Oh Vienna!

As Rob White’s short book for BFI mentions, the influence of Carol Reed’s The Third Man has permeated throughout film culture and beyond. One of the aspects we’ll consider in today’s “The City and the Cinematic Novel” seminar is the use of shadow and tilted camera angles in the Oscar-winning cinematography of the film. These influences, along with that of 40s fashion, shaped one of the best known videos in popular music, Ultravox’s Vienna (1981), which you can view on youtube here. The influence of European cinema of the modernist and late-modernist period (or British / US / European, in the case of The Third Man) is strong in 1980s film and video culture, as we’ll see in Wenders’s Wings of Desire. The sleeve design for the single Vienna was developed by the hugely influential designer and taste-maker Peter Saville – you can see it here.

The Only Anything and Everything

Following our discussion in the “Dream Cities” seminar about the possibility of describing cinema-going as a kind of communal dream, here’s a useful quotation from Dorothy Richardson (who keeps cropping up lately):

“And so here we all are. All over London, all over England, all over the world. Together in this strange hospice risen overnight, rough and provisional but guerdon none the less of a world in the making. Never before was such all-embracing hospitality save in an ever-open church [. . .]. School, salon, brothel, bethel, newspaper, art science, religion, philosophy, commerce, sport, adventure; flashes of beauty of all sorts. The only anything and everything. And here we all are, as never before. What will it do with us?” – Dorothy Richardson, “The Increasing Congregation” Close Up 1.6 (1927).

You might also like to have a look at the latest instalment of the Guardian’s “ClipJoint” feature (here), which draws together a series of clips tackling the experience of cinema-going itself. Perhaps the most interesting is Wim Wenders’s short film Chacun son Cinéma, which provides a useful warm-up for our final seminar on Wenders’s Wings of Desire.

Metropolis Reborn

Have a look at this article to find out about the restoration of those lost scenes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which we mentioned in our Cities of the Future seminar. These missing sections, compensated for in the version we watched by some rather clunky intertitle summaries, are now reinstated in the film, having been found in an archive in Buenos Aires in 2008. The restoration reminds us that the version of the film shown in the US, and very poorly received by critics, was a long way from the “director’s cut,” and exaggerated some of the most implausible plot developments. It must be said, however, that the reception of the film’s complete version, now restored, was also critically condemned in Germany. Despite this, large crowds are expected at the forthcoming Berlin screening of this restored film. The influence of Metropolis on subsequent science fiction or futuristic filmmaking partly explains this rehabilitation of the film’s reputation.

The After Hours

In our session on department stores, and in this previous blog post, we noted an interest in after-hours, non-spending exploration of department stores in literature and film. Nora has suggested that we all have a look at another representation of such activity, in an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled “The After Hours” which you can watch on youtube here.

Another Diary Date

Martine reports that Mark Kermode (prominent film critic on British TV and radio, and in Sight and Sound and The Observer) will be speaking at the Cameo Cinema, Home Street, Edinburgh on Monday 8th February at 7.30pm. We presume he’ll be discussing his recently published autobiography It’s Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive.

Diary Dates

Thursday 4th February
5.15 pm, Lecture Room 1, 20 Chambers Street.

Professor Laura Mulvey (Film and Media Studies, Birkbeck College, 
University of London): "Rear Projection: the work of contemporary artist 
Mark Lewis".
[History of Art Research Seminar/Film Studies]
Friday 5th February
4.30 pm, Faculty Room South, David Hume Tower.
Peter Decherney (Pennsylvania): "Gag Orders: Chaplin, Comedy, and 
Copyright".
[English Literature Research Seminar]
Both events open to anyone interested.

Botanising on the Asphalt

Following our discussion of the figure of the flaneur, here are some links you might like to explore when thinking about the contemporary legacy of the flaneur figure:

The website of contemporary street photographer and self-styled flaneur John Matthews is here (thanks to Irina for finding this link)

Details of the basic moves involved in Parkour or Free Running, undertaken by traceurs, are available on the American Parkour website here

A discussion of skateboarding as an act of architectural / spatial reinterpretation can be found in Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body by architectural historian / skateboarder / all-round gentleman Prof. Iain Borden – details here

Some discussion of the sensory experience of walking can be found on my blog springcoppice here, and in this article on the work of Richard Long by my friend Robert Macfarlane

Do send in further nominations for contemporary acts of flanerie.

Department Store-y

Following our discussion of Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, it might be worth chasing up the filmed versions – Julien Duvivier’s of 1930, and Andre Cayatte’s of 1943, both released under the title Au Bonheur des Dames. However, here I’m succumbing to temptation and posting a clip from Michael Gottlieb’s 1987 film Mannequin. The film stars Andrew McCarthy (Pretty in Pink), Kim Cattrall (Sex and the City) and James Spader (Crash etc.). Generally understood to be a rather pointless and graceless remake of the little-known film One Touch of Venus (1948), it in fact owes a lot to both Zola’s novel and Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The clips posted here – from Mannequin and Modern Times respectively – both make use of the notion of the department store as a space of play and fantasy as, in both cases, nightwork is occurring and the building appears deserted, creating a greater scope for illicit non-consumer activity. In both cases, the women are present without authorisation (snuck in by Charlie, a mannequin come to life) and are taking part in a fantasy of consumption (without spending) and of romance. You will note the presence of a fur coat scene in both – strangely chaste in the case of Modern Times, with a greater presence of lingerie (Zola’s obsession) in the Mannequin version. Both films have a central protagonist who is unable to hold down a job, although the Depression context of Chaplin’s film contrasts strongly with the 1980s of Mannequin. Notably, in the latter context, Jonathan (McCarthy)’s rise from postroom boy to manager follows a classic narrative arc of the American dream, a rise that is achieved by his efforts to create window-dressing spectacles which bring great prosperity to a previously ailing store. Mannequin essentially forms an unlikely conflation between Zola’s novel and Chaplin’s film, pushed into strange new forms as a mass-market, feel-good film of an unashamedly spectacle-oriented and materialistic period in US culture.

Literary Training

As will have been clear from our screening on Tuesday, trains are a particular fascination of early cinema. Both Walter Ruttman’s Symphony of a Great City and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera include shots of trains within their opening scenes. Vertov’s depiction of the cameraman struggling to set up his camera in time to film the rushing train (which recalls images of the damsel in distress tied to the railway line by baddies) highlights the fact that ingenuity had to go into this process of using one new technology to film another. We’ll talk more about trains in film (and fiction) on Thursday, but in the meantime, have a look at this piece of film history – the Lumiere brothers’ 1895 The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

Humour and Humanity

During the course we’ll have a look at some clips from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Whether you’re a slapstick comedy fan or not, there’s much to enjoy in this film, and many useful perspectives on the physical and psychological repercussions of modern life. A good stab at explaining the ways in which humour can be used to make such broad cultural points, and the personal contribution made to such attempts by Chaplin, can be found in the speech given on the event of his honorary Oscar award in 1971. An emotional moment for Chaplin and his audience – not a dry eye in the house!