In the City : March - April Theme
“You’re not allowed to hate it unless you love it.”
We love the city. The aggregation of civilization, culture, and disparate life in one place forms one of humankind’s greatest social institutions with towering structures that create skylines from afar and awes from below. The hustle and bustle of its inhabits make a living, breathing organism of steel and concrete that is ever changing, constantly shaping and reshaping by those who inhabit it. It’s breathtaking, and when you’re in the thick of it, there’s truly no experience like when you’re IN THE CITY.
For this month’s theme, we’re selecting films that put a particular emphasis on the concrete jungle, films where the city itself becomes not just a location, but also a character. We may be following the lives of protagonists on screen, but it’s where they inhabit that’s just as important as they are. Whether it be a film where the city sets the backdrop for getting truly lost in order to find yourself, a somber reflection on loving a city that doesn’t love you back, or the presentation of a monolithic vision of the future, these films show an appreciation for the city in all the ways we do. We hate the traffic, the loud noises, and the lingering pollution, but we’ll be damned if we ever trade the metropolitan madness for suburban life. Because it’s the city, and there’s nothing like it.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
(Joe Talbot, 2019)
“You’re still here in this crazy fucking city?”
What happens when you love a city that doesn’t love you back? It’s a tough question and one that is increasingly relevant for the swaths of people being displaced by booming economies in large cities. For director Joe Talbot, it becomes the focus of his his debut feature The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Telling the story of Jimmie Fails, a man who refuses to give up his grandfather’s home in the middle of a gentrified San Francisco, the film is a sincere and painful reminder that the individuals who helped build a city — giving it its life, its color, and its character — are being pushed out. The friction between loving the city and not having that city reciprocate drives the underlying tension in the film, and represents the pervasive plight of gentrification taking hold of major cities — an unwavering social issue that continues to be carried out no matter how hard Jimmie resists it.
Through and through, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a city film where the images on screen bleed with an overwhelming affection for its subjects and a yearning to share it with anyone willing to watch. But this isn’t in celebration, no, but rather in mourning. A reflection on a city that has captured the hearts of Talbot and Fails, and asks whether they have a place in it moving forward. So deeply melancholic while simultaneously impassioned is this idea, but around it, Talbot constructs an immediate and contemporary work, carrying with it a pointed message about the social conditions faced in one of America’s greatest cities.
- Greg Arietta
The Sweet Smell of Success
(Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
“I love this dirty town”
Fresh newspaper bundles barely hit the stands before they’re snatched up and fanned open. Scouring the pages, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) huddles around the sparse light found in the early morning hours while the city sleeps to see if he’s made his mark. Sidney makes the fast buck, he hustles. In the bustling streets there are thousands of stories for the thousands of people within the radius of a single city block. At a cost, Sidney would tell you he, as a press agent, plucks the best of them for the papers. Specifically for mention in the all-influential JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) column which can ruin careers or invaluably boost profiles with a single offhanded comment. It’s a simple hustle. Sidney does JJ’s dirty work in exchange for words of flattery for Sidney’s clients in JJ’s column. Everyone wins. JJ can manifest his intangible influence with Sidney’s enforcement. And Sidney himself? Well, he can make a profit. “It’s a dirty job but I pay clean money for it” is a client’s less than glowing review of Falco’s press agent tactics. But “This is life! Get used to it!” is seemingly Sidney’s ideological retort.
Mackendrick’s New York is in the shadows. Jazz clubs groove until night turns day, their back alleys ripe with hearsay to use in the ruthless game of reputations both Sidney and JJ are obsessed with. Late night calls just before print deadline change the tide of the word on the street. The only places worth going are ones you have to jockey for space at the bar. All the opportunities the city provides are outnumbered by the folks looking to capitalize on them themselves. The streets buzz tirelessly as maintaining power and influence is an around the clock task. In the city “you’re a prisoner of your fears, your own greed and ambition. You’re in jail.” The power is too alluring to stop reaching for it. At times the chase knocks you from the penthouse viewpoint to the muggy steam-filled curb. But you get back up. Your relationship to the city is toxic and intoxicating but you’re aware of it. So you soldier on like JJ and Sidney, in the city’s cutthroat jungle of egos, ideas, and idiots because you, too, love this dirty town.
-Kevin Conner
Lost In Translation
(Sofia Coppola, 2003)
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be”
“You’ll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less things upset you.”
Sometimes to find yourself, you need to truly lose yourself. Sofia Coppola’s sophomore feature sees two individuals stuck in place during a moment in time when they ask themselves, “What have I done with my life?” and “What will I do with my future?” Bob, a late forties has-been celebrity who comes to Japan to endorse a whiskey, and Charlotte, an early twenties psychology grad has accompanies her husband on a work trip, both completely dissatisfied with the current state of their lives. After crossing paths in a hotel bar, their mutual loneliness strikes up companionship that results in an undeniable influence on each other’s trajectory.
Coppola positions Tokyo as a place where both Bob and Charlotte can get lost in their environment while finding answers to the existential questions they brought with them. They arrive strangers, not knowing themselves nor the culture, customs, and physical environment they’re in, but as they spend more time together — and by extension the city — they come closer to the answers they’ve been desperately seeking. At first, the city is distant, modern and cold, but it becomes lively, enveloping our characters with a sense of wonder and realization when they start living moment to moment. Whether that be visiting shrines, hitting up the local bars, or even engaging in some late night karaoke, the city offers escapism, a place where they don’t have to think about their dissatisfied careers or negligent husband. By the time they leave — and as Coppola uses her final frame to show the city around them — we know they are strangers no more in the place where they found themselves.
-Greg Arietta
Man with a Movie Camera
(Dziga Vertov, 1929)
“…”
In 1929, Man with a Movie Camera was not only an early experiment of the Kino Eye movement, but also served as a comprehensive anthropological study of the urban Soviet Union at the time. Created by Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Kaufman, and Elizaveta Svilova, the film studies human and automated machinations through the span of a day. Employing avant-doc capture of footage and innovative techniques that played with speed, exposure, angles, and editing all at once, Man with a Movie Camera pushed the boundaries of filmmaking. Vertov’s style is adventurous and risky, and the reward is a creation that captures attention as well as its many subjects.
One defining element is its distinct Marxist values — everyone is portrayed in the film, the film belongs to all it portrays. The seas of people on screen are one and the same with the audience. It suggests film is a medium for anyone, that any human experience can be captured on film. This is achieved by the frankness of the camera, be it placed in front of a live birth, on a train, or within a teeming street of people on their way to work for the day. It can be read as a panoptic vision of the masses, celebrating the power of labor.
-Megan Bernovich
Do the Right Thing
(Spike Lee, 1989)
“My people, my people, what can I say…say what I can. I saw it but didn't believe it; I didn't believe what I saw. Are we gonna live together? Together are we gonna live?”
A neighbourhood in Brooklyn is the focus of Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, a city film that tackles social and political issues ever pertinent to the present day. A microcosm for wider race relations in the US, this neighbourhood becomes deeply and irrevocably fragmented as a result of building tensions between the African American community and an Italian American family who run the local pizza joint. The film takes place over the course of one sweltering summer’s day, and the unbearable heat serves to intensify growing unrest that culminates in brutal violence between the owners of the pizzeria and neighbourhood’s inhabitants.
Lee both stars and directs this highly influential film that spoke to widespread tension and systematic injustice at the time of its production and sadly still speaks to our current climate of racial discrimination and police brutality thirty years on from its release. Whilst its a film deeply rooted in a specific Brooklyn neighbourhood it transcends the one-block area in which it takes place to achieve a deeply affecting social commentary with far-reaching and lasting importance.
-Ivy Pottinger-Glass
Wings of Desire
(Wim Wenders, 1987)
“Isn't what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn't before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?”
There are few cities in which the scars of the twentieth century are quite so visible as Berlin. Made just a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall, Wim Wenders’ masterpiece film, Wings of Desire, is a portrait of a city haunted by its past and fractured by its present. Weaving a tapestry out of the inner monologues from the city’s inhabitants — on the streets, in their apartments, in libraries, on the U-Bahn —the film meditates on the anxieties of day-to-day life while presenting a West Berlin that is crowded but fundamentally lonely — cosmopolitan but disconnected. The film’s original German title – Der Himmel über Berlin – translates to ‘The Sky Over Berlin,’ which provides an apt metaphor for the only thing that unities East and West Germany.
In Wings of Desire actual angels watch over the city. Derived from Berlin’s towering Victory Column which features an angelic manifestation of the Roman goddess Victoria, the angels are able to overhear Berliners’ every thought but remain totally invisible to them. Though they might place a comforting hand on an anxious shoulder, they are unable to interact with the sensual world. They can’t imagine what it is to taste, to smell, to touch, to see color. Their mission is to learn about the humans, yet remain totally removed from what it means to be alive. When the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) falls for the trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), he decides to clip his wings, exchanging his immortality for a chance to be human – and as he does so Wenders’ drab Berlin, Oz-like, bursts into vivid color. Wings of Desire is not only a stunning time capsule of pre-unification Berlin, but more pressingly a story about cultural memory, a divided city, and the overwhelming desire for – and possibility of – human connection.
-Theo Rollason
Before Sunrise
(Richard Linklater, 1995)
“Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?”
A modern city symphony sets the backdrop for one of the most essential cinematic romances ever put to film. A spontaneous connection between Parisian student Céline (Julie Delpy) and American traveler Jesse (Ethan Hawke) spurs them traverse Vienna together over a single night, abandoning their plans in favor for human connection. They talk about everything from love to religion to their personal lives as they walk the city’s streets, and with each city block, they reveal more about themselves, growing closer and closer as their attraction builds.
Linklater’s approach to the setting is counter to a traditional travelogue, trading famous landmarks swarmed with crowds in broad daylight for dreamy, vacant back streets. It is still unmistakably the atmosphere of Vienna, and the youthful impromptu nature of the film allows them to float from record shop to ferris wheel to cafe without a sense of artifice or tourism. The two wander Vienna as it were the halls of their own private gallery, only occasionally sharing moments with other inhabitants of the city. The film creates a whole private world for them to connect, but it is as fleeting as it is romantic, and the magic fades once the light of dawn touches the city.
-Megan Bernovich
“Rhapsody in Blue” From Fantasia 2000
(Eric Goldberg, 2000)
“…”
During the cold winter months of 1924, American composer George Gershwin was fast at work on his latest piece. Having been tasked with writing a jazz concerto for the Aeolian Music Hall in New York and under immense pressure to finish it within five weeks, he struggled to find the right sound for a piece aiming to mix classical music with jazz elements. That is, until he took a train to Boston, and heard the hustle and bustle of a city in motion, the sound of hundreds of thousands of people being mobilized, moving asynchronously throughout a tightly confined space and generating a chaotic rhythm only known to dense urban centers. “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America,” Gershwin described it. “Of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.”
It would be this sound that gave rise to “Rhapsody in Blue,” one of the most famous American compositions ever created, and the tune used in a segment of the same name in Disney’s Fantasia 2000. Set in Depression Era New York City, this short tracks four individuals — a construction worker who wishes to be a jazz drummer, a down-on-his luck middle class American who wishes he had a job, a regimented child who wishes she could spend more time with parents, and a wealthy man who wishes he could be free from his demanding wife — during a singular day, going through the motions of their routines, crossing paths in happenstance ways, and adding to the collective body we know as the city. People plowing through revolving doors as they leave for work with piano, horns, flutes, and strings alternating in successive pattern. Congestion on the subway set to Gershwin’s high energy ‘Train Theme.’ Weighty horns and percussions generating the echo of urban construction. All of it and more are animated in sync with Gershwin’s jazz-infused music and drawn in the style of Al Hirschfeld’s minimalist caricatures. What begins with a single stroke in the frame eventually builds to an entire city, one moving frantically and kinetically in motion, capturing the ‘metropolitan madness’ Gershwin set out to recreate sonically almost a century ago.
-Greg Arietta
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis
(Walter Ruttmann, 1927)
“…”
At the foundation of the City Symphony genre is Berlin, a silent yet vivacious film directed by Walter Ruttmann. Making use of Soviet montage techniques, the film segments the day into five discrete acts. Uncontextualized by any character arc, the documentary explores the city and its inhabitants as they go about their lives amidst a technological boom.
Preempting the travelogue genre, Ruttman places the mundane and familiar at the heart of the film, seeing the city without any romantic filters. Crowds, individuals, and zoo animals all are the subject of the camera, behaving regularly. The dynamic quick cut editing of the film allows the viewer to recognize and develop their own connotations through observation of the subject matter.
The film ruminates of the chaotic energy of technology and ways in which it has become essential to city life. Street cars, telephone wires, and production lines entangle themselves with humanity, accelerating the pace of the film. While it captures the industrious side of Berlin, the documentary also observes recreation and socialization after the workday concludes. The final moments of film culminate in whirling explosion of light, and the day ends, waiting for the sun to rise on the next.
-Megan Bernovich
John Wick 2
(Chad Stahelski, 2017)
“Tell them... Tell them all... Whoever comes, whoever it is... I'll kill them. I'll kill them all.”
More so than its predecessor or its sequel, John Wick 2 feels conceived and nurtured by New York City. Though the Continental Hotels boast locations world wide for the traveling assassin, New York is a part of the foundational concept of the film itself. The franchise builds a whole world of urban fantasy, nestled in amongst the ordinary. It elaborates upon the world building previously established in the first film, heightening its potential for danger around every corner, and hinting at an enormous network of eclectic figures. The addition of the Bowery illustrates the film’s keen fondness for New York, an all-seeing network hidden in plain view.
John Wick’s signature action turns the city into a playscape, staging subway systems for thrilling showdowns and pigeon-covered rooftops as a kingpin’s throne. The film ultimately set a countdown to kick off its third installment, a ticking clock until open season is called upon our hero and all the city’s lethal operatives prepare for the hunt. The film colors New York with an indomitable energy as unstoppable as Wick himself.
-Megan Bernovich
Metropolis
(Fritz Lang, 1927)
“Those who toiled knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned. And the minds that planned the Tower of Babel cared nothing for the workers who built it.”
Cities are centers of opportunity. Live in one long enough and you'll meet someone successful who entered the asphalt jungle with nothing more than a pocketful of cash and some hope. But the math says for every one of those fortunate folks, there's a good amount who don't catch their break. This means with the close-quartered confines of the city limits, top-floor level executives and your average person in the working class are interacting constantly, using the same streets and banks and amenities. Now, imagine your average city based on that description and factor in a recently lost world war, that a wheelbarrow brimming with money cannot purchase a corner paper, and a populous anxious about their nation's tenuous future.
This is the context in which Fritz Lang made Metropolis (1927) in Germany.
As politically charged as it is architecturally dazzling, Metropolis shrouds its commentary on the German state in bustling cityscapes and a genre-defining sci-fi aesthetic. Its simplistic pitting of the ivory tower-living rich and the underground cave-like dwelling working class is familiar — Parasite Hive, how ya’ doing? — and poignant enough to withstand the sometimes clumsy-told specifics of the plot. With a tumultuous history of partial-restorations and varying runtime cuts, the film has managed to stay relevant despite the consequences of time taking a toll on its technology. A touchstone in production design, Metropolis is unique in the sense that its look can still inspire wonder from viewer, finding magic in Lang’s sublime compositions and grand sense of scale. Your favorite Terry Gilliam or Ridley Scott-type sci-fi director certainly owes a lot to this one.
-Kevin Conner