Design Context: Cities in Film

Follows the Berlin Trade exhibition of 1896

Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932

Freuds New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis 1932

coined the phrase, in 1896, in his article «The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered». Here Sullivan actually said 'form ever follows function’

Red terracotta

He and Adler divided the building into four zones. The basement was the mechanical and utility area. Since this level was below ground, it did not show on the face of the building. The next zone was the ground-floor zone which was the public areas for street-facing shops, public entrances and lobbies. The third zone was the office floors with identical office cells clustered around the central elevator shafts. The final zone was the terminating zone, consisting of elevator equipment, utilities and a few offices.[3]

The supporting steel structure of the building was embellished with terra cotta blocks. Different styles of block delineated the three visible zones of the building. Sullivan was quoted as saying, "It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.

Sullivan’s ornament is unmistakably original, but it is not without precedents in the contemporary tradition of the English Arts and Crafts movement. “The numerous parallels between Sullivan’s ornament and the architectural decoration of Furness make it clear that Sullivan’s ornament came directly from Furness and, through him, from earlier ornament by English architects.” (Sprague 1979)

America built on immigration

Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film which revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. With the city as subject, it consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view from a sky scraper. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions.

It was an attempt to show the film makers' love for the city of New York. The interspersed title cards include exceprts from Whalt Whitmans poetry

Episode looks at the work of artist/photographer

on the occasion of the introduction of the new Ford Model A. Sheeler was commissioned to photograph the plant in Dearborn, Michigan as part of a larger $1.3 million advertising campaign.

Wrote directed and starred in

Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker, employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos.

Gets accussed of being a communist, goes to jail, meets a girl, ends up working as a waiter ends up performing a kind of pantomime which is a hit and saves the day for the two of them.

Production line

Sought to gain maximum productivity with minimum effort through repetitive mechanical action

Cycle of mass production and mass consumption- in this case cars

Russian silent documentary film, with no story and no actors,[2] by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Accompanied by live music originally many contemporary versions of the soundtrack have been recorded

his film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This imagined city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. Celebrates industrialisation mechanisation transport communication. The camera has access to intimate moments bed/birth as well as public street life. World peopled by mannequins.

Not unlike victorian arcades of leeds

Café society

Figure of the flaneur also becomes important in contemporary architecture and urban planning which seek to harmonise the environment with the human experience of the city

Not unlike victorian arcades of leeds

Café society

Figure of the flaneur also becomes important in contemporary architecture and urban planning which seek to harmonise the environment with the human experience of the city

The flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer

‘For months I followed strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.’ Frieze magazine

Couple go to Venice to recover after the loss of a child. The woman is haunted by a figure in a red cape that darts through the city.

Issues of memory. Grief Trauma

Plays with time

Mixed up identity

Detective (1980), consisted of Calle being followed for a day by a private detective, who had been hired (at Calle's request) by her mother. Calle proceeded to lead the unwitting detective around parts of Paris that were particularly important for her, thereby reversing the expected position of the observed subject. Such projects, with their suggestions of intimacy, also questioned the role of the spectator, with viewers often feeling a sense of unease as they became the unwitting collaborators in these violations of privacy. Moreover, the deliberately constructed and thus in one sense artificial nature of the documentary ‘evidence' used in Calle's work questioned the nature of all truths. Tate.org

Shot at the base of the WTC

The shots of the WTC don’t look like the WTC unless you knew the towers well and could recognise the windows in the background. I wasn’t trying to make photos of Manhattan; I wanted the pictures to be mysterious and to look like unidentifiable locations. So I used types of building that looked as if they could be anywhere

Based on a story by Malvin Wald, The Naked City portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young model. A veteran cop is placed in charge of the case and he sets about, with the help of other beat cops and detectives, finding the girl's killer. The Naked City producer Mark Hellinger's voice was used for the film's narration. Hellinger died of a sudden heart attack after a preview of the movie. The film was the inspiration for the 1958-63 TV series Naked City and its closing tag line, "There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”

Film Noir documentary style

L.A. Noire is set in Los Angeles in 1947 and challenges the player, controlling a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective, to solve a range of cases across five crime desks.[17] Players must investigate crime scenes for clues, follow up leads, and interrogate suspects, and the players' success at these activities will impact how much of the cases' stories are revealed.

As the title suggests, the game draws heavily from both plot and aesthetic elements of film noir – stylistic films from the 1940s and 1950s that shared similar visual styles and themes including crime, sex, and moral ambiguity and were often shot in black and white with harsh, low-key lighting. The game uses a distinctive colouring-style in homage to the visual style of film noir, including the option to play the game in black-and-white. The post-war setting is the backdrop for plot elements that reference the detective films of the '40s (as well as James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential and the Curtis Hanson film based on it), such as corruption and drugs, with a jazz soundtrack. L.A. Noire is also notable for using Lightsprint's real-time global illumination technology, as well as Depth Analysis's newly developed technology for the film and video game industries called MotionScan, where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle.[19][20] The technology is central to the game's interrogation mechanic, as players must use the suspects' reactions to questioning to judge whether they are lying or not.

L.A. Noire is the first video game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.[21][22] Upon release, the game received critical acclaim.

When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street

Street photography telephoto lens synched with flash

Surveillance

Taken at street level this offers an eye level view of incipient confusion. The eye is overwhelmed by signs, and colour adds to the effect of chaos. Although the image is full of deail there is no sense of tradition or of unity. Indeed it is difficult to find a solid building at all. Clarke