Cities and Film

• The city in Modernism 
• The Possibility of an urban sociology
• The city as public and private space
• The city in postmodernism 
• The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918)

• German Sociologist 
• Writes metropolis, Mental Life in 1903
• Influences critial theory of frankfurt School thinkers. Eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer 

Dresden Exhibition 1903

• Simmel asked to lecture the role of intellectual life in city. But instead turns the idea around and writes about effect on city and individual. 
• Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan

  Urban Sociology
Resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed ip in social technological mechanism
Geroge Simmel, The Metro.. and Mental Life 1903

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)

• Created modern skyscraper

• An influential architect, critic of the Chicago School

• Mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright

• Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY   

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity

Fordism: mechanised labour relations
 

"The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them” (De Grazia: 2005:4)

 

Stock Market Crash on 1929 

• Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically

• Leads to great depression 

 

Flaneur

Comes from French masculine noun flaneur. Basic meanings of stroller, lounger, saunterer, loafer.

 

Susan Buck-Morss,

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project 

Susan Buck-Morss,in this text suggests that the only figure a woman on the street can be is either a  

prostitute or a bag lady   

 

Venice

City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always

end up back where you begin

 

The Detective (1980)

Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence