2145517’s Film blog

In this week’s lecture, we were introduced to cityscapes in experimental cinema, particularly how films frame and piece urban landscapes. The lecture highlighted the shift in city representation from ‘modernity’ to ‘postmodernity’. Modernity refers to cities built around commodities and labour, whereas postmodernity transitioned to be shaped around services and information. This shift in structure, while material, is also visual and psychological as the changes impact how the cities are perceived.

In modernist depictions, filmmaking captured the industrial city’s overstimulating tendencies by using techniques such as formal detachments, montages and repetition. Supporting films provided as examples included Jean Vigo’s À Propos de Nice (1930) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). These films mirror the modernity elements of a city in its alienation and fast movement. In doing so, the people transform into a prominent figure, symbolising cooperative life and an anxiety inducer. The city almost becomes a contraption which consumes the people within the industrial capitalist system. In contrast, postmodernist depictions convey the city as a space of instability and division. Long-standing cultural symbols such as landmarks and architecture in a postmodernist city begin to disintegrate, so, in consequence, the people’s sense of connection to the city begins to disintegrate as well. This disintegration results from the overflow in surveillance and consumption, displacing the order of modernity. In turn, the city becomes a subject of observation and idealised. Through distorted editing and framing, postmodernist cinema portrays the city’s instability.

Both modernist and postmodernist films are similar in techniques, but the intention is what distinguishes the two. On the one hand, modernist films use the experimentation method to almost critique the alienation of the industrial landscape and aim to assess the underlying psychological truth beneath the surface, such as in À Propos de Nice. Instead of portraying the cityscape as an image of objectivity, Vigo applies the fast-paced montage, presenting rich, merry people and the poor working-class quality of life. This juxtaposition acts as a critique of the social inequality and pretentiousness of the bourgeoisie in Nice, France. In doing so, Vigo uncovers the truth of the unsightly reality, disguised behind the aestheticised cityscape. On the other hand, to demonstrate the change in the city environment in a capitalist system, postmodernist films incorporate the fragmentation and ambivalence associated with it. Contrary to modernist intent on revealing the underlying truth being masked, postmodernist films dive deeper into investigating whether such a truth exists (Boggs, 2001). In Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), he uses the narration of fictional character ‘Robinson’s observations, who is heard but not seen, to illustrate his observations of London city. The city is represented as a fragmented chain of shots, making it appear less as a stable space. Adam Scovell (2016) states that Keiller’s film “emphasises the irony that, in spite of the sheer social brutality of Thatcher and her time in government, the country and city sleepwalked into yet another political dead-space with continued negative topographical effects.” By linking semi-long, still shots with a subjective voiceover, it potentially disrupts the spectator’s sense of a stable reality. The city then symbolises the state of postmodernity in its instability as a consequence of the surveillance and detachment.

Apart from the lecture, we officially initiated the pre-production stage of our group film project in this week’s class. We were required to select a theme surrounding our film. After briefly reviewing the content of the lecture, my group decided to explore trauma as our first experimental film to resonate with how the ‘ugly’ could be concealed with the ‘attractive’, as filmmakers have done with cityscapes.

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