From Post-Industrial City to Postmetropolis: the Representation of Urban Change in Non-Fiction Film (1977-2010)
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2015 6 Xosé Iván Villarmea Álvarez From post-industrial city to postmetropolis: the representation of urban change in non-fiction film (1977-2010) Departamento Filología Inglesa y Alemana Director/es García Mainar, Luis Miguel Tesis Doctoral Autor Director/es UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA Repositorio de la Universidad de Zaragoza – Zaguan http://zaguan.unizar.es Departamento Director/es Tesis Doctoral FROM POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY TO POSTMETROPOLIS: THE REPRESENTATION OF URBAN CHANGE IN NON-FICTION FILM (1977 -2010) Autor Xosé Iván Villarmea Álvarez Director/es García Mainar, Luis Miguel UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA Filología Inglesa y Alemana 2014 Repositorio de la Universidad de Zaragoza – Zaguan http://zaguan.unizar.es Departamento Director/es Tesis Doctoral Autor Director/es UNIVERSIDAD DE ZARAGOZA Repositorio de la Universidad de Zaragoza – Zaguan http://zaguan.unizar.es Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana Universidad de Zaragoza From Post‐Industrial City to Postmetropolis: The Representation of Urban Change in Non‐Fiction Film (1977‐2010) Iván Villarmea Álvarez Director: Luis Miguel García Mainar 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 Abstract / Resumen 9 Introduction. Place, Images and Meanings 13 · A Short Spatial Autobiography 13 · Places of Memory 14 · A Matter of Approach 15 · An Economic and Aesthetic Cycle 18 · A World-Systems Approach 23 · Subjects for Further Research 24 1. On City and Cinema 29 · From Post-Industrial City to Postmetropolis 29 · The Social Production of Space 31 · Space and Place 35 · The City in Film 36 3 · The Historical Value of Film 38 · The Identity Value of Film 40 · The Expressive Value of Film 41 · Voyeurs, Walkers and Drivers 43 2. Documentary Film at the Turn of the Century 47 · Aesthetic Functions and Modes of Representation 49 · The Objectivity Crisis 52 · Subjectivity in Documentary Film 54 · Space in Documentary Film 55 3. Symphonies and Post-Symphonies 59 · Koyaanisqatsi: The Creative Destruction of the Modern Paradigm 62 Part One. Landscaping 75 4. Observational Landscaping 79 · One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later: Documenting Time and Space 83 · The California Trilogy: Mapping a Tortured Landscape 90 · California Company Town: The Forgotten Memory of the Territory 102 5. Psychogeographical Landscaping 109 · LAX: Hidden Stories and Foreign Gaze 111 · Thames Film: The River of Time 116 · London: The Absence of the City 124 · The Empty Centre: Urban Borders After the Fall of the Wall 140 6. Autobiographical Landscaping 147 · News from Home: Urban Crisis from the Walker’s Perspective 150 · Lost Book Found: The Subconscious of the City 158 Part Two. Urban Self-Portraits 169 7. Self-Portrait as Socio-Political Documentary 175 · Roger & Me: The Industrial Town in Global Times 176 · Lightning over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy. The Big Fish in a Little Pond 188 4 8. Self-Portrait as Essay Film 201 · Les hommes du port: Self-Portrait in First-Person Plural 205 · Of Time and the City: Memories from the Dirty Old Town 215 9. Self-Portrait as Self-Fiction 233 · Porto of My Childhood: A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man 236 · My Winnipeg: The City as a Text to Be Decoded 249 Part Three. Observation and Participation 267 10. The Digital Turn of Observational Documentary 271 · In Vanda’s Room: The Finding of a New Documentary Fiction 273 · Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. The Shock of the Old 285 11. Participatory Ethnography 295 · Can Tunis: The Camera as Accomplice 297 · Foreign Parts: Before and Behind the Camera 310 Part Four. Metafilmic Strategies 323 12. Inside Hollywood Film 329 · The Decay of Fiction: Ghosts of Film Noir 332 · Los Angeles Plays Itself: A Critical Tour Through Cinematic Los Angeles 342 Conclusion. Cinema as Agent of Urban Change 361 Appendix I 367 Appendix II 377 Works Cited 389 · Films 389 · Books and Articles 403 5 6 Acknowledgements Every morning, I have the bad habit of wasting too much time and water in the shower, thinking about what I am going to do throughout the day, especially when I am writing. At such times, I have recurrently imagined myself writing these acknowledgements to the point of testing some lines in my mind; but now, at the time of actually writing them, I feel a bit strange because I would not want to forget anyone. After all, this is the story of every meeting, whether personal or professional, I have had over the past six years. The starting point of this dissertation was my arrival at the English Department of the Universidad de Zaragoza in October 2008 with a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research (BES-2008-007953) associated to the Research Project HUM2007-61183. There, I had the pleasure of meeting the members of the research group ‘Cinema, Culture and Society’, as well as other postgraduate students, who soon became my friends and colleagues. I would like to first thank all of them for supporting me during these years, especially my supervisor Luis Miguel García Mainar, who has been an excellent editor of all my texts. He is undoubtedly the person who has helped me the most throughout the entire research and writing process of this dissertation: thanks to him, I have learnt the great difference between describing and analysing films, as well as the importance of knowing how to conclude an academic essay, among many other professional skills. 7 There have been many other people who have somehow contributed to bringing this dissertation to a successful conclusion: some have invited me to give lectures, take part in conferences or publish in academic journals or collective volumes, others have given me access to archives, libraries and schools, have corrected my papers, have lent me films, or simply have given me ideas. For all these reasons, I would like to mention the names of Sorin Alexandrescu, Marta Álvarez, Ana Maria Amaro, Thom Andersen, Steve Anker, Tiago Baptista, María Soliña Barreiro, Elvira Antón Carrillo, Josep María Caparrós Lera, Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos, Michael Chanan, Efrén Cuevas, Paulo Cunha, Eva Darias Beautell, Max Doppelbauer, Susana Duarte, Justin D. Edwards, Dino Everett, Angelica Fenner, Georges Fournier, Paulo Granja, Hanna Hatzmann, Ángel Luis Hueso, Óscar Iglesias Álvarez, Margarita Ledo Andión, Delphine Letort, Asunción López-Varela, Laura Montero Plata, Mariana Neţ, Martin Pawley, Michael Renov, Daniel Ribas, Jesús Rodrigo, Filipa Rosário, Inmaculada Sánchez Alarcón, Isabel Santaolalla, Kathrin Sartingen, Ana Soares, Luis Urbano and Susana Viegas. I would also like to express my infinite gratitude to all my comrades in the Cineclube de Compostela, the Tertulia Perdiguer and the film magazine A Cuarta Parede, because our endless debates on cinema have probably been the most important part of my film education. I am tempted to mention many other people, basically all my friends in Galicia, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Portugal, Colombia, London and Los Angeles for having accompanied me during different periods of my life and remained my friends despite my absence in recent times, but that list would certainly be too long for this section. Let me then finish with a few words of thanks to my parents, who have taken me to the movies since I was a child, and are still now funding my life as an unemployed researcher; to my sister Cristina, who has taught me almost everything I know; and to my partner Teresa, who has had to endure too many cold nights alone in bed while I was writing this dissertation. 8 Abstract This dissertation aims to explain, through formal analysis of twenty-two case studies, the way urban change has been depicted by non-fiction film since the late 1970s. In all these works, the traditional objectivity and omniscience of the expository and observational modes have been replaced by the subjectivity and self-consciousness characteristic of participatory, reflexive and performative documentaries. This paradigm shift has led to the development of a gaze at urban space that is closer to citizens than to the institutions and corporations responsible for the main urban transformations in recent decades. The analysis of the strategies of representation and cultural discourses associated with the four aesthetic tendencies discussed below –documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits, the digital turn of observational and participatory documentaries, and the recent rise of metafilmic strategies– will certainly help to understand the social perception of urban change during the slow transition from post- industrial city to postmetropolis. The films that adopt these four aesthetic tendencies must be ultimately regarded as agents of urban change because they usually expose the negative consequences of this process –the loss of urban identity, the privatisation of public spaces, the eviction of former residents from renewed areas and the destruction of places of memory– in order to challenge, question and even stop the most controversial urban policies of late-capitalism. 9 10 Resumen Esta tesis pretende explicar, a través del análisis formal de veintidós casos de estudio, la forma en la que el cine de no-ficción ha representado el cambio urbano desde finales de los años setenta. En todas estas películas, la subjetividad y autoconciencia propias de los modos participativo, reflexivo y performativo han sustituido a la tradicional objetividad y omnisciencia de los documentales expositivos y observacionales. Este cambio de paradigma ha llevado al desarrollo de una mirada hacia el espacio urbano que está más cerca de los ciudadanos que de las instituciones y empresas responsables de las principales transformaciones urbanas en las últimas décadas. El análisis de las estrategias de representación y los discursos culturales asociados con las cuatro tendencias estéticas abordadas en esta tesis –el paisajismo observacional, los autorretratos urbanos, el giro digital de los documentales observacionales y participativos, y el auge reciente de las estrategias metacinematográficas– ayudará a comprender la percepción social del cambio urbano durante la lenta transición de la ciudad post-industrial a la postmetrópolis.