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Dynamic of the Metropolis: the City Film and the Spaces of Modernity

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Dynamic of the Metropolis: the City Film and the Spaces of Modernity Dynamic of the Metropolis: The City Film and the Spaces of Modernity Anthony Kinik Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal August 2008 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctorate. ©Anthony Kinik 2008 2 Acknowledgements First of all, I‘d like to thank Will Straw, who saw the Graduate Program in Communications through some difficult times, and then steered it with a steady hand into what has proven to be a hugely successful merger with our friends in Art History. More importantly, he has been an invaluable advisor for many of us who‘ve passed through the department over the years, and he was there when it counted. Secondly, I‘d like to thank Steven Jacobs for reviving a conversation about ―city films‖ and ―city symphonies‖ some years back. His timing couldn‘t have been better. Love and respect are due to Michelle Marek, who somehow managed to stick by me through thick and thin (mostly thin), and who has proved herself to be both a tireless proofreader and a true believer. A number of friendships were instrumental to seeing this project through to completion—in particular I‘d like to thank Marc Furstenau, Christine Strähle, Ira Wagman, and Peter Urquhart, all of whom led by example, and provided much- needed encouragement down the final stretch. *** This project was partly funded by a Max Stern Recruitment Fellowship (1999-2000) and by a Hydro Quebec Two-Year McGill Major Fellowship (2000-2002). *** This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my father, John Kinik (1938-2008). 3 Abstract Dynamic of the Metropolis: The City Film and the Spaces of Modernity For some time now the realm of film studies has been profoundly shaped by two separate but overlapping tendencies. On the one hand, a ―spatial turn,‖ or concern with social geography, which has been particularly attracted to cinema‘s complex relationship with urban space. On the other, a concern with cinema‘s origins, its early history, and its relationship with a complex of forces, many of them emphatically urban, that has come to be known as ―modernity.‖ This thesis concerns itself with the history of the ―city film,‖ a hybrid genre, at the crossroads between documentary, experimental, and narrative modes of filmmaking, that sought to capture the dynamics of the modern metropolis and that emerged out of the artistic avant-garde‘s embrace of cinema in the 1910s and early 1920s. As such, these films are situated directly at the intersection of the film‘s ―spatial turn‖ and its ―modernity thesis,‖ but for some reason they remain largely overlooked (certainly no book-length studies have emerged). This is all the more surprising given the fact that although the ―city film‘s‖ classical period was relatively brief, ranging from around 1920 until the outbreak of World War II, this genre continues to have an interesting, if diffuse, afterlife. Dynamic of the Metropolis looks at this history through lens of this afterlife, and quite specifically through the work of the contemporary British filmmaker Patrick Keiller, whose films, essays, and interviews reveal a great deal about the emergence of this genre, its great potential, and its missed opportunities. In this manner I accomplish two goals: I provide a thorough and much-needed analysis of the ―city film‘s‖ emergence and its contexts, one that takes into consideration four cities in particular: New York, Berlin, Moscow, and Paris; and I place Keiller‘s work in this larger history in a way that‘s never been done, while giving his two most celebrated films—London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1996)—a level of attention they have yet to receive. *** Depuis un certain déjà, le domaine des études cinématographiques est profondément influencé par deux tendances distinctes, mais qui se recoupent néanmoins. On retrouve d‘un côté un « tournant spatial » ou un intérêt pour la géographie sociale, particulièrement attirée par la relation complexe du cinéma avec l‘espace urbain. De l‘autre, un intérêt pour les origines du cinéma, ses balbutiements, et sa relation avec toutes sortes de forces – beaucoup d‘entre elles extrêmement urbaines – connu à présent sous le terme de « modernité ». 4 Cette thèse s‘attache à l‘histoire du « cinéma urbain », un genre hybride à la croisée des films documentaires, expérimentaux et de fiction qui a cherché à capturer la dynamique de la métropole moderne et qui a émergé de l‘approche avant-gardiste du cinéma des années 1910 et du début des années 1920. En tant que tels, ces films sont situés directement au point de rencontre du « tournant spatial » du cinéma et de sa « thèse moderniste ». Étonnamment, ils restent cependant largement négligés (il n‘existe en tout cas aucun livre sur le sujet). Ceci est d‘autant plus surprenant que bien que la « période classique » du cinéma urbain ait été relativement courte – de 1920 au début de la seconde guerre mondiale – ce genre se perpétue encore de façon intéressante, quoique diffuse. Dynamic of the Metropolis observe cette histoire à la lumière de cette renaissance, et plus particulièrement à travers l‘œuvre du cinéaste britannique Patrick Keiller, dont les films, les essais et les entrevues sont très révélateurs de l‘émergence de ce genre, de son grand potentiel et des opportunités manquées. De cette façon, j‘atteins deux buts : d‘une part, je propose une analyse approfondie et nécessaire de l‘émergence du « cinéma urbain » et de son contexte, en prenant en considération quatre villes en particulier : New York, Berlin, Moscou et Paris. D‘autre part, je replace l‘œuvre de Keiller dans ce contexte historique d‘une façon encore inédite en donnant à ses deux films les plus acclamés – London (1994) et Robinson in Space (1996) toute l‘attention qui leur est due. 5 Table of Contents Introduction 7 Chapter 1: Manhattan Project 25 Chapter 2: Shattered Spaces 99 Chapter 3: Kino-Eyes 1: Vertov and Ruttmann 153 Chapter 4: Kino-Eyes 2: Benjamin and Kracauer 193 Interlude: The Department of Inversion Presents… 237 Chapter 5: London 243 Chapter 6: Robinson in Space 307 Conclusion 349 Bibliography 355 6 Introduction It is a society, and not a technique, which has made the cinema like this. It could have been historical examination, theory, essay, memoirs. It could have been the film I am making at this moment.—Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni In 2004, Patrick Keiller, the British filmmaker, critic, scholar, and former architect, published an article entitled ―Tram Rides and Other Virtual Landscapes‖ in Toulmin, Popple, and Russell‘s The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, an anthology dedicated to a recently rediscovered treasure trove of early British films from the first few years of the twentieth century now known as the Mitchell & Kenyon films, after the Blackburn-based company that produced them.1 Most of the article concerns Keiller‘s interest in the collection‘s tram films—actualités with self- explanatory titles such as Tram Journey into Halifax (1902)—and his experience of revisiting the locations documented by these films in Nottingham and Halifax a century later (193). This simple experiment in time travel allows him to get a sense of just how the built environment of these cities has changed over the course of a century, and his conclusion, which was motivated by a project he was working on at the time entitled ―The City of the Future‖—a project that became an experimental found film by the same name in 2005—is presented rather modestly: The spaces of the films were dynamic, subject to tensions as unsettling as (and sometimes surprisingly similar to) those we experience today. Cities are increasingly seen as processes structured in time. In these remarkable films, we can explore some of the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future. (199) 1 Keiller‘s essay appeared in a slightly different form in Webber and Wilson‘s Cities in Transition (2008) under the title ―Urban Space and Early Film.‖ 7 The essay‘s introduction, on the other hand, is something altogether different. Here, he begins by talking about how, ―the spaces and spatial experiences characteristic of industrialised economies underwent significant transformation‖ between the opening decade of the twentieth century and the outbreak of World War I, before including a passage from Henri Lefebvre to illustrate his point: The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communications; the space, too, of classical perspective and geometry, developed from the Renaissance onwards on the basis of the Greek tradition (Euclid, logic) and bodied forth in Western art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and the town… Euclidean and perspectivist space have disappeared as the systems of reference, along with other ‗commonplaces‘ such as the town, history, paternity, the tonal system in music, traditional morality, and so forth. This was truly a crucial moment. Interestingly, Keiller approaches this quote not from the opening chapter of The Production of Space, where it first appeared, but from the geographer David Harvey‘s afterword to the 1991 English edition, and he notes that Harvey had already quoted this exact passage once before in his The Condition of Postmodernity (1990). In any case, Keiller then continues by describing a number theorists and writers—Stephen Kern, John Berger, and Reyner Banham among them—who‘ve also pointed to this very same period as being pivotal in the ―evolution of modernist thinking‖ (191-2).
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