
declining film industry, but with funding from Channel Four, which
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encouraged alternative approaches. Frears was working against the reigning
political powers, while Alea had the support of his government. Frears
presents an ambitious carnival of difference, and especially flaunts sexuality,
starting w ith the title which caused some distribution problems here in the
US. Part of the counter-hegemonic force of this film lies in the overturning of
bourgeois conventions of propriety, of what can be shown. Sergio, on the
other hand, presents an interesting case: a socialist film about a parasitical
bourgeois character (and who is selfish, has a low opinion of women, is self
absorbed). Though the film aligns itself with his perceptions narratively, he
is not a really sympathetic character. In the end he resigns himself in despair
in the face of the challenge of the US to Castro (which the date of the film's
production shows was not an inevitable response.) But by showing this
product of bourgeois society as incapable of adjusting to a revolutionary
consciousness, yet having him be the focal point for the audience's
identifications, a message of what is needed in the revolution is conveyed.
Videograms of the Revolution
A remarkable film that explores urban space while documenting the
real decapitation of a cephalic totalitarian state is the 1992 documentary by
Andrei Ujica and Harun Farocki, Videograms of the Revolution, which charts
the revolution that ousted Nicolai Ceaucescu as dictator from Romania in
1989. The film is a compilation film, draw n from found footage, mostly
video, that reveals the power of imaging technologies to construct a public
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space and inform and lead a population. It proves a very powerful text, not
only because it literally reveals a tumultuous history in the making, but also
because it is quite skillfully carried out. The film documents the last days of
the Ceaucescu regime as mapped by various video technologies, broadcast
and amateur, from the first expressions of unrest in the provincial city of
Timosoara to the public address in the capital Bucharest where a surprised
dictator was heckled, to the establishment of a revolutionary interim
government.
The sources vary, from home camcorders wielded timidly by those
curious about unheard-of social protest, to state-run media transmissions,
raw media feeds, to the first media broadcasts from a post-Ceauceascu unity
government, as well as behind the scenes showing the transitional leaders
discussing the strategies that they will follow as they lead the newly free
nation forward, to a Western journalist performing take after take of his
breathless, earnest live report. The film presents these fascinating historic
images both to "speak for themselves," but it also turns a critical eye to
analyze the images and the nature of visual media itself through selection, a
narrator's voiceover commentary, and occasional replaying of sequences,
stilling the frame, and presenting views of the same event from other angles
or sources to comment on the politics of im ages.1 0 The state run television
cameras present the staged pageantry of an official speech, but when
something unexpected occurs~and the look of incomprehension and
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disbelief on the face of the man who ran the country despotically for decades
being confronted by unhappy subjects is truly riveting— the cameras pan
upward to the sky as instructed, and the television signal goes blank. But the
filmmakers had access to material that was not broadcast: in the control truck
they monitored the emerging situation. Other sources include amateur
camcorders immobile in apartment block rooms, their presence too
dangerous to go outside in Timosoara, straining to understand the
movements of chanting people in the distance; or in Bucharest panning from
the unclear affairs at the speech on TV to the w indow and the people moving
on the street outside, searching for some understanding, then venturing out
into the street, recording the impulsive crowd in the street. State TV
cameramen smuggle a camera out to document the turbulent state of affairs.
Later the TV studio itself would be the site of agonized debates about
whether to join the freedom movement, and after doing so leaders
congregate and debate how best to convey a message asking the army to join
them against the feared security police. A standoff between army troops and
Securitate thugs seen from a building above leads to the retreat of the
security police as the army, with a crowd of civilians at their backs, fires over
the irregulars' heads. When shooting breaks out in some luxury apartment
blocks— never finished, but constructed only to provide a grand facade at the
site of the public speeches— it is not clear if it is security police, or perhaps
the Army trying to manufacture an enemy to exorcise to provide a sense of
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solidarity for the populace. Throughout, the film interrogates the capabilities
and limitations of video as a medium to gather facts, to investigate events in
a public space, and the role of television in garnering consensus and
mobilizing action in both totalitarian and revolutionary settings.
Thus, in this project the film delves into the mechanics of creating a
public sphere through media, and as part of that endeavor explores urban
space as an arena for public activity, whether a tightly controlled and
repressive space governed by fear and secret police informers, a location for
spontaneous political protest, or a highly fluid and volatile terrain where
control is negotiated through methods ranging from violence to persuasion
to public acclamation. In exploring the contests for a public sphere generally
and public space specifically the film also provides a range of examples of
the mechanics of using m odem optical technology to explore-document-
represent urban space.
One of the first uses of cameras in urban space in the film stems from
a camcorder operator capturing surreptitious fleeting images from a student
dormitory window that depict nascent protest demonstrations in what was
then a clearly illegal gesture. The narrator of Videograms discusses the
abstracted use of the frame that the anonymous operator creates, with solid
high-rise housing walls creating a static foreground, while barely perceptible
in the background, protestors can be seen marching in protest of recent
conditions and hum an rights offenses in the regional city of Timosoara, their
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cries a m urm ur on the soundtrack. The danger of taping such an event in the
police-state atmosphere of Romania is manifest in the furtive approach to the
disturbance, for an informing neighbor seeing this act could quite possibly
lead to one's disappearance or death. In a way, the image embodies the
panopticon, the penal apparatus promulgated by Jeremy Bentham and
resuscitated as a locus for critical inquiry by Michel Foucault; though in
Videograms that concept operates in a reverse (and I suggest more accurate)
sense of the way that the term is usually ascribed to contemporary
visualizing technologies.1 1 Literally bringing the Enlightenment to bear on
the former dungeon conditions of social control, the panopticon renders
imprisonment highly efficient through a centralized observation tower
monitoring an array of cells surrounding it, with the gaze of the jailer
ultimately internalized by the prisoner in so that regulation is self-enforced.
In this view from a window, the gaze of the security police is evident in its
absence, in the discretion with which the camera operator explores the
events outside. Thus we see the effects of that self-censorship which reveals
the power of deploying an imagined surveillance, which more accurately
comports to the meaning and significance that Foucault excavates than the
loose critical uses of the term panopticon that are bandied about in reference
to any state-administered or powerful visual technology, without the
internalized component.
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Another sequence in Videograms of the Revolution captures a historic
state event, and reveals the power and limitations of state-run media. The
dictator Ceauceascu and his despised wife Elena face a stage-managed
crowd brought in to offer a show of public support as a response to the
recent events in Timosoara, an event covered by state-run television. While
addressing the crowd, Ceauceascu recoils as a public protest starts to
manifest from the rear of the crowd, right before his eyes. Having ruled as a
despot over a police-state for over thirty years such a display was
inconceivable, and the look on his face as a crowd surges forward chanting
in protest is of stunned disbelief. He and Elena resort to yelling "Hello,
Hello," as if speaking on a telephone line that is bad, trying to regain the
authority to speak. The image in this case is from the live state-run
television. The film shows how television viewers have their transmission
interrupted at this point, as if experiencing technical difficulty. Yet, from
within the control truck the television agency still monitors the event, and
from this non-public archive the filmmakers can compare the "official"
version to the events as they transpire. Eventually, the camera operator
follows standing instructions to turn the camera to the sky if an unforeseen
disturbance arises. Yet further evidence of the event stems from another
propagandistic media arm, the weekly state newsreel, which also captured
the unprecedented public display of unrest emanating from the crowd
gathered before the Central Committee Headquarters. In counterpoint to
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these views from official media, an amateur operator films the coverage of
the public event from his television, then pans to the crowds starting to
stream through the street. Clearly a wind of change blows through the air.
The next day, the location of the botched public address is again the
scene of momentous historical events. An emboldened crowd rushes the
government building, home also to the feared Securitate secret police, and
Nicolai and Elena Ceaucescu and their entourage escape with mere seconds
to spare in several large helicopters, while the crowd tosses books and files
from the windows, and throngs gathered on rooftops jeer. Amateur
videographers cruise in vehicles to document the happy masses flocking to
the streets. Meanwhile, cameramen from the state media smuggle out rigs in
order to document the fluctuating scene: a m an hugging soldiers, masses
moving through the streets. Inside the media headquarters hurried
discussions are held, stressing the need to appeal for order and stop the
bloodshed, not in the service of repression, but rather to consolidate the
gains and avoid a fall into anarchy. The need to appeal to the army as an
agent of strength and order emerges as a counter to the repression of the
Securitate. Hurried arrangements are made to create a public address about
the revolutionary appeal, with debates about politics and technical decisions
("then go in for a close-up") continuing up to on-air time. The appeal itself
features a lineup of heroes, dissidents, minorities, poets, flanked by flags,
looking for all the world like a tableaux lifted from a painting of the French
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Revolution. Such appeals are staged again and again as the media apparatus
has moved over to the opposition, in one case asking for help as the media
building is under siege from Securitate terrorists. In this latter case the
media moves from the universal to the specific, from a generalized appeal
aimed at the population at large to a call for help to protect from immanent
dangers in the corridors literally right outside their broadcast studio.
Whether the threat actually resided in this localization, or whether it
stemmed from panic and confusion, or perhaps even operated as a
motivated, tactical "propagandistic" call, is unclear.
A later sequence also specifically engages public urban space, in this
case Victory Square, where the dictator had built large m odem high-rises
surrounding a plaza. However, the buildings were never finished, and had
no inhabitants, but served only as facades for propagandistic public displays,
an image of m odem standard of living even as m uch of the country suffered
substandard conditions due to corruption and failed centralized policies.
Within this arena pro-revolution soldiers fire hesitatingly from some steps
off of the square at unseen enemy in the high-rise buildings, while
pedestrians flit about cautiously amid the sound of isolated sniper fire. It is
not clear if they actually know where the fire is coming from, or even if there
is an enemy there— the film raises the speculation that some give that elite
military police units engage in mock sniper fire to galvanize support and
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vigilance against a prospective enemy, the inauthenticity of the buildings
thus overlaid by a questionable authenticity of reactionary threat.
The film also allows for the comical aspects of media as an agent of
public discourse. The remaining figure of the previous government, the
Prime Minister, is persuaded to resign his position in front of a large crowd,
and this official act is documented on video. However, because the
television station was not ready to transmit, the Prime Minister had to repeat
his resignation. A British war correspondent delivers his pithy standup
summation of conditions at the moment as sniper fire echoes in the
background. He then delivers it again, flubbing his delivery, so another
attempt is given, giving the lie to the appearance of a spontaneous "live"
coverage given under duress. Other media glitches are less comical, more
ominous. As certain dissident figures try to deliver addresses technical
problems ensue, or there is cutting to and from different speeches at
random—and the film does not clarify if there are political machinations
within or without the station contributing to these problems, or they are
legitimate technical difficulties.
As the film progresses there is less attention to an overt analysis of
how images work, to a fascination in the sheer power of seeing history
happening. We watch as pitched battles occur in front of the Central
Committee building, the combatants unclear. One sequence within the
television station offices shows an ex-police leader, w ho maintains that he
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only commanded border guards, and a military general who engage in
behind the scenes power brokering, alert to their role in shaping the future
of the country, aware no doubt of the stakes personally as well as for the
public, but also seemingly quite aware of the camera that pans back and
forth between them— not mugging to the camera, but rather playing along
with the transparent fourth wall that we have come to expect from film.
They joust verbally a bit implicitly threatening each other as they posture,
each with their own set of cadres and equipment, even as they attempt to
work together and find out who has several unidentified helicopters that
apparently belong to a hidden Securitate air fleet. The scene reminds one of
cinema-verite and direct cinema movements, like Primary, important figures
are engaged in momentous events that are documented for posterity. And
the evidentiary value of video transmission is revealed when the importance
is given to showing the son Nicu Ceauceascu arrested, and footage of Nicolai
and Elena after their arrest, and later their crumpled bodies following
execution.
This editing together of diverse sources forms a meditation on the
specific powers and capabilities of video, both amateur and broadcast, in
surveilling and mobilizing subjects in public space. I w ould argue that the
conjunction of hum an/video (camera and broadcast/ reception apparatus)
envisioned here constitutes a cyborg subject, for in the turbulence the lens
and tape extend bodies within space (and later act as memory); while the
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complex of producer, camera, leadership tableaux at the production end and
the TV receiver act as powerful sources of information and organizers of
behavior, though able to be mobilized to diverse ends. Here this complex
was seen as pageantry that bolstered the dictatorship; as a political tool to
acquire Army support; it was used to show a revolutionary united front to
keep the population's spirits up; and was used to show the executed former
dictator and his wife to reassure the population they w ould not return and to
intimidate their supporters still resisting. The broadcast technology works
towards the ends of the dystopic police state, yet also serves liberation from
this oppressive yoke, a utopian gesture. But is it the cyborg that chooses the
direction in this case? Perhaps the image of the cyborg is neutral, waiting to
be appropriated: then what entity does this, is this a "human" response, or
can we avoid reverting to such binomialisms?
The challenge this film raises I think is to those theorists I that project
the proliferation of "the screen" as an inherent loss of hum anity and
diminishment of space. I think in the case of Video grams of the Revolution the
role of imaging technologies worked to expand access to public space for
bodies, to help liberate the conditions of life, and is thus utopian in spirit, as
opposed to the implicit dystopia I see in, say, Baudrillard. Perhaps the
analysis needs to be made more acute: perhaps it is the entire composition
and dynamics of the society of the spectacle that needs to be confronted, the
role of desire, consumption, and the status of the individual in relation to the
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corporate; and therefore it is not sufficient to rely on the conditions of the
apparatus, of the technological/body interface to define the cyborg. In
Haraway's model of the cyborg choosing tools, who decides, where is the
locus of decision-making? In Blade Runner the Corporation decided for most
of the cyborg entities, at least for a while. After cyborgs "seized the tools"
they did not have much truck with humans.
Cyborg Subject?
In her oft-cited article "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," Donna Haraway
proposes the image of the cyborg--a creature that blurs the boundaries
between hum an and machine, hum an and animal— as a liberating figure
through which to imagine current social realities.1 2 This figure is founded in
both speculative (mythic, fictive) discourses and contemporary scientific
materiality, but by siding with cyborg identity or consciousness (which she
claims we are already inhabiting) one can confront and oppose conventional
hierarchies of gender, class, national identity; power articulations that shape
the world through divisive and destructive implicit narratives. Cyborgian
identity breaks down the division nature/culture, seeing the subject as
constructed at the interpenetration of the two, but in a m anner that eschews
19th century formulations of origin such as the unconscious.
In constructing her figure of the cyborg Donna Haraway is explicit
about its role as a myth that serves as an intervention in a num ber of
discourses, especially feminism; the self-declared irony guiding this effort
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should make one cautious of wholeheartedly embracing the cyborg identity
as an ontological given. But it does have a num ber of uses: she especially
invokes the m yth to help destabilize essentialist constructions of "woman."
Also, as a historian of science (perhaps more than this, it sounds so
reductive) interested in the study of the boundary anim al/hum an (her
Primate Visions book1 3 ) and in attention to technological discourse and
practice, her effort is a way to help introduce such concerns to other
academic discourse communities that often dismiss these areas out of hand.
Haraway is especially calling for suspicion of totalizing theories, and she
seeks to undermine the binary oppositions that support such grand theories:
"self/other, m ind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized / primitive,
reality/appearance, w hole/part, agent/resource...."1 4 By conceiving of our
identity as constructed, partial, and the result of interactions with
technology, Haraway suggests that we can move beyond seeing the world in
terms of a hum an purity that is threatened by the forces of increasing
technologization. To me, this also seems a move beyond the binary of
utopia/dystopia; in the logic of her argument the opposition to the
demonized, dehumanizing technological forces that are eviscerating what it
is to be hum an would be a hyper "human" realm of thought and emotion
outside of the world (of the animal in us, of the world appropriated for
human ends through various technologies). W hat she advocates is a "seizing
of the tools" in a strategic operation to shape one's construction, be that
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discursively or technically. To speak of utopia or dystopia already implies a
wholeness threatened by a loss: Haraway rather proposes moving beyond
such categories (though the "informatics of domination" still remains a
threatening force). If human, animal, and machine are kept as opposing
worlds, then domination can be real within those terms, but by recognizing
partiality one transcends outright domination. If one then sees this resultant
cyborg as a debasement, a subjugation, then one m ust be holding onto a
reified conception of the hum an that is itself "subjecting" and determining.
And removing one's conceptual horizon from these oppositions are difficult
due to the degree of sedimentation of such models bound up in the history of
Western thought, from Plato to Christianity to Descartes to....
However, implicit to Haraway's argument but submerged is her
granting a level of autonomy and free will to the cyborg that has
traditionally been conceived as a "human" property. If we are already
cyborgs, due to the level that our being in the world has been and is
increasingly mediated through multiple technologies, from the wheel to fiber
optics, then to w hat strategic or teleologic end are the "seizing of the tools"
directed? It seems that the assertion of free will ignores some aspects of the
subjection of cyborg bodies in the technological age, specifically aspects such
as I raised in the first paragraph as I traced the road to this particular answer.
How does a cyborg identity fit in with the society of the spectacle as outlined
by Guy Debord, and elaborated by Baudrillard? It seems that increasingly
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the built space and our engagement with the world is mediated by a complex
interweaving of technology and consumer desire, and marked by the
proliferation of imagery that increasingly distances us from a concrete
reality. Does a cyborg identity consider this a negative phenomenon? Can
the cyborg identity make such binary distinctions between positive and
negative? Is a cyborg identity better able to engage in cognitive mapping, to
place itself in the global flows of capital, or do those forces seize upon the
nexus of consciousness / technology for their own purposes? It seems that
perhaps ultimately Haraway's cyborg is more on the hum an side of the
multiply constituted identity.
Blade Runner overtly traffics in issues of cyborg identity and
dystopia.1 5 The urban space imagined is a projection of an industrial,
decrepit, polluted, predominantly minority LA in the future. Replicants,
cloned humans, are designed to fulfill jobs dangerous and unsavory for
humans: nuclear handling, army pleasure hostesses, attack specialist. (Why
are all the replicants white? This is actually a complex question when the
social dynamics of the imagined world are considered). They are fitted with
limited memories so that they will not realize w hat they are, they are given
built in termination dates so that they will never find out their status. The
distinction hum an/cyborg (if replicants fit this term: I would argue that they
do) must be policed and kept absolutely separate, which of course is the
mission Deckard is brought in to facilitate when some replicants rebel and
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want revenge for their allotted state. The urban landscape depicted in the
film is dirty, cluttered, subject to extensive surveillance and policing by the
collusive Tyrell super corporation and the police against the lumpenprole too
poor to escape, but w hat is not shown is the "off w orld/7 the space colonies
that are constantly advertised by large airships. While the LA depicted is
dystopic, alienated, one does not see the alternative which might in fact be a
utopia— for the elite who can afford to escape (who are they? Is this an
ethnically mixed world, or presumably white? Where are the black people in
Blade Runner's universe?) Utopia doesn't enter into this picture, except as a
longing for it (or just perhaps in the executive penthouse of the Tyrell Corp.,
creator of the hum an substitute.) The film provides an updated Frankenstein
myth (with many Gothic trademarks in the visual design), or an allegory of
Lucifer demanding too m uch from his creator. Under the dystopic gloom
the film interrogates the question "what is human?" The answer is rather
conservative: desire is w hat makes one human. Instrumentality is not
human, but to possess desire is to be human, as is seen by the gradual
awakening of Rachel, the advanced prototype of replicant that is to
dangerous to be built in numbers— better to have models that will not
challenge their state.
Alphaville also portrays a dystopic view of the future city, but in
contrast to the elaborate art direction of Blade Runner, Godard m ade due with
filming an unadorned contemporary Paris as the totalitarian surveillance
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state of the future. The model here is less the imaginative projection of
existing corporatist and urban developments as in Blade Runner, but rather
references the communist totalitarian police state, in this case run by a
computer. Haraway's cyborg would not feel comforted by the relation to
technology exhibited here: the film is stridently "humanist" in opposition to
the (cartoonish) dehumanizing technology and the rationalization of all
aspects of daily life; even romantic in its privileging of love, language, free
will individualism. The organization of society is quite cephalic: by
knocking out the central brain-a talking computer that could be considered
a cyborg— an evil social organization is dissolved; unlike the multiply-levered
and dispersed inscription of power applied through surveillance
technologies and through the uses of the built environment that operates in
the Ridley Scott film; which yet also emphasizes an essentialized "human" in
the face of rationalization of society.
An area where one can manifestly view the cyborg subject incarnate is
in the m odem televisual subject and the m apping of urban space by
television news. The television screen has become an essential mode of
interaction w ith the outside world for many people. Nowhere was this more
evident than in the recent civil unrest in Los Angeles following the initial
acquittal of four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
All of the local network affiliates and independent stations went on around
the clock coverage of the events that transpired, mediating the dangerous
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urban spaces into a spectacle of riot for those in their homes who, in many
cases, watched events on television that were happening within blocks or
yards of their dwellings. The local news media normally constitute elements
of the public sphere, but in this interruption of daily routines the coverage
revealed that the public sphere created is partial and ideologically
constructed. Here I will explore the relationship of the sensorial, cyborg
subject to urban space and the public sphere, and the media's role in
positioning the subject regarding these.
Haraway notes the blurring of the boundary machine/ human as a
result of new technologies that can seemingly "think" and autonomously
"act" in ways that machines of an earlier age could not.1 6 I would like to
explore the boundary from the other side, noting the way that human
subjectivity is constructed through interactions with technology. One useful
place to start is w ith the work of Jonathan Crary, whose Techniques of the
Observer charts the increasing prevalence of the visual mode in the
nineteenth century.1 7 Crary takes exception to two conventional views of the
history of representation, that characterized by the emergence of a Modernist
sensibility from a rupture with Renaissance perspective in the late 19th
century (instigated by either Manet, Impressionism, or post-impressionism),
and that history which sees an unbroken line from Renaissance perspective
through photography and cinema in a proliferation of realist representation.
Crary instead argues for situating a change in the historical conditions and
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forces that shape the role of the observer as occurring in developments in the
early 19th century. These developments can be situated by comparing
optical devices characteristic of different ages, the camera obscura for the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the stereoscope and
phenakistiscope for the early nineteenth. Crary sees the camera obscura as a
device important for both scientific exploration and artistic practice, as well
as a metaphor for how the m ind works. In the camera obscura the process is
of an objective outside world viewed by a detached, interiorized eye. Both
the stereoscope and phenakistiscope were used for scientific experiments in
the subjective processes of vision before their popular uses as novelties; and
these popular uses are prior to and independent of their subsequent
elaborations in photography (for stereoscopy) and cinema (for the
phenakistiscope). In these the "realistic" is approached through techniques
that radically abstract and reconstitute optical experience, as in the optical
process governing the functioning of stereoscopic viewing. Thus, the
observer that emerges in modernity is constituted through models of
subjective vision, which marks a shift from conventional histories of realist
representation in modernity. This model of subjective vision also separates
vision from the other senses, in that the visual effects occur within the
subjective visual processes of the spectator and not in relation to the touch
associated with corporeality in a defined space. Foucault charts the same
rationalization of the individual in this period of time, and while he is
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concerned with the institutional monitoring and control of bodies, the
process discussed in Discipline and Punish is highly visual, where the
Panopticon internalizes the monitoring of authority, and obviates the need
for physical intervention. Vision is thus abstracted from stable models of
clearly demarcated space, and associated with a subjectivity that is bodily,
internal, adaptable to a changing and fluid world. Subsequent developments
in visual technologies such as the cinema and, later, television, can be seen in
the light of this positioning of the subject. Clearly they are developments
that contribute to a saturation of the public sphere with new types and forms
of signs, signs dispersed through new commodities that distinguish class
fractions. These forms of industrial image production lead to the loss of
"aura" that Benjamin describes in his famous essay.
A crucial question remains: does the subject that occupies the current
landscape of visual representation operate under the same regime of
subjective vision separated from the other senses? Or have new forms of
subjectivity arisen that mark new forms of visual representation? I will
argue that we m ust think of new models of subjectivity that have arisen
precisely because of new modes of accessing public space that lie in forms of
visual representation, scopic technologies, the changing nature of a public
sphere that has been saturated by media (both those that fall under
Benjamin's means of mechanical reproduction, and those that are ephemeral,
electronic, fiber optic). The subject of today is a cyborg precisely because of
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our interface with technological features, because Angelenos (at least of a
certain class, and to varying degrees) are constituted in part through their
automobiles that are prosthetic extensions facilitating movement, computer
screens, bank cards that alter patterns of consumption and are linked in a
vast web of information.
Television and Public Space: Discursive Conventions in
Constructing Television News
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among
people, mediated by images.1 8
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become
real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as
a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized
mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be
the privileged hum an sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs.1 9
In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord discusses the condition of
Western society as an all encompassing "spectacle," where economic
concerns have saturated daily life in the form of a multifarious dissemination
of images, representations that abstract and alienated humanity. "In all its
specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct
entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially
dominant life."2 0 For Debord in this polemic, the spectacle is not the merely
misuse of visualizing technologies in alienating fashion, but rather the
extrapolation of a capitalist system of production that permeates all layers of
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life through patterns of consumption that shape all non-working time. This
formulation of media and modern society is overarching and quite abstract
and does not allow for resistance against the system except in terms of a
"revolutionary worker consciousness." For me the concept of "spectacle" in
the larger sense is useful to a point, but does not allow m uch room for
resistance or any working within the new technologies of visualization and
representation. Proliferation of new sign systems and the incorporation of
various forms of technology have changed the nature of subjectivity, of what
it means to be a human. To adequately grasp the dynamic of society and
allow for constructive change, one m ust confront the existing situation and
forms of relating with the world, and not look nostalgically back on some
pure vision of a natural humanity that perhaps never existed. And the
current nature of the individual today is, at least in the industrialized
nations, a cyborgian interface of hum an and machine that traverses a social
space that is overlaid by a web of information and monitored and accessed
by a proliferation of images and imaging technology.
Social critic Paul Virilio discusses television in terms of other
architectonic inventions. The first such device in hum an history that makes a
dwelling separate from raw nature is the door, an opening that creates an
appropriated, specifically hum an space. Much later (relatively) came the
window for light, and recently the television screen appeared on the scene,
which punctures the walls and allows access to a world beyond, though
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admittedly a world of light beams and electricity.2 1 Though shifts in notions
of time conforming to a new relation with computer and TV screens
performs a kind of social engineering on contemporary subjects, as they align
their activities not in terms of givens like sunrise and sunset, but rather in
terms of arbitrary parceling of screen programming, a change I would
compare to the creation of standardized time with the introduction of the
railroad schedule in the nineteenth century. Virilio does not view these new
exo-skeletons of our hum an body with the same sense of pessimism that
Debord does, but rather views an opportunity for new types of subjectivity
to emerge.
W hat is the relationship to an external world that subjects in facing
the new window experience? Clearly this cannot be conceived in terms of
some relationship to a "reality" that the cathode ray tube can transparently
present, though remote satellite transmission and helicopter-mounted
cameras offer new ways of providing the video-eye/TV screen with
immediate access. But is this relationship purely discursive, a creation of the
modes of presenting information? What is the nature of the individual's
relation to an external space, especially an urban space? Virilio w ould say
that tele-informatics are contributing to a de-urbanization of an urbanism
conceived in the classical sense. By looking at a specific example of the
mediation of urbanism for televisual subjects, the coverage of the Los
Angeles riots in 1992,1 will explore these issues of the bodied subject in
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relation to an urban space that is represented through the televised screen,
and the attendant implications.
Television newscasts operate according to conventions that grant
them the function of objectively presenting "the Real." In her articles "The
Television News Personality and Credibility" and "Talk, Talk, Talk" Margaret
Morse discusses some of the rhetorical devices that grant this legitimacy.2 2
For instance, the positions of the reporter and news anchor in their subjective
presence elide the corporate, team quality of the news gathering process and
confer instead a sense of objectivity and "inner conviction." These figures
speak directly to the audience, which is defined both in the collective, but
the address is also positioned in a personal manner to the individual
watching at home. The actual videotape pieces that are shown typically are
brief illustrations of the verbal, content: a clip showing the aftermath of a car
crash, a dignitary, a grieving person. The presence of a reporter at the scene
can lend credibility, thus the prevalence of the "stand-up" at the site of an
event, even though often nothing warranting remote taping seems evident: it
is the rhetoric of liveness, of authenticity, of presence by someone that lends
the objectivity. The function of liveness in television discourse has been
explored by Jane Feuer as related to the format: the nature of the medium of
video transmission, the scanning of lines of light in television, the seeming
close relationship to an ontological real of videotape; but she argues that the
ideology of "liveness" is rarely used as actual live coverage, but rather works
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to grant a veridical status to the heterogeneous mix of materials in network
newscasts. The situation is somewhat different in the situation I will be
discussing, both because of the differences between national network news
and local coverage, but also the intervening years have witnessed shifts in
attitudes both the producers of news as well as the audience (especially in
the local LA m arket of late). Still, the text of the newscast is constructed
through conventions that knit together disparate sources: studio
personalities reading the news off teleprompters (in a m anner that purports
to unproblematically present the truth), previously taped segments, the
occasional live location report (which is often merely a "stand up" synopsis
given by a reporter), as well as the advertisements which punctuate the
objective news discourse to "pay the bills"; though the relationship of the
news to the advertisers seems unclear at times. All of the stations in the local
market seek to be competitive with their local newscasts; they do not merely
provide an inherently noble public service, but rather engage in a way to
secure an audience of certain types of people whose viewing time is
considered marketable to purveyors of various products, both for the
immediate newscast, the subsequent shows, and as a w ay of building station
identity that might be seen as a deferred audience builder.
Robert Stam, following the Glasgow University Media Group,
discusses the contradictory impulses that television news has inherited: the
journalistic and the filmic. The codes of journalistic practice— investigation,
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checking sources, synthesizing diverse material, eyewitness veracity-often
collide with the imperative of the visual mode. Stam claims that despite the
power of authenticity that visuals provide, that TV news is weighted on the
side of the journalistic sensibility.2 3 Morse concurs, in that she discusses the
relative absence of visuals in TV news which
are not based on the 'realism' of a space rendered as an optical
analogue of the visible world, a perspectival space which began with
the Renaissance. Far from being a rationalized view of space, news
visual are a collage of items of incongruent types and scales co
existing with the television frame.2 4
In the race for ratings, one of the current fashions is the live coverage
of a breaking story. Several extended automobile pursuits by law
enforcement officers raised this phenomena as a matter of discussion, as
some stations quickly went to any car chase, no matter how banal it might be
in the long run. The attraction lies in the idea of news happening in front of
your very eyes, of the possibility of a tragic end, or an exciting shootout, or....
This has happened at the same time as a surge in the num ber of "video-
verite" programs such as Cops that take video cameras along with law
officers on their rounds. It as if the audience is clamoring for more "live"
(though taped) coverage in the rumbling of a voyeuristic appetite; it might be
viewed as a desire for danger and insight into marginal situations by an
audience that has become complacent and bored after digesting the regular
fare for years. This sensationalism plays off the notions of objectivity and
authenticity fostered by news coverage, but at the same time this tendency
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takes away from the scripted control and predictability of the tightly knit
newscast, where taped material does not have the same ontological weight of
a dynamic and mutable reality, but functions instead as illustration: a
graphic correlative, but not to be scanned and inspected as they typically are
short and highly edited. These new breaking stories and video-verite I see as
a type of "spectacle," but with the word conceived in a more limited sense
than Debord, with an emphasis more on the hypnotic quality of watching
events unfold before the video eye, though the limitations of the television
frame immediately reframe the reception of such imagery. Also, one
component of this phenomenon appears to be the attraction of violence and
destruction, especially when so m uch of TV violence is not realistic but
conventional and narrative driven, and thus can act repeatedly as plot
devices rather than operating as the brutality and finality that true violence is
capable of.
What's in a Name? Riots/Rebellion/Unrest/Civil Disturbances
In the Los Angeles unrest, typical conventions of news broadcasting
broke down. The inclination as events begin to transpire is to show the
spectacular, the awe-inspiring, the more excessive-than-normal footage; the
"news" is precisely in the volatile situation. Several stations focussed on the
increasing chaos at the intersection of Florence and Normandie with live
helicopter coverage of people being dragged out of vehicles and beaten, and
a liquor store looted, culminating in the now historic brutal beating of the
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truck driver Reginald Denny, with no police presence in sight. The visceral
nature of the expression of violence is transfixing, and informal responses
have related how people stared at the unfolding coverage in awe, wondering
where the police were and why they were not intervening. Later the liquor
store was torched, and another building down the street began burning as
well. As night fell a number of other fires began, and news coverage
continued unabated. The "story" was the immediate spectacle; fires that
might individually receive breaking coverage were competing with unruly
crowds in front of police headquarters that later ram paged through parts of
downtown.
At least initially, journalists monitored the separate protests and fires
with a degree of professional demeanor, presenting the events that occurred
with a certain distance, sometimes with a mix of dismay. Controlled
reporting was not always possible in the fluid situation: in one report on the
first night from Westwood the reporter looked at a looted store, then had the
camera follow a police cruiser crawling by. Evidently nothing exciting was
occurring, and he eventually pitched the coverage back to the studio.
Reporters discussed with anchors the locations of incidents, debating over
addresses, sometimes giving street names as an intersection that do not in
fact cross-such incidents make one wonder if they really do know the city,
or if perhaps the city they imagine and visit is incompatible with the city
they were forced to find during the unrest.
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Newscasters had problems labeling the situation: in one scene from
downtown a reporter was somewhat flustered as she blurted out "perhaps a
hundred buildings are like this; no, maybe I'm exaggerating." She then told
of talking with a fire captain, asking him if "did 'this' cause the fire?,"
explaining that "this" meant the broken glass lying around her and the
crowds that swept through. She explained that the captain indeed had said
"yes, 'this' did it." The anchors then talked about how "this" meant "its just
happening here and happening everywhere," about how "it has turned to
something far more than legitimate protest," invoking the occasion to
editorialize. During this whole "stand-up" coverage the camera shook and
roamed around, not in the typical smooth and controlled fashion. That same
night one station put a caption on images from live helicopter coverage,
"Violence in LA." The lack of a name for what was occurring indicates that
"the story" was in doubt, that it did not have a clearly defined scope or
narrative pattern; cognitive dissonance overcame m any in the broadcasting
community. The concerns and sensibility of those in the street and those
from a different social class in the broadcasting organizations were at odds.
At least in the first twenty four hours of the riots there seemed a need to try
to contain the events by stressing that the "riot zone" was limited to a certain
area-and therefore safe for those (whites, middle and upper class
individuals) in places like the Valley. Even Governor Wilson spoke of the
need "to seal off the area" which he clarified was "South Central." One
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station was showing a graphic of the "riot zone" as centered in South Central
even as they were giving accounts of fires and looting clearly outside of that
area.
Late in the first evening the coverage often took a condescending tone,
as journalists and anchors began chastising looters and discussing how
people are helping destroy their own neighborhoods, using terms like "sad"
and "sickening." Kitty Feldy from Channel Four editorialized in her
conversation with a helicopter reporter: "It's very, very difficult to have any
sympathy for the message of these torchers that light these fires and do this
looting; they lose their currency, they lose their credibility....it's outrageous."
The question remains as to whether she understands "the message" that the
arsonists are sending. It appears that she takes a narrow view, that actions
taken were strictly a response to the not guilty verdict, and not an indication
of other serious problems regarding race and class in the city. Several times
during coverage of the events there was the rather ironic, even surreal
situation of journalists tut-tutting about looters, as w hat appear to be poor
minorities haul away a television set--the very abode of the newscasters, the
world that they privilege and reinforce as necessary every day. Eventually
the inadequacy of a completely dismissive and condescending stance in the
face of the further inflammation of the city (partly being fanned precisely by
the media coverage) gave way to expressions of fear, helplessness, awe.
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As the civil unrest continued into the second day the tone of the
anchors and reporters sometimes approached a palpable sense of
apprehension and unease at the duration and extent of the unrest, often
mixed with a sense of awe at the mighty forces that were unleashed. This
mood even seemed to be a sense of devastation, perhaps due in part to the
exhaustion of the news personnel. One recurring trope was the reporter in
danger. At one location near USC Channel 2's Harvey Levin was seen
choking on smoke, having bottles thrown at him, then hiding behind a
sheriff's car after shots were fired. In this case the need for excitement
seemed the most compelling reason for the coverage, a self-promotion for the
"action news" team. The firing that he ducked from was not carried live, as
he had signed off to get away from the choking smoke and bottles in his (and
the sheriff's) general direction, but the station took pains to play it back very
quickly, which led to the surreal situation of Harvey Levin commenting on
his own behavior as we see him scramble in the recently taped footage. It is
almost as if their (disingenuous? foolhardy?) stunt about the intrepid front
line reporter degenerates quickly into a tangibly dangerous situation.
One strategy that news coverage took was the interview of
bystanders, which often meant the search for neighborhood voices that
corroborate the "correct" opinion, that is, something to the effect that "looting
is wrong and we should not destroy our own neighborhood." Sometimes
these points of view are not found, and an unpalatable message comes
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across, or inadvertent foul language hits the airwaves. In such a case
newscasters would typically seek to contain this type of message, either
through direct censorship by turning away the camera, or by having the last
word and denigrating the point of view espoused. In one instance a reporter
asked a young black woman what she thought of the National Guard
moving into positions across the street. "It's bullshit," she remarked, at
which point the correspondent chose to move away and apologize for the
offensive language, rather than query the citizen further about w hat her
concerns were. In another instance a reporter parried with a young man,
asking him if he could justify the pair of shoes he had just looted. The young
man discussed how he would not loot a mom and pop type enterprise,
however, if a corporate establishment were already being looted he might
join in, but not if people were not already entering the store. He further
elaborated that he was a rapper, and that many of his songs were against the
system, because the government was compromising liberties invested in the
Bill of Rights, so that anti-corporate behavior was part of that anti
authoritarian, anti-Establishment stance. The anchor tried to have the
correspondent remove the microphone, and later said he was sorry that he
asked the journalist to ask the man in the first place, claiming that the rapper
made absolutely no sense. Rather, it seems that the anchor did not like the
message the man presented, which seemed considered and principled, if not
completely conforming to a logical coherence. In several situations a
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reporter would try to conduct an interview with a looter, seeking to reason
with them, and attem pt to make them admit some fault.
Of course, it is manifestly obvious that news broadcasts are not
vessels of objectivity and truth, but shape social agendas by focussing on
certain events or themes and ignoring others. It is through choosing what
becomes the subject of discussion that news media can implicitly present
certain ideological points of view. Stuart Hall discusses this by an example
such as the defining of all industrial disputes by television news as threats to
the national economic security, which leads then to issues of economic policy
always being talked about in those terms. In such a case the media helps "to
construct a subject to which the discourse applies: e.g. to translate a
discourse whose subject is 'workers versus employers' into a discourse
whose subject is the collective 'we, the people."’ 2 5 In this case media can
unconsciously be contributing to an ideological struggle through the forms
of the message and not just in the choice of content. An event of such scale
as the Los Angeles riots/rebellion/unrest is shot through with competing
ideological struggles and requests for recognition of a message. The whole
breaking coverage as well as the post-riot analyses of the city and of the
media's self-analysis of its ability to cover events before, during and after the
event can be seen as ideological struggles. In the cases of anchor
editorializing the ideological stance is relatively transparent. A similar
instance occurred on the first night when a Channel Five reporter gave a
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stand-up report from a police headquarters, using some just-taped but edited
footage as support. Images showed police "rescue vehicles/' which are a
form of armored personnel carrier, rolling into a compound. He also showed
heavily armed and battle-dressed SWAT team members in their armored
pickup, then showed these same men making arrests in front of a liquor
store. The SWAT team members— all large, rugged white men— had several
black men in custody. One man appeared to be a transient, and his head
shook in the m anner of ravaged cocaine addict. A muscular young man was
forced to turn around by the commanding officer, whom we hear say "let's
put your face on TV." Occurring relatively early in the affair, this appears as
a transparent attem pt to show some control of the situation, to make some
arrests and thus assuage the audience's fears. The most elite police officers
are sent out to find a target of opportunity; quite possibly the reporter went
out with them specifically to make the arrest, then return to the base that his
live stand-up is from. The contest is constructed as a strictly black
underclass versus white police officers. Of course, the use of such
propagandistic messages dissipates as the many images of clearly out-of
control situations proliferate.
At one point amid the first fires on the 29th a reporter, out of breath
after hurrying back from talking with a witness, remarks of the inferno being
transmitted live, "the pictures speak for themselves." But do they? What
message(s) do they speak? Why are they self-standing? Here in the unrest
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Stam's discussion of the dual heritage of TV news is reversed, with the
coverage falling closer to the "film" side of his film /journalism split. Is the
image of a fire burning out of control, or a crowd of minorities of all ages
ransacking a store a "multivocal sign"? A transparent presentation of
"reality"? W hat is the role of such aesthetic/technical conventions as
framing, distance, angle, choice of lens in TV news in general, and in this
situation in particular? How does the deviance from the normal two-
dimensional TV news image created by studio lights, flat, plain color
background, and the relatively stationary studio camera work in creating
meaning when the news shifts to extended location video of urban scenes?
Does riot coverage constitute a genre? W hat are the defining terms and
practices of this genre? The issue of "catastrophe" coverage has been
addressed by Mary Ann Doane and Patricia Mellencamp in separate articles
in the Logics of Television anthology,-2 6 however, I believe that coverage of the
outbreak of rioting in LA does not conform exactly to their models (e.g. there
is less of the anchor's control of the dispersal of meaning in LA), though the
two are related (uninterrupted coverage, a break from the structured
heterogeneity of television's flow). The riot coverage does constitute a genre,
but the tropes invoked and how they work awaits further elaboration.
Ultimately the effect occurs in the public sphere and the conceptions
that citizens have about their city, though these need to be resolved in the
longer term. In the short term there are questions of how people use/view
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these images. It seems that Benjamin’ s distinction between the intense
concentration of viewing the work of art still surrounded by aura as opposed
to the distraction of viewing the multiplied commodities in the world of
mechanical reproduction is inverted in this special case, where anecdotal
accounts— and even the words of high officials like the governor—describe an
intense fascination in viewing the spectacle, of "being glued to the set." One
issue that was noted by an anchor from the first night of coverage was that
people were perhaps watching the coverage and joining in based on the
perception of the breakdown of social order, and even perhaps to the naming
of close-by locations that were ripe targets (though he did not imagine the
possibility of curtailing coverage at all for these reasons). This has been a
topic of contention in the endless self-recriminations since the unrest as the
media have wondered aloud about the quality of their coverage, and if they
adequately reported on the environment of those neighborhoods before the
cataclysm.
Social Consensus: Media and the Public Sphere
Despite not addressing the whole population, as revealed in the riot
coverage, the news media appear to have an enormous power in reaching
members of the community. As other forms of sociality and information
gathering are diminishing, television increasingly becomes a venue for
articulation of public ideas, goals, sensibilities. The public sphere, the arena
for debate and consensus building which according to Habermas emerged in
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the wake of Enlightenment reforms as decision-making moved from outside
the arcana of closed-door court insiders to a sphere of rational and open
discussion through media such as the newspaper, has increasingly been
taken over by television. Gilles Achache presents three different models of
the public sphere: the dialogic, or the equal exchange of reason between
individuals from the Enlightenment (primarily verbal); the propagandistic,
based on an earlier religious model that strives for homogeneity as opposed
to heterogeneity, based around the images that unite; and the marketing
model of public space that is comprised of various segmented zones, where
it is the uncommitted audience that decides political races, where different
constituencies are addressed or ignored depending on the issue and the need
for their participation. The events of April 1992 would appear to have
erupted within a world that primarily operates under the latter model,
where the typical viewer addressed by the television stations before the riots
was not one of the people that engaged in burning and looting; yet the
stations primarily see their own mission as within the dialogic model of clear
and rational discourse. The role of the televised images, which in their
power overshadow the commentary that seeks to control, contain, make
sense of the chaos, would appear to be operating at some level within the
frame of the propagandistic model, though at cross purposes. The "public"
that the stations address and define clearly is not the whole population;
further study would be useful to study the role of the m edia fostering
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inclusiveness/shaping divisiveness. An extraordinary event like the LA riots
brings these types of issue to the fore.
Some scholars have argued that it is through special media events that
society articulates consensus and reconciles divisive issues in a manner that
can be compared to ritual processes that perform similar functions in non
electronic societies. Daniel Dayan, for instance, has studied the category of
Media Events as a genre that operate in a processual m anner to forge
consensus around important decisions and on such issues as national self-
identity. Dayan has a number of criteria that separate m edia events from
other genres such as coronations and contests like the Olympic Games,
which may appear in similar respects. The funeral of President Kennedy, the
Watergate proceedings, the visits of Sadat to Israel and the Pope to Poland
all qualify as media events. (I will put aside questions of how actual people
use these televised occasions, but Dayan's work is backed up with some
ethnographic research.) Drawing on the anthropologist Victor Turner, these
events work to articulate common social goals. But if television is important
in shaping consensus, if it is a prime constituent of the public sphere today,
riot coverage revealed a breakdown in that process. The initial riot coverage
is not a media event in Dayan's specific terms, but it shares m any of the same
characteristics: the live, uninterrupted coverage, the special viewing
conditions of the audience, the importance in forging a new view of the
collective. But it perhaps performs less of a ritual function than the special
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2 6 4
events he discusses, which are in some senses orchestrated. The consensus
building process appears to be operating (for at least some sectors of the
population) in the long run, as the media are bending over backward to look
more closely at neighborhoods and constituencies that they formerly painted
with a broadly stereotypic brush.
If the media do act as "priests" of a sort in performing these rituals
where society undergoes a period of liminality with subsequent new
consensus, then the model of Debord's "spectacle" needs to be overhauled
somewhat: the media might still serve a system of commodity fetishism and
alienated consumerism, but the way it does would be inflected and less one-
dimensionally evil. But if the model of the current public sphere as
promulgated by the media is Achache's marketing paradigm, then it seems
that within the system of consumerism and visualizing technologies there is
the possibility for progressive change, as the dispersed and defined
constituencies use their specificity to advance specific claims— altemative
sexualities, environmental consciousness, non-mainstream political views.
The technologies of visualization, both on the increasingly accessible
producing end, as well as on the multiple fiber-optic channels slated for the
future, offer a possible stage for transformation of the relationship of
citizen/nation, individual/collective. It m ust be remembered that much of
the riot discourse traces back to the famous George Halliday tape of Rodney
King being beaten, that consumer imaging technology led to the address of
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2 6 5
serious institutional deficiencies. Some claim that riot coverage encouraged
individuals to participate in ram pant looting, though this may be disputed;
still, it was media coverage that prompted the individuals that saved
Reginald Denny after his brutal assault was transmitted live. The same
footage was used later by law enforcement as a way to apprehend suspects,
so it is apparent that the images themselves can be appropriated to many
uses. In this age our access to the public sphere is mediated by electronic
visualizing media that are undergoing modifications and advancements in
technological capability; we are cyborg subjects by virtue of our necessary
and implicit relation to technology that extend from our bodies, or rather
wrap them within a web of images and differing gazes, where the
Panopticon is turned inside out and rather than subjecting us through our
internalization of the gaze of authority, we are chained in some respects to
our TV sets to experience the outside world; this world necessitates a new
comprehension of the aesthetics and logics of the cyborg electronic subject,
and the dislocating shifts that occur as the former society is ruptured as in
the spring of '92 in Los Angeles.
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2 6 6
End Notes: Chapter Five
Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen (Princeton University Press, 1978).
2 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
2 The level of attention to indexical markers of subcultural expression of identity is
highly attuned to the approach of British cultural studies which was in full flower when the
film was made, having recently emerged as an intelle ctual approach, that had studied the
diverse communities of London and other British cities. See the work of the Birmingham
School and especially the seminal work of Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
(New York: Routledge, 1981).
4 Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modem
nation,"in Nation and narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 300.
5 M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 275.
ibid. 276.
ibid. 276.
ibid. 300.
ibid. 358.
1 0 A practice that recurs in Farocki's work, whether the close examination of World
War II surveillance photographs and Nazi concentration camp photographs that show how
the Allies could have stopped atrocities, but did not, in Images of the World and Inscription of
War to an analysis of worker protests in feature films throughout film history in Workers
Leaving the Factory, or the deadpan critical view of a soft-core porn photo shoot.
1 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1977 [1975]).
1 2 Donna H araway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology and socialist
feminism in the 1980s," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
1 3 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern
Science (New York: Routledge, 1989).
1 4 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs."
1 5 The literature on Blade Runner is voluminous. I would like to single out the early
and influential article by Giuliana Bruno, excerpted in a number of anthologies, "Ramble
City: Blade Runner and the Postmodern,"and Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London:
British Film Institute, 1997).
1 6 Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs."
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2 6 7
1 7 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
1 8 Debord, section 4, [no pagination],
1 9 ibid. section 18.
2 0 ibid, section 6.
2 1 Paul Virilio, Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 79.
2 2 Margaret Morse, "The Television New s Personality and Credibility" in Studies in
Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
1986).
2 3 Robert Stam, "Television N ew s and Its Spectators" in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Regarding
Television: Critical Approaches. An Anthology The American Film Institute Monograph Series 2
(Frederick, MD: University Publications of America), 23-43.
2 4 Margaret Morse, "The Television News Personality and Credibility," 70.
2 5 Stuart Hall, in Culture, Society and the Media., Michael Gurevitch, and Tony Bennett,
James Curran, and Janet Woollacott, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1988 [1982]), 69.
2 6 Mary Ann Doane, "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe," in Logics of Television, edited
by Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 222-239. Patricia
Mellencamp, "TV Time and Catastrophe," in Logics of Television, edited by Patricia
Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 240-266.
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Afterword
This study has been primarily concerned with issues of film theory
regarding the representation of urban space, especially in the special case of
location cinematography. At times I have undertaken relevant digressions
on related issues, such as around issues of urban space and the subject; and I
have entertained different theoretical approaches to the issue of contested
space and the city amid conflict. I have focused considerable attention on
Los Angeles as a case study for my inquiry, as it is both a center of film
production and has interesting issues of urban growth and development due
to its geography and history. While some of my points have universalist
implications, I do realize the boundaries inherent in this particular volume.
Many of my observations remain rooted in the specific facts and details of
the particular films and their industrial histories scrutinized, and in the
particular social conditions shaping urban form in the instances surveyed.
Yet, though there are at times divergent approaches and methodologies, each
of the areas that I have explored in this project do revolve around a set of
common interests and themes, and implications of this project offer areas for
further research and elaboration.
Opportunities certainly remain to further develop and expand this
project. The exploration revolving around basic principles of the image,
frame and apparatus could be refined and buttressed for the discussion
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2 6 9
undertaken here. This overall area of study offers an important niche for
research in aspects of medium specificity and of how they have been
encountered in film history, but also for discussions of urban history and
spatial representation. Regarding Los Angeles, more attention to the specific
phases of urban development and their possible relationship to
developments of the city in film could be elaborated. Important shifts in the
use of Los Angeles locations and the representation of the city in film after
the early 1970s offer ground for more fruitful inquiry, and present a
significantly larger pool of data. The area of the relationship of the
individual subject to changes in urban form, technology, and visualizing
processes has remained a vital field of intellectual activity for over a century,
and is no less important or settled now. While such inquiries are somewhat
speculative in nature, they remain integral to an understanding of what the
human subject is and how social growth impacts this organization of the
body and identity. In short, I see this project as a point of embarkation for
further and more refined observations on the intersection of spatiality,
urban form, film theory, and film history.
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2 7 0
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Asset Metadata

Creator Arnwine, Clark (author)

Core Title The city seen: Cinematic representation of urban space

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,mass communications,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-626924

Unique identifier UC11334880

Identifier 3116658.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-626924 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3116658.pdf

Dmrecord 626924

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Arnwine, Clark

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA