New York in Cinematic Imagination: The Agitated City 9780367247560, 9780429284205

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New York in Cinematic Imagination

New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War, examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city in flm. The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s machine age city are replaced in flms of the 1930s and 1940s by a new critical theory of “agitated urban modernity” articulated against the backdrop of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. Written for postgraduates and researchers in the felds of flm, history and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of New York City. Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Columbia University, and was a Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College. She is a New York-based scholar whose research focuses on cinema and urban space, immigrant incorporation, and political activism in sanctuary cities.

Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design is a series of academic monographs for scholars working in these disciplines and the overlaps between them. Building on Routledge’s history of academic rigour and cutting-edge research, the series contributes to the rapidly expanding literature in all areas of planning and urban design.

Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments Jennifer Kent and Susan Thompson By-Right, By-Design Housing Development versus Housing Design in Los Angeles Liz Falletta Rebuilding Afghanistan in Times of Crisis A Global Response Adenrele Awotona American Colonisation and the City Beautiful Filipinos and Planning in the Philippines, 1916–35 Ian Morley Regeneration, Heritage and Sustainable Communities in Turkey Challenges, Complexities and Potentials Muge Akkar Ercan Cultural Mega-Events Opportunities and Risks for Heritage Cities Zachary M. Jones Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore Rethinking the 21st Century Public School Erkin Özay New York in Cinematic Imagination The Agitated City Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes For more information about this series, please visit: https://routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Planning-and-Urban-Design/book-series/RRPUD

New York in Cinematic Imagination The Agitated City

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes The right of Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cordes, Vojislava Filipcevic, author. Title: New York in cinematic imagination: the agitated city / Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes. Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge research in planning and urban design | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020008945 (print) | LCCN 2020008946 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367247560 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429284205 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: New York (N.Y.)–In motion pictures. | City and town life in motion pictures. | City planning–New York (State)– New York–History–20th century. Classifcation: LCC PN1995.9.N49 C64 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.N49 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/627471–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008945 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008946 ISBN: 978-0-367-24756-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28420-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Daniel AND IN MEMORIAM Ikonija Nata Knežević-Filipčević

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

1 New York’s agitated urban modernity

28

2 The city in motion

51

3 Urban planning and the spaces of democracy

83

4 In the streets of Harlem

113

5 The agitated city

144

6 Agitation implodes

175

Coda: Of urban remains

210

Bibliography Index

213 235

Acknowledgments

I owe gratitude to colleagues and friends who have supported my research and intellectual interests, encouraged my teaching, nourished my curiosity, and endured my fascination with the study of New York and flm. Sincere appreciation is in order frst to the editors at Routledge, in particular Grace Harrison, but also to Emily Collyer, Sophie Robinson, Julia Pollacco, and Stephen Riordan, as well as to Nicole Solano of Rutgers University Press who recommended the manuscript. Second, to journal editors (and indeed, anonymous peer-reviewers) who have encouraged the publication of the articles on which the book is based, and who have provided helpful recommendations for these revisions, including David Sterritt, Ben Fraser, Gareth Millington, and Mark Noonan, among others. Given that the manuscript grew out of a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, I must thank the members of the dissertation committee, Ira Katznelson, Andreas Huyssen, Elliott Sclar, Richard Peña, and Robert Beauregard (who joined the committee following Susan Fainstein’s departure from Columbia), as well as Herbert J. Gans, who have all provided invaluable advice on various aspects of my research, doctoral study, and university life. It was my privilege and intellectual pleasure to receive thoughtful comments from scholars who have read selected chapters of the manuscript and from conference audiences who have listened to my presentations. I hope that my revisions have done justice to the perceptive remarks and editorial suggestions of Marshall Berman, James Donald, Phillipa Gates, Stuart Klawans, Paula Massood, Robert Sklar, Will Straw, Daniel Walkowitz, Joseph Entin, Dana Polan, Laura Wittern-Keller, James Naremore, Noam Elcott, John Mollenkopf, and Robert Beauregard, among others. Scholars who have further encouraged my publications or research include Cindy Lucia, Lloyd Michaels, Gilberto Perez, Charles Silver of MoMA Film Archives, Julia Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans, Sam B. Girgus, Joseph Heathcott, as well as Jane Gaines and the Columbia University Cinema and Interdisciplinary Studies Seminar committee. I am particularly thankful to professors who have supported my teaching in interdisciplinary urban and/or cinema studies, Ira Katznelson, Herbert

Acknowledgments

ix

J. Gans, Nicole Marwell, Richard Peña, Annette Insdorf, Carol Wilder, Owen Gutfreund, Greg Smithsimon, Michael Sobel, Mark Wigley, Richard Plunz, Kenneth Sherrill, Radmila Gorup, Vangelis Calotychos, Cathy Popkin, Ester Fuchs, Xiangming Chen, Tony Messina, John Mollenkopf, Andy Beveridge, Dana Weinberg, David Green, Robert Garot, Richard Ocejo, Erica Stein, Annika Hinze, Rosemary Wakeman, Sheila Foster, Benjamin Barber, Mark Street, and David Storey. Carol Banks, Ellen Cohen, Laura Pinsky, and Gordon Bardos have additionally made me feel a part of the Columbia University community. My graduate study, interdisciplinary research, and dissertation writing has been sustained by fellowships and propelled by awards from the Columbia University Department of Urban Planning, the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (I am especially thankful to Kathy Neckerman, Bill McAllister, and Peter Bearman), the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, the American Political Science Association Award (“Best Paper in Urban Politics”), the Open Society Institute Global Fellowship Program, the Columbia University Public Policy Consortium Fellowship, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Dissertation Award. Resources, professionalism, and dedication to research at Columbia’s Butler, Lehman, Barnard, and Avery libraries and media collections, have made this study possible. I am particularly thankful to Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) – Peter Bearman, Bill McAllister, and Michael Falco – for Columbia library access. I have also benefted from teaching and research assistantships with Professors Peter Marcuse, Elliott Sclar, and David N. Dinkins, and from discussions with the students enrolled in my courses on “The City in Film,” “Graduate Seminar: Cinema and Urban Space,” “Sociology of Film,” and “Urban Sociology: Cultures of the City” at Columbia University. At the very beginning of my graduate study in New York, professors and senior colleagues at Pratt Institute including Ron Shiffman, Tom Angotti, Ayse Yonder, Bill Menking, Joan Byron, and Brian Sullivan, have been helpful, as were the residents of the New York neighborhoods of Greenpoint, Norwood, and Washington Heights. I remain grateful to my parents, Ikonija Nata Knežević-Filipčević and Milovan Filipčević, who in their own different ways have made me come to New York, and to Daniel and his family for their understanding and kindness. The cherished memory of my grandparents Vida and Lazar Knežević and empathy for their partisan struggles as well as for the darkness of my grandfather Dobrivoje Filipčević’s imprisonment in Mauthausen, connect me to the historical period in this study, about which a scholar can only strive to learn further. My late uncle Božidar Knežević’s book of poetry Cascades of Light (“Slapovi svetlosti,” Krusevac: Bagdala, 1969) discovered

x

Acknowledgments

me at Columbia’s Butler library, where I did not expect it, as if to remind me that words do not perish. The transnational group of friends and fellow travelers who have shared ideas, agitation, and joy, included Nataša, Sunčica, Tanja, Goran, Dragana, Tamara, Milan, Lidija, Ivana, Simona, Graeme, Edi, Ben, Sam, Scott, Maria, Leticia, Ebru, Simone, Luc, Ingrid, Milena, Tench, Susie, Raša, Milcho, Mercedes, Devyani, Dario, Damjana, Biljana, Dzasa, Nesa, Elvira, Olja, Donald, Taro, Vivian, and many others. My advisor Ira Katznelson’s wisdom and generosity helped me over many hurdles, including with a warning that even revised manuscripts are necessarily imperfect documents, collections of research ideas to be developed further. What remains as worth considering is dedicated to the memory of my mother, to Daniel, and to our sons, Danilo and Francis. Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes New York, February 2020

Introduction

Walter Benjamin (Benjamin and Arendt 1988: 236) wrote, Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offces and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up hopelessly. Then came flm and burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-fung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. This book proposes that Benjamin’s paradigm of the shattering of the spatial constraint by cinematic travels fails to fully capture the stark transformation of cinematic urban spaces that occurred in 1930s and 1940s New York flms. Filled with “far-fung ruins and debris,” critical New York imaginaries reinforced spatial constraint and sharpened the trope of urban ambivalence through a cinematic discourse of agitated urban modernity (see also, Norris 2008).1 Mediating the shock effect of both flm (Benjamin and Arendt 1988: 238) and the modern city (Crinson 2005: xvi–xix), spatial tropes facilitated as well adventurous and escapist travel, but more acutely, presented confictual social and aesthetic imaginaries of the metropolis and the world in transformation. This book examines the relationships between imaginaries, representations, and discourses about the American metropolis, urban transformations, and economic and political crises from the 1920s to the end of the 1950s. It explores these relationships through analyses of urban change and changing visions of the American city in flm – “the modernist art of space par excellence” (Anthony Vidler, cited in Balshaw 2000: 8). Cinema, along with radio and the press, was the most signifcant media of mass communication in the period of study marked by the rise and decline of Hollywood’s engagement with social reality. The study uncovers an ambiguous, tensionwrought cultural discourse of simultaneous adulation and condemnation2 of the metropolis, referred to here as the agitated city. This interdisciplinary inquiry concerns the making and the unmaking of the American metropolis in the period just prior to the large-scale urban renewal and mass suburbanization of the 1950s and 1960s that irrevocably and radically altered urban space.3 The reconfguration of the metropolis into the “megalopolis”4 after the frst postwar decade entailed not merely a

2

Introduction

radical material and social transformation but also a critical reevaluation of the signifcance of the city in American culture. Discourses and imaginaries in this period entailed projections of a critique of American society, fears of the consequences of worldwide political and economic turmoil, and crises of modernity and mass society, onto the urban landscape. Having abandoned the endorsements of the machine age environment typical of the representations of urbanity of the 1920s, new images and imaginaries questioned the city’s cultural and social signifcance. Discourses of hopeful technological progress associated with the regional metropolis as presented in the 1939 New York World’s Fair exhibits of Democracity and Futurama, and the “panorama of Manhattan produced by Consolidated Edison,” quickly faded with the beginning of World War Two (Abu-Lughod 1999: 186). As the metropolis became established as the center of economic and political power, the most critical visions and discourses devalued it to such a degree as to view it as the necropolis.5 Although histories of Western industrial cities in the second part of the 19th and early 20th centuries abound with anti-urban discourses (Beauregard 2003, Glass 1989, Lees 1985, Susman 2003, White and White 1962), the return of the negative associations in the period of study proved particularly salient and, further, problematic in two respects. The frst aspect concerns actual urban transformations, while the second applies to urban discourses; but it is the relationship between the two that is crucial. Firstly, the decades of the 1930s and 1940s critically shaped the urban transformations that followed. The processes of urban renewal and suburbanization, caused by a complicated nexus of socio-economic and demographic factors as well as public policies, appeared to be further rooted as well in the discourses and narratives that undermined urbanity.6 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most well-known critics of modernist planning took post-war urban renewal to task for its apparently misconstrued vision7 of urban life,8 in addition to its adverse socio-economic impact and its explicit racial bias. “If in Chicago urban renewal became known as ‘Negro removal’ and in Los Angeles ‘Chicano removal,’ in New York the common phrase for it was ‘Puerto Rican removal’” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 206). The racial bias was also evident in urban discourses and news reports that tied the changing urban socio-economic to demographic conditions – that is, these sources erroneously linked the depictions of urban decline and the processes of inner-city decay to racial transition.9 The emphasis on the contrast between the inner-city decline and the prosperity in suburbs in the popular press, and to an extent urban planning discourses, after World War Two shrouded numerous problems, from economic disparity to racial discrimination, from the urban educational system to criminal justice, and from fscal policies to political representation. Secondly, the inquiry in the 1920s–1950s imaginaries and documentary images of American cities in art is necessarily complicated by the contemporary reevaluation of urban renewal. Thus, for example, images of pre-urban

Introduction

3

renewal 1940s downtowns of American cities, including the same urban images once associated with decline or blight, or the crises of mass society and modernity, now form a nostalgic palimpsest of the collective urban memories of the ruins and relics of American cities’ supposedly glorious past.10 An examination of a range of urban imaginaries from the period – cinematic as well as photographic and literary – suggests, however, layered and still under-explored “landscapes of power”11 echoed throughout the latter part of the 20th century. This visual landscape of power, this book argues, shapes an ambiguous and tension-wrought discourse of agitated urban modernity with its simultaneous enchantment with, and critique of, the American metropolis. The linkages between, on the one hand, visions, images, and discourses of the American metropolis of the 1920s–1950s, and on the other, urban transformations and world-wide crises, have for the most part not been studied in depth in either the interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies literatures, or in urban planning and sociological research. The study flls a signifcant gap in the scholarship of the cinematic city of the period, which examines the metropolis in flm for the most part solely through the lenses of architecture or spatial theory. Additionally, urban studies and planning literature has almost entirely neglected the relationships between discourses in popular press, documentary images of the city, urban imaginaries, and urban social change.12 This is all the more striking an omission given the signifcance of both the urban transformations, and the remarkably infuential repertoire of city imaginaries in art of the period examined.

Spatial motifs in flm and social production of urban space Film represents “a peculiarly spatial form of culture” (Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001: 5) in at least two domains signifcant for this inquiry. Firstly, cinema spectatorship is inalienable from the experience of travel (see also, Bruno 2002), as suggested by Benjamin, and secondly, as observed by Huyssen and Batrick (1989: 13), literary, as well as cinematic, urban narratives condense “experiences specifc to modern life.” Cinematic spaces may further represent cultural and historical artifacts of the modern city – palimpsests in the urban modern memory repertoire (Murray Pomerance’s [2007: 4] “evanescent” and also “lingering” cinematic New Yorks [4]), that have the potential to subvert nostalgic refections “with the pain taken out” (Crinson 2005: xi) but that can also facilitate the processes of spatial memory erasure and decontextualization. Decoding spaces in flm enables, in reverse, the understanding of both the processes of urban memory discourse constitution as well as erasure. Furthermore, this undertaking calls for the probing of relationships between the content of urban imaginaries and their historically specifc socio-spatial and cultural contexts. The study is situated at the crossroads of two academic felds thus far not commonly connected: the history and theory of the urban planning of

4

Introduction

the growth and development of American cities, and the cinema and cultural studies literature about symbols, narratives, imaginaries, and understandings of the city.13 Social transformations are always accompanied by cultural processes through which individuals and groups make meanings, create symbols, share sentiments, and envision alternatives, within the specifcity of their environment, or habitus (Bourdieu 1990).14 Urban imaginaries and representations are neither entirely delimited, nor single-mindedly structured, by their environments, and they both can refect current, as well as generate new, discourses and expressions. This especially applies to the cinematic cities given that flms appropriate and recycle discourses at large in the world outside cinema and ideologies current in specifc societies … At the same time, the act of flming any space is clearly an act of discourse production, prey to complex elision, condensation and repression and dependent on previous acts of discourse production as on relationships with the “real” world. (McArthur 1997: 40) Spatial imaginaries in flm represent complex mediations of narrative and visual engagements with the city, further structured by production limitations, complexities of the flms creators’ imaginaries, censorship norms, and audience reception. Nevertheless, flm is an art form through which flmmakers actively “shap[e] history into a heightened form of communication” (Insdorf 2003: xviii). Urban imaginaries and documentary images of the 1930s and the 1940s lie at the core of this cinematic process of the heightened discursive shaping of historical circumstances. As scholarship has reasserted, “urbanism privileges, even as it distorts, vision and the visual;” further, visual representation may be said to bring the city into focus: it frames recognition of urban forms (architectural syntax, street signage); it offers legibility through the reproduction of what is seen (in maps, plans, guides and images); it unites aesthetic and spatial apprehension of the urban scene (levels, planes, perspectives); it mediates scopophilic and voyeuristic desires (to look, to be seen); it technologizes the act of seeing (the fusion of the eye and the camera lens). (Balshaw 2000: 7) Thus, the city itself can be seen as “inseparable from its representations15 but it is neither identical with nor reducible to them -- and so it poses complex questions about how representations traffc between physical and mental space” (Balshaw 2000: 3). Henri Lefebvre (1991) has offered a set of responses to this puzzle by arguing that the social production of urban space is achieved through the built environment as well as through representations and mass-mediated

Introduction

5

infuences. The processes of the production of space unite the physical and mental spaces that urbanity entails (Balshaw 2000: 2). This production is accomplished through spatial practices (that encompass the material world and the domain of everyday life), representations of space (that include normative theories and spatial representations in urban planning and architecture), and representational spaces (that consist of imagined spaces and lived experiences) (Lefebvre 1991: 38–39). But some scholars have stressed that, following Lefebvre, the everyday is colonized as much as it is a site of resistance (Fraser 2015: 195); others have noted that the impact of Lefebvre’s theory is limited because “the crucial link between the construction of place in representation and at the level of everyday experience has not been demonstrated” (Michael Savage and Alan Warde, cited in Miles, Hall, and Borden 2004: 257), while others still have emphasized in more general terms the danger that the real city simply becomes absorbed by the imaginary within this fuid, layered scheme (Soja 1989).16 David Harvey (1989: 219) has contested Lefebvre’s striking claim that “spaces of representation, therefore, have the potential not only to affect representation of space but also to act as a material productive force with respect to spatial practices,” given the opaqueness of the dialectical, rather than causal, processes by which spatial practices are supposedly produced by spaces of representation. Yet Harvey’s mere discursive return to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as the critical mediating link, has left the linkages between representation of space and social practice equally unexplained.17 These ideas can be fruitfully applied to the study of spatial imaginaries in flm and the signifcance of everyday imaginaries within them. Encompassing multiple aspects of the production of urban space, cinematic visions form representational spaces and imaginaries that are both reconstituting and producing of the cultural discourse of the metropolis. The lack of a depth of engagement with urban space in the cinematic city literature necessitates a paradigm shift, to which this study contributes, to “make the urban a fundamental part of cinematic discourse and to raise flm to its proper status as analytical tool of urban discourse” (AlSayyad 2006: 3–4). The urban theory premises of this book argue frstly that flm art joins in a unique manner Lefebvre’s three-part scheme of the experience (collective popular art), the perception (spectatorship), and the imagination (narrative and image) of space. Further, urban spaces in flm underscore important aspects of the missing link in the socio-cultural production of urban space between a) the representational spaces and spatial practices, and b) representational spaces and spaces of representation, that flm as popular art and communicative medium provided. The study departs, however, from Lefebvre’s (1991: 97) estimate that visual form tends to “fetishize abstraction and imposes it as a norm.” Rather, discrete rules of montage, movement and corporality of cinematic art, narrative patterns and visual styles, collective viewing experience, and the particular position of flm as both art and entertainment subject to censorship norms and industry requirements,

6

Introduction

render intricate spatial tropes within visual story-telling that actively partake in representational and discursive aspects of the production of space. To extend, thus, the crucial metaphor of this study, via montage and movement, flm agitates and places the cinematic viewer amidst the agitated city. Secondly, the book delineates the relationships between urban change and city imaginaries in a dual manner: 1) by studying urban development, planning interventions, socio-economic processes, and discourses that have led to the transformation from the metropolis to the megalopolis; and 2) by examining both the independent and Hollywood cinematographies (made in studios and on location), their social and political agendas, and cinematic audiences. The study considers the ways in which these two aspects have been shaped by three spatial tropes that critically engage with the social, aesthetic, and physical urban change of the period. The three spatial tropes include: a) the changing symbolism of the New York City skyline, the slum, and the street;18 b) the fading visions of the rural alternative to the metropolis; and c) the divergent and related set of anxieties about suburban, in contrast to inner-city, life in flms of the 1940s and the 1950s. The detailed analyses of flms are, however, for the most part confned to the examination of the spatial tropes of the skyline, the slum, and the street.

Hollywood and popular imagination in the 1930s and the 1940s The establishment of the Hollywood studio system and, importantly, the rise and fall of Hollywood’s interest in social problem narratives characterize the period of study. Further, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration acted as an innovator of political communication increasingly characterized by participatory rhetoric and, in the domains of flm and photographic art, by realist and documentary representations (see Muscio 1996: 19, 33). This historical institutional confuence during the Great Depression and World War Two shaped economic and political interest in flm as the medium, which, prior to the introduction of television, had a unique capacity to visually communicate with broad audiences. Hollywood’s critical engagement with social issues emerged as a “result of a political and esthetic negotiation [among] European anti-fascist refugees, radical American urban intellectuals, and studio executives” (Giovacchini 2001: 1, 1–12; see also, Muscio 1996) and was, by the end of the 1940s, restrained by political and censorship pressures. The uneasy alliance between New Yorkers and European exiles was critically shaped by the anti-fascist resistance, in particular the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) that “provided a focus and an organizing structure for Hollywood politics” (Giovacchini 2001: 73; see also, chapter 3 in Giovacchini 2001). Although Soviet flmmakers had already demonstrated the political powers of flm by the early 1930s, Hollywood had for the most part seen flm as

Introduction

7

entertainment. European exiles and New Yorkers brought to Hollywood an approach that did not perceive art and commerce as inherently opposed categories. Further, although the origins of the cinematic democratic impulses can be traced to the early silent flms that targeted immigrant audiences, the 1930s are marked by a critical awareness of flm as a democratic mass medium. The concerted emphasis on democratic populism, however, did not entail a shift away from commercial cinema toward an explicit socially or class conscious narrative. Rather, in the 1930s, both forms of escapist entertainment and also social engagement were present. Researchers have cited relationships between the contexts of the Great Depression in the case of, for example, musicals as well as gangster flms (Bergman 1992). And indeed, the following decade ends with the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) crackdown on the Hollywood left, starting with the hearings in 1947. Firstly, the relationship between the social and political imagination of Hollywood exiles, or New Yorkers in Hollywood, and imaginaries of urban space is rarely discussed, even though, as will be examined in the subsequent chapters, urban settings are critical for flms that engage with social problems. Notwithstanding the fact that the two groups were the most infuential in shaping urban flm noir of the 1940s, the specifcity of urban spaces cannot, however, be simply attributed to exiles and New Yorkers in Hollywood. The infuence of European exiles19 can further be seen in their hybrid cinematic imagination, shaped by “the experience of emigration, antiNazism, and the interaction with the American scene” (Giovacchini 2001: 28). Further, memory discourses related to Berlin of the Weimar Republic are also notable in the imagination of Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau in spite of their very different cinematic styles. Moreover, although the social and spatial imagination of flms by Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak often took a hybrid European-American shape, in the case of directors such as Billy Wilder or Otto Preminger, urban imaginaries seemed more strongly marked by their encounter with the American environment. New York artists and intellectuals20 moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s and perceived Hollywood as “compatible with their intellectual and political commitments” as can be seen in New York narratives of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Shaped by the infuences of Hollywood New Yorkers, European exiles, Hollywood studios and also, independent low-budget production companies, flms refected their respective searches for cross-class audiences and radical social change, democratic modernism and cultural pluralism, and, of course, proft. Within not always a realist engagement of cinema, that according to some flmmakers “was going to speak to America only insofar as it would equip itself to speak about America” (Giovacchini 2001: 36), this book uncovers the ways in which New York (and commonly, more narrowly, Manhattan) as the American “metropolis” was at the core of this engagement. Secondly, in the case of the cinema of classical continuity21 from which most of the examples in the study are drawn, the cinematic city is shaped

8

Introduction

by the physical urban settings as delimited by production location requirements and the relationship of these settings with their narrative construct.22 But cinematic spaces rely as well upon recognition on the part of popular audiences drawn from their everyday symbolic imaginaries or psychic mapping. Viewers thus might associate with urban and/or specifc social space or with the attitudes formed in resonance with other media (in the 1940s in particular, the infuence of the popular press), thus addressing, even if indirectly, Lefebvre’s missing link between representational spaces and everyday life. A common, albeit differently motivated, aim of European exiles, New York artists and intellectuals, and studio executives in Hollywood, was the creation of broad cross-class spectatorship. The interplay between the narrative structure and the spatial environment, this study proposes, provided an important link for this negotiation. Thirdly, cinematic cities of the period of study were in dialogue with discourses and practices of urban development, that is, with the second aspect of the production of space in Lefebvre’s scheme. This is evident in flms, documentary and fctional, that include narratives set in slums and blighted areas or that treat neighborhood change. Film scholars have noted the prevalence of urban themes in flm,23 in particular made in the 1940s, as this study argues, in resonance with the Great Depression and World War Two. Although this predominance is not easily explained, cinematic cities are in dialogue with the critical social imaginary of the two decades of study,24 during which the metropolis became the central arena for the projection, mediation, and discursive recreation of critical views of American society. The fourth point, importantly, represents this study’s repositioning of the emphasis from a debate on urban spaces in flm, as exemplifed in Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion, to the relationships between spaces in flm and social contexts of flm, in particular urban transformations and social crises. Unlike, however, the scholarship by Edward Dimendberg, in Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, this book is not confned to relationships between the cinematic spaces of noir and modernist planning practices of the late 1940s. Indeed, one of the several critical differences between this study and that of Dimendberg’s is the emphasis on spatial discourses, social anxieties, and socio-political crises in shaping city imaginaries, which, along with gender dynamics in flm noir, are neglected in Dimendberg’s work. A particular emphasis here has thus also been placed on flm noir (because it exemplifes a critical and highly infuential tendency across a variety of media and national cultures (Naremore 2019: 104)), and on space in noir, not as a space of modernity per se, but rather, as a site of struggle (see Urry 2001: 11). Indeed, noir possesses subversive characteristics that can compel audiences to undertake potentially transformative cognitive searches, including, as Manthia Diawara fnds, by African American flmmakers in social justice narratives (Flory 2002: 180 cited in ibid.).25 Further, Agitated City examines New York cinematic spaces across genre, flm cycle, and visual styles, in an examination that encompasses relationships between crises of the 1930s

Introduction

9

and the 1940s and cinematic imaginaries, neglected in the cinema and urban scholarship. Thus, this is a book that traces critical currents of the 1930s and the 1940s urban cinema, further extending the period of study to also include cinematic cities of the 1920s and the 1950s for the purposes of comparison of how urban agitation emerges and then implodes and fades from view. Cinematic urban spaces present a set of discontinuities in the socio-cultural production of space between representational spaces and social practices of the 1920s and those of the subsequent decades of study. Historical evidence suggests that the contrast between the high modernist avant-garde of the 1920s and the realism of the 1930s represents too simple a dichotomy (as noted in Giovacchini 2001: 3), but a more narrow analytical focus on urban spatial tropes highlights nevertheless differences between the 1920s metropolitan imaginaries and documentary narratives, and American cinematic cities of the subsequent decades. The shift from the “metropolitan flms” of the 1920s and the urban social imaginaries of the 1930s, to noir city narratives of the 1940s and 1950s, cannot be explained by either intertextual infuences alone or merely a study of the Hollywood flm industry. This study argues that the cinematic city discourses of the 1930s and the 1940s were shaped by projections of social anxieties onto metropolitan imaginaries in resonance with socio-spatial transformations amidst worldwide crises. The confuence of crises, spatial transformations, and social anxieties projected onto the cinematic New York in particular, constructed the critical palimpsest within American cultural discourses of the modernist metropolis. The discourses of the cinematic metropolis of the 1930s and the 1940s entailed the projections of the perceived negative characteristics of mass society – e.g., alienation, rationality, impersonality, anonymity, and social disembedding – as well as the growing disillusionment with the modern world, economic uncertainty of the 1930s, World War Two traumas, nuclear anxiety, and loss of faith in modern technologies. Cultural discourses of acceptance and rejection of cities26 can be traced to late 19th and, of particular relevance to this study, to the frst part of the 20th century American social thought. Insofar as the economic and political crises of the 1930s and the 1940s represent an important infuence on the cinematic urban imagination of the period, their impact is nevertheless ambiguous.27 Jay Winter has offered compelling arguments that suggest strong connections between representations in Western art and social transformations in times of crises or turmoil, as can be illustrated, for instance, by the resurgence of apocalyptic motifs in European (especially German) visual art during and after World War One.28 Sources of anti-urban bias manifested in these discourses or visions often draw from a Biblical repertoire of narratives of urban decline and fall, but according to Winter’s argument, the content and form that the discourses and visions took was shaped by the resonances specifc to the period – in particular with reference to The Great War. Winter’s, and also Paul Fussell’s, analyses of resonances

10 Introduction with crises in visual art across a broad range of 18th and 19th century examples, trace the nuanced variations of the projections of apocalyptic motifs onto the urban landscape. Indeed, discourses critical of urbanity are not limited to the period of study; neither are their linkages with economic and political crises apparent or suffcient to explain the urban ambivalence. Krutnik has pointed out that cinematic narratives are “often a little too conveniently framed as a symptomatic response to the cultural and social upheavals besetting the U.S. after the Second World War” (Krutnik 1997: 83). Projections of the motifs of decline on the metropolis or resonances with social crises ought to be seen as an acceleration of earlier tendencies, but the presence of predecessors would still not explain the predominance of urban themes in such a broad range of examples. Notwithstanding the signifcance of the literary and visual art urban discourse in the frst part of the 20th century, the aesthetic identifcation between the camera and the gazes at, as well as the motions through, the city of an urban faneûr, represents an important precursor for the specifcally cinematic engagement with the city. Further, the metropolitan flms of the 1920s signaled the adoption of urbanity as the narrative – the city acts, as it were, as the main protagonist in a drama of its daily occurrences, from dawn to after hours. Presenting discontinuities with the 1920s visual cityscapes, cinematic cities of the 1930s and the 1940s coincide not only with economic and political crises but also with the creation of the metropolis, and the radical alteration of the physical and social environment of the metropolis into the megalopolis. Films documented the spatial transformation but also actively mediated and also shaped discourses about the city. Notwithstanding the importance of photography and flm as cultural artifacts, the cinematic cities of the decades of study are signifcant because of their discursive, as well as urban discourse-producing, attributes. This new critical discourse, the study argues by examining New York in flm, is that of agitated urban modernity. The cinematic feld ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s presents agitating tensions resonating with both the broader cultural and planning discourses, (sub)urban transformations, and also the deeper economic and political crises transposed, transmuted, reshaped, and radically re-envisioned into an imaginative landscape of modernity. The 1930s, in particular, were “a decade of considerable technological innovation in industry … the triumph of the mass media, the Hollywood movie industry, … [and] the modern rotogravure illustrated press” (Hobsbawm 1996: 102). Newspaper circulation doubled between 1920 and 1950 in the U.S. and radio transformed the household in powerful ways, bringing information to the illiterate and the house-bound and also, in 1938, spreading mass panic following Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” transmission. Cinema became the key international mass medium, and also established the global dominance of the English language. The urban environment functioned, amidst economic and political turmoil, as the central arena for this popular culture transformation. A combination of the

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conditions of unemployment of the 1930s, the need for escape from the dreary reality of the Depression, the changing social mores of the 1920s, and the technological innovation of the talking pictures, popularized movie theaters as “dream palaces” in the already established urban entertainment districts where classes and genders mixed. The cinematic revolution of the sound motion pictures brought to broad popular audiences escapist images along with narratives that related to their own lives in times of struggle. Movie theaters and urban entertainment districts represented an important aspect to the continuing appeal of the urban environment in the midst of the hardest economic times. Several important characteristics bear on the nature of cinema as both art and entertainment. First, as Herbert J. Gans (1957) pointed out, flm as a popular art that is a collective and costly endeavor is characterized by a feedback process in which audience preferences and tastes impact the creation of a flm (selection of themes, scenes, actors, directors, setting), which enables the flm’s economic sustainability but often limits or constrains cinematic narratives. Film directors like Hitchcock and Welles, for example, have indeed understood this process and its limitations, deliberately calculating the expectations of audiences within cinematic narratives. But to the extent that cinematic experience is a social act, it needs to be emphasized that the images and narratives of the period of study also greatly limited or underestimated the range of this act for over one half of the audience of a different gender and/or race (see Mulvey 1989, Shohat and Stam 1994, Stam 2000). Within complex visual and narrative language that makes their story-telling life-like and larger-than-life, many other cinematic experiences that have been critical of such gendered or racial representations have also entailed liberating acts. In this context, David Riesman’s (1961) note in The Lonely Crowd of more than half a century ago bears repeating as much as it also requires challenging, reinterpreting, and updating. I believe that the movies, in many unexpected ways, are liberating agents, and that they need defense against indiscriminate highbrow criticism as well as against the ever-ready veto groups who want movies to tutor their audiences in all the pious virtues that home and school have failed to inculcate.29 By the time that Riesman was writing these words, however, Hollywood was becoming signifcantly less democratic, pluralist, and ambiguous in its imaginaries; further, Riesman did not fully theorize the possibility that the same flm narratives could be interpreted differently by alternate ideological constellations. Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton of Columbia University’s Offce of Radio Research had already noted in 1943 that radio audiences responded to different messages based on their social origins, individual agendas, and cultural backgrounds (Giovacchini 2001: 171). The promise of the media as

12 Introduction a social unifer is at best suspect, but the democratic promise of cinema was also different given its visual and narrative structure, and its mixture of art and entertainment, a promise and mixture quite unlike that offered by the radio or the press. The urban environment and socio-spatial imaginaries in flms of the 1930s and the 1940s played a critical role in bridging the reactions and responses of different audiences. Secondly, as scholars have argued in the case of other forms of popular amusement, early 20th century audiences focked to theaters and penny arcades seeking escape from the dreary reality of the long, exhausting workday in the industrial economy or from the daily grind in the offce (Lewis 2003, McDonnell and Allen 2002, Nasaw 1999). Andrew Bergman (1992), writing about the cinema of the Great Depression, noted that if audiences escaped from the harsh realities of unemployment and poverty into the world of popular amusements, they nevertheless did not “escape” into a world they could not relate to, thus suggesting a complicated relationship between the escapist and non-escapist aspects of the entertainment of the 1930s. This relationship becomes even more intricate in the 1940s’ flms’ urban fctional worlds as well as in the increasingly semi-documentary examples of on-location shooting. What did cinematic representations tell popular audiences about the urban environments that they inhabited, or alternatively, what alternate urban worlds did the flm narratives offer as an escape or an imaginative voyage? Socially conscious cinema of the 1930s tackled subjects such as urban poverty within varied flm genres, including crime stories specifc to the gangster cycle. The city in the latter case becomes a critical environment in which the new cinematic hero – “the city boy” – emerges, whose frst metropolitan embodiment and nationally-known urban male flm star is James Cagney (Sklar 1992). Although for the most part the city represents a stage-set, it nevertheless emerges as a central arena for the narrative engagement with a range of social problems: the criminal justice system, low-income housing, and unemployment during the Great Depression (Sklar 1992), among others. In the flms of the 1940s, however, urban imaginaries assume a critical, and also more complex, visual and narrative role. The 1940s period – the middle of which, in 1946, is marked by “all-time-high Hollywood attendance fgures” (Harris 2003: 5) – is also remembered for neorealist representations of social problems, praised by the flm theorist André Bazin (Bazin and Gray 1967), who endorsed the abilities of the cinematic image to record motion in time and to present the ambiguities of the real. The emphasis on the capacity of the flm camera to record actual places and locations in the 1940s is, however, further complicated by the uses of photographic technologies developed during World War Two for military purposes (Virilio 1989). The American cinematic metropolis of the 1930s and the 1940s also featured “New York streets and neighborhoods” elaborately staged in Hollywood studios to emulate the actual city (see Sanders 2001). While

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13

Chicago was the setting for gangster genre narratives of the early 1930s, most notably Little Caesar (d. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and Public Enemy (d. William A. Wellman, 1931), the poor neighborhoods of New York in flms of the same period were most commonly tenement slums, docks, or waterfront areas. “Low-density working class districts in other cities were less commonly portrayed and, a fortiori, the suburbs of New York and of other cities stayed completely out of the picture,” with the exception of the documentary flm The City (d. Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939) (Sutcliffe 1984: 163). New York slums were commonly constructed in Hollywood studios, however. Further, as a cost-saving measure, the Hollywood New York stage sets of the 1930s and the 1940s became virtually the universal image of the American cinematic city of the period. Yet possible truth claims invoked in many documentary-like flms entail, of course, a complex staging of urban imaginary narratives, as in The Naked City (d. Jules Dassin, 1948), while a sense of fakeness that might underlie the slums created in a movie studio for the production of The Dead End (d. William Wyler, 1937) resonated as “real” with popular audiences in a narrative that pointed out the core human decency of many slum-dwellers who “deserved a better chance in life” (Sutcliffe 1984: 163). Depictions such as Wyler’s had, in addition, a socially-benefcial end-goal in prompting housing reform even if, of course, the urban renewal period that followed had also in the subsequent decades negative effects in reinforcing the ghetto of exclusion – precisely the opposite of what one of the chief protagonists, the architect in Dead End, dreamed about. In another example, Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) similarly brought a sense of urban zest and “authenticity” in a simulated New York waterfront staged in Hollywood. Yet another example is Dark Corner (1946), which was shot in Hollywood as well as on location in New York.30 Further, as was clear to Soviet and German cinematographers since the 1920s, flm could be a powerful instrument of propaganda, although as also became apparent, flm could as well serve as a potentially subversive, never fully controllable, medium. Critics concerned with the social meanings of the medium saw in it a potential for enlightening popular audiences about the profound horrors of their time (Kracauer and Quaresima 2004), although they failed perhaps to conceptually engage with the relationships between cinema as the art of visual montage (therefore, manipulation, deception) and the art of motion pictures that captures movement in real time yet condenses temporality. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, its historical distortions aside (see Forgacs 2000b), prompted James Agee’s attempt to articulate the nexus between the flm’s urban social discourse and its cinematic form. The author noted in 1947 that he appreciated the flm not because of its use of non-actors, its semi-documentary approach, or its “realistic” feel. It is rather, that, [it] show[s] a livelier aesthetic and moral respect for reality – which “realism” can as readily smother as liberate – than most

14

Introduction fctional flms, commercial investments in professional reliability, ever manage to. If they are helped to this – as they are – by their concern for actual people and places, that is more than can be said for most documentaries, which by average are as dismally hostile to reality as most fction flms. The flms I most eagerly look forward to will not be documentaries but works of pure fction, played against, and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality. (Agee 2000: 230)31

Notwithstanding Agee’s infuence on the important realist flmmakers in this period,32 what is signifcant for this study is that the noted narrative and visual playing into and, especially, against the then-established representational visions, exposed urban tensions, conficts, anxieties, traumas, and also possibilities, connections, and alternatives. In this manner too, flm both acknowledged and questioned the transformation of metropolis to megalopolis. These flms left us, in other words, with imagery that implicitly, although not always intentionally, contested the course of American urban development. For even if some of the noir flms vilifed the urban environment they did so by visualizing urban decay in a manner of an explicit and implicit exposure of, in James Naremore’s estimate (1998), the savagery of the capitalist system.33 And many of these cinematic narratives flmed at future urban renewal areas portrayed these neighborhoods – the Upper West Side neighborhoods that gave way to Lincoln Center, the Third Avenue El, the pre-urban renewal East Harlem, the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles – as economically and ethnically diverse sites that also housed artists and artisans. Further, given that in their critique of the brutality and ruthlessness of the economic system they remain among the most critical examples of American flm, these cinematic urban narratives might also allow for a juxtaposition with the urban flms of the decades that followed the HUAC hearings, although that project is beyond the scope of this study.

The nexus of spatial imaginaries and social transformations: New York’s agitated urban modernity The discontinuity in urban visions from the 1920s to the 1950s marks an important departure from the ways in which the modern cinematic city was conceived. The relationships between urban planning and the spatial tropes of flm – the skyline, the urban-rural contrast, and the emerging suburbia – are at once material and symbolic. The skyline, associated for the most part with New York but also with Chicago as the frst skyscraper city, represents, frstly, a material manifestation of the economic and political forces that reshaped the cityscape, and the emerging planning policies governing physical space that included lot zoning regulations and building height (see Revell 1992). New York’s vertical ascent was, as Kenneth Jackson (1984: 324) pointed out, prompted by the “specialization and differentiation of the

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Manhattan business district” that led to “rising land costs;” thus, by 1930, in most business hubs low-rise structures were quickly replaced by skyscrapers. By 1950, Manhattan remained “the most intensely developed piece of real estate in the United States” with a population density of 86,730 per square mile (in contrast, LA’s density was 4,391 and Chicago’s 16,165 per square mile) (Jackson 1984: 325). The skyline can secondly be seen as an icon of New York’s landscape of power, and after 11 September 2001, a site of national identifcation (Leach 2005: 182). From the early to the mid-20th century, the skyline became America’s growing symbol of global dominance, New York’s insignia of economic power and of its “modern” architectural triumph over European cities, and a metaphor for the promise of social mobility for over a million and half immigrants who settled in New York between 1880 and 1920. In the 1920s imaginaries and documentary representations, the skyline suggests not merely urban promise but also speed, movement, the propelling forces of modernity, and the Fordist economy. In the decades that followed, the dissipating associations of the urban promise with the skyline are strongly overshadowed by crises, in particular in the 1930s social narratives. The 1940s and early 1950s noir skyline imaginaries hint at negative connotations of class inequality, criminality, social corruption, anonymity, and alienation. At the same time, the concealed, delimited, or suggestively revealed (Straw 1997) skyline tropes in the narratives of urban crime, corruption, or individual disorientation of the same decade transmute the material domain of the cityscape into ambiguous fgurations of both the exposure and erasure of urban social anxieties. Insofar as the skyline becomes the symbol of the metropolis, this identifcation is expanded to the city as a whole, not merely limited to its downtown districts. The contrasting urban-rural and suburban-urban tropes demonstrate more ambiguously the economic and cultural triumph of the metropolis and convey, through cinematic lenses and the points of view of the protagonists, a signifcant cultural unease and social anxiety about the American city. Critical skyline visions, which ought to be viewed beyond their possible poles of the sublime and the uncanny or beyond their fgurations of instability (contra Lindner 2015: 10), can also be symbolically tied to the devaluing of the metropolis suggested by the anti-urban anxieties in the decades of this study. Urban planning played a key role as a mediating force between both the notion of valuing as well as of devaluing of the city. This can, for instance, be seen in the manner in which planning discourses adopted and at times enhanced social and racial biases, as a component of a specifc type of urban renewal project, many of which undermined inner-city neighborhoods in order to supposedly save them from the assumed “blight.” Amidst the economic impoverishment and turmoil of the 1930s, New York City completes its skyline and ameliorates its infrastructure, and becomes the site for projected discourses that at once enhance and question the images and understandings of the modern city.

16

Introduction

But rather than assembling evidence for a cultural, cinematic and urban planning history of this historical period, this study proposes an interdisciplinary investigation of the cinematic New York of the 1930s and 1940s – the site of the agitated metropolitan landscape of modernity. The agitated city metaphor encompasses a) the ways in which the city was understood, perceived, experienced, and represented, and b) direct and indirect relationships between these imaginaries and the historical processes that led to crises and also urban transformations in the period of study.34 In the context of city planning, this metaphor refers to the tension and collision between different urban paradigms and the resulting interventions supported by economic and state interests, a tension that was “resolved” by suburbanization, urban renewal, and the later decline in public and redistributive investments in American cities. As Abu-Lughod (1999: 182) points out, New Deal policies fostered an investment in cities but also decentralization; in New York, Robert Moses, then parks commissioner, was able to utilize PWA workforces to rebuild neighborhoods, parks, highways, bridges, and suburbs. While, as Abu-Lughod noted, the public policies promulgated by Robert Moses did not perceive a confict in this dual investment in the inner-city areas as well as the region, the two represented different economic and political interests and social alternatives. If the term “cultural structures”35 could apply in this context, it might be used to suggest the contradictory poles underlying these opposing discourses and tenets of urban development. The transformation from the metropolis into the megalopolis was thus shaped by economic conditions, demographic changes, and public policies, but it further entailed specifc symbols, narratives, and representations that upheld a different vision (in normative, representational, and imaginary senses) of the city. To the extent that these visions signifed a devaluing of the metropolis, they were marked by social and racial biases and misconceptions about the urban environment, in particular concerning the inter-relations between physical space and neighborhood life. Adopting a rational-comprehensive approach to urban development, planning retreated into its technical role with the commencement of urban renewal and suburban highways and subdivisions, thus neglecting and even dismissing broader cultural discourses and social anxieties about city life, not to mention the deeper inequalities masked within them. Ironically, planning’s very evasion of the interplay between these anxieties, social conficts, demographic changes, and structural conditions, entailed the adoption of broader cultural and social biases against the city and its diverse, working-class populations as the very motivations for many urban renewal projects. One approach to planning theory sees confict as a constitutive element of social relations that carries a transformative potential, a “potential resource for political emancipation and democratic transformation” (Gualini 2015: 3, 4). That indeed could be seen as one possible hope of planning. This study wishes, on the other hand, to emphasize the dark side of planning, as argued by Oren Yftachel (1998: 1), in which for elites, “urban and regional

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17

planning provides an important mechanism of oppression and control.” Witness for example the way that zoning was used for the purposes of systematic racial exclusion (Massey and Denton 1993, Hirt 2014). Yiftachel highlights the amelioration drive captured by the conception of planning as social betterment, which he terms idealistic and unrealistic. Citing David Harvey, Yiftachel (1998: 5) argues that the modern capitalist state and its planning apparatus facilitates the accumulation of capital and reproduces class inequality; quoting Peter Marcuse, that the housing policies of the urban renewal era in the U.S. used “spatial public policies to control, contain and deprive the poor and shift material and political resources to the wealthy.” Of particular signifcance for the context discussed here is, furthermore, the link between planning and, according to Yiftachel, the patriarchal order which subordinates women. Dolores Hayden (1996 [1980]: 143–144) has argued that neighborhoods are designed to emphasize that the woman’s place is “at home,” constraining women economically and socially, not simply physically. Hayden (1996 [1980]: 153) advocates for a new paradigm of home needed to support working women that would reshape the public and private space division along feminist and socialist lines. In 1929 Christine Fredrick published Selling Mrs. Consumer promoting homeownership, access to consumer credit, and marketing advice to target female consumers. Similarly, in 1935, General Electric sponsored a competition in which architects designed houses for Mr. and Mrs. Bliss. The Hoover Commission on Home Ownership and Home Building’s early 1930s goal of building private single-family homes was postponed by the Great Depression and World War Two and it was not until the late 1940s that the FHA- and VA-backed mortgages boosted the construction of single family homes, with Mrs. Consumers realizing spatial privacy and conformity in consumption by the 1950s (Hayden 1996 [1980]: 144). Writing in 1980, Hayden (145) describes conditions of domestic violence and charges that “the existing system of government services, intended to stabilize households and neighborhoods by ensuring the minimum conditions for a decent home life to all Americans, almost always assume[d] that the traditional household with a male worker and an unpaid homemaker [was] the goal to be achieved or simulated.” Hayden (1996 [1980]: 148) cites history of housing activism and agitation to address the needs of women and proposes extending existing housing efforts in a feminist direction including helping battered women and children, providing necessary services, including day care, food, laundry facilities, etc (ibid., 150, 153). The metaphor of agitated city resonates thus more broadly with urban social transformations and the impact of the economic and political crises, and their projections of the characteristics of mass society onto the urban and suburban landscape.36 Linguistically, the word “agitated” recalls turbulence, motion, and commotion, and has social, psychological, and political resonances, that might capture the turmoil of the Great Depression

18

Introduction

and the anxieties and paranoias of the World War Two period. The use of the word is symbolic in this sense and suggestive of an imaginary of urban discourses. Indeed, American cities in the period of study did not experience the overt confict and contention as during the earlier industrial city era, although, as will be discussed, tenant unrest did occur in 1932, and race riots took place in 1935 and 1943 in New York. In this manner, the metaphor agitated urban modernity resonates with the socio-economic crises and the social and physical transformations of the metropolis taking place beyond the space of the cinematic frame. While exact parallels cannot be made, the cinematic metaphor of agitated urban modernity captures the friction between the established and solidifed metropolitan power and its Janus-faced unsettled, tense, and even perturbed visual and narrative urban discourses. The point of the study is not, however, to seek overlaps and refections among visual discourses, crises, and physical urban changes, but rather to examine their specifc points of intersection and indeed contestation. Dimendberg (2004) has established important linkages between urban discourses and cinematic spaces in flm noir, and has also noted the contrast between the cinematic cities of the 1920s and the 1940s. No longer romanticized as a fantasy domain of speed, dynamism, and new perspectives on quotidian realities, the post-1945 American city increasingly appeared to many artists, social critics, and flmmakers as a cold-hearted and treacherous mechanism more likely to provoke fear than awe. (Dimendberg 1997: 66) Further, the metropolis of flm noir, Dimendberg (1997: 66) emphasized, became “a highly rationalized and alienating system of exploitative drudgery permitting few possibilities of escape.” Other scholars point even more explicitly to the connection between the urban transformations and the appalling metropolitan conditions represented in flms of the 1940s: [N]oir depictions of Los Angeles in the forties resembled the grisly exaggeration in urban planning documents of the same period: poor neighborhoods breed hopeless blight. This led, therefore, to urban planning of the ffties, and is unmistakably a kind of noir-master-planning as anti-noir, a corrective designed to remove the unsanitary remnants of the Great Depression, of the pre-war world too blighted for “good” families. (Klein 1998: 88) These arguments, including the ways in which urban transformations and planning discourses might be related to cinematic cities, are examined and challenged in the chapters that follow in the context of the urban spatial

Introduction

19

tropes. This study further contributes by complementing the scholarship on the cinematic city (Bruno 2002, Clarke 1997, Fitzmaurice and Shiel 2003, Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001, Konstantarakos 2000, Krause and Petro 2003, Sanders 2001, Pratt and San Juan 2014, among many others) with the focus on the neglected escapist as well as non-escapist urban and rural imagery from the 1930s. Namely, the study argues further that across a range of the 1930s, and especially the 1940s, a metonymic contiguity, within which urbanity at once triumphs and is undermined, can be traced not just through physical urban tropes but also social imaginaries. The metaphor of the agitated city thus evokes the crisis or turbulence of the 1930s and the 1940s but also more subtle uncertainties and unease as well as the unequivocal allure of the metropolis. It suggests as well a visual and narrative exposure of specifc social pathologies, and racial and gender anxieties of the period that became erroneously but inalienably linked to the American metropolis. As Naremore (1998: chapter 1, especially 13, 11–27) explains, these visual discourses are spatially mediated through narratives whose action takes place in the supposedly “wrong” part of the city, often a minority neighborhood. But this fascination cannot be simply reduced to the metaphor of darkness that entails a biased form of othering. Many noir narratives present spaces such as jazz clubs as settings of racial, and also class, solidarity. And E. Ann Kaplan (1998) has noted as well the ambiguity in the case of both the tremendous degree of agency given to the female protagonists in flms of the 1940s and the recurrent theme of the narrative punishment of women, even if, as Angela Martin (1998: 222) points out, the women-turned-bad have done so because they “have ended up with bad partners and/or are victims of male violence, perversity or authority.” In the cinematic noir cities both minority and/or female protagonists are often given a greater degree of expression although often to be quickly subjugated; further, these protagonists’ eventual liberation from oppression or suffering is often only achieved with the help of a white male. In many other flms of the period, protagonists of both genders and all races are rarely offered a positive narrative resolution of any sort or a promising urban future, although this point is not unambiguous. Discourses of agitated urban modernity, especially in the flms of the 1940s, conjure up thus the city of simultaneous allure and jeopardy, and indeed often the allure of jeopardy37 that leaves few possibilities for exit but does not necessarily undermine the city. This represents another aspect of urban ambivalence that characterizes the cinematic discourse of agitated urban modernity. While projecting urban anxieties, the critical target of many of the 1940s narratives was not merely the city but, as noted, American society. These narratives clashed with the American myths of social opportunity or mobility, and the cinematic capacities to uphold and enhance these myths through larger-than-life protagonists and their narratives. In the cinematic cities of the 1930s’ social mobility narratives, labor conditions, and urban crime, and also of the 1940s’ dangerous urban pathways, in select

20

Introduction

cases subverted stereotypes38 and became an arena for social critique in flm (see Naremore 1998). The cinematic city mediated these social anxieties through powerful, colliding visions of, on the one hand, urban might and glory, and on the other, decrepitude and decay, as can be seen in the trope of the New York skyline. The agitated city metaphor unites the cinematic urbanity of the period of study, although anxieties assume heightened or increasingly negative connotations in the latter decades of study, indeed evident in the cinema of the 1950s and the early 1960s. Dimendberg (2004: 165) has argued that “for countless buildings and neighborhoods of the postwar period, cinematic representation in noir augured the kiss of death.” A range of flms considered in this study, however, challenges this view. Thus while taking into consideration Dimendberg’s and Bruno’s important standpoints for interdisciplinary inquiry, this book focuses on an aspect that their research did not address, examining the ways in which cinema actively partook in the creation of the discourse of simultaneous adulation and critique of the American metropolis amidst world-wide crises. The scholars who point to the gradual erosion of the realist tradition of the 1930s and the increasing sense of defeat and desolation of the 1940s narratives seem to have overlooked the ambiguity of the cinematic sociospatial imaginary in the period. In the 1940s thrillers’ “intricate patterns of double-cross and sexual mobility” (Alloway 1971: 50) cities are presented unambiguously as environments in which violence is taken for granted, where the unwanted or the oppressed are easily expendable, and where there is a technique of framing that “convert[s] society into an unreliable and malicious place in which guilt can be manipulated and assigned.” Yet, narratives further subvert the possible arbitrariness of this scheme through blurred lines of the hero’s innocence and guilt (Alloway 1971: 26). The environments presented are not Kafkaesque, and violence is rarely shown as systemic, even if it might be hidden from view;39 through this concealing, as through the ways in which narratives locate violence within the spatial domain beyond the constrictions of the frame, cinematic art interacts with (and at times claims) the social and political sphere. Scholars have argued that flms of the frst post-war decade resonated with the paranoia following the witch-hunt on Hollywood progressives (Polan 1986), refected in “the fear of narrative, and the particular social representation it works to uphold, against all that threatens the unity of its logical framework” (Polan, cited in Giovacchini 2001: 191). Yet what is suppressed in these narratives is compensated for and acknowledged in the flms’ spatial imagination. This is, the book suggests, precisely the purpose of cameras’ spatial lingering in these narratives. Countering didacticism and also by-passing existentialism, narratives pause (questioning the promise of modern mobility of the 1920s “metropolitan flms”) to show the darkness of the spaces that hide, and at times expose, the sources of social contention or violence, which becomes increasingly stylized and non-cathartic.40

Introduction

21

The environment plays a critical role, as the city becomes an arena in which representations of space interact with spatial practices and partake in the social production of space. The space of the city is then often narratively surrendered to the spatial practices of slum clearance and urban renewal41 or presented in such a manner that further narrative trajectories of protagonists within the metropolis are implausible, although, importantly, their attempted escapes from the city also appear futile. But the study of cinematic cities and urban transformations further enables the questioning of Lefebvre’s scheme. If the imagery of the skyline, which often represents a stand-in for the metropolis, is contrasted with rural, suburban, and extra-urban environments, cinematic narratives present a more complex vision that entails the devaluing of the metropolis as much as the aestheticization of its decay, but do not fully uphold its transition to the megalopolis. The 1940s cinematic noir narratives of suburbanization presented even more dangerously exploitative worlds,42 evidence that indirectly questions the emphasis on anti-urban discourses in Klein’s and Dimendberg’s studies of noir. Aside from the criminal psychopathologies featured in select urban noirs, the suburban noir often presents distressing renditions of social isolation, oppressed femininity, and murderous criminality,43 even if, of course, cities are more often presented as containing blighted areas or harboring criminal groups as forms of collective social disengagement. Noir narratives of suburbanization or small-scale community44 life of the 1940s remain signifcantly more critical of these extra-urban environments than prominent planning discourses, including those by Lewis Mumford, as will be discussed in Chapter 5. Cinematic discourses of suburban noir worlds parted from both the broader cultural discourses of the period and urban transformations, and resonated more strongly with the noted gender anxieties and growing class divisions. And in noir narratives where urbanity may be explicitly posited against the rural environment (as in Huston’s Asphalt Jungle (1950) in which a protagonist remarks, “if you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town”),45 rural worlds suggest the fruitlessness of America’s regenerating visions or a false redemptive aim rather than representing a rejection of urbanization. In summary, important parts of the study represent contributions to planning and interdisciplinary urban studies literature. The focus is on urban transformations, changing socio-economic conditions, and the role of visions in planning, but the study places the emphasis on tangible changes in the social, economic, and physical sense, and on the gradually altered understanding (or underlying planning vision) of the city. By examining historical and social conditions of urban change, the study notes the policies that have led to the transformation from the metropolis to megalopolis, resolved in a perilous way through urban renewal and suburbanization – a resolution that involved inner-city disinvestment and the lack of social and racial integration.

22

Introduction

Urban imaginaries in literature and flm have also undergone myriad transformations in the postmodern era, yet the popular as well as high art audiences’ fascination with the black and white cinematic and photographic imagery of the pre-urban renewal New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco remains. These imaginaries within the urban memory palimpsest are uncritically tied in popular discourses to nostalgic visions of the bygone era of the American urban past – noir visions of what were once predominantly white cities. While these narratives remain fascinating in their exposure, and also creative reinterpretation, of the ambivalent, complex, agitating tensions between the city’s splendor and its potential peril46 – their more critical agitating qualities ought to be brought into the discursive core of an interdisciplinary examination. In Lefebvre’s terms, the agitated city discourse in flm underscores the missing link in the cultural production of space between a) representational spaces and spaces of representation, and b) representational spaces and spatial practices. In the frst case, critical cinematic cities of the 1930s and the 1940s suppress Benjamin’s notion of adventurous travel through the urban ruins by heightening both anxiety and thrill. The discourse of agitated urban modernity prompts further journeys of unsettled, indeed hopefully itself agitated, spectatorship given the surface evocations that decontextualize spaces or stylize violence and misogyny within the neo noir narratives that have surfaced more recently. But an alternate layer permeates the discourses as well – through a thriller genre that still casts the city narrative as that of allure and unsettling yet suspenseful thrill. This does not merely suggest the validation of Lefebvre’s scheme via a cultural production of cinematic discourses across representational spaces, or in dialogue with the spaces of representation (maps, urban planning documents, for example), as Dimendberg argues. Rather, the discourse of agitated urban modernity within cinematic cities of the 1930s and the 1940s is shaped more critically by the intersections between the representational spaces and spatial practices that resonated with the crises of the Great Depression and World War Two – a linkage absent in the neo noir imaginaries. The urban protagonists’ agency in the 1930s and the 1940s narratives delineated both metropolitan enchantment and socio-spatial constraint, exposing class, racial, and gender patterning and social and political tensions. This book demonstrates the pivotal role of the nexus between New York cinematic imaginaries and socio-spatial transformations and crises in shaping the critical discourse of agitated urban modernity.

Notes 1 This very notion is, ironically and with a different connotation, tackled by David Norris in Belgrade: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination; Oxford: Signal Books, 2008). 2 The notions of adulation and condemnation might suggest a focus on moral judgments upon the city, but I wish instead to juxtapose the trope of the overbearing, and often unfulflled, promise of the metropolis with the notion of

Introduction

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

23

“condemnation” not merely in a sense of critique of the city but also in the manner in which the built environment can be condemned (as in “to condemn a building” and to designate a lot for an alternate use.) The term “metropolis” refers to large economic, political, and cultural centers, in particular to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, centers that Janet Abu-Lughod has termed “America’s global cities,” although the scope of this thesis is largely limited to the example of New York. The “making and unmaking” of the metropolis concerns, frstly, altered physical space and changing socio-economic conditions, and the impact of the world-wide economic crisis of the Great Depression (1929–1933), and the political crises of World War Two (1939–1945). See Abu-Lughod 1999. By this I mean the processes of increased decentralization, suburbanization, sprawl, and “metropolitan disintegration.” The term megalopolis was coined by “the geographer Jean Guttman … [to refer] to a new form of urban development in which cities spread continuously across hundreds of miles as one metropolis merged with another” (Beauregard 2003: 93). This can be seen in Lewis Mumford’s Cultures of the City, Weegee’s photographs of crime scenes in New York, and in many examples of flm noir, although these interpretations or visions of urban life cannot be confated into a coherent cultural discourse. Mumford, whose infuential unsparing critique was not the predominant planning discourse, compared the beginning of a typical metropolitan day as beginning with “descent into Hades” (the subway), and described the stages of metropolitan decline to include “the standardization of blight,” “the acceptance of depletion,” “the defacement of nature,” among other signs of decline. Weegee photographed crime scenes in Manhattan with an uncanny sense of their occurrence (for Weegee, writes William C. Sharpe (2008: 292), “night was an exploitable frontier, the fertile soil from which he could harvest a crop of corpses, evidence of his boldness and food for the sensation-hungry urbanite”), while at the core of flms noir’s darkness lies a range of representations of urban decay, criminality, corruption, and a variety of other social problems. See Dimendberg 2004, Mumford 1981 [1938], Sharpe 2008. This is indeed a complicated claim, since not all planners, urbanists, public intellectuals, journalists, or writers who have published reports or articles about cities agree on either the evaluation of urban problems or the proposed solutions for cities. Many planners, however, by 1952 conceded that “the decentralization forces were too great to be reversed” (Beauregard 2003: 87), while popular press announced in 1955 that “while suburbs have boomed, the businesses and residential hearts of cities have choked and decayed” (Beauregard 2003: 89). See also, Beauregard 2003: 77–88. As Krajina and Stevenson (2020: 2) remind us, “city spaces are imagined, in some specifc way, before being constructed, and they are re-made through practical use after being built.” I use the notion of urban vision here to encompass normative, conceptual, and empirical senses, although, of course, without blurring these domains. This included the neglect of intricate social dynamics, neighborhood diversity, and variety and mixture of building types and architectural styles within communities perceived as “blighted.” See for instance, the well-known classics that also differ in their accounts of urban renewal as much as they all call for appreciation of American urban life, for example Berman (1982) and chapter V in Jacobs (1961). As Robert Beauregard (2003: 103) notes, “[in the] early postwar years, the two most prominent urban problems to be solved were slums and blight.” In the frst postwar decade, urban problems became problems of racial injustice in America (Beauregard 2003: 127–149). The consequences of urban renewal

24

10 11 12

13

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15 16

17 18

19

Introduction and suburbanization, occurring during the time of economic restructuring and impacting the poorest and minority inner-city residents, further contributed to the deepening of urban crises of the post-1975 period. For a discussion of urban collective memories and their contemporary evocations, see Boyer 1994. This term comes from the New York cultural sociologist Sharon Zukin’s work. I apply the term in the case of social meanings of select spatial motifs in flm, as well be discussed. See Zukin 1991. With the most signifcant exception of Robert Beauregard’s (2003) study that focuses for the most part on the post World War Two period, although it also includes a detailed account of “foundational urban debates” and both late 19th century and early 20th century discourses of urban decline. The study establishes this connection through common concerns for urban visions and discourses within both arenas of inquiry. As emphasized at the “Searching for the Just City” conference at Columbia University in April 2006, visioning can take different forms in the planning process – it can serve as a practical consideration and a necessary part of the planning process, a component of the deliberative democratic process, or as a deeper normative construct. The conference was held on 29 April 2006 at Columbia University and included presentations by Professors Diane Davis, Frank Fischer, and Susan Fainstein, among others. Urban images and imaginaries occupy a privileged position in literary, cinematic, and photographic art discourses, but normative and conceptual visions of the city – which necessarily draw from a broader repertoire of representations – represent as well an integral part of the planning process or urban discourse creation process. While this might not be the only possible analytic lens for urban inquiry, it is the case within the approach that I adopt for this study. David Harvey (1989: 219–222) has further updated Lefebvre’s scheme to propose an intersection between the three aspects and a suggested four-part grid of a) accessibility and distanciation, b) appropriation and use of space, c) domination and control of space, and d) production of space. Perhaps the latter are applicable in the case of postmodern spaces of spectacle – theme parks and festival marketplaces. By this I mean visions of both downtown and neighborhood streets in the flms. As Mennel (2008: 7–8) points out, the street, a recurrent motif in early urban cinema and commonly the locus of danger or sexual encounter, represents a site for negotiations of protagonists’ subjectivities. Most of the flms discussed were either shot in Manhattan or were studio productions in which art directors created sets for a Manhattan “street” or a “neighborhood.” But since virtually all flms include images of city streets, I have selected flms based on the prominence of the skyline motif and thus examine for the most part the streets of the “skyline” flms. Finally, in addition to the skyline, the street (or the sidewalk), and the slum, other spatial motifs, such as the grid and the subway, could also be included (see Lindner 2015: 9). See also, Sanders 2001. Prominent exiles included Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Ernst Lubitsch, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjöström, Benjamin Chistensen, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Emil Jannings, Fred Zinneman, and Otto Preminger, although historians make a distinction between the artists who came in the 1920s like Lubitsch and Murnau and those who escaped the rise of fascism, like Lang and Wilder. Hollywood held a special appeal as “the very symbol of modernity” and “a counterpart of the rigid German culture.” Wilder argued further that he “would have come to Hollywood Hitler or no Hitler” (Giovacchini 2001: 29, 31; see also, Phillips 1998).

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20 Prominent fgures included Ben Hecht, Herman Mankiewicz, Hy Kraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Benchley, John Huston, John Wexley, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Mark Connelly, Francis Faragoh, John Howard Lawson, Allen Boretz, and Clifford Odets, among many others. See chapter 1 in Giovacchini 2001. 21 The cinema of classical continuity is cinema that employs forms of narrative transitivity and closure, spectator identifcation, transparency in the construction of meaning, single diagesis, visual style of exposition and character development, as well as stylistical fgures of ellipsis and fashback; this kind of cinema is typical of the classical Hollywood period until 1960. It should be noted, however, that flms noir include narrative shifts and breakdowns and illinear story telling and differ signifcantly in cinematic form from the 1930s narratives. 22 In a narrow formal sense, this is the “space of the frame” – the space of the visible and implied city on the cinema screen. 23 For example, Clarke 1997, Krutnik 1991, Krutnik 1997, Lamster 2000, Sanders 2001, Silver and Ursini 1996. 24 This issue is, however, more complicated. As Bodnar (2003: 225, 222–223) notes, “both conservative and radical forces in America worried about the potential of the movies to weaken collective mentalities of any kind.” Emphasizing ambivalent messages about working-class protagonists that Hollywood movies included, Bodnar points out that these flms “did not tell people something they already did not know. They were challenging because they told them exactly what they did know to an extent that undermined the assumptions of political and moral leaders that individuals could be regulated and futures insured.” 25 Perhaps it is then not quite accurate as Eric Lott (1997: 551) would have it, that noir represents “white-face dreamwork of social anxieties with explicitly racial sources, condensed on flm into the criminal undertakings of abjected whites” even if Blast of Silence (d. Allen Baron, 1961), for example, might allow for this type of interpretation. 26 Beauregard (2003: 16–19) has termed these notions the discourses of “urban ambivalence,” as will be discussed in the following chapter. 27 Linkages between crises, warfare, and artistic imagination have been tackled in a number of studies, most famously in Fussell (1975). 28 See, especially, chapter 6 in Winter (1995). 29 While bearing in mind both the persisting and the diminishing liberating aspects of movies (the latter especially in the face of contemporary digital media), it should also be noted that the functions of celebrity identifcation of contemporary generations in particular and the role of peers in this process seems to have changed signifcantly since Riesman’s pre-1960s evidence. That said, one might still appreciate his examples, especially of the stars whose careers outlived generations and various peer-pressures, even if one might wonder about the roles of those stars in emancipating audiences, as well the audiences’ hidden aims to impress, exceed, or ignore peers derived from those visions. But Riesman’s examples of Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn become also more problematic if compared to stars like Richard Widmark, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Gregory Peck, Greta Garbo, James Stewart, or for instance, Merlyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge on opposite ends of the white-black spectrum of stardom yet also, as far as gendered identities are concerned, both casualties of Hollywood. See Reisman 1961; see also, for instance, Rippy 2001. 30 Although I indicate of course the differences between the flms shot in Hollywood studios and on locations, I focus especially on the narrative and visual functions of the spatial leitmotifs, often used quite effectively in stylized and staged

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35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

Introduction productions. To an extent, it could be argued, that there is a metonymic contiguity of the cinematic city, in particular in the 1940s narratives that connects both the studio productions and the flms shot on location. James Agee’s flm reviews appeared in The Nation 1942–1948. The above quote is drawn from an article entitled “Movies in 1946,” written on 25 January 1947. Given Agee’s infuence, ramifcations of this statement for the Hollywood realist school ought not be underestimated. Agee was certainly not the only prominent fgure of the period to question the realist approaches in flm – others included the increasingly vocal Mordecai Gorelik (interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a former set designer), writer Budd Shulberg (On the Waterfront, one of the ‘friendly’ witnesses for HUAC), and directors Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Charlie Chaplin. See Giovacchini 2001: 137. See chapter 1 in James Naremore (1998), More Than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts. I thank Ira Katznelson for his insight and help in delineating these two meanings. Ira Katznelson also noted the two ways in which the historian E.P. Thompson used the term experience in The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963). I have adopted this term cited in Michèle Lamont’s research on collective identities. I use it here to apply to planning visions. See Lamont 2001: 175. See Gans’ critique of Wirth in Gans 1995. As can be seen in the representations of femme fatale characters in the 1940s but also of the city’s skyline that increasingly captures this “lure” and even “luridness,” thus transitioning as a cinematic trope from its associations of masculinity and economic power of the 1920s, to femininity and at once fragility and solidity of the landscape of the 1940s. Perhaps this distinction should not be seen as strict since earlier examples of urban visual art from Weimar Germany suggest that images of women were associated with the landscape of Berlin precisely in the imagery of the 1920s where the woman becomes the metaphor for modernity and the desirable “otherness” of the city. In the case of American flm, this gender/spatial ambiguity seems to me to be more typical of the 1940s visions than of the 1920s. See Petro 1989. For a sociological critique of stereotypes in flm, see Perkins 2000. For example in flms like The Killers (d. Robert Siodmak, 1946), D.O.A (d. Rudolph Maté, 1949), The Lady from Shanghai (d. Orson Welles, 1947), and Dark Corner (d. Henry Hathaway, 1946). It should be noted, however, that many narratives of the 1940s focus on the interplay between social and metaphysical violence. In Criss Cross (d. Robert Siodmak, 1949), for example, in which the femme fatale and the city might be seen as mutually constitutive (Mennel 2008: 54–55), a narrative of individual defeat and social disconnect is merged with a vision of spatial loss and neighborhood change. The setting in this case is L.A.’s Bunker Hill neighborhood that, as Mike Davis (2001: 40) noted, is in this flm “shown as a vibrant hard-working neighborhood” terrorized by local bullies and awaiting urban renewal. These suburbs were, however, different from the middle- and low-class suburbs of the 1950s. For instance in flms set in the suburban environment such as Double Indemnity (d. Billy Wilder, 1944) or Mildred Pierce (d. Michael Curtiz, 1945). For example, small-town environments in The Killers (d. Robert Siodmak, 1946), Fallen Angel (d. Otto Preminger, 1945), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (d. Lewis Milestone, 1946), Pitfall (d. André De Toth, 1948), Raw Deal (d. Anthony Mann, 1948), and The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949).

Introduction

27

45 Also, in for example, Out of The Past (d. Jacques Tourneur, 1947), They Live by Night (d. Nicholas Ray, 1948), and On Dangerous Ground (d. Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino, 1951). 46 By “agitating tensions” I mean here the second sense of the term, referring to ambiguities in the representations of the city – the kind of ambiguity in representation that seems to me to be confned to the period of study. Although a type of ambiguity may recur frequently in contemporary cinematic remakes, it does seem to have lost a sense of aura as well as a sense of critical distance as the American culture in general and movies as its subset, have become signifcantly more cynical and transparent. (And to perhaps illuminate this further, as Benjamin has noted on a scrap of paper, “[a]ura is the appearance of distance however close it might be.” Cited in Isenberg 2008: 36.)

1

New York’s agitated urban modernity

The historical period of this study is bounded by the economic crisis of the Great Depression at the beginning and the political and military turbulence of World War Two at the end; as Andreas Huyssen (2015: 13) points out, following World War Two “metropolitan urbanity in the West has invaded and saturated all social space … and has become all encompassing.” The two decades of this study, which include economic stabilization, the recovery programs, and comprehensive social and urban policies of the New Deal, end with the Housing Act of 1949, whose Title I section permitted slum clearance for urban renewal projects.1 While the study focuses both on urban social transformations and visual discourses about the city, 1929 is adopted as the historical marker year that introduces changes in both spheres, to the extent that historical parallels are at all possible. As noted, the striking representational contrast of urban imaginaries from the 1920s (the decade particularly signifcant because of the prevalence of “metropolitan flms” or “city symphonies” in both Europe and in the U.S.) as opposed to the 1930s (and in turn, from the 1940s as opposed to the 1950s) is one of the subjects of this study; thus, the examples from cinema of the 1920s and the 1950s bracket the historical period several years back and forward in order to point to these shifts. The construction of the Chrysler (1929–1930) and Empire State (1928– 1931) buildings as the key markers of the New York City skyline, the “cathedrals of commerce,” the symbols of the city’s economic might, commenced at the very eve of the Great Depression and were completed during its frst years (see Tafuri 1979). The example is suggestive of the linkages between the transformation of the built environment, and the social and economic processes infuencing urban change as well as metropolitan imaginaries. The ending markers of the study were more ambiguous – one marker represents the end of World War Two, or in the New York context, the VJ-Day celebration in Times Square, although to emphasize the signifcance of urban transformations and examine the post-war years, the study concludes at the end of the decade, with the adoption of the Housing Act which foreshadows the following decade of large-scale urban renewal, discussed in the fnal chapter. While the literature on the 1890–1940s New York “landscape of modernity” (Ward and Zunz 1992) has contributed important historical insights,

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the relationships between urban transformations and imaginaries, and the changing role of popular art in the 1930s and the 1940s, have not been suffciently examined. Thus, in urban planning and sociological terms, the periodization from the 1920s to the 1950s tackles largely the frst phase of urban restructuring discussed in Part Three of Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1999) study of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In cinema studies terms, the introduction of sound in 1927 with The Jazz Singer (1927, d. Alan Crosland) produced by Warner Brothers, the Hays Code of 1930, and the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) crackdown on the “Hollywood left” in 1947 and 1950 represent the key historical markers. Given the political persecution of flmmakers in this period, and an increasing sentiment of paranoia, rarely do cinematic visions of the 1950s urbanity adopt a stance as critical as the late 1940s noir narratives or the social problem flms of the 1930s. The book, thus, examines the conceptual set of linkages termed metaphorically agitated urban modernity through a dual focus on urban transformations and imaginaries of the American city – applied to a period slightly longer than the two decades, starting with the metropolitan flms of the 1920s and ending just after the formal conclusion of flm noir by 1955 (Kiss Me Deadly, d. Robert Aldrich)/1958 (Touch of Evil, d. Orson Welles),2 or in urbanist terms, concluding with the publication of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), tackled in Chapter 6.

American cities in transformation, 1929–1950 During the decades of gradual urbanization and stabilized population growth between the 1920s and 1950s, thus preceding suburbanization, racial transition, white fight, and the fnally fully apparent (although already ongoing in the 1940s) industrial sector decline, the American cities of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles solidifed as centers of economic, political, and cultural power (Abu-Lughod 1999). At the same time, during the period 1929–1945, wrought with deeper crises, beginning with the Great Depression (1929–1933), and ending with the years after World War Two, several American cities experienced labor unrest and racial riots but also rising employment, and, as a result of New Deal policies, overall growing economic stability. The Great Depression inaugurated a set of events with catastrophic consequences in Europe, and also the rise of two troubling alternatives that ought not be equated – devastatingly, fascism in Germany, and disturbing in its extremity, totalitarian state control in Soviet Russia. In this context, cities emerge as centers of power, and arenas of leisure and entertainment, and remain sites of racial and labor contestation. The urban ascent or the establishment of the great American urban centers as seats of political and economic power occurs following tremendous social and demographic transformation and is accompanied by the expanded role of planning in the period following the economic crisis. As late as 1930, the U.S. was only partially urbanized; the dominance of cities, their establishments as centers of power and control, is striking

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and contested up until the second decade of the period of study (see chapter 1 in Kennedy 1999). As the greatest benefts of economic growth in early 20th century occurred in urban areas, the cities also became sites where the setback caused by the Depression was most strongly experienced, whose greatest brunt was borne by the poorest neighborhoods and most deprived residents, particularly minority populations. The impacts of the economic crisis, however, cannot be generalized to all cities, as they were affected differently based on their particular local economic structures, urban governances, and social conditions (Abu-Lughod 1999). The continuing concessions to economic interests in this Fordist era contributed to the expansion of economic opportunities, including benefts for the female labor force (Kennedy 1999). With the limitations imposed on immigration by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 (see chapter 1 in Foner 2000), cities became sites of ethnic integration and gradual incorporation of white European ethnic groups,3 while at the same time racial boundaries remained frmly maintained through institutional and social mechanisms in the still largely segregated cities (Massey and Denton 1993). The Northeast and the Midwest, and especially New York and its international markets, were particularly affected by the consequences of the 1929 stock market crash. As in the context of the industrial city, as much as the period is remembered for its harsh economic conditions, it is also remembered for government intervention, this time much broader in scope and impact, in the form of the New Deal: poor relief, the Social Security Act for widows, orphans, and dependent children, and the establishment of a retirement system. The physical planning intervention included the building of public facilities and large infrastructure projects. Thus, as the formerly waning commitment to social reform of the Progressive Era evolved during and after the Great Depression into the policies of the New Deal, the cities in this period also emerged as arenas for the possible resolution of urban ills through broad national redistributive policies and planning interventions.4 As Schuman and Sclar (1996: 434) noted, “only a national emergency … permit[ed] a brief opportunity to expand the acceptable boundaries of government control over development” beyond the mere regulation of the market. The policies of the New Deal led to investment in public works, facilities, and infrastructure in cities; the administration also importantly supported rural rehabilitation, electrifcation, and development. By the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s, the comprehensive planning interventions diminished and resulted instead in the implementation of programs that, while also providing needed housing or services, were in part misguided and negatively affected many low-income areas. Urban renewal and post World War Two suburbanization supported by federal programs inaugurated a new urban era in America that was marked by the decline of the inner city, ghettoization, and racial segregation. Suburbanization was further accelerated by “a national mania for the motorcar and by federal policies favoring private transportation.” Jackson (1984: 330) notes further, using the example of New York, that employment

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patterns also refected this decentralization. For instance, in 1920 about 80% of jobs were in the four main boroughs of New York, in Newark or in Jersey City, while in 1970, over half of the employment in the New York Metropolitan Region was outside of the old urban core. Moreover, former urbanites who later moved to the suburbs accepted a different kind of “urban” life. Hurley (2001: 1–19) associates these new socio-economic modes with the emphasis on commercial enticements, the search for “middle majority” to partake in this popular luxury, visions of good family life, and the new spatial arrangement based on the division between a residential periphery and a production and consumption-oriented downtown. In contrast, as noted, Hayden (1996 [1980]) has pointed out that the new suburban paradigm heightened existing gender inequalities and emphasized the sexual division of labor. Thus, even if discussions of postwar suburbanization are commonly associated with the notion of “American ways of life,” they are shaped by class, race, family, and work structures, as well as in part by life-cycle preferences. An urban planning study uncovers the emphasis on private over public land uses, and the inequitable consequences of zoning policies, in many cases exclusionary in effect, whether or not this intent could be legally established. In either case, even a sketchy outline of the characteristics of this new social and spatial environment contrasts signifcantly with the urban, particularly inner-city, environment that the new suburbanites left behind – so much so that it could be argued that the new suburbs represented a rejection of the modern metropolis, even if of course it cannot be argued that there are substantive differences between suburban and urban ways of life absent the emphasis on class and life-cycle stage (Gans 1995). Although suburbanization was not a new phenomenon, the post World War Two suburbs displayed strikingly different characteristics from the earlier garden cities: located at the periphery, far from the inner city in low-density, mass-produced, architecturally-uniform developments that were characterized by “economic and racial homogeneity” (Jackson 1985: 238–241). The scale of the suburbanization phenomenon is also striking. “By 1950 the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities, and in 1954 the editors of Fortune estimated that 9 million people had moved to the suburbs in the previous decade” (Jackson 1985: 238). In spite of suburbanization, American cities actually gained population in the period 1945–1955 but did not grow as fast as suburbs; rather, the city was “losing its metropolitan dominance” (Beauregard 2003: 79, 91). By emphasizing these changes, the point is not to chart a simple well-known narrative of the “decline” of the American city, critiquing federal policies for encouraging suburbanization and urban disinvestment or the American middle classes for abandoning the metropolis en masse. This has been done in other studies. An analysis of urban planning and social policies of the 1930s and the 1940s can demonstrate how this gradual and partial “rejection” of the metropolis occurred by the end of the period, as well as point to the fact that this change also entailed an abandonment of a set of social

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policies and political programs. In addition to the altered socio-economic conditions and policies that promoted suburbanization and urban renewal, the period of study marks a distinct, critical set of changes in the ways urban life was envisioned, perceived, and culturally conceived. Urban America of the 1930s and 1940s is marked by unresolved tensions: the deep economic crisis that necessitated systems of social protection, the political crisis of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War, the expansive yet not always satisfactory redistributive programs, and a lack of social polices for racial integration. The latter is particularly critical since the percentage of blacks migrating to northern cities more than doubled in the period 1900–1940. The physical planning changes included investment in cities – the continuation of the building of the skyscraper city, the construction of low- and moderate-income housing construction, public and infrastructure works, and the anticipation and active promotion of post-war suburbanization – the management of regional growth, and the infrastructure and transportation systems needed to accommodate increasing traffc and car ownership. As the middle class abandoned cities for suburbs and federal investment in cities declined, the metropolitan urbanism of the 1930s and 1940s was undone by the constellation of broader forces and city-specifc policies and conditions in the post World War Two era, without the critical urban tensions that came to the foreground in these two decades ever being fully addressed or resolved. If, as Eric Hobsbawm (1996: 85–177) contends in The Age of Extremes, the 20th century simply cannot be understood without knowing the period 1929–1945, so too the crises of the modern American urban world that followed cannot be fathomed without a knowledge of urban conditions in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

New York’s landscape of modernity In the context of the 1930s and 1940s social, economic, and political transformations, New York offers a privileged arena of observation. New York epitomized urban extremes of wealth and inequality in the early 20th century, and was also seen as an “un-American” exception (see Bender 2002) because of its tremendous diversity, its particularly intense accumulation of capital, and its pioneering role in social planning and housing policies. Surpassing Boston, the city became America’s cultural capital – the home of Broadway theaters, major radio and television networks, book and magazine publishing, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet. “By 1940, with a city population of more than seven million and a metropolitan population of more than eleven million, New York had become the world’s largest and richest city” (Jackson 1984: 323). New York City’s population was 7,454,995 in 1940 (an increase of almost half a million in comparison to 1930), and 7,891,984 in 1950 and declined only slightly in 1960 to 7,781,984; in the same period,

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the non-Puerto Rican black population increased from 328,000 in 1930 to 1,060,000 in 1960 (Jackson 1995: 921). But in the 1930s New York also emerged as a city in economic distress torn by racial contestation (Harlem riots in 1935 and 1943), and tenant and labor unrest. At the same time, under the helm of a liberal-reformist coalition mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the city instituted a set of reforms and redistributive programs in the urban planning realm, notably, building the frst public housing project in the nation, and developing a network of highways and parks under the supervision of Robert Moses. The physical planning of the period included the building of public facilities and large infrastructure projects, exemplifed in Moses’ early career as the parks commissioner and executor of public infrastructure projects. In the same period, the magnifcence of the skyscraper city epoch of “commerce and convenience” continued with the “completion” of the marvelous Manhattan skyline,5 not only with the noted Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, but also with Rockefeller Center (1931–1940) (see Stern et al. 1987, Stern et al. 1995). The period termed metaphorically as the era of agitated urban modernity resonates in this context with the powerfully manifested tensions between the creation of the built environment, signaling New York’s metropolitan dominance, amidst economic crises, racial tensions, and labor contention. The contestation is often overlooked in discussions that point to the stability of the city, particularly in the 1940s. Tracing relationships between socio-economic conditions, political alignments, and popular discontent, and policies and planning projects, is particularly relevant for the examples of popular discontent in the housing sector in New York. In July 1932, for example, neighborhood groups prevented evictions of tenants in the Lower East Side, with “crowds up to 1,000 neighbors stopping evictions;” further, “grassroots resistance succeeded in restoring 77,000 evicted families to their homes in New York City” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 179). Indeed, in part in response to this agitation, by 1937 in New York there were 2,330 housing units built.6 This marks New York’s pioneering role in public housing that precedes the federal Housing Act of 1937. Janet Abu-Lughod (1999: 180) emphasizes that “the building of Harlem Houses was undertaken in rapid response to racial unrest,” although evidence also points to the political power of the black leaders and LaGuardia’s policies. Also notable in this context are the similarities with LaGuardia’s rejection of the riot investigating commission report’s recommendations (that charged that extreme poverty was the cause of the riot) with Lyndon Johnson’s later rejections of the Kerner Report’s fndings. These examples highlight the tumultuous aspects of a period remembered as a phase of stability preceding urban renewal; the instances cited further indicate the kernels of the race problem that exploded in urban America in the mid-1960s. Riots occurred in Harlem again in 1943, although not to the same extent as in Detroit in the same year. Further, this was a period of signifcant labor unrest as well as signifcant gains for unions in New York, manifested in the successful lobbying for

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the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. (Although, it should be noted, in the case of these protests, that these tensions were present to a much lesser degree than in the earlier periods of the city’s history – most horrifcally as in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 that claimed the lives of 146 workers, mostly young women). In New York 1930, Robert A.M. Stern et al. (1987: 757) suggest that the metropolis in the decade of the Great Depression was understood by its economic, political, and cultural elite to be “an essential but unnatural phenomenon.” Thus, following World War II, New York changed rapidly from a clearly defned and unifed metropolis to the principal but not exclusive focus on an entity whose boundaries stretched far beyond those of a traditional city to constitute a vast, regional urbanism that has come to be known as “megalopolis.” (Stern et al. 1987: 757)7 While a trajectory of disinvestments, accompanied by a different set of socio-economic conditions and public policies, can be clearly discerned as the economic and racial composition of cities changed, the discourses and perceptions of urban life8 from the period of study present a more complex, more ambivalent picture of America. This book thus combines historical, cultural, and social urban loci of investigation. Even as an interdisciplinary urban studies inquiry ought to deny forms of essentialism,9 any argument based on the contrast of a particular set of urban modes of life, even if inclusionary, might still dangerously resemble a nostalgic or an arbitrary array of particular urban communities. Scholars have also argued that the seemingly “organic” approaches to the study of urban life have also neglected class differences or vestiges of racial discrimination.10 The counterpoint example of New York’s heterogeneity and class differences, its dynamism and also its social polarization, remains an extraordinary pole of any comparison in any historical period.11 Studies of New York have thus yielded critical analytical works about urban inequality, especially in the post-1975 fscal crisis period, and also illustrative examples of urban promise12 as well as scholarship about visions and senses of the city in arts and literature.13 A fascination with the city has also marked the feld: even in cases where a scholar would be cautious not to impose his or her own sets of urban preferences over the object of study, the very writer is typically a New Yorker by choice. Critical reevaluation of nostalgic discourses of New York has, however, also taken place, in particular in the cases of urban spaces that have changed dramatically, as is evident in the scholarship on Times Square, for instance (see Berman 2006, Delany 1999, Reichl 1999, Sagalyn 2001, Taylor 1991).14 Nevertheless, specifc periods in the city’s history that might have offered opportunities for a more equitable and inclusive environment,15 or the political trajectories not pursued, planning visions not realized, or creative cinematic imaginations curtailed16

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rather than unfettered, have also marked the New York studies debate. The trope of agitated urban modernity is signifcant in all three respects: it recognizes fascination with the city and its art; it recognizes and also challenges the nostalgic emphasis on the urban imagery of the period, especially in the case of flm noir; and it points to the critical infuence of urban social and cultural discourses, marked by the period of crises. It would be erroneous to claim that the late 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s were the golden age of the American metropolis. Kenneth Jackson has used the notion, however, to refer to the broader historical period of 1890 to 1940 in the case of New York (Jackson 1984) – in the period of study, rather, we can fnd evidence of both urban promise and predicament. Understanding cultural discourses and visions of urbanity of this period, including why it was perceived with such ambivalence by urban scholars, planners, and public offcials, as well as by the broader public, and why and how it was in part “rejected” or undermined, is critical for an understanding of American urban 20th century transformations, as well as how we conceive of cities today. This is the case for two reasons. First, in an urban planning and sociological sense, socio-economic changes and unresolved political tensions and processes resulted in urban renewal, suburbanization, and racial exclusion, and thus defned in much-maligned terms post World War Two urban America. Second, visions of 1940s urbanity are marked by an ambiguity characterized by the devaluing, as well as the enticement, of urbanity. But select cinematic visions of the last decade of study also demonstrate that the suburban alternative was not perhaps perceived as the unquestionable cultural ideal, a prototype of the “American dream.” Thus, although discourses critical of urban life, or in worst cases overtly laden with antiurban biases, have older origins, urban visions from the 1920s to the 1950s capture a specifc set of biases towards the American city that has marked subsequent urban representations and that emerges behind an important layer of contemporary memories of the “lost” American metropolis. In this manner, this book examines cultural processes that have accompanied the change from the metropolis to the megalopolis in the post World War Two period; the changing narrative and visual imagination of urban life in flm as popular art and mass medium in this period highlights a particularly signifcant aspect of the cultural discourses of urbanity in the period of study.17

New York skyline and the discourses of urban ambiguity Before the establishment of the Hollywood studio system and until the introduction of sound in 1927, New York was the very center of the American flm industry. In 1929, one quarter of the national flm production was still based in New York, where flms like The Musketeers of Pig Alley (d. D. W. Griffth, 1912), starring Lillian Gish, were flmed on location (in this case, the Lower East Side) and numerous dramas directed by Allan Dwan, for instance, combined on-location sequences with studio shooting in Astoria (Stern et al. 1987: 78–79; see also Muzzio 1996: 194). In addition

36 New York’s agitated urban modernity to the Astoria studios established by the Famous Players-Lasky Company (which changed the name into Paramount) in 1920, Fox built studios on Tenth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets the same year, and William Randolph Hearst opened his Cosmopolitan Studio in Harlem on 127th Street and Second Avenue in 1927 (Stern et al. 1987: 78–79). In Down the Hudson (d. Frederick S. Armitage and A.E. Weed, 1903), the camera captures natural and urbanized landscapes at a speed faster than boat travel would permit, suggesting both the rapidity of industrialization and memory-images of landscapes, rather than capturing an actual travel experience. Early 20th century cinematic New York is also more prosaic, however – a site of titillating imagery in What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (d. George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter, 1901), a gallery of colorful Brooklyn characters as in The Thieving Hand (d. J. Stuart Blackton, 1908), or a collection of popular amusement sights at Coney Island in the eponymous flm Coney Island (d. Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, 1917), in which Buster Keaton and the cross-dressing Fatty Arbuckle engage in variety of mishaps. Keaton’s Cameraman (1928), which includes an insensitive yet predictably self-mocking scene in Chinatown appears to suggest that deceptions can only be undone by “accidental” urban camera work. A class-divided city of identity transformation fgures too, as in Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration (1915), in which a former gang leader fnds “education and inspiration” in the settlement house. (Walsh returned to New York themes in The Bowery in 1933 to depict the 1890s city.) In Manhandled (d. Allan Dwan, 1924), Gloria Swanson’s impoverished shop girl Tessie McGuire is roughed up in the crowded subway, prefguring several forms of assault that she will have to endure before her partner will see her as guiltless. The Saphead (d. Herbert Blaché and Winchell Smith, 1920) will simply introduce Wall Street in an intertitle as “a little street where money is everything and everything is money,” while in Lights of New York (d. Bryan Foy, 1928), a small-town protagonist from “the main street that is 45 minutes from Broadway but a thousand miles apart,” is swindled by New York bootleggers into opening up a money laundering barber shop on 46th street. Redeemed in the end, he and his girlfriend (routinely assaulted by her gangster boss in the night club where she works) are advised by a New York police offcer to return to the country and “leave the roaring 40s.” Similarly, in Lonesome (d. Paul Fejos, 1928) the protagonists (who accidentally meet and separate in Coney Island) daydream of a little white house with blue shingles in the country. That flm, opening with a train zooming past New York tenements, is Simmelian ([1905] 2004) in its proclamation that loneliness is most diffcult in the “whirlpool of modern life,” and in its transposition of a ticking clock over the daily routine of a switchboard operator and a manufacturing worker. In Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), an aging burlesque dancer’s grown daughter is saved from harassment on the street by sailor with whom she goes on to spend a night on the Brooklyn bridge observing the city. (“Even Brooklyn looks pretty!”) In another sequence, gazing at the Woolworth building from a rooftop, the sailor proposes, inviting her to leave the city

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for Wisconsin. She fnally accepts his offer, in the concluding lines of the flm, to go “away from this awful place.” But agitation and class difference will come into sharper focus with the Great Depression. In Buster Keaton’s agitated Sidewalks of New York (d. Zion Myers and Jules White, 1931), “East Side kids” roaming free in the streets rescue from danger Keaton’s philanthropist (who had built for them a gym in their neglected tenement neighborhood). His uptown mansion was built “75 years ago,” boasts the host, while Keaton’s romantic interest, an older sister of an East Side kid, comments, “if it were in our neighborhood, 75 families would live here.” In Central Park (d. John G. Adolf, 1932), which commences with an aerial shot and skyline imagery, two unemployed strangers share a hot dog stolen from a food stand by Joan Blondell’s Dot. “First meal I’ve had in days,” responds Dot’s homeless, penniless future partner (Wallace Ford). The flm features too a malnourished lion which breaks out of the Central Park Zoo; prowling through the park, the lion reaches a banquet hall where the animal terrifes frst the African-American caterers in white uniforms, then the affuent black-tie white New Yorkers in their dining room and dance hall. By 1934, more than half of the movies produced in the U.S. were set in urban areas and “over a third were set in New York, with an additional 12 percent located in an unidentifed city that often resembled New York” (Stern et al. 1987: 78–79). While early 20th century New York flms presented documentary glimpses of urban life (Sanders 2001: 26), flmmakers of the subsequent decades realized that the city’s visual qualities could be presented to popular audiences as spectacles through sequences of staged chases and stunts, as well as by shooting everyday “spectacular” occurrences – rush hour crowds amidst the rising towers, the glittering lights of the metropolis at night. The scale and visual dynamism of these images was unparalleled if compared to other cities – New York’s spectacular qualities made it into at once a unique cinematic metropolis and also a universal American big city.18 Further, physical reality is an important domain of urban flms of the period albeit neither in a literal sense nor exactly in a manner envisioned by contemporaneous flm theories of Andre Bazin or Siegfried Kracauer, as will be discussed. Cinematic visions of the skyline can be seen as documentary images to the extent that they frame the urban environment and record the creation of the skyscraper city. In the case of flms set in New York, these visions predominate up until the late 1920s and appear again in the post World War Two period. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, prior to the introduction of flm technologies that enhanced the ability of the flm camera to record sights and sounds outdoors (as can be seen in post-World War Two productions, in particular), the skyline visions were overwhelmingly staged in Hollywood studios. This enabled a cost-effective mode of production for several flms at once, many of which used the same sets with slight modifcations. As James Sanders documented, art directors applied several techniques in recreating the New York skyline in Hollywood studios: the standing sets that included the entire recreated New York streets, painted two-dimensional “scenic backings” as seen through the windows,

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three-dimensional miniature constructions of skyscrapers, painted views on glass sheets that enabled composite visions of both static sets and also crowds in motion, and rear projections for scenes that required moving backgrounds (Sanders 2001: 62–84). These examples suggest the manner of recreating, staging, or faking the New York City skyline or neighborhood streets in Hollywood studios but tell us little about the relatedness of sets to flm narratives. Perhaps an infnite number of relationships between the two could be charted. Researchers who focused on the physical aspects of art design outlined several types of schemes adopted by studio set designers. Set designs represent: a) minimalist denotative enclosures for protagonists; b) expressive forms that de-familiarize ordinary environments by offering metaphorical linkages to the narrative; c) embellishments that heighten the spectacular aspects of flms; d) stylized artifces; and e) explicit narrative signifers, often in flms shot in one location (Affron and Affron 1995: 37–40) (although the latter case could also apply to narratives focused on specifc spatial environments – not necessarily shot on one location). All of these types – and their elaborate variations – can be found in Hollywood productions that featured the New York skyline and streets. But linkages between the actual and the staged visions of New York in the 1930s and 1940s were also more elusive. Namely, art directors in Hollywood created the skyline sets to deliberately simulate and approximate the real city. This applies to most flms set in New York except for the musicals of the 1930s where the sets are deliberately embellished or stylized, as for example in 42nd Street. As Sanders explains, Hollywood studios maintained extensive photographic fles on New York views produced by teams routinely sent to New York to document the city. This highlights the emphasis on restaging the urban environment to closely mimic the actual urban change. But in recreating the real New York, alterations in scale, size, and even the position of buildings were also common on sets. Art directors and set designers at times even included additional structures that looked, as it were, of New York. New York created in Hollywood, a set designer proclaimed, presented “a more subtle” even “poetic” reality for the flm; it was “more real than real” (Sanders 2001: 66). But a closer look at Hollywood flms presents a discrepancy between the designers’ intentions and actual flms. Even if art directors strived to create a slightly altered “impression of reality,” in Christian Metz’s (1974) flm theory terms, many flm sets of the period appeared as embellishments rather than expressive, much less poetic, renderings. A sense of the artifciality of the re-creation becomes apparent in these productions in spite of the elaborate attempts of make the city look “real.” In some cases, the sets are stylized and deliberately artifcial but they also present a critique of the artifce produced in Hollywood in a manner that masks deeper narrative conficts or contradictions. This is perhaps the most critical difference between Hollywood and independent productions – the settings of the cities that the latter feature are radically different, presenting unglamorized, if not explicitly realist, visions of protagonists and their lifeworlds.

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In the case of Hollywood flms, however, the relationship between visions of the New York environments staged in studios and narrative constructs is also further complicated by the predominance of both European directors and also formerly New York-based writers in Hollywood. In these accounts, New York visions emerge in part as exilic renderings of longing for the lost city. This could be one dimension of the cinematic “homage to possibility,” in Mary Ann Doane’s (2003) words, that might include social and political connotations, genre interpretations, or homages to “loss” of a particular place or neighborhood narrative that the writers who moved to California during the Great Depression associated with New York. Perhaps not paradoxically, the cinematic aspect of this very longing was also a part of the glorious substance of the New York splendor so desired by studio producers and directors. Herman Mankiewicz’s sighing remark, “oh to be in Hollywood, wishing I was back in New York” (Cited in Sanders 2001: 60), recalls this aspect of the longing, iconic, mythical dimension of the imagined metropolis replicated in a variety of skyline visions in Hollywood. Thus, taking into account the fact that many flms with New York themes produced in Hollywood studios were directed by European exiles based on screenplays by New York writers, homages to various lost cities could also be found in them. Naremore’s (1998) thesis that flm noir is a contemporary idea projected onto the past, as well as Dimendberg’s (2004) argument that these flms refect traumas of unrecoverable space and time, could then be reinterpreted as well in relation to the multiple exilic narratives in Hollywood of the noir era. If we take into consideration the fact that many New York writers moved to Hollywood during and because of The Great Depression, and that many others were exiles evading fascism in Europe, possible linkages between crises and staging particular visions of urban environments begin to emerge in the earlier decade as well. But replications of similar sets and imaginaries in a great number of flms were in part also expected to meet Hollywood fscal criteria within specifc production standards and to match as well genre constructs that audiences were becoming accustomed to.19 As noted in the introduction, flm is critically marked by a feedback process in which audience preferences and tastes impact flm themes; this applies not merely to narratives but also to the relationships between the narratives and settings (Gans 1957). Thus visions of a “lost Berlin” projected onto New York or the New York of the East Coast writers’ imaginations were delimited by production requirements, Hollywood settings, flm technologies of the period, genre requirements, and audience expectations. The New York skyline permeated photographic and visual art, in resonance with broader cultural discourses of urbanity. The relationship between flm and other sources of popular discourse on the city is, however, ambivalent. This relationship was further mediated by cinematographic technologies, as well as visual styles and directorial approaches. Many crime story flms were actually derived from tabloid journalism or garish pulp fction, but black and white cinematography, and especially that of New York,

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aestheticized these visions. Thus when Dimendberg (2004: see chapter 1) compares Weegee’s photographs of New York to flms, he neglects the skyline splendor that so many flms convey in spite of the horrid crime scenes that are included in their narratives. Although dark and sometimes ominous, the skyline rarely escapes its spectacular glare while Weegee’s photographs convey sordid and grimy urbanity. Skyline visions of New York, moreover, inspired subsequent artistic visions: Black-and-white cityscapes of the Manhattan skyline became virtually synonymous with the artistic sensibility, and they began to appear with increasing regularity throughout the visual culture – in the younger generation of street photographers, in flms such as The Naked City, The Window, and Detective Story; in the graphic monochromatic effects of non-representational paintings. (Naremore 1998: 171–172) Although contemporary reception of flm noir from the 1940s is in part tied to this aestheticization of urban space, when New York visions compared to narrative constructs, a more ambiguous understanding of the city also becomes quite apparent. In this sense, flms of the period of study glorifed the city more than discourses in the popular press but tackled more serious problems and entailed more critical visions than the aesthetic imagery of post World War Two era photographic art that until today is still inspired by black and white flms of the 1940s. Thus, if the skyline trope includes resonances with crises, anxieties, and urban tensions, the aestheticized Manhattan skyline imagery from the 1940s, in particular, also subverts and questions this connection with the social context.

Imaginaries and discursive representations: The interdisciplinary nexus Although Lefebvre’s (1996: 101) remark that the city itself is an oeuvre of art, much like Mumford’s (1996 [1937]) notion of the city as “a theater of social action,” seem insightful metaphors, this book departs from works that see the city merely as representation (see Donald 1999), often rendering its realities intangible or relative to the eye of the observer. Following Lefebvre (1996: 101), the city has a history; it is a work of a history, that is, of clearly defned people and groups who accomplish this oeuvre in historical conditions. Conditions which simultaneously enable and limit possibilities are never suffcient to explain what was born of them, in them, by them. Thus this inquiry maintains a dual focus on both social conditions, and representations and imaginaries, and resists the blurring of the two spheres, while it also seeks to unravel the linkages between them.

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Cities, of course, possess signifcant representational qualities, as Kevin Lynch (1960) has demonstrated in The Image of the City. Indeed, the tremendous artistic creativity of the modern art period of 1918–1939 is characteristically situated in, and inspired by, the metropolis, as much as it is marked by the social and economic crises of the period. As if transposing Benjamin’s faneûrie and even Simmelian pronouncements about the mental consequences of metropolitan life in stylistic and narrative manners, urban literary and visual sensibilities withdraw to inner realms to depict the psychological effects of urban existence or project them onto the city. In turn, they celebrate the pulse and verve of the streets, delight in its open spaces, its illicit pleasures, and also lament the routinization of work and human existence in the machine age environment. Representations can be discursive and discourse-producing. An inquiry into representational meanings is a study of the visions of the city in the arts and popular culture and also a means to interpret possible experiences of urban modernity. The dual focus of the book is not meant to equate the two spheres of inquiry, however, but refects rather a search for the unexplored connections that might elucidate and also question the representational aspects of the increasing ambivalence towards cities in the U.S. The metaphor agitated urban modernity captures a specifc aspect of urban ambivalence, which, as Beauregard (2003) has argued, is a broader theoretical concept encompassing Western urban history since the 19th century.20 Beauregard’s (2003) study demonstrates that these discourses increasingly become “voices of urban decline” in the postwar period, while this book captures the preceding historical period in which urban ambivalence took a specifc tension-wrought shape. The notion of “agitated” suggests this sense of unsettled, and also of an unsettling, fuid and changing set of urban imaginaries. Raymond Williams (1998: 50–51) has argued that it was certainly an error to suppose that values or art-work could be adequately studied without reference to the particular society within which they were expressed, but it is equally an error to suppose that the social explanation is determining or that the values are mere by-products. But if crises prompt the juxtapositions of ideas or representations against the historical realities and vice versa, the process might not be a simple equation of confrmation or denial (Williams 1973: 291). By arguing in The Country and the City to “overcome the division … by refusing to be divided,” Williams (1973: 306) meant a reconciliation, in the British context, of the contradictory country and city ideals. But this “division” could be seen in another sense, vis-à-vis the nuanced, fuid, complex, and ambiguous representational aspects of art/popular culture in their range of meanings, and their social and political contexts, focusing on the ways in which they produce meanings as well as the means through which these meanings are produced and reproduced. A study of the possible, indirect, and

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diverse contexts of urban images provides as well an understanding of the ways in which these contexts have been altered, reinvented, and by-passed. Although the relationship might be very indirect (yet also more than merely complicit in producing altered [extra]urban settings) towards the end of this period, large cities are changed by urban renewal, middle-class abandonment, decline in female employment with the departure to the suburbs, and racial transition. But what other representational analyses perhaps did not see was that it was less intriguing to code specifc visions as anti-urban stances, ideological or class acts, but perhaps more rewarding to look at the ways in which a visual and narrative encounter with city spaces and their lifeworlds emoted, re-imagined, and re-structured these urban perceptions, commenced novel urban discourses, and also even rendered uncanny urban fgurations without masking social inequalities. In analyzing Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s street texts and urban miniatures which concern the metropolitan condition and (in the form of feuilleton) play a political role, Andreas Huyssen (2015: 118, 123, 153) concludes that Kracauer selected photography and flm, focusing on the materiality of urban space understood as a social space, while Benjamin opted for the emblem in urban space, thus illuminating the role of script and legibility. In their respective writings of short prose, Kracauer possesses an architectural sociological imagination, while Benjamin possesses a literary philosophical one; both share, however, the same interest in “burrow[ing] the material thicket in order to unfold the dialectic of the essentialities” (Huyssen 2015: 120, 122). Kracauer’s urban texts cannot be solely related to flm and fânerie, neglecting the role of photography and “a certain stasis of cold allegorical gaze in and at urban spaces” (Huyssen 2015: 119). A critique of photographs that Huyssen (2015: 123) applies to reportage and derives from Brecht (“reportage photographs life; … a mosaic [assembled from single observations on the basis of comprehension of their meaning] would be its image”) is applicable perhaps to a cinematic critique of photography as flm offers too such a mosaic, a “fow of life” in Kracauer’s terms. And if according to Huyssen (2015: 123), Kracauer sought politically progressive potential in photography while criticizing its use in illustrated papers, he appears to have found it in flm as evident in his Theory of Film. Kracauer’s urban miniatures reveal his sociological interest as is apparent in the very titles “The Unemployment Offce,” “Homeless Shelter,” The Underpass,” and “Farewell to the Linden Arcade,” in which urban space is seen as a “social space” and images of space are for Kracauer “the dreams of society” (Huyssen 2015: 124). Kracauer locates in flm and photography a new feeling for space as “an interweaving of objective and subjective culture (Simmel), with built urban space generating psychic and bodily reactions that are not simply private and internal to the subject but enunciated and performed, as it were, in and by urban space itself.” The key here is the capacity of this spatial imagination to engender an alternate social order (Huyssen 2015: 125).

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Huyssen (2015) locates in the language of the text what photographic art lacked in its indexicality, given its ties to mass circulation. Film adds movement and montage but in a manner that subsumes both language and photography. Huyssen is, however, correct in charging flm with the “inexorable speed of indexical images” and exalting the slowed-down pace of the written word (a response especially in the form of feuilleton, Huyssen (2015: 126) does not fail to emphasize, to the threat of visual media). But Huyssen (2015) does not notice that flm too has its own lingering, tracking shots, its pauses, its forms of slowing down, then speeding up; indeed, not all metropolitan flms retain the speed of Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927, d. Walter Ruttmann) that “evokes the city as a palimpsest of rhythms, experiences and scales, in the process rigorously excluding the vistas, monuments, skylines, and axial perspectives characteristic of the urban postal trade, the stenographs and flms that dominated Berlin’s earlier representational tradition” (Uricchio 2008: 108). But it is less so in the cinematic overtures in flms noir which hold the skyline as jazz music plays inviting the viewers’ refexion upon the city, but more in the subversive scripts of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Abraham Polonsky, etc. that cinema attempts critical and political emancipation in and of the urban environment. Yet Huyssen (2015: 19) may be more accurate in noting that this (cinematic) space is a profoundly exploited space by the capitalist media, thus, no doubt that “[o]utright political critique of the capitalist cultural apparatus and its exploitation of the image found its appropriate aesthetic form in the miniature [in the newspaper feuilleton], where literature asserted its Eigensinn in relation to the visual media and mass circulation.” Thus, “remediation in reverse” takes place as the literary word asserts its specifcity, challenging the boundaries between the visual and the linguistic, and importantly, “between narrative and spatial representation” (Huyssen 2015: 8, 9). For Kracauer, deeper knowledge of cities required “making visible” “dreamlike spoken images of cities,” those “'creatures of contingency' that were not subject to rational city planning” (Huyssen 2015: 127). And even though Huyssen (2015: 127, 130) repeatedly insists on the literary discourse of miniatures to make up for the defciencies of photography (and sides perhaps with Benjamin’s script more than with Kracauer’s blizzard of images) (Huyssen 2015: 146), the argument made in this book is perhaps that cinematic cycles, or urban discourses across a range of flms – and here I mean an entire corpus of flms – create precisely this “mosaic” and an “image of life” (Huyssen 2015: 127), which also holds the “potential for political awakening,” the emancipatory potential that Kracauer so yearned for (Huyssen 2015: 146) (and that might not be unattainable in photographic art too, as Helen Levitt’s work, discussed in Chapter 4, shows). Perhaps at stake in urban discourse is not so much which media (or rather what combination of literary, cinematic, photographic, visual, etc) but what type of discourse of the urban in question are the viewer and readers alike traversing. Thus, when Huyssen describes the harbor of Marseille and discusses its memory that holds the residue of another life to be counterposed

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to modernity as a void (Huyssen 2015: 131), the question is what kind of discourse of the diverse city of Marseille does it convey, what agency does it assign to its dwellers, what strata does it hide from view. A representation of the city in literature can be seen as both a “social image” and “palimpsestic impression” (Pike 1981, 13–14). A simple contrast or comparison between the actual social conditions does not apply, as this relationship is more complex even in a mere temporal sense since both cinematic and literary narratives are often displaced slightly backward in time. While not all representations are social, the notion of the city as a social image suggests that it is developed in relationship to the social circumstances even if this might be indirect. The notion of the city as a palimpsestic image, on the other hand, is more suggestive of the blurred spheres of reality and imagination.21 While depictions of the city in flm do not entail mere social images, aspects of these visions might be more pronounced in times of crises.22 While this study groups the flms thematically, it does not see the flms as mere “images of society” (Sorlin 1991, Sorlin 1980). Thus an important distinction has to be made between the city as a social image in contrast to the city as an image of society. Following Dimendberg’s (2004) study of flm noir, it can be argued that there are parallels and connections between the change in urban conditions and the ways in which representations of the city in flm (across authorial styles) are trying to come to terms with urban life. These infuences are neither linear nor mere background. A cautious note thus ought to preface any possible linkages between actual cities and urban imaginaries. Real and imagined cities are neither such polar opposites nor do they perhaps form jointly a completely shapeless blurry entity; neither can we talk about a singular set of city characteristics nor set against them their supposed single-minded real faces or their specifc sets of envisioned auras. As Mary Ann Caws (1991) noted, “there is no way … of abandoning the almost impossible claims of representation, or of hoping to represent it all.”23 The skyline motif in other arts’ encounter with the metropolis, and not merely flm, enables access to a broader repertoire of the visions, feelings, symbols, and signs that have infuenced a particular set of urban images and socio-spatial tropes. While the study has proposed that imaginaries of the metropolis undergo a set of changes during the period from the 1920s to the late 1950s, neither the simplicity nor the linearity of such alterations can be assumed. Linear shifts in representations cannot be assumed, “for in all such interpretations it is the coexistence of presence and change that is really striking and interesting, and which we have to account for without reducing either fact to a form of the other” (Williams 1973: 289).24 Differences in art and media also have to be considered in the ways that they infuence the content of the urban worlds envisioned or narratively constructed as well as in ways in which they structure or contest the notion of representation. In the context of the classical Hollywood period, distinctions between flm and photographic representations are signifcant.2526

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Unlike a still photograph, and like a painting, a fction movie is a world … A movie may take fragments from life but it arranges them into a fction; the world of its representation is not the world we inhabit but another world put together on the screen. Yet it is a world presented a piece at a time, so that each image is to be regarded as of the world, a detail picked out from an indefnitely larger world of the movie that the movie treats as tantamount to the world. … Central to the fction of a fction movie is the convention that the movie camera is like a still camera endowed with access and mobility in a world like our own where it can go about successfully pointing to the signifcant detail. (Perez 1998: 397–398) Film narratives represent worlds of their own, separate from those lived in the actual New York of the 1930s and 1940s, but visually, flms, both those shot on location and the studio productions, are also of the world. These differences as well as similarities point to the unique synthetic characteristics of movies in conjuring up both fctional and real urban worlds and creating complex, often ambivalent, relationships between these worlds.27 That images matter in ways that they shape our consciousness and imagination has been well established. That cinematic and photographic urban images from the period of study have been re-appropriated and reshaped by contemporary memories (whose important palimpsestic veil they have threaded) has already been argued. “Urban images” from fne arts, photographic art, literature, and flm, however, derive their representational meanings in part through codes specifc to their medium. Further, as Kevin Lynch (1960, 46–91) has pointed out, cities are uniquely visual landscapes but different cities entail alternate symbols and patterns that the author argued could be grouped into fve general spatial categories: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. In this manner, the legibility of the city is related to the ways in which its denizens might identify and mentally arrange these visual patterns (Lynch 1960: see chapter 1). Albeit the assumed neutrality of Lynch’s scheme is problematic, these patterns are in part impermanent since design, architecture, and planning are temporal “arts” (Lynch 1960: 1) and as such are necessitated by economic, political, and social circumstances that have caused the metropolitan built environments once created to be radically altered, abandoned, destroyed, or recycled. The approach taken in this book accounts for the errors or silences in both methodological approaches sketched above: the dubious relativism of urban observation and the deceptive sociological mirroring in art, although only in a limited sense by focusing on the urban contexts in flms. A more complete theory of representations would build upon the works of flm theory, analyzing not only the social context in the flms studied, but also the complexities of flm’s production, distribution, and reception, histories of the directors and actors. This is beyond the scope of this study. Just as this study is not meant as a comprehensive social and cultural history of the troubled period, neither does the scope of representational analysis

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examine the entire artistic or cinematic production of this remarkably creative era. The book is privileged by the fact that the historical period in question has produced some of the most compelling works of art about New York. Further, a common set of city tropes appears appropriated in a range of cultural and artistic products and is characteristic of the period of study. In flms noir of the 1940s, American urban social worlds assume the central thematic and visual reference.28 Further, sculptural and three-dimensional aspects of the medium make flm close to architecture (see Lamster 2000), even if Hollywood movies from the end of the silent flm era, including the following two decades of the classic studio system, did not yet take advantage of the full range of cinematic possibilities. This can be seen in the ways in which physical space is represented in flm. The notion of space in flm refers to “screen space” and “off-screen space” (the latter refers to the space outside of the four sides of the frame, behind the frame, in front of the frame).29 As Stephen Heath has pointed out, “the cinema of ‘classical continuity’ worked to ‘contain’ and ‘regularize’ off-screen space, to erase the work of the apparatus of cinema, and to construct a reassuringly stable but fctitious subject-position for the spectator.”30 In other words, the capacity of flm language to enact or perceive the social and spatial worlds in “an art of absence, of partial views, an art that hides more than it shows”31 (as well as to question the medium’s own role in staging, if not manipulating, visual content) is only hinted at in flms of the classical Hollywood period. Further, while flm is often considered the most “modern” of arts, according to Ann Freidberg, this marker has been attributed to it by French directors in the early 20th century for the purpose of “adopting” flm into the pantheon of high art, in part as a way of distancing it from its popular culture aspects. Further, flm has a paradoxical place in critical discourse about modernism. The narrative and mimetic conventions that developed as the cinema became a popular mass cultural form are precisely the conventions of representation that modernisms were challenging. Cinema can be seen as a “modern” form embodying distinctly anti-modern narrative conventions (closure, mimesis, realism) disguised in “modern” technological attire. (Friedberg 1993: 164–165) Thus, while flm in the early part of the 20th century emerged as the most modern of arts, it did not necessarily adopt the modernist techniques of other art forms – “while modernist art explored fragmentation, multiplicity, juxtapositions, and the utilization of discontinuity as a principle of construction, the cinema strove towards unity and continuity as a formative principle” (Horak 1987: 8).32 The urban environment played a critical role not only in establishing flm as modern art and but also in making a spatial and social claim within

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the modern world. Giuliana Bruno (2002) argues that this occurred in two ways. First, through actual physical spaces within growing urban entertainment zones in Western cities that included “a network of architectural forms,” “arcades, railways, department stores, the pavilion exhibition halls, glass houses and network gardens” [that] “produced a new spatiovisuality” (Bruno 2002: 17). This notion allows us to expand Friedberg’s views on the aesthetic aspect of the modern that flm embraced noting thus the alternate and not necessarily opposed commercial tendency that placed flm, in the U.S. in particular, closer to the world of urban popular amusements. Second, flm claimed the space of the modern “with regard to its constant reinvention of space” adopting through narratives and visual styles “[a] geography of travel culture.” In this manner, early cinematic panoramas accomplish “a mirroring effect;” that is “the life of the street, views of the city, and vistas of foreign lands were offered back to urban audiences for viewing” (Bruno 2002: 18). This corresponds further to Shiel’s and Fitzmaurice’s notion that cinema is a peculiarly spatial form of culture … best understood in terms of the organization of space: both space in flms—the space of the shot; the space of the narrative setting … and flms in space—the shaping of lived urban spaces by cinema as cultural practice.” (Fitzmaurice, 2001: 5) The cinema of classic continuity challenged the limits of its apparatus and the range of its hidden or subversive meanings precisely through the uneasy encounter with the American urban world. Some of the most creative and the most compelling visions from the period can be found precisely in the varied range of imaginaries of the American metropolis, flmed both in studios as well as, especially since the early 1940s, in the streets of big cities. Even if not preoccupied with the exploration of spatial absences (that is, circumstances, spaces, or images that might be implied by narratives but are not shown or may have been deliberately omitted),33 American urban flms are laden with another sort of narrative and visual present-absence. This often less apparent, but in select productions of The Great Depression period, and especially by the 1940s, fully evident content can be found in the complex positioning of the cinematic medium towards the changing social and also urban-spatial circumstances of the two tumultuous decades. Authors of the cinematic city literature thus err if they consider merely the material or architectural domain of the flm settings. Shaped by the material grounds of urban social transformations, frequent narrative resonances with economic and political crises, the Hollywood mode of production, and references to other urban arts, New York flms from the period of study are distinguished by their articulation of the discourse of agitated urban modernity.

Notes 1 Moreover, “whereas in the 1930s and 1940s, these programs were government initiated, built, and managed, the 1949 urban renewal law brought private

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2

3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

New York’s agitated urban modernity entrepreneurs into the act.” This further highlights the fact that the period of study is characterized by specifc forms of urban public intervention. See AbuLughod 1999: 207. The end year depends upon whether Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly or Welles’ Touch of Evil is taken as the formal epitaph of flm noir. Perhaps the argument could be made for the latter flm as the epitaph. Set in the border town of Los Robles where physical decay and disintegration stands in for social corruption, Touch of Evil insists on complicating, if not blurring, the boundaries between right and wrong, actively manipulating the social constructs of race and sexuality. Even if the process of incorporation was, of course, not at all smooth. Repatriation also occurred (in the case of Italian immigrants in particular), especially during the Great Depression. “Echoing Russia’s Five-Year Plans, “Plan” and “Planning” bec[a]me buzz-words in politics” (Hobsbawm 1996: 96). The signifcant skyscrapers or structures that were built in New York in the period of study include the American Radiator Building (Raymond Hood, 1924), the Telephone Building (Ralph Walker, 1922–1926), Sherry-Netherland Hotel (Schultze & Weaver, 1927), Fred F. French Building (Fred F. French Company, 1927), Hearst Magazine Building (Joseph Urban and George B. Post & Sons, 1928), Helmsley Building (Warren & Wetmore, 1928), Daily News Building (Howells & Hood, 1930), the McGraw-Hill Building (Hood & Fouilhoux, 1931), Century Apartments (Irwin Chanin, 1931), Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (Schultze & Weaver, 1931), Irving Trust Company Building (Voorheers, Gmelin & Walker, 1931), New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfnch & Abbott, 1932), Rockefeller Center (Hood & Fouilhoux; Reinhard & Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, 1932–1940), Rockefeller Apartments (Harrison & Fouilhoux, 1936), The Museum of Modern Art (Edward Durell Stone and Philip L. Goodwin, 1939; [Philip Johnson, 1951, 1964]), in addition to the most well-known examples of the Chrysler (William Van Allen, 1930) and the Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 1931). Other signifcant structures built in the period of study included the First Houses (Fredrick L. Ackerman, 1935), as the frst public housing project in the nation in 1934, the United States Courthouse (Cass Gilbert and Cass Gilbert, Jr., 1936), the middle-class housing project of Stuyvesant Town (Gilmore D. Clarke, 1947), as well as the George Washington Bridge (Othmar H. Ammann, engineer and Cass Gilbert, architect, 1931). The most signifcant skyscrapers included a variety of architectural styles, from the ornamental black structure of the American Radiator Building, the early set-back style of Telephone Building, the vertically-striped, chilly Daily News Building, the sleek, jazzy, radiant Chrysler Building and the stoic Art Deco style, formerly the-tallest-in-the-world, eightysix story Empire State Buildings. See, White and Willensky 2000. A number that was, according to Peter Marcuse, important in relative (although not absolute) numbers. Quoted in Abu-Lughod 1999: 179. While these statements sketch broader trends in the changing urban landscape in the case of New York, and while my study offers further substantiating evidence for this change, I attempt to go further than most urban studies scholarship in explaining why this might have been the case. Including in what respects and by which social strata was the metropolis deemed, in Stern’s terms, “unnatural” (although this may not be the most suitable word to describe the transformation). Upholding thus urban equality, diversity, and non-elite cosmopolitanism. See also Brunsdon 2012 on the ironies of interdisciplinarity in the cinematic city literature. See Peter Marcuse’s critique of Louis Wirth in Marcuse (2002).

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11 I am not implying or suggesting any level of generalization from the New York experience of the time. Abu-Lughod’s study itself points to distinct economic, political, and cultural differences between the three cities that she investigated. It should, however, be noted that one of the characteristics of the urbanist and urban sociological writings, for instance by the prominent academic and intellectual fgures in the historical period, Lewis Mumford and Louis Wirth, have in fact included often erroneous generalizations and predictions about the social life of the American metropolis from the cases of New York and Chicago. The characteristics attributed to the city and this phenomenon of equating the urban modern experience with New York in particular is one of the subjects of this study. 12 This can be traced back to the celebrated and also critiqued works of Jane Jacobs, discussed in the fnal chapter. 13 Precisely because of its complexity, New York (and this might be the case for many other urban environments) seems to be particularly suited for interdisciplinary inquiry. 14 It should also be noted that planning literature has been generally unsparing in its critique of various forms of the artifcial staging of urban heritage. See Boyer 1994, Sorkin 1992. 15 I mean this in the urbanist sense discussed, for instance, in Beauregard and BodyGendrot (1999). 16 Especially in the period 1947–1954 in the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. 17 Illuminating these ambiguities presents a particular analytical challenge. In the era of economic and political crises of such magnitude, the socio-economic conditions in cities would necessarily override cultural concerns. I have to preface the following sections of study thus with a note that my research in urban sociology and planning, as well as flm, art, and literature, has led me to question strict structural-cultural dichotomies and especially forms of determinism. The American urban arena, historical and contemporary, and especially the case of New York, offers perhaps the most intriguing opportunities for research that can relate these realms and study their complicated interplays. 18 It should not be forgotten that cinema itself was an urban phenomenon in both the U.S. and Europe. The frst cinemas in the U.S. were in immigrant and working-class neighborhoods; by the 1920s and the 1930s movie theater palaces were built for middle class audiences, in central amusement districts as well as in suburban areas. 19 On flm genre, see Leo Braudy (1999). 20 Robert Beauregard traces this notion to the 19th century rural-urban antagonisms, but further relates it to the fscal crisis, unemployment conditions, labor unrest, racial transition, spatial planning, suburbanization, and urban disinvestment. See Beauregard (2003: 16–20). 21 Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities presents an example of this. 22 Hence, for instance, the presence of shell-shocked soldiers in flms of the 1940s who return to American cities to roam in disorientation and haze, in an indirect cinematic narrative and visual sense commentary on the memory and forgetting of socio-spatial environments, conveying as well a sense of gender tensions and family struggles of the period. 23 Further, “If the conceptual city is, like the real one, diffcult either to wander in or be at home, with its contradictory claims and promises, our representations double back on each other, promising nothing but problematics.” More poignantly, “about city mystery, physical and mental, about loneliness and loss and powerlessness we know: that consciousness we must not lose. And yet it must not be, either, an excuse for yet more city-despair, for yet less use of the imagination, political, textual, and personal.” See Caws 1991: 6–9.

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24 This is based on Williams’ study of representations of the city and the country since the 16th century onwards. Perhaps only a scope as broad and as deep might begin to uncover the changing meanings of social visions; yet an inquiry perhaps more open-minded and less rigid than Williams’ is also necessary. 25 In the context of photographic art, John Szarkowski has stressed that “the best of photographers have all been frst of all pointers … [The photographer says,] I call your attention to this pyramid, face, battlefeld, pattern of nature, ephemeral juxtaposition.” Photographs thus proclaim, “look at this as I saw it.” In contrast, as Gilberto Perez illuminates, “in painting what is to be seen is another world, apart from ours and enclosed within its boundaries, a world that may recognizably resemble ours but whose only encounter with our circumstances was through the eye and hand of the painter who put it together.” Quoted in Perez 1998: 394. 26 One might question this strict distinction by pointing precisely to the “ephemeral juxtapositions” in photographs that capture non-representational abstractions as well as those that appear so elaborately staged as if to evoke entirely fctional worlds. In turn, there are also paintings that both claim the representational sphere (as in Dutch 17th century group portraits, not to mention Vermeer’s art) and also present worlds of their own. Then, of course, one might cite cubist collages that often included photographs or pieces of real objects within their fctional worlds. Perez (1998: 395–396) cites Stanley Cavell who has stated “a painting is a world, a photograph is of the world.” 27 This is important to point out because to my mind being able to at once distinguish between the ways in which flm negotiates these spheres, as well as between the actual urban contexts that it represents and the range of plausible interpretations about the shapes and forms of experiences of modern life that can be derived from these contexts, does not necessarily much less implicitly convey a sense that the supposed “intertextual implosion of representations” has completely collapsed “the boundary between social reality and representations.” See King 1996: 3. 28 Even if themes of urban discontent can be found in earlier flms, and even if noir city visions return to treat social crises or gender tensions of the latter periods, we can still trace the key vision of the agitated urban modernity and the key shift in the urban representation precisely in the period of study. 29 This formal distinction is according to Noël Burch’s Theory of Film Practice, quoted in Forgacs 2000a: 106. 30 Stephen Heath’s essay “Narrative Space,” quoted in ibid. 31 Perez has pointed this out in the context of Antonioni’s cinema. Again, flms of the 1930s and the 1940s do not yet foresee the full scope and depth of this type of relationship with physical and social space that can for instance be seen in Antionioni’s Eclipse (1962) (Perez 1998: 387). 32 Friedberg cites examples from European early 20th century avant-garde flmmakers in their attempt to claim the status of flm as art by an affliation of flm to movements in painting and visual art (constructivism, Dada, surrealism) as well as by “exhibiting” flms in art galleries. Thus Friedberg challenges the arguments of critics who claim that avant-garde movements questioned the elite art establishment. 33 Attempted later by the modernists of European cinemas or the cinematographers of the French New Wave movement in the 1960s, although many of them gradually moved away from social engagement, as could perhaps be expected.

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The city in motion

The skyline motif is an assertive trope and critical visual detail in flms of the 1920s–1950s, appearing not merely in the framing establishing shots but throughout narrative junctures. In his research based on the analysis of the skyline postcards of New York that he traces back to the mid-19th century, Taylor (1992: 23–33) associates the city’s skyline view in the frst decades of the twentieth century with novelty, modernity, and sophistication. This is what the city could have meant to thousands of immigrants who sent postcards from New York home to Europe, to small towns, the villages that they left, boasting of the city and their own voyage to it. “By 1910, New York had not only outdistanced all other places in the world in the upward extension of its buildings, it had already twice as many tall structures as Chicago would have a full decade later” (Zunz and Ward 1992: 5). In Lower Manhattan, the Woolworth Building or ‘The Cathedral of Commerce’ emerged in 1913 as the supreme modernist skyscraper (Tafuri 1979: 432, 391). Tafuri (1979: 389–390, my ellipsis) points out that the skyscraper was perceived as a magical creation, “an element of mediation, [and] an entity that remain[ed] aloof from the city.” Writing in the 1920s, Mumford ([1924] 1955: 81) described the modernist skyscraper as “a building that reduces the passerby to a mere note, whirled and buffeted by the winds of traffc.” More broadly, Schleier (2009: vii–ix) argues that in flm history, skyscrapers, which range from offce buildings to apartment houses and hotels, are emblems of capitalism and democracy, symbols of class and social mobility, and gendered fgurations (on the skyscraper and gender see also Douglas [1995]). The skyline and street motifs further invite linkages with urban theory. Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 92–93) dichotomous critique of modernist planning posited through the disparate visions of fâneurs (walkers, denizens) and voyeurs (planners, power structures), might hence apply, as Thomas Bender (2002: 104–105) has argued, to the visual art of the 1920s and the 1930s that presented the alternate “cities of making do” and “of ambition.” But the fâneurs-voyeurs dichotomy simply cannot capture the visual and narrative complexity, plurality, and ambiguity of the skyline views in American flm. The skyline, linked to the trope of motion, is not merely a

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collection of skyscraper styles but a complex cinematic metonym for New York visions – and more broadly, the American metropolis – critically shaped during the 1920s–1950s period. The frst portion of this chapter examines skyline views in Manhatta (d. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921). Through a dialectical interlinkage between the city imagined and the city experienced, the flm presents the city as a site of unfathomable strangeness and unresolvable contradictions. This strangeness and the diffculty of defning and understanding the elusive subject of the modern city – a trope discernible in Manhatta and also in flm noir – is also noted in the writings of Simmel, Mumford, and the Chicago School of Urban Ecology. The fnal portion of the chapter focuses on two flms, East Side, West Side (d. Allan Dwan, 1927) and The Crowd (d. King Vidor, 1928) which try to capture the achievements and contributions of the common man in the city. The dual motif of the skyline – at once a celebration of the modern city’s promise and the symbol of the American dream – is narratively appropriated and reclaimed in East Side, West Side, offering agency and capacity to cope with the forces of modernity, not be ruined by them, to transform, rebuild, and to help reform urbanity. The skyline in the fnal long shot becomes a tribute to the capacity of newcomers and settlers to jointly reclaim the city. The metropolitan prospect in The Crowd is devoid of the magnifcence of such propelling dreams, but, notwithstanding the flm’s pessimism, in The Crowd representational spaces interact strongly with spatial practices of the city to provide a crucial link for understanding and changing reality – the goal of flm art for Vidor (Cited in Gerstner 2012: 15).

Manhatta as a City Symphony Early cinema played a role, as Huyssen (2015, 4–5) points out, in training perception for new forms of urban life conjuring up imaginaries of the “accelerated speed of urban experience.” The 1921 flm by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand is a pioneering example of the cinematic relationship with the city as embodied in movement (Schwartz 2013: 3). Manhatta partakes in a project that Huyssen (2015: 18) has described, in the context of modernist miniatures, as “a new understanding of architectural space expanded to include traffc, rail lines, train stations, and urban movement in general. It opened up the closed city to circulation of air, movement, and dynamism.” Strand was a photographer and a painter during the 1910s; Sheeler studied industrial art and explored photography (see Mouat 2013: 22). This eleven-minute visualization of Walt Whitman’s poem “Mannahatta” is a forerunner of the 1920s’ city symphonies’ attempt to capture, through a visualization of a fragmented reality, the experience of cities following the terrors of the First World War and subsequent political instability (KorenKuik 2013: 12, 13). This is a larger trope tied to, following Benjamin, the growth of the modern capitalist metropolis as the new sensory universe in

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which cinema took shape, evoking the fragmentation of new urban experiences of industrialization (Singer 2001: 9). City symphonies construct an image of the city as a quasi cohesive entity, an urban chronotrope that prioritizes the spatial (Koren-Kuik 2013: 17) and uses rhythmic montage and varied angle shots to evoke cubist paintings (Mouat 2013: 21; also Koszarski 2008: 343). Jacobs et al. have termed “city symphony” a full-fedged genre, defning such a flm as “an experimental documentary dealing with the energy, the patterning, the complexities, and the subtleties of a city” (2019: 10). Avoiding narrative and text, city symphony flms use, among other techniques, a “highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life that […] is organized through rhythmic and associative montage in such a way as to evoke musical structures” (Jacobs et al. 2019: 5). Of particular relevance is the authors’ argument that “city symphonies do not just adapt the flm viewer to the imperatives of the metropolis and the capitalist economy, they also emphasize cinema’s power as a cognitive instrument, using the mastery of the stimuli of the metropolis as the basis for creative responses, artistic refections, and critical interpretations” (Jacobs et al. 2019: 33) City symphonies, however, apply the languages of cinema and music to suggest an organic view in which the city becomes an entity, an organism, and a character, skewing urban stratifcation, hiding social problems, evading cultural patterns, and screening out political dimensions of urban problems. Manhatta’s structure and syntax are examined in this context. While some authors have questioned Manhatta’s originality (Chang 2003: 17), others perceived it as the frst visual statement of the new epistemology of the city (Shiel 2003: 166). Manhatta claims the cinematic space of the “modern” and it does so in two ways – through an avant-garde visual style and through a reinvention of the urban vista in its enchantment with and puzzlement by New York’s built environment, its emerging skyscraper city, and its crowds in motion seen for the most part from aerial or elevated camera positions. Manhatta is similar to Flaherty’s 1927 Twenty-Four Dollar Island, shot with telephoto lenses featuring views from New York City skyscrapers (Koszarski 2008: 343). The flm was shot from the rooftops and streets of Lower Manhattan, “within a fve blocks radius around Battery Park, the Staten Island Ferry docks, Wall Street, Broadway and Trinity Place” (Horak 1987: 9), from early 1920 until the fall of the same year. This landscape was the site of tremendous physical change in the frst decades of the twentieth century but equally important was the diverse social landscape of the Lower East Side. Suarez argues, referencing Kracauer’s mass ornament, that Manhatta effaces difference, and yet Devine is more correct in asserting that the flm appears closer to celebrations of pluralism (Devine 2012: 109–110; also Suarez 2002). The flm represents an example of a skyline vision at once engaged with the physical reality of the built environment, a “homage to the technological-age city” (Stern et al. 1987: 86),

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and yet also an intertextual reference inspired by early 20th-century photographic and visual art representation. Horak notes infuences of Stieglitz’s City of Ambition and The Ferry Boat (1910) that can indeed be discerned in the flm; Strand’s well-known Wall Street photograph is virtually replicated in the flm as “the blurred pedestrians of the original still dwarfed by the huge, dark windows of the Morgan Trust Company Building;” Sheeler would in contrast reuse images from Manhatta in his latter paintings, but his aesthetics on the other hand in the latter period seemed more closely tied to the machinery, geometrically arranged steel girders, painted in 1935 as his “Totems in Steel” (Horak 1987: 12). The skyline perspective of Strand and Sheeler favors “multiple, refexive points of view” and also includes a “‘romantic’ subtext involving a desire to reconcile man with nature” (Horak 1987: 8), a mélange of modernist visions, and a tribute to Whitmanesque romanticism, although the Whitman of “Mannahatta” is more of a “witness” to the city than the poet engaged in the “embrace of the crowd or the city at large” (Devine 2012: 107; also Oehlrich 2013: 28). In Strand’s original press release written in 1921,1 the cinematographers are identifed as a “younger modern American painter and a photographer of distinction” (Sheeler) and as an “experimenter in photography” (Strand). Corn (1999: 294–295) termed Sheeler the father of the discourse of “American tradition” or the “usable past,” associated most closely with Machine Age art and Precisionism; Strand’s art in Corn’s view was similar as well, given that he practiced “a new ‘straight’ style of photography and [emphasized] cubist abstraction, often using city buildings and mechanical forms as his subject matter.” The argument here is more aligned with Schleier ([1983] 1986: 100–101), who locates in Manhatta discourses of urban ambivalence, with the imagery of the skyscraper more closely linked to the work of Sheeler, the plight of the urban dweller, and depictions of dehumanization, than to that of Strand. The press release for Manhatta states that Strand’s work was reproduced in “Camera Work,” shown in the library at the Met, within the New York Public Library, and European museums, thus linking the flm with European avant-garde traditions, and recalling the discussion of the active attempts of the Stieglitz circle to establish, legitimize, and take credit for shaping the image of the “modern landscape” of New York. Strand further praised Stieglitz’s urban photography in his 1917 essay entitled “Photography” (Kalb 2000: 92–93). The initial reception context of the flm, however, challenged the cinematographer’s avant-garde vision. The flm, which opened commercially on 24 July 1921 at the Rialto Theater on Broadway,2 was released under the title New York the Magnifcent (Horak 1987: 9). Interestingly, despite the background of the photographers and the emphasis placed on their ties with the art establishment of New York, neither the distribution nor the reception context would allow Manhatta to be perceived as an avant-garde flm. The New York Tribune review of the premiere points to the fact that audiences seemed thrilled, as they saw the flm as a patriotic endorsement of New

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York. During the screenings of Manhatta, “[p]opular songs accompanied each scene and the audience was on the verge of singing along” as the flm also played “The Streets of New York,” the campaign song of Governor Al Smith who was an immigrant of the Lower East Side and a Tammany Hall politician (Kalb 2000: 99). There does not seem to be suffcient information to argue that this reception context in a manner attributed additional social meanings to the flm’s aesthetic vision. A source seems to indicate that it refected the lack of acceptance of flm as art in the U.S.; another reviewer cited by the source, praising the flm’s modernist style, argued that “[t]he city, they discovered, reveals itself most eloquently in the terms of line, mass, volume and movement. Its language is plastic. Thus it expresses its only true individuality” (quoted in Horak 1987: 10). The flm was cheered in the Paris avant-garde and Dadaist circles as well, where Marcel Duchamp helped to show it on 7 July 1922; the “scenic” was presented in French art houses, flm clubs, and artists’ soirees. This suggests multiple but not necessarily contrary perspectives of reception – skyline views combined with Whitman’s poetry screened to audiences in New York were understood as an ode to the city (although critics have even suggested that the inclusion of Whitman’s poetry was a commercial compromise [Devine 2012: 105]), while in Paris the striking photography of the Manhattan skyline covered with misty white smoke symbolized the emergent American modern landscape. The skyline in Manhatta appears frst as a print of a photographic negative – signaling the reversal of its real appearance. Over the black sky Whitman’s poetry appears: “City of the world (for all races are here) City of tall facades of marble and iron” (see Figure 2.1). The last line of the verse ends with “passionate city.” Whitman sought vitality and stimulation in urban restlessness, in the city’s “tumultuous streets.” The city is intoxicating, spellbinding, and vertiginous, full of feeling, multiple bonds, and renewed enthusiasms. But this vision also reveals a poet who, while submerged in the streets, is yet mentally distant from them, and in the same manner Sheeler and Strand capture urban motion from high angles, withdrawn from the immediate experience of urbanity. The joy is an abstract joy for humanity, almost as if any human particularities could be instantly replaced. As Whitman says, he is “blind to particulars and details magnifcently moving in vast masses” (Cited in Riggs 2012: 138). Manhatta captures this sentiment aptly; we fnd Whitman’s words appearing over the “incomplete” skyline, over crowds, buildings, and streets, as the strangely disembodied epitaph of the city’s ephemeral, abstracted movements.3

Modernity, mobility and the Chicago School of Urban Ecology Cinema seen through a modernist lens is a cinema of utopian potential, Tom Gunning (2006: 299) has argued; as an “emblem of modernity,” cinema had revolutionary potential for avant-garde artists (2006: 302, 301). Film’s “ability to capture motion” and “to combine motions into new

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Figure 2.1 Frame enlargement from Manhatta (d. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921).

confgurations” was central to the avant-garde (Gunning 2006: 301), especially to Manhatta. Giuliana Bruno’s (2002: i) term cinematic (e)motion underscores the importance of the ways in which traversals, journeys, and movements are represented in flm. As Huyssen (2015: 3) points out, following Kafka, “motion and its sudden arrest, standstill and its transformation into renewed motion were central aspects of the urban experience.” There is an interesting relationship between movements and knowledge. It is not, after all, that there is “no stable world to know, but that knowledge of that world contributes to its unstable and mutable character” (Giddens 1990: 45). Refexivity is the chief characteristic of the modern – the constant examination of social processes and their relentless reformation based on new information fundamentally alters the character of the very processes examined (Giddens 1990: 38). Social/aesthetic (especially, the linkages between the two domains) understandings of the city are thus crucial. Giddens writes that “[i]n the heart of the world of hard science, modernity foats free” (1990: 39) – although the subject here, however, is not the enigmatic core of modernity (1990: 49) but the city itself. The thesis that the greater the knowledge about social life, the greater the control over it, indeed proved false (Giddens 1990: 43). Manhatta is suggestive of the diffculty of reaching that knowledge of the city from the positions of both science and art in the early twentieth century. Treated as a scientifc object,

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the city viewed erroneously as an organism enchants and evades the scholars of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology, perhaps much the same way that it fascinates and eludes the cinematographers of the 1920s. Robert Park, the leading scholar of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology, believed that motion and mobility were signifcant for understanding the city. According to Richard Sennett, “Park assumed that psychic and moral conditions of living in a city would refect themselves in physical ways – in how space was used, in the patterns of human motion and transport and so on” (1969: 14). First, it bears retelling that Park and other members of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology erroneously conceived of the organic character of the city in their attempt to dispel Spenglerian notions of the “disembodied society of the city” (Sennett 1969: 14). The chief three scholars of the Chicago School of Urban Studies, Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, exemplifed in their work what became the School’s method of researching locations in various cities to uncover the “formal principles of human behaviour” (Gottdiener 1985: 27). According to the Chicago School, urban patterns could be explained by human nature. Devoid of class and cultural perspectives, the Chicago School scientists were seeking to uncover in urban life a universal pattern of human behavior in the language of Darwinism and the economic context of capitalist laissez-faire society. The Chicago School theory culminated in the concentric zone model devised by Burgess, with which he explored the notion of centrality: as a city grows there is an internal differentiation of its urban form into a central business district and four surrounding concentric rings by two processes: agglomeration (or centralization) and decentralization. The Chicago School urban sociologists responded to the negative perceptions of the city of the 19th-century discourses – Thomas Jefferson’s condemnation of the city and Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation regarding the threat of the urban lowest classes (Smith 1988: 29). Park saw the city as a “social organism” or “a social laboratory,” populated through the “[e]cological processes of competition, specialization, and segregation,” where groups clustered in enclaves and ghettoes (Smith 1988: 122, 119, 127). Park made allusions to the second generation of immigrants abandoning their traditional cultures and also claimed that the melting pot was the entire world, not merely America (Park, Cited in Smith 1988: 125, 126). Indeed, the Chicago School, which emerges in the early 20th century when the U.S. rapidly industrialized and cities increased in population due to waves of migration, can be seen as a response to anxieties about urban diversity and immigrant poverty. In an important contrast to Park and the scholars of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology, early 20th-century infuential urban thought by Georg Simmel focused on individuality and ways in which it persevered against modern institutions that threatened to extinguish it (Smith 1988: 121). Simmel’s notion of the “intensifcation of nervous stimuli” is a key element of the modernist perception of the city, and early 20th-century urban

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fâneurs, fâneuses, walkers, loiterers – and also: the masses, the crowds (see Charney and Schwartz 1995: 3–5) – all seem to be subject to this experience. Simmel believed that punctuality, calculability, exactness, intellectualism, blasé attitude, detached sophistication, and emotional coldness have in the metropolis replaced warm neighborly ties and restricted modes of conduct determined by the fxed social orbit of small towns and communal units. The magnitude of these conditions was seen as corresponding to the size of the metropolis – the larger the city, the more prominent these individual characteristics. Even if, according to Simmel, the urban condition was sociopsychological in nature rather than created by the forces of modern capitalism (as Weber had argued), Simmel nevertheless identifes the metropolis as the seat of the “money economy” that in his view creates a calculated, logical metropolitan individual characterized by a matter-of-fact attitude and with a modern mind that is calculating, precise, punctual, unambiguous, certain, reducing all qualitative values to quantitative. In Simmel’s urban sociology, devoid of economic or political changes, class or ethnic exclusion, the urbane blasé personality completely internalizes the “money economy” that works as a leveler, failing to explain how discrimination persists despite, and even because of, the money economy. Rather, the concentration of people and activities in the city stimulates the nervous system, which responds by refusing to react, and in this manner it accommodates the urban environment. While Park followed Simmel in arguing that reserve and a need for social distance (Smith 1988: 129) were produced by a psychologically complex urban environment, he updated Simmel’s notion of the stranger to construct the concept of the marginal man (Smith 1988: 121). Park parted from Simmel in important ways on the concept of urban liberty. According to Sennett, urban freedom, as envisioned by Park, is sharply opposed to Simmel’s conception of liberty in the city. The freedom Park envisioned was behavioral, and involved the capacity of men to express themselves through acts unlike, and unrestrained by the community as a whole. The liberty that Simmel envisioned does not suppose this condition of social deviance; it was instead a transcendental, inner activity of searching out a sense of selfhood beyond petty routine, routine Simmel took to be an ineradicable condition of metropolitan life. (Sennett 1969: 16) It cannot be overemphasized that the impact of Park’s theory remains limited due to an apparent Social Darwinist bias as, according to Park, the temperamental characteristics of each race predisposed it to select “‘elements in the cultural environment’ and ‘seek and fnd its vocation’ in a specifc region of the larger social organization” (Smith 1988: 125). Park saw prejudice as a “social attitude […] embodied in the habits of individuals” (Smith 1988: 126) and perceived the black migrant from the South

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as a stranger who encountered fear and hatred in northern cities (Smith 1988: 127). Modernity, as has been noted, can be tied to circulation and heightened mobility. Giddens (1990: 11) identifes the mobile character of modernity with capitalism as a transformative force. David Frisby has elaborated upon this to emphasize that the metropolis is dominated by circulation, evoking Simmel’s notion of the “money economy,” stressing, not merely […] the movement of commodities and our images of them, but also our increasingly indirect relation to things in the money economy (as the extension of the ideological chain in money transactions). In turn, for individuals the metropolitan experience is also associated with movement, with new experiences of social spaces and the plurality and speed of contact with others. (Frisby 2002: xxx) Also Raymond Williams ([1973] 1993: 296), it should not be forgotten, stressed that the city’s transportation network was itself a communication system, “a form of consciousness and a form of social relations.” The city is characterized by forms of intensity and sensory complexity (Singer 2001: 2). Similar to Simmel, Singer (2001: 8) describes sensory urban properties and evokes the city as a location of sensory overload, identifying sensory shocks and bodily perils (2001) in popular amusements and the popular press serving mass urban working-class audiences. The two domains are related as the “sensory intensifcation of modern amusement [could be seen] as an immediate refection of the surrounding sensory intensifcation of the modern city” (Singer 2001: 9). This is also comparable to Mumford’s views expressed in The Culture of Cities ([c. 1938, c. 1966, c. 1970] 1981: 271): “To counteract boredom and isolation, mass spectacles: to make up for biological inferiority, a series of collective games and exhibitions, based on the withering specializations of the body.” Singer (2001: 65) offers evidence of the heightened sensory properties of urban life via perilous traffc accidents in the city, random injuries, and pedestrian deaths, and also including “hazards of tenement life” (2001: 78–81) and “the perils of proletarian labor” (2001: 82) covered in sensational press; a 1909 illustration in Life demonstrates “a frantic onslaught of sensory shocks,” which “conveys the fractured perceptual polyvalence of urban experience” (2001: 67). Pointing at an example of death in the workplace, Singer cites “a hazardous dimension of modern life that, not coincidentally, was suffered most acutely by the working class that made up the sensational press’s core readership” (2001: 78). Mumford ([c. 1938, c. 1966, c. 1970] 1981: 271), who wrote extensively in the 1920s and the 1930s, took these ideas a step further to argue that the metropolis was characterized by negative vitality, contrasting with nature. “Nature and human nature, violated in this environment, come back in destructive forms […] a dissociated mind in a disintegrated city: perhaps the normal mind of

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the world metropolis.” This recalls imagery from another cinematic city, Berlin Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), which stages an unexplained suicide in the city. Manhatta shares with these early sociological views of the city a sense of unease with the complexity of the urban environment. Manhatta’s imaginary of the city is decidedly modern in that it is driven by a disorienting “sense […] of being caught up in a universe of events that we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control,” which may also be hinting at the postmodern universe (Giddens 1990: 2–3). The city itself, as we shall see, is not fully legible and is the domain of strangeness. Manhatta is concerned rather with the pace of change – indeed, “rapidity of change in conditions of modernity is extreme” (Giddens 1990: 6). Further, Manhatta shapes New York as a phantasmagoric space infused by its poetic past as “locales are thoroughly permeated by and shaped in terms of social infuences quite distant from them” (Giddens 1990: 19). Manhatta is suggestive precisely of how “space can be poetry” (Stilgoe [1958] 1994: x), which involves the portrayal of space that lies beyond the intimate that is necessarily shared. Bachelard in Poetics of Space ([1958] 1994: 231) shows how Balzac corrected his phrase in Louis Lambert from “he made space withdraw before his advance” to “[h]e left space, as he said, before him,” showing a “decline of power of being faced with space;” the same is true of Manhatta, in which the poetry withdraws before the space of the city.

Cinematic mobility in Manhatta Manhatta’s intense expressiveness is manifested in the frst set of shots of the flm: “the bottom of the frame presents an extreme long shot of the Lower Manhattan skyline and the Hudson river, as seen from the New Jersey shoreline, including from left to right: New York City hall, the Woolworth building, the Singer Building, the Equitable Building, and the Banker’s Trust Building” (Horak 1987: 11). This image could be interpreted as a form of stylistic positioning of the viewer towards the cityscape in “the manner of Renaissance perspective” (Horak 1987: 11). But Strand and Sheeler then break this unifed space into a series of discontinuous, seemingly random images. The cinematographers claimed that they sought the elements of expressiveness, attempting to accomplish in a “scenic” what The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) did with the staged sets, thus emphasizing aesthetic qualities of the visual environment – “the visual primacy and the frenetic façadism of Weimar urbanism and modernization” – and the signifcance, in Janet Ward’s (2001: 146, 143) terms, of the “architectural ability to involve the viewer.” Unlike the 1920s city symphonies, Manhatta’s shots of the city are static as the camera contemplates motion within the frame but does not partake in it (see Horak 1987).4 For the most part, the flm avoids images of human

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beings, or understandings of the city as an actual manifestation of social relations (Horak 1987: 14). Manhatta avoids reductive comparisons of crowds and machines, of the human at times reduced to the mechanical in metropolitan flms to follow. The flm contrasts with Berlin Symphony of the City (1927) and its ant-like movements that present inhabitants as insects mingling among the city structures (Horak 1987: 14). This rudimentary Darwinist imagery is again reminiscent of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology – problematic due to the universalism and generalizations of the analyses, the neglect of the importance of class and cultural factors, and the equation of sociology with ecology, thus reinforcing an anti-urban bias. Rather, Manhatta establishes cinematography as a bridge between the city and nature, present in Whitman’s poetry (see Geiger 2011: 75). There is a disembodied quality to Manhatta, yet one that does not quite diminish urbanity or its denizens, as can be seen in the image of the Brooklyn Bridge in which cinematographers capture their own urban traversal. This can further be seen in contrast to the authors who emphasize that the frst sequence of the crowds exiting the ferry is the very last of what we see of New York denizens viewed from the “vertiginous perspectives into the city’s streets” (Corbett 2011: 559–561). The familiar trope of arrival and the pervasiveness of the skyline image, which is “repeated fourteen times in the flm” (Kalb 2000: 85), is also the immigrants’ frst view of New York. Manhatta shows images of everyday life in the city and includes “multiple, refexive points of view” of “shapes and rhythms generated through manmade objects like skyscrapers and boats” (Verrone 2013: 46, 45). The merging of the modern city and modern cinema takes place in Manhatta – here, “modern cinema,” and we can say modern city as well, “does not represent a physical world but a mental image of the world on the basis of a belief that this is an existing world” (Verrone 2013: 50). The camera is the fâneur in Manhatta – moving into the territories unavailable to the stroller, into the “unknown,” where it can “see the hitherto invisible, only imaginable, realities of life” (Koren-Kuik 2013: 14). Eisensteinian montage, which “strike[s] a hammer blow on the psyche” (KorenKuik 2013: 14), is rejected in Manhatta and yet the flm contains “dialectical dynamics” between the city imagined and the city experienced. “The city is precisely a network of invisible connections that exist between people, architecture, streets, and vehicles by the sheer fact that they share the same place and thus partake in its spatial consciousness” (Koren-Kuik 2013: 18–19). By claiming the city as both a material object and, in Mumford’s words ([1937] 2004), “man’s greatest work of art,” the cinema becomes modern visual art; hope for the city of Manhatta becomes hope for new avant-garde art (see also Oehlrich 2013: 28). According to Gilles Deleuze, “in Vertov’s flm [Man with a Movie Camera], buildings, machines, humans, and cinema itself all appear on the same plane” (Mouat 2013: 24) – the same is perhaps true of Manhatta, in which poetry, cinema, and the city are on the same plane.

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Mouat (2013: 25) argues that explorations of motion are symbolic of the celebration of progress, and yet she does not see Manhatta engaged in a critique of the social problems of the industrial society. The silence of Manhatta about urban problems is more complex, however. When Simmel frst observed Berlin in the early 20th century it was full of people he could not classify; the city was in his view a site of strangeness – a strangeness that had a profoundly provoking quality. It was a place where the unknown possessed a force, “a kind of power of arousal in crowds” (Sennett 2002: 43). According to Richard Sennett, early 20th-century cosmopolitanism in fact meant being engaged by the unknown: When these frst urbanists talked about cosmopolitanism, they understood that the problematic character of urban crowds was created by the emotional charge people felt in them […] For example the fâneur in Benjamin’s account immerses himself in a Paris that is both a puzzle that cannot be deduced and something that is compellingly attractive. (Sennett 2002: 43) This is the city that cannot be easily fathomed, whose contradictions cannot be resolved. Manhatta is an exploration in physical and, less directly, social change in the city – its physical and social landscapes are sites of strangeness. This is also conveyed by contrasting the city with a romanticized 19thcentury poetic landscape, and thus, with the older modes of representation that modernists were trying to forsake (see also Kalb 2000: 73). Also this too is not far apart from the Chicago School of Urban Ecology as Robert Park too “had persisting reservations about the relative desirability of the new world being brought into being by ‘progress’ as compared with the old world being left behind” (Smith 1988: 114). Manhatta, moreover, appears to be concerned with the transience of the urban experience – with the urban moment and the fragility of urbanity. Corbett (2011: 578) is unsettled by the human absence in Sheeler’s photographs and in Manhatta, suggesting how “[i]ndividuality if it exists at all is usurped by the building which arrogates the variations of human personality to its own array of impersonal blinking eyes.” But what is at stake in Manhatta is not the loss of individuality or the absence of humanity but the diffculty in leaving a mark on the city – the attempts to alter the city while being changed by it. Manhatta is further suggestive of a city that has not fnished its course of development (Kalb 2000: 90) and is thus always in the process of motion, of being re-created. Corbett (2011: 577) fnds in Sheeler’s art that “rooftop vigils uncover frst of all the brevity and fragility of human time when viewed from the summit of the new modernity.” But while the fragility of humanity is tackled in these brief shots, it is the fragility of the city, as has been noted, that is the main subject of Manhatta. New Yorkers “fade into a rush of movement” and are transformed into “abstract” and “blurred” forms (Kalb 2000: 88).

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The city is endangered in particular by economic forces. “Manhatta was designed to question the meaning of contemporary American life particularly and its urban center, Manhattan, which during the 1920s had become increasingly dominated by economic forces concerned far more with proft than individual or spiritual expression” (Oehlrich 2013: 30). Shots of the Equitable Building and the Morgan Trust Company Building are suggestive of the “associations with what many believed to be destructive, poweroriented politics” (Oehlrich 2013: 33). The focus of Manhatta on the work day and the Wall Street shots in which the pedestrians are miniaturized by the scale of the Morgan Building (see Figure 2.2) are suggestive of the “money economy” as is the inclusion of silhouettes passing through the church cemetery. According to Simmel ([1905] 2004: 13), the “[m]etropolis has always been the seat of the money economy” that dominates the city and creates a calculated, logical individual. In Manhatta, the workers are “diminished by the city’s architecture,” which can be contrasted with Strand’s The Wave (1936), “a story about labour struggles in post-revolutionary Mexico” and compared to Strand’s New York photographs of ordinary people – “the newspaper seller, the sandwich man, the ‘dandy’ in his bowler hat” and also, the blind woman (Schwartz 2013: 6). Paul Strand utilized a camera with a hidden lens, in a method similar to private detectives. This displayed a class bias, according to Dennis (Naed and Morris, Cited in Dennis 2008:

Figure 2.2 Frame enlargement from Manhatta (d. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921).

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63, 64) (“The working classes were generally regarded as a cast of picturesque types who could not possibly object to being photographed unless they were being deliberately awkward”), but also revealed the “evidence of poverty,” similar thus to not just the discourses of surveillance and power characteristic of censuses and social surveys, as Dennis (2008: 63) argues, but to the teachings of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology. Silhouettes of workers (see Figure 2.3) prompt questions on the role of the working classes, suggesting perhaps a pessimistic view of their power set against the landscape of the capitalist metropolis heightening Manhatta’s complex critique of modernity and of the forces of capital. Strand, who will in the 1930s become socially engaged with the Group Theater in New York, argued that, “[m]oving pictures […] were a ‘powerful social instrument,’ one that had been been perverted by the medium’s ‘most destructive and corrupt form,’ Hollywood flm” (Cited in Schwartz 2013: 10, 11–12). Schwartz (2013) argues that another aspect of the critique of Manhatta, which is also present in Strand’s 1922 essay “Photography and the New God,” is a critique of technology and the dehumanization of men as is evident in the noted trope of the absence of citizens. The theme of dehumanization is similar to the Seven Arts circle’s arguments “that America’s greatness depended on the future of native arts that could have a remedial impact on a dehumanizing industrial society” (Devine 2012: 89) and to Lewis Mumford’s views, who will argue in The Culture of Cities that the

Figure 2.3 Frame enlargement from Manhatta (d. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921).

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city should cease to be a mechanism and instead become an organism. Yet Manhatta is rather more delicately concerned with the question of how to humanize a city that does not have a contemporary poet similar to Whitman, the artists seem to suggest. But the photographic camera has a “productive potential” and can, according to Stand, be used to “creatively humanize new technologies” and can even be perceived as “a new form of labor” (Schwartz 2013: 22–24). The city is a measure of human connectedness in both Whitman’s poetry and Manhatta: with the human faces absent, the physical change of the city moves into the foreground, while the background – the social landscape – is rendered even more signifcant. This is because the civic space of the city absent in Manhatta is seemingly recreated by Whitman’s poetry. As Mumford argued in his 1937 essay ‘What is a city’ ([1937] 2004: 29), the city is also an “aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates theater and is the theater;” indeed, as noted, Mumford termed the city a “theater of social action.” In Manhatta, the camera is positioned outside of the city, as it were; the point of view is outside of human perception – Manhatta denies the point of view of the fâneur in the crowd relying upon the voyeur, a view accessible to the workers working on construction sites. The flm is at once a meditation upon the city and a tribute to the construction of the city and to an aesthetic gaze upon it. Discussing 1920s urban imagery, Kalb (2000: 70) cites Mumford noting that in Sticks and Stones ([1924] 1955), he “was particularly concerned with the apparent discrepancy between the needs of New York City residents and the creations of New York City builders,” suggesting further that because of the new scale of the built environment, the city was becoming incomprehensible to the citizens. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, Manhatta is invested in an imaginary of the city from the point of view that lies beyond everyday experience and includes “an unstable viewing position” (Kalb 2000: 96). Suarez (2002: 85) argues that “the entire urban landscape appears in the flm as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.” But Manhatta represents a critical social imaginary of cinematic motion also because it shows how diffcult it is to discern the forces shaping the city, which is also why sociologists of the Chicago School observing the early 20th-century city made so many intellectual errors in their understandings of the urban environment.5 The flm “relies more strongly on the long-shots of city and river scenes, as well as high angle shots taken from balconies and roofs of tall buildings; these evoke the sublime with their extreme angles” (Oehlrich 2013: 29). The camera is “never placed at street level” (Oehlrich 2013: 29). This also suggests a perspective on the city as if it were an organic entity – a perspective that will in the 1930s be further developed by Louis Wirth in “Urbanism as a way of life.” Wirth ([1938] 2002: 71) places importance on the city size but also its heterogeneity: “The city has historically been the melting pot of

66 The city in motion races, peoples, cultures, and a most favorable breeding ground of new biological and cultural hybrids. It has not only tolerated but rewarded individual difference.” If heterogeneity is alluded to by the arrival of the ferry, size or a sense of the scale and density of the crowds are central to Manhatta. This “reassert[ion] of the organic order” (Devine 2012: 108) in fact hides the question present in Wirth’s work of how city life can be rescued from the negative consequences of industrialization, although the vision of the city of “unity and harmony” (Devine 2012) is of course deceptive. Oehlrich (2013: 30) suggests that Manhatta conveys a pessimistic view of the modern American city. “Shadows create disturbing angles and cut across the view, suggesting uncertainty and foreboding, while extreme camera angles contribute to a ‘fragmentation of the [viewing] subject’s perception’” (Horak, Cited in Geiger 2011: 78) – the city is, in Suarez’s (2002: 99) view, a “fractured space.” But the pessimism of Manhatta is also merged with the hopefulness of Whitman’s poetry as the flm “appropriated Whitman’s democratic ethos” and “spoke to the potential for an American way of life that had not yet been achieved, but which they hoped was on the horizon” (Oehlrich 2013: 31). Also it is notable further that Park, Wirth’s teacher, also shared “Whitmanesque enthusiasm for the possibilities of a world of natural fulflment untrammelled by convention” (Smith 1988: 114). Fear of the late 19th-century crowds can, of course, be tied to the potential for uprising, demonstrations, radicalism, and the threat of socialism (Borch 2012: 128); Whitman “expressed fascination with the urban crowd […] [and] felt refreshed by the common experience that the crowds gave rise to” including “egalitarian bonds of comradeship” (Borch 2012: 128, 131). Borch (2012) argues that Park’s understanding of the city was indebted to Whitman’s depictions of urban crowds. In a 1930 lecture, Park praised Whitman’s “manifold and multitudinous life of the city.” Park and Burgess found the “liberating potential in the crowd in social unrest giving way to a ‘new social order’ which could result in new political and religious movements” (Borch 2012: 145). The cinematic journey comes full circle in the approach to Manhattan from the Staten Island ferry; in the fnal image, the camera looks towards Staten Island from the Equitable Building. This might represent a certain level of “visual dehumanization” (Oehlrich 2013: 15) of the landscape but the vision also displays a lack of fascination with the mere movement. Manhatta presents an unusual example of a poetic endorsement of the skyscraper city, a tender meditation on it, largely withdrawn from images of humanity, and yet one that does not portend to “air-mindedness” or entail a mechanical endorsement of motion. It at once documents the built environment and cautiously endorses its prospect. The propelling drive for “air-mindedness” links the construction of the skyline to notions of modernity. We can note ambivalences within the top-down visualization framework, which in machine age representations suggested a propeller, a driving force to spin farther, to build higher, as

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suggested by Douglas (1995: 434–461). “William James’s perception of ‘the air [as] itself an object’ was translated in the 1920s into the commodifcation of the air as marketable product, as radio, airplanes, and skyscrapers” (Douglas 1995: 434). Douglas (1995: see chapter 11) develops arguments about this craving for building higher and faster, for fight and space-commodifying (the contemporary literature might say, globalizing) yearnings of 1920s capitalism, and uncovers as well gender ambivalences behind the architectural accomplishments of the skyscraper city. Douglas (1995: 456) suggests that the fascination with “air-mindedness” was “in good part an American phenomenon” and this vision can further be traced in the representations of motion, speed, and movement, also projected onto the urban landscape. Modernity itself is often equated with a propeller of sorts – a machine in perpetual motion – as has been suggested by Giddens (1990); modernity signals an accelerated pace of change and scope of change, having in mind the reach of printed money, of economic exchange and the printing press, the communications revolution. Thus, while in a representational sense the skyline can be a text, an image, a character, an event, a metaphor, encompassing all of this, New York’s skyline serves in this manner as an immediate and seemingly easily understood equation with the modern. If we were to take the trope of air-mindedness further, the imaginaries of the 1920s are suggestive of the juggernaut, “a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of control and which could render itself asunder” (Giddens 1990: 139), suggesting the crash of 1929. The “cinematic (e)motion” is, however, a more fuid structure of feeling in the context of this Manhatta; the traversal and the travel through the city is accomplished through the cinematographer’s vision, and yet one that does not seem to diminish the everyday experience or subordinate it to the voyeuristic gaze. The magnifcence of the city that the skyline conveys in Manhatta is a triumph of the conquering of space or architectural accomplishment, but also a triumph of human accomplishment. If Lewis Hine’s photographs shot a decade later represent a literal manifestation of the “city rising” as the workers are constructing the Empire State building, in Manhatta cinematographers present the very magnifcent result of this creation – the ever incomplete skyline cheered by the audiences of New York the Magnifcent. Manhatta additionally points to the distinct aspects of mobility and “cinematic (e) motion” associated with the skyline trope that have infuenced subsequent cinematic urban social imaginaries, anticipating the social issue flms of the 1930s and, especially, 1940s noirs, that include the skyline trope to introduce a more critical view of the urban prospect. Yet this would not have perhaps happened had the motifs of the propelling drive and motion of modern life not been developed in the 1920s metropolitan flms, whose shaping of skyline views began with Manhatta.

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The skyline, mobility, masses, and the ordinary man in The Crowd and East Side, West Side The city is a modernist perpetuum mobile too in both The Crowd (1928) and East Side, West Side (1927). Yet an engaged, class-difference shaped, street-corner perspective on the “settled cloud” is developed to a radically different effect based on the (in)capacity of the ordinary individual to reclaim the city. Dennis (2008: 103) briefy compares The Crowd to motion and mobility in Manhatta, the former utilizing superimposition shots of traffc and pedestrians. “The Crowd also included shots of Lower Manhattan where the prominence of el trains winding their way above and around teeming crowds indicated the circulation of the city. Seven years before The Crowd, in Manhatta, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, too, had used shots tracking elevated trains from above, emphasizing both the magisterial scale and the mechanistic functioning of the modern city” (Dennis 2008: 343). According to Dennis (2008: 103), in both Manhatta and The Crowd, cinematic arts of fragmentation similar to popular amusements and new arts movements ordered and reorganized the chaos that surrounded urbanites. Following Benjamin, as an art of fragmentation, cinema matched the motion, the speed, and the shock of modern urban life (Singer 2001: 99). The Crowd’s prospect: Cinematic motion and class mobility King Vidor’s silent flm The Crowd (1928), set in New York, was flmed largely in a studio, while its striking shots of an offce tower were flmed on location at the Equitable Building in lower Manhattan. Before the spectator’s gaze can approach the skyscraper, the flm shows images of crowding and congestion (see Figure 2.4). Vidor hid his camera (and his cameraman, Henry Sharp) in a rubbertired pushcart stacked high with boxes; the lens, poking through a small hole, was able to photograph [the leading protagonist] Sims walking among the crowds without their knowledge. Though only a few of these shots were used in the fnal flm, they effectively suggest the gradual reduction of Sims’s dreams as he confronts the inevitable urban reality of a million other dreams, all vying for greatness. (Sanders 2001: 41) According to Sanders (2001: 41), crowds of people such as Sims “re-Americanized and reenergized” New York. Mumford ([1938] 1981: 235, 39, 41) linked the metropolitan form to the “crowd form,” indicative of the stages of development of the rapidly industrializing city. According to Mumford ([1938] 1981: 239; see also ibid., 235, 241), the metropolitan phase becomes “universal only when the

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Figure 2.4 Frame enlargement from The Crowd (d. King Vidor, 1928).

technical means of congestion had become adequate – and their use proftable to those who manufactured or employed them.” According to Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) two types of crowd could be distinguished – the homogenous crowd (class, caste) and the heterogenous crowd (street crowd); based on this view, the street crowd functioned as a leveller of class difference but the author did not attribute democratic potential to the crowd, arguing instead that the emotional, feminized crowd can have a hypnotic infuence (Cited in Schleier 2009: 42–43). Following Le Bon, further, the individual behaves irrationally and is susceptible to mass suggestion, s/he is hypnotized by the crowd, which Freud saw in relation to the leader – the groups were thus libidinal in nature (Cited in Kirby 1997: 153). Early 20th century flms “seldom involved dramatic representations of the crowds because of the limited costs, budgets, and visual techniques, condition that begun to change sometime before 1910” (Bush 1991: 216–217); D.W. Griffth’s flms frst began to include crowd scenes. Further, [c]hanging images of crowds in movies were mediated by several broad cultural factors in the decade before Vidor’s flm was made. The impact of the war was especially important in showing that the public acted like ants, bees, a herd of beasts, or drops of water in a stream. The war also rationalized the role of press sensationalism, advertising, and what

70 The city in motion Edward Bernays would soon label the ‘profession’ of public relations – all felds that were often informed by ideas about crowd psychology. (Bush 1991: 223) The Chicago School’s sociologist Park – cognizant of the revolutionary, radical potential of the crowd to reorder old structures and free human potential – thought that the contestations in a modern urban society could be fruitfully reconciled with democracy, assuming that the crowd could be altered to become a rational public, open to deliberation and tolerant of difference (see Smith 1988: 114). The notion of the crowd is particularly important given that, following Baudelaire, the crowd can be tied to the notion of solidarity. “[I]n [the] ebb and fow of the crowd the basic solidarity of the species can be grasped as congestion – as quantity, density, the collision of unknown bodies, the threat of contagion, the materiality of boundary and classifcation and nothing more” (Blum 2003: 289). Furthermore, “[c]ongestion itself, as a lure to the fâneur, becomes a way of bringing to mind the solidarity of the species in becoming, in fragility and perishability, raising the constantly haunting question of its endurance and continuity, of the kind of record it will leave, the remains to which it will testify, the kind of monument its present will tomorrow be” (Blum 2003: 290). The fâneur, according to Simmel, is not seeking detachment or exercising his superiority but seeking to challenge himself “though the ‘particular encompassing of its accidentally external force’” (Simmel, Cited in Blum 2003: 289). The crowd in Vidor’s flm is, however, “bereft of any viable sense of urban community,” cannot serve as “an agent of liberation” or social reform and the flm’s political aesthetics thus is limited by the fact that it remains “the product of a major Hollywood studio which defned the limits of social protest” (Bush 1991: 234, 232). Teeming streets of New York, in turn, are less of a metaphor for collectivity than an imaginary of a trap for the individual, and the flm visualizes “the strain on the modern individual” and “irreparable damage to the common man caused by unfettered modern progress” (Gerstner 2012: 1, 14). Compared to European metropolitan flms, “cinematic (e)motion” in Vidor’s flm is not abstracted but attributed to capitalism, whose forces are crushing, yet the city’s regenerating power can further be located in a market-driven existence, in the sphere of urban consumption. The skyline in The Crowd is associated with economic opportunity and it appears early in the movie in a brief shot that lasts only a few seconds – the director is not allowing audiences to exalt in, or even be hopeful for, the main protagonist’s urban prospect. The move to the city of the main protagonist is prompted by economic necessity and represents a hopeful quest, but even in these feeting shots that conjure up an urban promise, the director seems to doubt it. John Sims, as a young man on a ferry to Manhattan, is identifed in the silent inter-title cynically as “one of the seven million

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people that believe that New York depends on them.” As Hansen (1992: 104, 105) points out, “again and again, John appears in relation to group fgurations of which he is only a more or less identical element—fgurations that participate in the historical and ideological problematic of what Siegfried Kracauer, in an essay contemporaneous with The Crowd, has called ‘mass ornament’” – the latter “undermines the clichés of bourgeois individualism spouted by John.” These sequences are suggestive of Vidor’s concern with the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. Much like Wirth’s Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938), written however a decade later, which reveals common biases in urban discourses of the period, projects aspects of mass society and broader social crises onto the urban environment, and entails extrapolations from specifc characteristics of downtown districts, its select residents, or professional strata onto the entire inner city – The Crowd presents the city as an arena for meditations about mass society and the corruption of the private realm by the forces of capital. “Vidor’s vision of Sims as a man of the crowd moved beyond certain aspects of progressive visions of fearful mobs and righteous crowds while retaining many naturalistic and romantic elements widely used during the nineteenth century” as the flm “reinforced and extended older notions concerning the inevitable power of large bureaucracies, urban spectacle, and the malleability of the American public” (Bush 1991: 214). In shaping the unstable urban individual in The Crowd, the flm owes much to a Simmelian view of urbanites who supposedly possess distinct traits that allow them to rise above the masses. According to Kirby: [t]he urban code in general is a code of prior knowledge, one of negotiating nonsense, scurrying through the crowd, knowing which trains to board, not falling for the trick. This code is hermeneutic – one that can be cracked only by those in the know – which is precisely what makes it a privileged point of view. (1997: 138) This, according to Kirby, connotes a particular middle-class position. “In many flms that make fun of tramps, rubes, ethnic minorities, and other socially marginal types, upward mobility enters into flm/viewer relations as already accomplished, inasmuch as spectational pleasure is frequently bound up with a position of social and epistemological superiority” (Kirby 1997: 139). This derision of the lower classes in The Crowd has a similar effect to solidify a class position. This stands in contrast to the early 20th century cinema – flms such as A Rube in the Subway and 2 A.M. in the Subway “mixed and confused on-screen social types much as urban transportation and early flm spectatorship did, and they provided a source of identifcation for city folk in general, while playfully undermining ‘proper’ middle-class values” (Kirby 1997: 140).

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According to Shiel (2012: 91, 92), following Benjamin, crowds can be seen as a civilizing force but also a source of revulsion and fear to the isolated individual and of the “energy of the capitalist metropolis.” What is relevant here is, again, the class connotations which Shiel (2012: 92) points out regarding Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer, 1923) – on the one hand, crowds show appeal to middle class audiences, and on the other hand fctional comic characters evoke working-class sympathies. Schleier (2009: 42), in commenting on Safety Last, points out that Harold’s character never achieves complete autonomy; rather, he is dialectically related to the mob throughout the skyscraper sequence; he needs the mass audience for his star power and validation and seeks disengagement from it in the attainment of an elevated class status and an integrated gender identity. (Schleier 2009: 42) In the mid-20s, two million people traveled to Manhattan each day (Mumford [1938] 1981: 239), and indeed Vidor offers a set of sequences in which we trace the fate of an individual on his quest for economic prosperity in this metropolitan world. But Vidor also presents John who is alienated from the working classes (even if the middle class anxieties about working class mobs diminished by early 20th century [Bush 1991: 215]). According to Hansen: Kracauer sketches the profle of a new class that mushroomed in Germany after World War I: the urban employees whose working and living conditions in effect made them proletarian, especially with the full onslaught of rationalization and unemployment since 1925, yet who deny any commonality with the working-class by faunting a wornout ideology of bourgeois individualism. (1992: 105) This new “proletarianized [group of] clerical workers” is further underscored by the Taylorist division of labor (see Figure 2.5) (Rhodes 1993: 118). The Crowd was in fact withheld by the studio, with its distribution delayed, because it presented a dark vision of America, one that contrasted sharply with the prosperity of the 1920s. Furthermore, “the stark contrast between the limitless opportunity for social mobility that existed in the early days of American history and the realities of technological determinism, urban spatial relationships, and bureaucratization is underscored throughout the flm” (Bush 1991: 228). Imagery of the crowds is suggestive of “the fact that John is caught within forces beyond his control” (Bush 1991: 229); the skyscraper “served as both [the] symbol of the modern corporation’s power and necessities under the complicated new division of labor” (Rhodes 1993: 117). Perhaps the most effective sequence in The Crowd (attributed to the screenwriter John V.A. Weaver and not to Vidor [Gerstner 2012: 12]) is that

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Figure 2.5 Frame enlargement from The Crowd (d. King Vidor, 1928).

of the Equitable Building, shown initially from a lower angle, and then from the perspective of a camera panning and moving up the side of the building. “The flm sequence begins by focusing on the crowd, gradually revealing the exterior of the building, with its great height and its monotonous pattern of windows, before entering through a window” (Stern et al. 1987: 79). The camera looks down on a giant corporate offce with rows of identical desks, by which are seated identical clerks, moving sheets of paper as mechanically as marionettes, and then dollies downward to John Sims, clerk 137. This terrifying image of sameness, alienation, and routinization seems to have been further appropriated by the main character, John Sims, out on the town with his pal Burt on a double date in an open roof double-decker, who remarks mockingly, scornfully in a silent inter-title to his date and future wife: “Look at that crowd! The poor boobs … all in the same rut!” This is met by a slightly bewildered and suspicious look from his girlfriend, but is then quickly followed by their mocking of a clown: “I bet his father thought he would be president.” A reviewer cites “Vidor’s sympathy for the urban crowd, and [anticipating] the late victims of Depression America,” as Sims’ prospects are from this point on largely limited (see Hanlon 2009). The flm “fts squarely into the tradition of American flms dramatizing the plight of the ‘common man’” and is “usually linked to an ideological stance of socially conscious individual humanism and moral optimism” (Hansen 1992: 103). The common man, Vidor suggests, is the victim of industrial society, equating urbanization with industrialization. In Sticks and Stones (1924), Mumford ([1924]

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1955: 73) anticipated the ultimate encroachment of “business enterprise” in the urban environment: “every district of the modern city tends to become a business district, in the sense that its development takes place less in response to direct human needs than to the changes and exigencies of sale.” The artifcial structure of the city is refected in the artifciality of its population. The absence of any humanizing potential renders the buildings of the city as “ft only for athletes and dynamos to dwell in” and reduces human beings to “machine tenders” ([1924] 1955: 87–88). The most apparent results of metropolitan growth, as defned by Mumford ([1938] 1981: 252, 271), are “the physical drain, the emotional defeat, of these cramped quarters, these dingy streets, the tear and noise of transit.” Mumford describes inhabitants of the Metropolis as victims of the “supermechanization” of urban life. During the 1920s, Mumford was further concerned with the crisis of personal identity in a corporate society, which in his view diminished the importance of “selfreliance” and “character” and was replaced by the kind of “personality” and “self-expression” that indulges in mass consumption (Blake 1990: 286). The modernity in The Crowd refects an image-based culture (Kirby 1997: 251), as urban life is shown as one of deception to the ordinary person. The urban mode of perception of which cinema itself forms a part is in the writings of Kracauer and Benjamin tied to the exposure of inauthenticity and the fragmentation of existence under the conditions of alienated labor (Kirby 1997: 141) – a contrast to the Hollywood movies which make distractability an end in itself (Hansen, Cited in Kirby 1997: 141). Kirby (1997: 150) sees The Crowd’s antimodernist impulses towards mass culture in which “the weight of urban alienation and depersonalized progress is so oppressive that it nearly kills its subjects,” yet the flm ends in fact with an embrace of capitalism. According to Hansen (1992: 107), Kracauer’s work is further signifcant in this context because he was able to “discern qualitatively new forms of subjectivity attendant upon consumerist modes of representation.” The flm includes “the tragedy of the modern consumer who believes that he has found happiness from standardized commodities, advertised with the help of other slogan writers” (Bush 1991: 213). In The Crowd, the spheres of amusement and consumption (set in Coney Island’s Luna Park6 and shown via “[f]ootage of the electric contours of the ornate … entrance and spires” [Glick 2015: 218]) are further tied to visions of horizontal movement and motion – an ironic comment on the limited economic and social mobility of the main character. The sensation that the flm seems to convey in a set of sequences in which John Sims, his friend Burt, and their dates visit Luna Park is that of fying on the wings of modern machines. Josh Glick (2015: 216) points out, while depicting Coney Island as a “liberatory space” for modern courtship, that Hollywood flmmakers often screened out minority populations who visited and worked at the amusement park. Careless, like children, on the spinning circle or the Ferris wheel, Sims and his friends indulge in the thrill of the

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motion and a sense of being transported away from everyday routine or the work environment. This suggests another duality of modernity – modern amusement is less about the carnivalesque and the removal of social inhibitions (as in Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice, for instance) and more about aimless motion, directionlessness that prefgures visions of a Disney-fed innocence. Vidor allows for very little joyfulness, presenting amusement districts of New York in the 1920s as sites where the white protagonists search for an aimless propeller and their individual fragmentation and emptiness is discernible precisely through the interaction with the urban environment saturated with commercial messages. Sims “becomes a manipulatable blob of suggestion and imitation, a tabula rasa ft for the designs of advertisers and the purveyors of an ostensibly ‘popular culture’ aimed at the lowest common denominator of consumer appeal” (Bush 1991: 228). Anticipating Debord, capital becomes an image: “commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the [imagery of] commodity” (Ward 2001: 4). Sims, however, fails, through the experience of motion, to arrive at a moment of “double consciousness,” seeing through the “surface culture” that surrounded him (Ward 2001: 162). Singer ties the rise of commercial sensationalism with the growth of a massive urban working class at the end of the 19th century. The post-Victorian middle class, and particularly the burgeoning lower middle class, was inherently more receptive to sensual and spectacular amusements than previous generations governed more thoroughly by the moral austerity of the Protestant establishment. The surge in popular sensationalism in the decades around the turn of the century was an immediate response to the new demographics of the amusement marketplace. (Singer 2001: 97) Singer (2001: 90) cites social critics who perceived “a correlation between the hyperstimulus of the metropolis and popular amusement’s increasing emphasis on powerful sensations and thrills.” Scenes at Coney Island can, however, also be seen as an homage to the cinema of attractions. Gunning writes: [t]he cinema of attractions truly invokes the temporality of surprise, shock, and trauma, the sudden rupture of stability by irruption of transformation or the curtailing of erotic promise. Like the devotees of thrill rides at Coney Island, the spectator of early flm could experience the thrill of intense and suddenly changing sensations. (Gunning 2004: 49) The cinema of attractions provides for “an intense interaction between an astonished spectator and the cinematic smack of the instant, the ficker of presence and absence” (Gunning 2004: 49).

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Kracauer stated that “[s]hows which aim at distraction are composed of the same mixture of externalities as the work of the urban masses” (Cited in Singer 2001: 98); the aesthetic of shallow thrill and sensory stimulation, Kracauer observed, found their parallel in the texture of urban experience (Cited in Singer 2001: 98). “The commercialization of the thrill was a refection and expression—as well as an agent—of the heightened stimulation of the modern environment” (Singer 2001: 97). There are no possibilities of altering or infuencing the city life in The Crowd, evident also in the scenes in which Sims unsuccessfully tries to stop the urban noise.7 There is furthermore no escape from the urban environment: “the industrial age leveled any claims for a secure relationship between productive labor and use-value. The promise of escape from mechanical life to an idyllic landscape is, hence, rendered nothing more than a cultural dupe” (Gerstner 2012: 8). In his entirely mediated and gradually completely trivialized experience, Sims attains thrill in a form of disembedding. Vidor makes him into the very clown that he has been mocking although he also seems to present this transformation as a necessary sacrifce. According to Dennis (2008: 104), Sims’ laughter and re-inclusion in the crowd in the fnal shots of the flm are “almost as dispiriting a resolution of the dilemmas of city life as had he succeeded in committing suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming express train a few minutes earlier in the flm.” According to Kirby (1997: 164), “the very urban, consumerist culture created by the railroad, cinema, and advertising – vehicles of the feminizing crowd – is what deprives John [Sims] of the certainty of his gender and makes him vulnerable to the image, that is, vulnerable to advertising and, ultimately, to cinema.” Sims integrates with the crowd by literally becoming an advertisement (see also Kirby 1997: 169). The ending, commenting “on the flm’s own complicity with mass culture,” (Rhodes 1993: 123) however, remains ambiguous suggesting possibilities for regeneration, creativity, and the reward of innovation, even within the crowded city. East Side, West Side: Spatial geography of social mobility narratives East Side, West Side, a silent flm directed in 1927 by Allan Dwan, connects social and spatial practices in charting a narrative of urban inclusion and social mobility. The narrative posits a sharp sociological distinction between the worlds of gemeinschaft (a communal environment) and gesellschaft (an urban environment in this case)8 as a rupture marks the main protagonist’s trajectory to the urban world caused by circumstances of not mere impoverishment, but presented as a sharp break, thus resonating more with the discourses of modernity than with the material imperatives of urbanization. In East Side, West Side, the machine of industrialization is an explicit and extreme trigger of social and spatial disembedding. In the striking set of dark

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gray and black shots that commence this silent flm, a giant ocean liner literally crashes into a tiny wooden barge on the East River inhabited by a modest, conscientious elderly couple and their young, restless son. The sequence, shot in miniature, was praised by Harrison’s Reports (October 22, 1927), which cited it, along with another sequence later in the narrative that shows the collision of the ship (a reference to the Titanic), for its realism. In the barge sequence shown in long and medium shots, Dwan visualizes the communal environment of a nuclear family, which is represented as an existence outside of modern civilization. The rupture of the world is caused by an outside source, a machine of unstoppable might and speed in motion. Literally ship-wrecked on the streets of the Lower East Side, the young man is adopted by a Jewish family, then, as in a fable, he traces his roots to an upper class New York father. But Dwan subverts again the fable through a narrative of urbanization – after being tempted by the promise of a richer life, the main protagonist eventually returns to his Lower East Side sweetheart. The Lower East Side was a Jewish immigrant enclave until the Great Depression when the shift from the enclave to the ethnic neighborhoods of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Upper Manhattan, from the tenement house to apartment building, “marked the transition into the urban landscape of modernity” (Moore 1992: 252). Moore (1992: 255) argues that: [b]ecause many second-generation Jews faced employment discrimination in white collar work, the location of such key industries such as the garment center and its accessibility via mass transit infuenced where Jews chose to live. Jewish neighborhoods belonged to New York City’s landscape, yet they often appeared to their inhabitants and to outsiders to be a separate world linked only though mass transit with the ‘real’ city of corporate Manhattan. (Moore 1992: 255) Another important aspect of the Lower East Side can be tied to the history of cinema as “the image of cramped, dingy nickelodeons in Manhattan’s Lower East Side ghetto stands as a symbol of cinema’s emergence in America” (Singer 2004: 111). While research showed that nickelodeons were frequented by the middle classes, Singer (2004: 130) fnds that the emphasis on immigrant and working class may have in fact not been inaccurate. Theaters south of Union Square and in the Lower East Side neighborhoods constituted 40 of the total movie theaters in Manhattan (Singer 2004: 122; see also Allen 1979: 6 and Mullins 2000). Further, “[t]he majority of nickelodeons were in overwhelmingly Jewish areas (the Lower East Side and East Harlem), so one can assume that Jews constituted the largest sector of Manhattan’s nickelodeon audience” (Singer 2004: 127), although the audience was of course not composed exclusively of Jews, including also especially Italians.

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The American Film Institute Catalogue (Munden 1971: 211) classifes East Side, West Side as social melodrama. The catalogue also lists a 1923 flm with the same title, based on an unpublished play, whose narrative involves a cross-class inter-ethnic marriage.9 Visions of neighborhoods in this flm represent key cinematic and narrative markers that help to overcome plot contrivances or at times aimless shots. As suggested by the flm’s title, the spatial division is coded in the narrative by class, status, and ethnicity – East Side represents the immigrant lower and emerging middle classes, while West Side, the upper-class older, better established, and “whiter” immigrant groups. The narrative of class integration and cultural pluralism ends with the happily married couple standing on the rooftop of a Midtown skyscraper looking not down upon the city as much as boasting their own capacity to make it a better place. “We will build a better city” appears among the last inter-titles, which is shared by both the Lower East Side sweetheart and the class-mixed “son of the city.” The imagery of conquering the city is merely suggestive of the ways of conquering unjust and exploitative aspects of urban existence. “When will we stop building?” his wife Becka asks him. “When we build the perfect city,” the inter-title responds, as the camera captures in long shot the reclaiming of the urban promise with which the flm begins and ends and which in a manner completes the cycle of the 1920s silent flm skyline visions (see Figure 2.6). The dual motif of the skyline – at once a celebration of the modern city’s promise and the symbol of the American dream – is narratively appropriated and reclaimed in East Side, West Side. The flm in this manner ties, in

Figure 2.6 Frame enlargement from East Side, West Side (d. Allan Dwan, 1927).

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urban theory terms, social practices with the production of urban space (see Lefebvre 1991: 38–39) by offering agency and capacity to the protagonists – through the main character’s individual efforts and through the promise of building the city collectively. The frst sequence, a visually stunning representation of the unstoppable forces of modernization, becomes at the end a symbol of the human capacity to cope with these forces, not be ruined by them, to transform, rebuild, and to help reform the city. The skyline in the fnal long shot becomes a tribute to the capacity of newcomers and settlers to jointly reclaim urbanity. In terms of the imagery of the urban environment, The Crowd and East Side, West Side, along with Manhatta, have historic preservation value, as “a bit by bit popular architecture of the past is being demolished” (Gans 1999: 318). As Herbert J. Gans (1999: 317) has written about historic preservation, the Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York “mainly preserves the élite portion of architectural past” and “allows popular architecture to disappear, notably the homes of ordinary New Yorkers, and structures designed by anonymous builders without architectural training … This policy is undemocratic, for it implies that the only history worth preserving is that of the élite.” East Side, West Side and The Crowd instead try to capture the achievements and contributions of ordinary people to the city (See also Gans 1999: 317), much as these attempts are also compromised. The two flms, perhaps more so than Manhatta, remind us further, in Elsaesser’s (2016: 27) words, how much “resistance and strife” we can witness in the city of modernist “shock and trauma” in comparison to the regimes of acquiescence, habit, and indifference in the current generic and clustered global city.

Agitation and urban sociological discourses of the 1920s But Elsaesser may perhaps also be wrong as the cinematic city of the 1920s partakes in its own form of modernist acquiescence by muting social and political confict in the city. Thus the cinematic city of the decade discussed here appears to lack agitation; the city is conceived as an organic entity in which neighborhoods are shaded by “peculiar sentiments of the population” as Park (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 6) would have it, such as the neighborhoods of the Lower East Side of East Side, West Side. On a superfcial level, Manhatta at times echoes Park (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 4) – “[the] geometrical form suggests that the city is a purely artifcial construction which might conceivably be taken apart and put together again, like a house of blocks” – and East Side, West Side and The Crowd help us to conceive that “the city is rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit it.” The Chicago School left us with the erroneous, much overused term “melting pot,” declaring that “great cities have always been the melting-pots of races and of cultures. Out of the vivid and subtle interactions of which they have been the centers, there have come the newer breeds and the newer

80 The city in motion social types,” (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 40) neglecting the fact that groups lived in enclaves, as they still do, side by side, as in a fruit or salad bowl (Marcuse 2002: 102), and did not necessarily mix (as they do in East Side, West Side), and of course it cannot be overemphasized that AfricanAmericans remained in the ghettoes. The American urban ghetto was created in the early part of the 20th century, in the period from 1900 –1940, immediately after industrialization unleashed social, economic, and technological changes that reshaped the face of northern cities. Massey and Denton (1993) fnd that before 1900 blacks were not signifcantly segregated from whites though they were confned to poor areas, but their segregation was not significantly different from that of European immigrants during this period (before 1900). Nevertheless, this was also the time when there were very few blacks in North American cities. During the period 1900–1940, as black migration from the South increased (even during the Great Depression), as has been noted, Northern whites gradually started to view immigration with “increasing hostility and considerable alarm” as the percentage of blacks more than doubled in Northern cities (Massey and Denton 1993: 29). Park similarly identifed the fact that: the isolation of the immigrant and racial colonies of the so-called ghettos and areas of population segregation tend to preserve and, where there is racial prejudice, to intensify the intimacies and solidarity of the local and neighborhood groups. Where individuals of the same race or of the same vocation live together in segregated groups, neighborhood sentiment tends to fuse together with racial antagonisms and class interests. (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 9–10) But, as can be seen from the quote, Park attributed this condition to racial prejudice rather than to institutionalized racism and social exclusion. This is all particularly frustrating given that Park (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 115) in fact understands the notion of the “community” as “a collection of institutions.” Park asks the question: what is social unrest? (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 19), but does not develop this term, instead arguing that what is fascinating “about the study of crises, as of crowds, is that in so far as they are in fact due to psychological causes, that is, in so far as they are the result of the mobility of the communities in which they occur, they can be controlled” (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 21). A legacy of the Chicago School particularly relevant for this book may in fact be the frst sociological defnition of the American city, which includes the notion of agitation; hence, “the vast casual and mobile aggregations which constitute our urban populations are in a state of perpetual agitation, swept by every new wind of doctrine, subject to constant alarms, and in consequence the community is in a chronic condition of crisis” (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 22). But again Park fails to link agitation to conditions of labor exploitation or racial discrimination.

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Park leaves us with valuable, yet vague, defnitions of the city: The city, and particularly the great city, in which more than elsewhere human relations are likely to be impersonal and rational, defned in terms of interest and in terms of cash, is in a very real sense a laboratory for the investigation of collective behavior. (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 22) Importantly, Park (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 22) proceeds to comment that “[s]trikes and minor revolutionary movements are endemic in the urban environment” failing, again frustratingly to the reader, to elaborate on the discriminatory mechanisms and seeing the city as an “unstable equilibrium” (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 22). Yet there is something of the motion of mobility or, as Park would say, the “mobilization of individual men” to which motion pictures speak so eloquently. Park argues that: [t]he processes of segregation establish moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate. This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly and easily from one moral milieu to another, and encourages the fascinating but dangerous experiment of living at the same time in several different contiguous, but otherwise widely separated, worlds. All this tends to give to city life a superfcial and adventitious character; it tends to complicate social relationships and to produce new and divergent individual types. It introduces, at the same time, an element of chance and adventure which adds to the stimulus of city life and gives it, for young and fresh nerves, a peculiar attractiveness. The lure of great cities is perhaps a consequence of stimulations which act directly upon the refexes. (Park and Burgess [1925] 1967: 40–41) These dangerous (and alluring) experiments of living in alternate worlds (and indeed the question of which strata are susceptible to them and under what conditions), the experience of the city while traversing it, elements of contingency, chance, and adventure which form the stimulus of life will come to the foreground in the cinematic imaginaries of the 1930s and the 1940s, as too indeed will a more critical view of agitation that would shape a more complex urban discourse.

Notes 1 I thank Charles Silver, MoMA Film Archives for this resource. 2 The program included “Ouverture L Selections from ‘Manon’; Current events: ‘Rialto Magazine’ (newsreel); Ballet: ‘Danse Orientale’ presented by Lillian Powell; Scenic: New York the Magnifcent; Vocal: Caesare Galletti singing

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The city in motion ‘Celeste Aida’; Feature: The Fall Guy and Organ: Marche Pontifcale” (Strand 1921). As Paul Strand noted in the 1921 press release: “This elusive spirit of a place, its essential life, they realized was not to be captured through any artifce of diffusion, photographic trickery or superfcial picture-making. Neither was it to be found by merely recording in a haphazard fashion, unrelated places of interest. Restricting themselves defnitely to the towering geometry of lower Manhattan and its environs, the distinctive note, the photographers have tried to register directly the living forms in front of them and to reduce through the most rigid selection, volumes, lines and masses, to their most intense forms of expressiveness. Through these does the spirit manifest itself” (Strand 1921). More precisely, the flm “consists of 65 shots with individual movements breaking down into sequences of 13, 15, 17, and 15 shot respectively” and resembles a structure of symphony. The “four movements” in this flm include camera approaching Manhattan from the Staten Island ferry, the construction of skyscrapers, modern means of transportation, and images of Lower Broadway and the Hudson River (Horak 1987: 13). Even greater errors of stereotyping are indeed made in so many flms but it is these errors that are so edifying, so fascinating – as Kracauer has pointed out. “[T]he more [the contemporary flms] misrepresent the surface, the more correctly they represent society, because they refect its secret mechanisms” (Cited in Hansen 1992: 113). Following the opening of Coney Island 1895, “other parks specializing in exotic sights, disaster spectacles, stunning electric illumination, and thrilling mechanical rides soon proliferated across the country […] These concentrations of audiovisual and kinesthetic sensation epitomized a distinctly modern intensity of manufactured stimulus. So did a variety of mechanical daredevil exhibitions such as ‘The Whirlwind of Death’ and ‘The Globe of Death,’ in which a car somersaulted in midair after hurtling off a 40-foot ramp” (Singer 2001: 91). “The Crowd represents a high point in the American cinema’s engagement with the modern noisescape” a moment that only could have existed “prior to the coming of the ‘talkies’” as sound images relied upon “an intellectual rather than a sensual response” (Hanlon 2009: 74, 87). This outdated duality does apply as a concept in the case of flm scripts that attempt to stereotype environments for various narrative purposes. The concepts of gesellschaft and gemeinschaft are often generalized and misapplied in explaining urban, in contrast to rural, social systems. When attributed to the modern city, the social characteristics of gesellschaft describe value-negative aspects of alienation, calculating rationality, self-interest, and impersonality. In the gesellschaft mode of social organization, formal bureaucracies and expert systems replace the bonds of communal solidarity associated with gemeinschaft, rendered unachievable within the complex urban system (Kasinitz 1995: 11). See Herbert J. Gans’ (1995: 170–173) critique of Louis Wirth’s applications of the concept of gesellschaft in Wirth’s 1938 article. See also, Wirth [1938] 2002. West Side neighborhoods signify economic prosperity of the established earlier generation of Dutch settlers; this is suggested as well by the names of the upper income characters (Duncan Van Norman and Gilbert Van Horn). In contrast, while Becka Lipvitch (played by Virginia Valli) of the Allan Dwan flm is of the Jewish Lower East Side, Lory James was played by the Irish actress Eileen Percy.

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The 1930s imaginaries capture a sense of agitated urbanism through what might be seen as a collapse of the machine age city visions. Yet this point is, however, still ambivalent if examples from the 1920s and the 1930s are compared. In a number of literary texts and visual art from the period, both fascination and discontent with the machine age environment can be discerned: from Carl Sandburg’s poetry collection Smoke and Steel (1920) to Robert Cantwell’s novel The Land of Plenty (1934); in jazz as urban music, with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and also in musicals with Busby Berkeley’s choreographies for Footlight Parade (d. Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and 42nd Street (d. Lloyd Bacon, 1933); from the urban verticality in paintings such as Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge (1922) and Georgia O’Keefe’s City Night (1926) to the turbulent visions of the machine age crash in James Rosenberg’s Dies Irae (1929) and Philip Evergood’s American Tragedy (1937); from the city’s lights spinning in Walker Evans’ Broadway Composition (1928–1929) to Lewis Hine’s worker-acrobats constructing the Empire State Building. In the context of New York imaginaries, architectural and planning historians have argued that “during the Depression[,] the cinematic vision of New York as a magical town reached its zenith,” helping to create the myth of the glamorous metropolis, while undermining “the city in the public mind by presenting the image that the reality … could hardly equal” (Stern et al. 1987: 78). They neglected, however, the signifcant countercurrents in flms that acknowledge the city as a political space and that critique or reevaluate the discourses of the cosmopolitan, magical New York imagined and produced for mass consumption on the Hollywood lot. One particularly important contribution represents the depiction of agitated streets by The Workers Film and Photo League (1931–1936) and The Photo League (1936–1951), examined in the frst part of this chapter. Richard Sennett (1998) has argued that urban public spaces are essential for democracy, citing the agora of the Greek polis, the semi-public space of the stoa, and the performative and deliberative space of the theater (Athens’ Pnyx). The three flms examined in detail in this chapter, 42nd Street, Dead End (d. William Wyler, 1937), and The City (d. Ralph Steiner and Willard

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Van Dyke, 1939) affrm the performative space of the theater and further probe deliberative and democratic spaces of popular art’s agora and stoa, in which cinematic imaginaries intersect with viewers’ perceptions and urban socio-political contexts. In order to understand what kind of democratic space and public sphere the flms create, this chapter will examine both “space in flm” (the narrative settings and urban discourses), as well as “flms in space,” that is, “the shaping of lived urban spaces by cinema as cultural practice” (Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001: 5). 42nd Street played a role in Roosevelt’s presidential campaign, signaling “the incorporation of politics and the popular arts into [the] remaking of the nation” (May 2000: 99). Indeed, the political and the popular are at stake in all three flms, with discourses about the metropolis defning the linkage between the two domains and the urban spaces of democracy. 42nd Street, Dead End, and The City advocate for reforms in relationship to the material grounds of the city: unemployment, class differences, disenfranchisement, and a desire for social change are made apparent in the sequences that document the metropolis or shape its cinematic image. In all three narratives the visual imagery of the skyline, the street, and the (neighborhood) slum asserts the call for the reclaiming or for the utopian alteration of the urban environment: in 42nd Street, within a populist entertainment zone, in Dead End, through an amelioration of housing conditions, and in The City, in a garden city-suburb. The flms differ, however, in their presentation of the relationships between mass culture and the city. While 42nd Street celebrates an inclusive, abundant, and plural popular urban culture, Dead End remains ambiguous about the same (especially in the case of its lowest-income protagonists), and The City emphasizes the destructive aspects of mass culture and mass society, crystallized in the metropolis. The three flms’ spaces of democracy thus exemplify a spectrum of political aesthetics apparent in dozens of other non-glamorizing productions made during, and immediately after, the Great Depression.1 The Warner Brothers studio that made 42nd Street specialized in social problem narratives. Dead End was a production of Samuel Goldwyn, who also produced class conscious flms, such as Street Scene (d. King Vidor, 1931). The City, screened at the New York World’s Fair (1939), is the most signifcant urban planning documentary of the frst half of the 20th century. Dead End can be compared to the early 1930s gangster genre flms set in Chicago, most notably Little Caesar (d. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), Public Enemy (d. William Wellman, 1931), as well as to Angels with Dirty Faces (d. Michael Curtiz, 1938) set in New York, along with other flms that feature “the city boy” as a new social type. Dead End can be seen as precursor to the flms starring John Garfeld, especially Body and Soul (d. Robert Rossen, 1947), whose narrative is in dialogue with 1930s proletarian cinema. The collaboration and community among the very poor living in Central Park in Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (d. Lewis Milestone, 1933) could further be contrasted with

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public spaces in Dead End and 42nd Street. The latter is often discussed in relationship to other Busby Berkeley musicals, including Gold Diggers of 1933 (d. Mervyn LeRoy) and Gold Diggers of 1935 (d. Busby Berkeley), but could further be compared to, on the one hand, My Man Godfrey (d. Gregory La Cava, 1936) and the New York of the Thin Man series, as well as on, the other extreme, Skyscraper Souls (d. Edgar Selvyn, 1932). Landscapes and extra-urban communities in The City can be compared to the rural settings in the Pare Lorentz documentaries The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), as well as to on the one hand, the agrarian collaborative and self-help motifs in Our Daily Bread (d. King Vidor, 1934) and on the other, to the role of the state in Power and the Land (d. Joris Ivens, 1940). The City’s implicit evocation of political crises can be compared to Native Land (Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, 1942) and the noted documentary work of the members of the Workers Film and Photo League, and contrasted with Gabriel Over the White House (d. Gregory La Cava, 1933). The City’s critique of the machine age city could also be examined in relation to Wellman’s Heroes for Sale (1933) and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Poetic urban documentaries from the 1930s are rare, with A Bronx Morning (d. Jay Leyda, 1931) as an outstanding example. The infuences of Dead End and The City can also be traced in flms noir of the late 1940s that applied documentary realist techniques, such as The Naked City (d. Jules Dassin, 1949) and Call Northside 777 (d. Henry Hathaway, 1948). The skyline in all three flms can further be compared to the New York imagery in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). Projecting fears of the economic crisis, of the rise of fascism in Europe, and of mass society onto the cityscape, many similar city flms of the 1930s, and the decade that followed, linked urban turmoil to broader social transformations, yet tended to censure the metropolis itself for the unequal protection of the social rights of citizens. Criticism of the city was not merely a projection of a 19th century discourse about the morally degrading industrial metropolis, but rather related to the challenges for urban democracy, participation, communal living, and labor emancipation amidst crises.

Agitated streets: The Workers Film and Photo League (1931–1936) and the Photo League (1936–1951) In the context of the cinema of the Great Depression, it is important to examine the Workers Film and Photo League as a pivotal counterpart to the 1930s flms discussed here in their depiction of the agitated streets. In her presentation on “The 1930s Workers International Photo Leagues and the Comintern,” Jane Gaines (2019) recently built upon Eisenstein’s notion that “outside of agitation, cinema does not exist,” demonstrating how cinematic attractions evolved into popular sentiment and consciousness. This is evident in the New York Film and Photo League’s Hunger,

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Figure 3.1 Frame enlargement from Hunger (d. Workers Film and Photo League, 1932).

the flmstock of which was seized by police before its 1932 New Jersey premiere, and which includes depictions of unemployment, homelessness (see Figure 3.1), and evictions (evident also in Leo Seltzer’s photographs that, for example, show a “strike against high rent” (Gaines 2019)). Hunger was based on the Washington, D.C. Hunger March (see Figure 3.2), Bonus March, and May Day demonstrations of 1931 (Chisholm 1992). Furthermore, [d]epictions of demonstrations in 1933 against the arrival in the United States of Nazi Emissary Hans Weidemann in the flm America Today, and scenes of anti-fascist protests in photographs, witness the view of the WFPL [Workers Film and Photo League], and later the [Photo League], that it could “happen here”, on the streets of New York. (Haran 2019) For the most part, these subjects, covered as well in The New Masses magazine and The Daily Worker newspaper, were ignored by the mass media’s mainstream newsreels of Fox Movietone, the Hearst organization, and Pathé News (Chisholm 1992). Participants in the Photo League, based initially in the West 28th Street offces of the Workers International Relief, were Harry Alan Potamkin, Sam Brody, Leo Hurwitz, Leo Seltzer, and Tom Brandon – mostly members of the radicalized Russian Jewish diaspora close to The New Masses and The Daily Worker with ties to the U.S.S.R. (Haran 2019).

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Figure 3.2 Frame enlargement from Hunger (d. Workers Film and Photo League, 1932).

Brad Chisholm describes a Photo League production: frst, an executive committee would dispatch a flm crew to some national trouble spot where they would have a fair chance of flming demonstrations. Once there, the flm crew shot its footage, and if they had access to the necessary facilities nearby, they would screen the rushes on site for the beneft of the demonstrators. Leo Seltzer claims this was a tremendous morale booster … Next, the flm would be sent back to New York where it would most likely be edited into an installment of WORKERS’ NEWSREEL or the AMERICAN TODAY SERIES. Then the episode would become part of a traveling program headlined by a major Soviet feature. That program would either be road-showed across the country or booked by interested theatres, regional League chapters, or miscellaneous workers’ clubs. Finally, when the events depicted in a given newsreel installment were no longer current, the footage would become part of a compilation feature flm organized around a general theme. (HUNGER and PORTRAIT OF AMERICA are exemplary productions). (Chisholm 1992) Barnaby Haran (2019) studied the differences between the Workers Film and Photo League (1931–1936) and the subsequent Photo League (1936–1951)

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to evaluate the shift from “worker photography” to “street photography,” fnding the latter museological term unsatisfactory to encompass Photo League’s collective grassroots project of documenting Lower East Side, Chelsea, and Harlem. Haran argues that the Photo League engaged in indepth investigation of the city depicting working-class, proletarian, multiethnic neighborhoods, thus continuing, not abandoning, the mandate of the Workers Film and Photo League. Anne Tucker (1994) reports that Attorney General Tom C. Clark listed the Photo League, along with seventy-nine other organizations and eleven schools as “either totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive,” information provided by the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), with the FBI claiming that members of the Photo League, which had ceased its work by the early 1950s, were prolabor and communist in their leanings (Dejardin 1994). The Photo League’s lens on the streets brings multiple forms of agitation (including housing and labor activism, anti-fascist protests, etc.) into the foreground, validating Gaines’ (2019), via-Eisenstein, assertion that cinema agitates more than can perhaps be accomplished by other means. The following sections investigate contrasting forms of the 1930s agitated city’s political aesthetics evident in the cinematic motifs of the skyline, the street, and the slum in 42nd Street, Dead End, and The City.

The skyline and the slum: Spaces of democracy and the metropolis of the Great Depression The subject of the inquiry here is the unexamined linkage between urban planning and a cinematic discourse regarding the possibility of an egalitarian, inclusive, participatory community in diverse city spaces. The cinematic discourse about the spaces of democracy includes a narrative concern for the excluded and an exposure of social divisions (Dead End, The City), a focus on social problems and unemployment (Dead End, 42nd Street), an emphasis on the public spaces in, and popular culture of, the city (42nd Street), and a critique of inequality and of the commodifcation of the built environment (The City, Dead End). 42nd Street and Dead End were flmed in Hollywood studios but not on the standard New York lot: the former flm shows New York’s most magical street as a theatrical artifce destabilized during the Depression; the latter applies naturalistic techniques in its New York tenement setting. The metropolis of the Great Depression has been neglected in American urban and cinema studies analyses,2 which is puzzling given that research evidence points to the importance of big city settings in the 1930s (peaking in 1935, when virtually 50% of flms were set in the metropolis) (May 2000: 293).3 The absence of analysis of democratic space in the cinematic city literature and in the interdisciplinary urban, cinema, and cultural sociology research, prompts further questions regarding the denial of the city as a political space in the Western metropolitan flms of the 1920s. With the

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exception of German contexts in Lang’s Metropolis (1927), identifying the flmic experience with a stroll in the city streets meant erasure of the political from the frame of most of the 1920s metropolitan flms, as if both flm and the city existed outside of the unsettling spaces of inequality. Political spaces in and of the metropolis remain either ignored or assumed in classical American cinema and for the most part in the documentaries of the 1930s as well. Moreover, the signifcance of the noted Workers’ Film and Photo League, Nykino, Frontier Cinema as the institutional, stylistical, and political counterparts to Hollywood is rarely linked to discourses about the city, or urban democracy and popular culture (see Wolfe 1993). The three flms of the Great Depression begin to question the modernist urban experience as “the intermediate zone” between the “inside of the self-validating technologies” and “the outside of political trauma” (Williams and Pinkney 1989: 11). Rather, the metropolis is more prominent in the flms’ implicit political discourses.4 The conceptual core of the argument examines how the cinematic spaces of the metropolis, both discursive and discourse producing, shape a new domain of democratic space amidst, and set against, the world-wide economic and political crisis. In urban theory terms, the link between the social and the urban is analyzed by connecting the material domain of representations with social practices, probing how, following Henri Lefebvre (1991: 38–39), representational spaces and representations of space together produce urban space.5 In the three flms, the representational spaces of the skyline and the slum visualize the social divide in the Great Depression narratives (especially in Dead End) and recall two distinct ideologies in planning (representations of space). “[T]he slum defned, directed, and limited public action through the device of ‘denomination’; the skyline quieted and pacifed and avoided inherent confict in the structure of the ideology by transforming new social facts into traditional aesthetic objects which in turn had a long-standing popular, confict-free position in the ideology.” Thus, the skyline became a symbol of “fashion, luxury, and social success” (Warner 1983: 393) – an aesthetic trope and a desired promotional image for the metropolis. In contrast to this view, Thomas Bender has argued that the tower imagery is more closely associated with mercantile capitalism in the range of late 19th and early 20th century representations, while the skyline imagery echoed the public realm.6 In the analysis that follows, the narrative and visual redefnitions of the skyline and the slum are examined in relationship to their publicness, collectivity, and their critique of commodifcation and inequality. Drawing from the popular culture repertoire, New York flms of the Great Depression created a new cultural discourse by emphasizing the conficting material domains of the skyline and the slum, albeit at the cost of undermining the metropolis (rather than the economic system, for instance) and, especially in The City, of limiting the urban spaces of democracy.

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Dancing skyline: 42nd Street In the 1930s, the Warner Brothers studio produced urban social problem narratives, such as the gangster drama Public Enemy, the juvenile delinquency story Wild Boys of the Road, and the criminal justice flm I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang – flms that included proletarian actors (Dick Powell, Paul Muni, and James Cagney) (Sklar 1992: 81). 42nd Street’s social engagement, the studio’s promotional poster proclaimed, was an example of a “New Deal in Entertainment” (Spector 1979: 93). Although completed in 1932, 42nd Street was released in March 1933 to coincide with the presidential inauguration. The Warner Brothers studio was active in the Southern California organizing campaign for Roosevelt’s election and the flm stars traversed the country on the 42nd Street “Better Times Special” train to take part in the inaugural parade (see Cormack 1994: 84; Hoberman 1993; Barrios 1995: 374). In the flm, the actual and the imagined 42nd Street blur into a cinematic construct in which spectators are often reminded that dancing is a form of employment and that members of the cast are fortunate to hold jobs during the economic hardship. The viewers are not called upon to enjoy the cinematic travel in Walter Benjamin’s terms (1988: 236); rather, adventurous travel is disrupted by the stage production narrative and by the cinematic staging of the city. While the promotional slogan, “New Deal in Entertainment,” used a political campaign as a vehicle, the cinematic spaces and the musical sequences shaped the flm’s political aesthetics by “transmit[ing] meanings in a form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations” (Rancière 2006: 63). This tension is crucial in understanding Benjamin’s theory of the 1920s flm, but also, more signifcantly, in discerning what was absent from his view: the notion that cinematic urban travel can at once subsume social constraint, present an adventure, and express unease. Cinema’s heightened sense of perceptual awareness fell short, however, of the revolutionary potential that Benjamin had hoped for. 42nd Street’s composer Harry Warren argued that its popular appeal was rooted in the audiences’ demand for uplifting tunes and the musical form’s presumed happy ending (cited in Van Gelder 1980).7 The populist motif is, again, shaped by an urban imaginary – the liveliest street, disorderly and thrilling, is tamed into a communal setting. The narrative and the musical sequences associate 42nd Street with collectivity, team spirit, joint struggles in which an ordinary person triumphs – the chorus girl (Ruby Keeler) who accidentally gets her big break and “does it all, learns the part in fve hours, and becomes a big star” (Bergman 1992: 63). The female protagonists in 42nd Street are only in part in dialogue with the changing gender roles of the 1930s and “the arrival of the working woman” on the cinema screen (Gates 2007: 2). 42nd Street’s reluctant new lead lacks agency in the beginning of the narrative, however, and is pressured by a solitary, workaholic, perfectionist theater director, bankrupted by the

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Depression and “dehumanized by the system” (“I’m in this for one reason only – money”) (cited in Grossvogel 2003: 142).8 The democratic aesthetic shapes a compromise to commerce through a craving for an instant celebrity status rather than a development into a talented star. As scholars note, amateurs in Hollywood musicals heighten identifcation with the audience and subvert or conceal the drive for proft (Feuer and British Film Institute 1993: 14–15; Phelan 2000).9 In this manner, the flm’s political message is at once articulated as that of emancipation and empowerment, but also undermined by the emphasis on commerce. In the material world of 42nd Street, art gives way to both commerce and cooperative spirit, smoothing the rupture between the two domains and limiting the scope of the flm’s political engagement. On the one hand, the musical expands a democratic space by imagining that the odds of success could be evenly distributed.10 On the other hand, it diminishes a possible “emancipatory” potential (i.e., in Rancière’s terms, a “verifcation of equality” that would disrupt the existing inequalities (2006: 86) that actually prevent an ordinary person’s success from being realized). The flm commences with an establishing shot of the skyline, followed by a montage sequence that presents the city as a space of inter-connectedness and 42nd Street as a site of anticipated wonder. In the skyline sequence that ends the flm, a dance troupe “dresses” as Manhattan towers, corporalizing the built environment and linking architecture, space, and cinema to fashion, artifce, and display. This shot echoes (and then subverts) the 1931 Beaux-Arts Ball photograph of the New York architects who appeared wearing cardboard models of the towers that they had designed. In contrast to their stillness, in 42nd Street “[t]he entire street is seen strutting, and even a cigar store wooden Indian dances in a mad urban ballet” (Stern et al. 1987: 80). Keeler’s dance amidst the towers transforms into a seduction of the city, suggesting her symbolic signifcance as a citizen. And yet, the corporalization process is explicitly gendered, never quite accomplishing the emancipatory potential of a political flm: the chorus girl performs for the male show director, the flm’s director and choreographer, and the male audience (see also, Cormack 1994: 86). But Keeler’s triumph is also a tribute to women and, according to one scholar’s ethnographic research evidence, a memory of symbolic empowerment for female audiences of the 1930s American cinema in Britain (see Kuhn 2002: vi, vii, 253) In the fnal sequence, as Keeler walks up the stairs in 42nd Street, they transform into a skyscraper. The skyscraper “falls,” as it were, on the sidewalk to become – 42nd Street, melting the material grounds of imaginaries, but also suggesting the transformative powers of agency within urban space. 42nd Street redefnes “cinematic (e)motion” (Bruno 2002: i) as a desire for the accelerated pace of the city that is suggestive of a social movement, derived from human rather than mechanical agency. The flm’s encounter with the city does not shape an aesthetic space through tracking shots or

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their simulation in a passing train; flm becomes an art movement within the city with its affliation with dance, creativity, and collective accomplishment. Berkeley applied a new technique of camera movement (pacing and compression), shifts in tone, scale, and perspective, as well as rapid alterations from two- to three-dimensional spaces (Rubin 1993: 100; see also Belton 1977). The democratic space in 42nd Street is thus shaped by the movements of dancers as urban denizens, and also of the mobile camera, which challenge the fâneur-voyeur dualities (de Certeau 1984: vii). Moreover, the skyline itself is in motion (42nd Street), its materiality and iconography rendered perishable during the economic crisis, subverting the individualism, the artifce of urban fashion, and the spectacle of display of the magical towers (Beaux-Arts Ball, 1931), and claiming instead a collective and a public image (see Figures 3.3 and 3.4). 42nd Street’s emphasis on the display and staging of urbanity and woman as artifce recalls Hollywood’s pioneering role in spectacularizing entertainment, too often accompanied by social stereotyping. The flm’s political aesthetics is articulated, however, in the reframing of the spectacularized triumph by the context of the Depression, as Berkeley’s seemingly uplifting musicals nevertheless “paint grim portraits of city life in the thirties” (Spector 1979: 96). An evocation of the economic crisis is not merely an

Figure 3.3 Beaux-Arts Ball, 1931. Courtesy: Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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Figure 3.4 Film still from 42nd Street (d. Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Courtesy: Photofest, New York.

ironic reversal in a musical number rhyme, as in the songs that Ginger Rogers sings at the beginning of Gold Diggers of 1933, “we’re in the money / we’re in the money … we never see a headline / about a breadline / today,” just moments before the rehearsal is dismissed because the theater is bankrupt (see also Bergman 1992; Spector 1979). The crisis is, rather, articulated by the flm language and located within the cinematic spaces: rapid montage of locations destabilizes not only the space of representations (the city in flm) but representations of space (the space of flm, and the space of the city beyond the frame), suggesting a new urban spatial discourse. In The Mass Ornament, Kracauer identifed “an aesthetic refex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires” (1995: 79), a refex discernible in Berkeley’s musicals in many sequences of surrender of spontaneous volition. Kracauer linked the latter image to depictions of urban life: “the ornament resembles aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them” (1995: 77). Darwinian or existentialist associations are absent in the beehive imagery in 42nd Street, however, so as to simulate the liberatory potential of the movement. The mass ornament trope is complicated in 42nd Street by the realistic and formative tendencies of the musical: the former captures the plots’ tendencies towards real-life

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happenings, the latter towards the constant emergence of song and dance numbers (see Kracauer 1997: 148). Berkeley’s Footlight Parade was explicitly political, expressing support for the newly-elected Roosevelt administration, going so far as to include a sequence of the military unfurling of “an enormous American fag, with the face of FDR smiling benevolently from the center. Finally, the sailors form a huge NRA eagle, level their guns and fre, signaling a declaration of war on the Depression” (Spector 1979: 95). Bodies form a mechanical collectivity and their movement adopts a socio-political frame of reference, absent the spontaneity and unforced staging of 42nd Street. As David Kennedy has noted, citing Alfred Kazin, a subtext of “patriotic nationalism” was apparent as well in many art projects of the New Deal era, in spite of their critique of American society (Kennedy 1999: 256). Beyond the vehicle of a political message for the inaugural parade, 42nd Street’s populist appeal rests on its interactions with the public space that is infuenced by, and also helped to shape a discourse about, Times Square. 42nd Street does not single-mindedly root crisis in urban conditions, although the Times Square neighborhood heightens the supposed disorder, vice, and sin (crimes of passion and danger are assumed to be specifc to the lively street). Hollywood’s New York Street of desires is inseparable from these dangers. Historical research about Times Square presents a more complex, yet perhaps not paradoxically, equally vivid, even cinematic, discourse (see Berman 2006). Before Prohibition, Times Square was considered “an international symbol of urban insouciance and success” and 42nd Street “the street that never sleeps”: By 1930, both Prohibition and the Great Depression had taken their toll, and the theater district had relocated to upper Times Square, leaving 42nd Street merely as its southern boundary. Prohibition, which took effect in 1920, compelled restaurant and night club owners to rent parts of their buildings for other purposes, adding to an already unstable real estate market of the Square. The Great Depression brought an increasing number of ‘low-cost, high-turn-over uses’ and ‘bulk off-thestreet trade’ forms of seedy entertainment, burlesque shows, dime museums, grind houses, pinball arcades, etc.11 (Kornblum 1978: 61) The mixture of high and popular culture (Broadway theater and low-cost entertainment) is not seen in 42nd Street as a part of the cultural process but rather as a potentially perilous mélange. In Henri Lefebvre’s terms, the representational spaces of the cinematic Times Square – in this and many other flms and popular culture discourses – shaped perceptions of space, positioning its supposed and actual vice and sin outside of broader economic and social conditions or New York’s policies (including zoning and policing). Yet the very same depictions were conveniently invoked by developers

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or quasipublic authorities in discourses that aimed to justify redevelopment, renewal, or “blight” clearance of Times Square throughout the 20th century (see also Taylor 1991; Sagalyn 2001). 42nd Street’s Pnyx and agora coexist amidst the city’s heightened economic deprivation and its seedier side, evoked in the motifs of uncertainty or the possible fall of a woman.12 The flm’s fnal performance attempts to override social uncertainties, anxieties, or fears by suspending class and status differences. A joyful crowd of denizens of all walks of life unites in a cooperative utopia of entertainment that saturates the traveling shot: an elderly white man in a tuxedo wiggles alongside two black boys tap-dancing on the sidewalk; two street vendors fold their fruit stands and walk off cheerfully with their golf bags, and so on. Dance-as-labor is abolished, and dance-as-leisure now prevails. Everyday life appears devoid of routine, boredom, labor, or of class or racial confict; the vibrancy of 42nd Street guarantees a communal utopia of big-city splendor. An expanded democratic space of the city aligns the spectator’s gaze frst, with the movement of the dancing crowd, suggesting empowerment and, second, with Keeler’s climb up the street/tower and out of the cinematic space retreating to a Hollywood phantasmagoria. On the one hand, the musical genre can evoke a cooperative spirit to stage spectacles of unproblematic community through “folk numbers and folk motifs” (Feuer and British Film Institute 1993: 17), which jeopardize urbanity. The attempted pacifcation of the city by a linkage with folk or the natural environment reveals the suppressed fears of class confict. On the other hand, the communal motif challenges the tropes of alienation associated with the inner-city, recreating a utopia where sheer joy arises from the range of experiences within diverse public spaces in which fâneurie and loitering are reshaped as urban citizenship. Thus, the real 42nd Street remains obscured behind a mirage of American democracy’s Pnyx and agora in which labor has been abolished. “[C]lassless and stateless society somehow realizes the general ancient conditions of leisure from labor and, at the same time, of leisure from politics” (Marx, cited in Arendt 1961: 20). In the New Deal in Entertainment, the ordinary person’s success is a wish-fulfllment dream of an urban social democracy that is nevertheless undermined by select biased, simplifed, or stereotyped discourses of decline. Behind the bright lights of spectacle and commerce, the utopian theatricality of 42nd Street fails to locate urban democratic spaces that would sustain and enfranchise the spectacle of social transformation.

Class confict: Dead End Dead End recasts the dichotomy between the skyline and the slum into a cinematic trope that unambiguously bridges the dual images: the skyline at the beginning and the end of the flm cannot be separated from the depictions of the slum13 in the central portion of the narrative. An East River waterfront corner is at once a “dead end” for the poor and a palace with

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a waterfront view for the affuent. By presenting the skyline and the slum as an amalgam trope, Dead End transposes New York’s architectural verticality as the extreme polarity of the city’s economic ladder. By using the cinematic ability to condense spatial distance, the space of representation introduces a rupture in the spectacularized skyline image. The flm’s allegorical spatial imagination and its signifcance for New York housing advocacy and planning policies during the Depression era are suggestive of the Lefebvrian linkages among spaces of representation, representational spaces, and the production of space (1991: 38–39). Dead End’s Manhattan East Side neighborhood is a setting for an “ameliorative environmentalism” needed to reform the slum conditions that turned a “smart, brave, and decent” child into a hardened criminal. The criminal Baby Face Martin is played by Humphrey Bogart, presented in the flm as a “moody, nostalgic, and confused [character] returning to the haunts of his youth in search of the place where he had lost his way” (Sklar 1992: 72; 75). The flm’s sensationalist trailer brands the East midtown waterfront blocks as a “lost corner in New York’s underworld,” and a “cradle of crime,” recalling a 19th century trope of the city as an agent of moral and character degradation and planning discourses of urban blight (see Boyer 1983; Lees 1985). In contrast to early 1930s crime flm narratives, however, Dead End undermined the gangster myth by “reducing that early thirties hero to a sociological cipher” (Bergman 1992: 155). Unlike Angels With Dirty Faces (d. Michael Curtiz, 1938), whose narrative perceives the rule of law and obeying moral norms as the solution to crime, Dead End’s social problems are caused by neighborhood (albeit not broader, socio-economic) conditions (see Ellis 1937). The flm’s political aesthetics is articulated in its rupture of the material grounds of the cinematic neighborhood (the skyline vs the slum) and in the narratives of class divisions, criminality, and labor agitation by specifying the forces and economic or political agents that caused urban problems. The indices of the key works on cinema and the city (Bruno 2002; Dimendberg 2004; Fitzmaurice and Shiel 2003; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001) neglect to include Dead End (along with most of the 1930s American flms), a striking omission given that the flm was instrumental in passing slum clearance and housing reform legislation in New York (Phillips 1998: 66). In Sanders’ account, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr attended the premiere of Dead End in August 1937 and the subsequent passage of the WagnerStegall Housing Act was facilitated by the favorable public opinion of Dead End (Sanders 2001: 165–166). The legislation was also the result of lobbying on the part of the Citizens Housing Council (Jackson 1995: 568). In 1938, the approval of article 18 of the New York State constitution authorized comprehensive planning, slum clearance, and urban redevelopment. Dead End called for improvements in tenement conditions, although this was not intentional on the part of the director William Wyler, to whom the notion that the flm helped to promote housing reform in New York was

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a “pleasant surprise,” especially given that in his view the slums were theatrically staged and were not depicted in such a manner that would evoke real conditions (Phillips 1998: 66). The flm attracted critical attention and received signifcant praise in the press (see M’Manus 1937; Norbert 1937; Mae 1937; Edwin 1937) as well as by public, charitable, and community organizations, winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Cinematography (Gregg Toland), and Best Supporting Actress (Claire Trevor for the role of Francey). A black and white still of a composite skyline facing the East River, overlaid by an inter-title, introduces the flm. The Hollywood studio scenic backing resembles a combination of a New York skyline and a rendering reminiscent of Hugh Ferris’ Metropolis of Tomorrow, highlighting an identifcation of New York as an American metropolis. In what seems to be among the earliest narratives of gentrifcation in American flm, the intertitles announce: Every street in New York ends in a river. For many years the dirty banks of the East River were lined with the tenements of the poor. Then the rich, discovering that the river traffc was picturesque, moved their houses eastward. And now the terraces of these great apartment houses look down into the windows of the tenement poor. These shots could be seen as a critique of the aesthetics and ideology of skyscrapers in Stieglitz’s early 20th century photographic art (Tracthenberg 1984: 462), which is in Dead End extended to the waterfront and industrial areas. Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting “East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel” (1928) does not yet anticipate new economic appropriations of space, artistic gentrifcation, and landscape recycling. Although the symbolic appropriation of space is in urban studies literature associated with the postmodern reconfguration of the post-1975 fscal crisis period (Harvey 1989; Zukin 1991), Dead End’s studio shots of the “picturesque” river traffc suggest an early symbolic alteration of New York’s waterfront landscapes. In the sequence that immediately follows the inter-title, the camera pans down over rooftops, then tracks left to a waterfront street corner. Medium long shots follow a policeman waking up a homeless man in front of an entrance to a penthouse whose brass plaque is being wiped by a black servant, transposing an image of Southern slavery to a north-eastern urban context (Figure 3.5). The camera pans between the shots of upscale housing, and a policeman near the Dead End kids on the waterfront.14 Emulating the original theater play by Sidney Kingsley (adapted for the screen by Lillian Hellman), the flm presents the city’s dead end corner as a social image juxtaposing class divisions. Wyler uses a panning technique to highlight connections between the rich and the poor protagonists, framing in dual planes a dense space of deep

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Figure 3.5 Frame enlargement from Dead End (d. William Wyler, 1937).

focus within which both the slum and the palace are apparent in numerous medium long shots. Dead End inverts the vertical vs horizontal trope (the tower vs the skyline) that Thomas Bender (2002) has argued characterizes New York visual art of the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, the emphasis on the interrelatedness of the skyline and the slum frames the housing problem as an embodiment of the city’s class divide.15 The structure replicated in the flm is The River House (1931) on East 53rd Street, designed by Bottomley, Wagner, and White, and located adjacent to low-income tenements. Already a year before the River House was built, in 1930, the slum area known as Beekman Place at East 50th Street was located near a fashionable enclave. The entire neighborhood gentrifed by the late 1930s and working class German, Hungarian, and Czech residents moved to Queens. The slums were demolished during the construction of East River Drive 1938–1941, built by Manhattan Borough President Stanley Isaacs (Stern et al. 1987: 81, 433, 700). Wyler had originally planned to include documentary sequences in New York City tenements, but was overruled by the producer Samuel Goldwyn who insisted upon a studio set production. Sources describe the tenement as “one of the seediest sets in Hollywood history” that included “every crack in the wall, thick coats of dust, peeling paint … and stairways that creak” (Phillips 1998: 66).16 Toland’s cinematography, simulating deep focus,

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allows the viewer to perceive several actions within one frame. There are few interior shots, however, and the cinematography is constrained in visualizing squalor and the eroding health of the residents in contrast to affuence. The Production Code fles note that Joseph Breen’s offce requested that the sequences with insects and other shots depicting appalling conditions in dilapidated housing be eliminated. The director heeded the censor’s request to tamp down the provocative language of the Dead End boys, but argued for the necessity of retaining the shots of tenement conditions (MPAA 2006). Sharply critical of the rich, the sequences with the Dead End boys are careful, however, not to offend the middle class taste by advocating for the poor.17 Low and high angle shots emphasize the constraints of space on the protagonists, and articulate the class polarization in relationship to the protagonists’ responses to their environment. In the flm’s saturated frame, the neighborhood is the most critical component, making the background (the neighborhood setting) more signifcant than the foreground plane of action (the plot).18 The emphasis on the material grounds, however, limits social or political action: the class divide, the housing problem, and crime, have deadlocked the poor’s democratic spaces. The class tensions on screen never reach the point of contestation, nor do they provide an explicit narrative trigger. The flm avoids references to social confict, with the exception of Drina’s (a striking working class woman) speech against police brutality and her support of labor agitation. Although big city settings were common in studio production treatments of class differences, Andrew Bergman notes that the degree of class animosity presented in Dead End was nevertheless much higher than in Hollywood flms of the period (Bergman 1992: 155). Virtually every line of dialogue emphasizes economic factors or class differences and the narrative does not merely sneer at the rich or sentimentalize the poor. The exception is Drina’s sentimentalized character – the flm’s moral center of consciousness (even if she also dreams of being magically lifted out of poverty) – although Dave’s (an unemployed architect) dilemmas of social and class belonging and his actions drive the narrative resolution. The flm includes a moral condemnation of the slums that have produced an environment of human degradation (see Sanders 2001: 163), however, its narrative focuses on social and economic problems of the waterfront block, and holds liable social institutions, such as the police and the courts, which favor and protect the rich and ignore or punish the poor, and reform schools, which failed to rehabilitate juvenile delinquency. The police and the press come to claim the bodies and to apprehend the perpetrators of crime when an upper-class resident is harmed. The neighborhood’s low-income boys, with “little education and no skills” who have turned to crime, “have already reached a dead end; that is, they have no prospects for a promising future” (Phillips 1998: 66–67). These slum families and street children have been written off for clearance – a process made apparent in the second

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part of the narrative as the center of consciousness shifts from Drina’s labor activism to Dave’s call for slum demolition. The director self-consciously stages a social problem narrative, hinting at a realist claim (see Doane 2003; Kracauer 1997) of a flm capable of truthful representation of conditions, in contrast to the manipulative mass media. The public sphere (situated off-screen) is corrupted by mediated fabrications or misunderstood urban conditions, but flm art, as is suggested here, does not conceal, reinforcing further the assumption that the location and the socio-economic conditions in the neighborhood determine the characters’ trajectories. The labor agitation contributes to the flm’s realist claim and connects more directly to social conditions during the Depression. Bergman writes that: [l]abor struggle was still bitter and when Drina tells a policeman who chastises the slum-dwellers for being “cop-haters”, “We’re strikers; one of you lousy cops hit a striker;” it became clear that battles were still to be won … Two months before Dead End’s premiere, no fewer than ten persons were killed when striking Republic Steel workers marched on their plant. Drina’s anger and class consciousness were not Hollywood fantasies, not in 1937. (Bergman 1992: 159) In Italy, the flm was banned in 1938 for “political reasons” and declared by local censors as having been “made with procommunistic ideas” (MPAA 2006). The flm’s political aesthetics, however, do not envision social redistribution or forms of reclaiming the city by the working poor. The flm eschews as well positive aspects of low-rent districts – the neighborhood is seen as a slum to be eliminated, and the narrative implies that the social problems and criminal behavior would be eradicated with the destruction of the site. Bergman fnds that working-class audiences felt that the flm’s ending was inconclusive, that the community’s future was left too uncertain, the empowerment of the protagonists incomplete. Writing about German silent flms, Kracauer noted that their cinematic streets “breathe a tristesse which is palpably the outcome of unfortunate social conditions … but whatever its dominant characteristics street life in all these flms is not fully determined by them” (1997: 73). Dead End’s political aesthetics in contrast suspend contingency. Banished are Simmelian intensifcations of nervous stimuli or Lynch’s notion of the city as a chaos of images (Simmel 1969 [1903]; Lynch 1960) – the artifce of crises that seeps through 42nd Street. Instead, the cinematic space reorders the city as a scheme of divisions – the urban contradictions (and not simply the flm’s protagonists) have come to their own dead end. In the closing shot, the camera moves up the rooftop to reveal again the skyline, whose prospect is now altered in the spectators’ eyes, as the rupture in the

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material grounds has embedded a socio-political discourse about the necessity of amelioration. Dead End renders the skyline and the slum as related and inseparable images with unsustainable contradictions. Systemic change through social movements fails (Drina’s labor activism does not succeed) and urban contingency is suppressed (it is as if the protagonists are trapped by the inseparable conjoining of the skyline and the slum in the very waterfront corner). Apart from the police, all other institutions seem to have abandoned the slum. In its yearning for equality, little space is left for democracy at this waterfront corner, as the very last shot shows Drina and Dave, their backs facing to the audience, leaving the slum. The flm’s invocation of slum clearance as a call for social reform is further suggestive of misapprehensions of urban problems and the implementation of modernist plans. Commonly seen as a prominent example of crime genre, Dead End is further an important class confict narrative that points to the limitations of utopian modernist projects in addressing social problems or accommodating democratic spaces.

The metropolis and community: The City While an escape from Dead End’s metropolis into nature is entirely inconceivable, as even the East River views have been commodifed, The City’s revision of the urban social system is a retreat into a planned garden city. Sponsored by the American Institute of City Planners through Civic Films Inc. and funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the flm was directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, based on a script by Henwar Rodakiewicz,19 and included a commentary written by Lewis Mumford.20 According to both Steiner and Rodakiewicz, Mumford’s learned commentary was phrased to avoid offending the Carnegie Corporation, given its role in the development of Pittsburgh, where the flmmakers had a brush with the local police (Alexander 1981: 249–251; see also Rodakiewicz 2001).21 The documentary presents perhaps the most apparent example of Lefebvre’s triad of spaces of representation intersecting with representational spaces with the aim of the production of space. Unlike in Dead End, whose director did not aim at an explicit role in housing advocacy, this nexus is announced by the flm’s very frst inter-title: “Year by year our cities grow more complex and less ft for living. The age of rebuilding is here. We must remold our old cities and build new communities better suited to our needs.” The City’s critique of urban growth is based upon four distinct sociospatial settings, presented as organic forms: pre-industrial rural and small town communities, the industrial city, the inner-city metropolis, and the garden city. The frst set of sequences focuses on the slums in industrial cities, de-emphasizing, however, the class polarization shown in Dead End. According to Van Dyke, the Planners’ Civic Films Committee vetoed the more critical segments proposed by Van Dyke and Rodakiewicz, and

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“insisted that there be no sociological or political [commentary] or any reasons behind [the urban problems depicted in the flm], but simply that this is what exists and this is what it could be” (cited in Alexander, 1981: 252). The City is a rare urban documentary from a decade in which prominent non-fction flms focused on the rural American landscape, notably, Pare Lorentz’s The River (1937) and The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). The City, which was initially supposed to be directed by Lorentz, however, includes a critique of urban life that is contiguous with the rural documentary tradition. This can be seen in the shots of the New England rural and small-town settings as contrasted with the subsequent shots of industrial cities and of New York. The idyllic settings, whose montage evokes silent newsreels, include a traditional division of labor and focus especially on the social activities of men: establishing shots of boys jumping into water are followed by medium-long shots of a horse carriage going by and a young man with a basket of apples in a sequence that ends with a dissolving pan of the pastoral landscape. In the scenes set in a town hall meeting that follow, the flm advocates for local-level small-scale participatory democracy (presented as unattainable in the metropolis), as the narrator reminds the viewers, “there was lasting harmony between the soil and what we built and planted there … working and living we found a balance. The town was us and we were part of it.” Scenes of men cutting grass are accompanied by the narration, “we have let our cities grow too fast to live in,” then dissolve onto an industrial landscape. Establishing shots show coal and steel mill, factory smoke, and a sole human fgure descending from a slagheap. Industrial areas are the most despairing, showing pollution, ailing bodies, degradation, and outright exploitation. The flm attributes the pollution less to economic conditions than to the machine age environment that has replaced the community and local democracy and, in this manner, “erased the past.” As the narrator exclaims: Machines, invention, power, block out the past, forget the quiet cities. Bring in the steam and steel. The iron men, the giants, open the throttle, all aboard, the promised land. Pillars of smoke by day, pillars of fre by night. Pillars of progress. Machines to make machines. Production to expand production. The narration suggests that the machine age environment and its system of production are self-perpetuating and that industrial progress per se has destroyed the quiet cities. (Although the context of Pittsburgh and the culprit of the industry there is apparent, the flm avoids assigning economic or political agency for the city’s development, or its detrimental environmental or housing conditions shown in the flm.) On the eve of World War Two, discourses of New York conveyed by Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1981 [c. 1938]) and Louis Wirth’s

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‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (2002 [1938]) and in the flm The City, merge socio-economic and political concerns regarding urban problems and social inequalities with a critique of modern society. Speed and motion associated with the 1920s machine age aesthetics now suggest environmental degradation. The camera shows factories steaming, then a dark, almost black frame, followed by shots of an industrial town in smoke. The pans of an industrial residential neighborhood close with a shot of the toxic landscape. The narrator’s mournful voice utters: “There’s millions like us living here on top of it … Smoke makes prosperity, no matter if you choke on it.” Poison in the river, children running across the rail tracks, and a fast-moving train like a black throttle are followed again by the narration: “Don’t tell us that this is the best you can do in building cities. Who built this place? What put us here? And how do we get out again? We are asking, just asking …” Shots of downtown and midtown Manhattan form the grid for the flm’s critique with broader cultural implications, in which the metropolis stands in for mass society and contemporary culture. Daniel Bell has noted that a discourse about the sundered bonds of modern society, characterized by estranged individuals amidst faceless masses, and by the breakdown of value structures and communal structures, can become an excuse for a defense of privilege and elite rule (supposedly needed to prevent the collapse of society and ensure the education of the masses) and an ideology of romanticized protest against contemporary society (Bell 2004: 364–372). Although The City was made a decade before this social theory debate, it is suggestive of the still underexplored linkages between the city, cinema, and mass society. The shots of the Manhattan skyline and downtown in the central portion of the narrative are neither images of luxury nor of commerce, but of a solidifed economic power. The skyline has lost any resonance with the public sphere or democratic space. Over black and white establishing shots of Manhattan skyscrapers, midtown and downtown street crowds rushing in and out of the subways, the narrator of the flm in a dramatically intoned, rushed voice proclaims: Follow the crowd, get the big money. You make a pile, and raise a pile that makes another pile for you. Follow the crowd. We’ve reached a million, two million, fve million, watch us grow, going up. It’s new, it’s automatic. It dictates, records, seals in one operation without human hand. What am I bid? What am I offered? Sold! The people, yes. Follow the crowd to the empire city, the wonder city, the windy city, the fashion city … [the narrator’s voice then changes; sorrowful, he utters] The people? Yes. The people … Perhaps. High angle shots show crowds on the streets, a technique familiar from Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (d. Walter Ruttmann, 1927), which is now framed by an audio commentary that renders destructive, rather than suggestive of propelling movement, modern technologies and urban

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growth. This sequence denies spontaneity and unrehearsed urban contingency, rendering its big-city democratic prospect implausible. The metropolis is over-determined by economic conditions, the division of labor, and mechanization. Sameness, alienation, routinization, and a “misapplied investment” of modernity leave virtually no space for decent living in what is among the most critical renditions of the metropolitan prospect in an early 20th century urban planning documentary. As the camera pans down Manhattan skyscrapers, the announcement “danger: congested ground” in close-up is followed by brief shots of children playing on the street (see Figure 3.6), accidents, residents on the phone calling doctors, toddlers going through rubbish or playing with fre, youth hanging on sanitation trucks, drunk men sleeping on empty streets.22 The sequences conclude with a montage of fast food consumption and production, car congestion, fres, car crashes, crowded clinics, ticking of clocks, street signs, whistles, faces and signs, a shot of Trinity church, empty streets on Wall Street, and fnally, vehicles leaving Manhattan. Everyday urban life is equated with perilous accidents, disorder, and aimlessness, dehumanization. The City denies the aesthetic appeal of the machine age environment and does not even hint at possible appropriations or restructuring of urban space. The economic system is not capable of creative destruction or reinvention; it simply cannot be altered. The fnal sequence returns to the skyline

Figure 3.6 Frame enlargement from The City (d. Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939).

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view to emphasize the need for the garden city alternative. The narrator critiques the inner city: A spectacle of human power, immense but misapplied. Disorder turned to stone and steel. A million mechanisms almost human, superhuman in speed. Men and women losing their jobs, losing their grip unless they imitate machines, live like machines. Cities unrolling ticker tape instead of life. Cities where people count the seconds and lose the days. Cities where Mr. and Mrs. Zero cannot move or act until the millions of other Zeros do. The shots of typists, accountants, subways, and cars, highlight the automatization and mechanization of the city, satirizing popular slogans and advertisements. Mr. and Mrs. Zero have lost their individuality in the flm’s key Manhattan sequence that seems to indict both urban liberalism and democracy. The visual imagery associated with an urban civilization on the verge of destruction echoes the contexts of the rise of fascism in Europe. The voiceover commenting on the aerial shots of Manhattan, crowds, then heavy traffc of vehicles abandoning the city, proclaims: “Science turns on new currents. Invisible forces carry speech and images. We grapple with brute force and chaos. Who shall be master, things or men? At last, men take command.” The black and white contrasts of the frst part of the flm turn into gray, suggesting an ominous portent. The framing shot opens on an airplane then cuts to physicists at work, as the voiceover commands: “Science takes fight at last for human goals. This new age builds a better kind of city, close to the soil once more as molded to our human wants as planes are shaped for speed.” The narration appropriates machine age vocabulary for social beneft, as modernization processes are supposed to be implemented by the knowledge elite. The flm associates suburban environments with social order, assuming an organic community, but eschewing a democratic process and deferring to the elite rule. “Order has come. Order and life together. We built the cities … all that we know about machines and soil … is waiting. It’s here – the new city waiting to serve a better age. ” Screened at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, The City’s regional planning vision was in dialogue with the popular Futurama exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes and sponsored by General Motors, in which the construction of a decentralized transportation network was presented as a solution not only for the problems of urban density and congestion, but also as a panacea for social and political instability (see Fotsch 2001). It is important, however, not to blur these imaginaries with actual planning policies in New York, as other sources point to Robert Moses’ dismissal of the exhibit (Ellis 1996: 268). The rational-comprehensive mode of planning (prevalent in the 1950s), promoted by both the World Fairs and the flm The City, is seemingly apart from the presumed corruption of politics – a top-down engineering for a safer world, a world saved, as it were, from democracy itself. The City does not evoke Mumford’s necropolis of The Culture of Cities, but the flm does suggest that a technological and human disaster is imminent

106 Urban planning and the spaces of democracy in the advanced stages of industrial capitalism and sees the metropolis as its utmost product. An alternative that appears to tame and resist this stage of capitalism and the technological age is envisioned as a garden suburb, offering a small-scale communal democracy to middle-class white citizens. It appears that while the metropolis has caused social breakdown, planners can reclaim order by appropriating scientifc management tools for the purpose of creating an alternate city-space as a tight-knit homogenous community. At the core of the flm’s discourse of social amelioration are the sequences of labor emancipation enabled through a communal, and in part elite, control of modern technologies. Mumford, importantly, advocated not only for regional planning and decentralization, but also for cooperative landholding, which was as well at the core of Upton Sinclair’s unsuccessful “End Poverty in California” bid for Governor in 1934. While the question of property ownership is obscured in the flm, the utopian garden city appears to favor a mixture of publicness and privacy (see also Fishman 1987). Medium-long and establishing shots present a suburb in which such control is established: a nuclear family, a school, and recreational spaces that allow for a fulflling human existence in a middleclass realm maintained safely outside of the metropolis, within an abstracted “oasis” of a “harmonious America … in control of its own destiny” (Alexander 1981: 257). While these shots evoke Mumford’s views regarding the role of physical planning and environmentalism in ameliorating social conditions and diminishing social confict, his social planning ideas more forcefully resonate with the flm’s critique of the inequality of the industrial metropolis. Importantly, Mumford outlined two great forces that infuence the growth of cities – the concentration of political power and the expansion of productive means – “modest and balanced levels of power and production gave the classic polis and the medieval city their coherence; and excessive growth of political power informed the baroque city; the hypertrophy of production created the nineteenth century industrial Coketowns, and high concentrations in both directions have produced the overwhelming cities of today” (Tilly 1990: 13). Mumford argued that if we “reduce the scale of both production and political power … a more humane city would result” (Tilly 1990: 14) and this more humane environment is here represented by the garden city. Of the three flms, this documentary entails the strongest resonances with crises, although they are recast not as cases of economic or political instability per se, but as disillusionments with the modern world that thwart or diminish democratic spaces. Several metropolitan sequences of this 1939 flm evoke a catastrophe that threatens civilization, one that seems beyond the circumstances actually presented in The City, linking the dangerous metropolis to an agitated world.

Cinematic spaces of democracy The two fctional narratives and the documentary flm are critical imaginaries of an urban democracy that question the veneer of the magical

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cosmopolitan New York staged on the studio lot. The narrow range of the cosmopolitan cinematic urbanism of affuence, leisure, and romance in the studio system of the 1930s under threat of the economic crisis and social uprising still gave space for a degree of equality for white denizens and included subversive constructs. But in the three cases of the cinematic spaces within, or set against, the contexts of economic and political crises, the democratic city became a more complicated matter. 42nd Street’s New Deal in Entertainment interpreted democracy as an urban pageant on the street of dreams where an ordinary person triumphs by accident, and where collective action shapes a utopian communal sphere in which class and social difference are erased, while danger still lurks from Times Square’s uncontrolled thrills. Released for Roosevelt’s inauguration, 42nd Street is an example of the era in which flm was a medium of mass communication presenting not mere slogans, but narratives suggestive of empowerment, yet still marred by urban bias and social stereotyping. Its political aesthetics could be found in the destabilized, shivering skyline – the material grounds of the city in need of vigorous social movements and stable institutions. If the systems of representations presented in the three flms shape alternate ideologies of the metropolis, Dead End has the strongest critique of social inequality and goes the furthest in its urban policy impact. In its indirect advocacy for housing legislation, Dead End offered an example of Lefebvre’s (cited in Harvey 1989: 219) notion that “spaces of representation, therefore, have the potential not only to affect representation of space but also to act as a material productive force with respect to spatial practices.” Dead End’s spaces of representation presented a heightened class divide by compressing the distance between the affuent and the impoverished, and by emphasizing the stepped-up appropriation of space in the scenes of commercial and residential gentrifcation. The flm amalgamates the skyline and the slum into a single cinematic social image. The domination and control of space are highlighted by the responsiveness of the police and legal institutions to the rich and their neglect of the poor, as the latter are denied a democratic space. The City’s skyline and the slum imagery targeted a different culprit: modernization equals mechanization, industrial progress has been subverted into the mindless pursuit of money, and human existence in the metropolis into a routine set of actions. The flm endorses a benevolent alternative, unattainable under the economic or political circumstances of the time, never specifying who would develop the garden suburbs or for whom such housing would be available, and treating as unproblematic social exclusion of races or lower-income strata within the ideal suburban community. It stresses the signifcance of institutions such as school and research laboratories for local-level development, however, but it also removes the garden city community from state institutions and politics.

108 Urban planning and the spaces of democracy The 1930s commercial enterprise of cinema and its compromise with producers, censors, and sponsors made apparent the limits of flm’s promise as a democratic art that would bypass the “the class-based establishment theater and all the cultural barriers which selective education had erected around high literacy” (Williams and Pinkney 1989: 107). Thus the exposure of the class divide in Dead End is cautious not to offend the middle classes, the critique of the metropolis in The City reproduces racial and in part class exclusions in the sustainable garden suburb, and 42nd Street’s pageant fails to enfranchise a truly democratic public space. When Raymond Williams cautioned in the 1980s, that “[w]hat we see in the case of the early cinema is … entirely typical of a more general cultural history … which is in fact closely paralleled by … [a] political history” (108–109), he had in mind the defection of populist support from the Labor and Democratic parties (the failure of urban and regional coalitions could be added to this). It is not perhaps too far-fetched to suggest that the most signifcant urban flms of the Great Depression point to incomplete democratic spaces. That the flms’ progressive political aesthetics doubt that the city can be the place of democracy in turn suggests cinema’s own limits, under the studio system and economic conditions of the 1930s, as a democratic space. Speaking of the political commitment of cinema, and knowing that cinematic meanings are a product of the society that in turn produces them, the claim that cinema can bring into view social realities (Gaines 2008) should of course be made with caution given that, as Gaines has elucidated, cinematic reality has been associated with “truth, illusionism, deception, class difference, gender inequity, marginality, historical materialism, and bourgeois capitalism” (Gaines 2008). And indeed, as Guido Aristarco noted, “There are many degrees of realism, just as there are many degrees of reality (reality as it is perceived)” (cited in Gaines 2008). In Gaines’ account, one solution to the problem of ideology in flm was as a “part of a post-1968 political project … to advocate flms that might be able to ‘disrupt’ or ‘sever’ the connection to ideology with the use of techniques refned along the lines of Eisensteinian-Brechtian models.” Elsewhere, Gaines associates “the pathos of fact” with documentary tradition, paraphrasing Dziga Vertov that one way of engaging in radical labor documentary (see Figure 3.7) is to make “fsts of facts” (Gaines 1999: 106). Most importantly for this study, Gaines argues that “[Sergei] Eisenstein advocates ‘agitation through spectacle,’ reminding us that it was the Soviets who originally imagined a political cinema of agitation and alignment, of world-transforming cause and consequence” with its related “question of radical flm viewing and the consequent radicalization of the spectator” – what Gaines refers to as the “agitated” audience (Gaines 1999: 111). And while Gaines of course notes that cinematic attractions also do not necessarily carry political meanings, she does hope for the latter, as does this study, which locates agitation in the cinematic urban environment.

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Figure 3.7 Frame enlargement from Hunger (d. Workers Film and Photo League, 1932).

And when Gaines ends her essay with the claim, following Patricia Zimmermann, that one way to understand cinema is to imagine “explosions into some passionate public space that moves you outside of yourself” (Gaines 2008) we can link this directly with urban theory in Iris Marion Young’s words of engagement in the process of the discovery of the city. This is the value of publicness and also of urban eroticism, which is not a sense of community where one sees oneself refected in others. In contrast, Young argues that: [t]here is another kind of pleasure, however, in coming to encounter a subjectivity, a set of meanings that is different, unfamiliar. One takes pleasure in being drawn out of oneself to understand that there are other meanings, practices, perspectives on the city, and that one could learn or experience something more or different by interacting with them. (Young 1990: 239–240) Young wishes to challenge premises of communitarianism while rescuing the notion of difference and this project, however, has its signifcant limitations, even in the apparent exoticization of otherness and the emphasis on group particularism that limits alliances; suffce it to say here that what is valuable in both Gaines’ and Young’s accounts is, however, the notion of publicness that connects cinema with the spaces of democracy.

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Notes 1 For a discussion of flms from the 1930s, see for example: Wolfe 1993; Bergman 1992; Hanson 2008. 2 See Bruno 2002; Clarke 1997; Dimendberg 2004; Fitzmaurice and Shiel 2003; Krutnik 1991; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001. 3 This fgure is in comparison to 35% of flms set in the metropolis in 1920, 45% in 1940, and 30% in 1945, based on the evidence collected through a systemic sampling technique of flm-plot synopses of hundreds of profles in Motion Picture Herald (May 2000: 293). 4 The three urban flms meet Jacques Rancière’s normative requirement for a “political work of art.” This is expressed as a “negotiation of opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.” Rancière, however, neglects the nexus between socio-political images and cinematic spaces (Rancière 2006: 63). 5 Cinematic spaces can contain imagined spaces (often, although not solely, in studio productions), lived experiences (documentary images or sequences), and/ or a combination of both. 6 The tower imagery is in Bender’s analysis separate from the skyline vision. The former is tied explicitly to commerce if seen as a distinct skyscraper (the Chrysler, for example), while the latter shapes the material grounds of the public domain (visual landmarks within the skyline, for instance). See chapter One in Bender (2002). Daniel Walkowitz has noted that this argument neglects the contested discourses regarding the public realm, and the ways in which different audiences interpreted their relationships to the plurality of New York representations. Discussions with Daniel Walkowitz, 11–14 October 2007. 7 Praised in 1933 by flm industry publication Harrison’s Reports as “a fne entertainment … realistically presented” and by critics in The New York Times as “one of the liveliest and the most tuneful screen musical comedies that have come out of Hollywood,” 42nd Street in more contemporary evaluations retains appeal (‘42nd Street’, 1933; Hall 1933). Seen as a musical of pre-Disney Times Square still suitable for young audiences in New York Post’s estimate (Musetto 1998), and in contrast as “a fascinating ideological time capsule – with its persistent emphasis on teamwork, full employment, and strong leadership” in the words of The Voice critic (Hoberman 1982). 8 In the novel upon which the flm is based, the director is presented as a homosexual, an aspect the otherwise heterosexual flm treats only obliquely. See James et al. 1980; Leff 1999. 9 Jane Feuer argues that Hollywood musicals allow for the triumph of popular genre over high art, amateurs over professionals, outsiders over insiders, and also folk art over urbanity. Lyn Phelan, in a related argument, further suggests that 42nd Street’s embrace of the New Deal ethos is applied to humanize capitalism (Feuer and British Film Institute 1993: 14–15; Phelan 2000). 10 In Keeler’s account, the flm captured every chorus girl’s desire to succeed, even if the desire is framed through a masculine lens of how success ought to be accomplished, emphasized by the repositioning of the focus of spectatorship on the show’s director whose career is at stake. (Ironically and importantly, labor conditions to which the actors and dancers were subject at the time could hardly be described as equitable.) In turn, Keeler’s looks into the camera in the directaddress musical sequences reestablish a connection with the audience, and mediate between the spectator and the cinematic spaces of the show in the flm as well as within the musical comedy. (The need for Keeler’s mediation with the audience is heightened by the fact that the audience within the show Pretty Lady

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12 13

14 15 16

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is absent from the flm; placing proscenium and the audience within the show will become the fxture of the classical Hollywood musicals to follow.) The citation is from the author’s research on Times Square. The quoted text within the citation is from New York State Urban Development Corporation, Final Environmental Impact Statement: the 42nd Street Development Project (New York State UDC: New York, 1984), EIS, I–4. In the last dance number sequence, while Keeler triumphs, another women dies, stabbed in the back on the street. Herbert J. Gans makes a distinction between slums and low-rent districts. “Slum dwellings and the like may be defned as those which are proved to be physically, socially, or emotionally harmful to their residents or to the community at large. On the other hand, low-rent dwellings and so forth, provide housing and the necessary facilities which are not harmful, to people who want, or for economic reasons must maintain, low rental payments and are willing to accept lack of modernity, high density, lack of privacy, stair climbing and other inconveniences as alternative costs.” The flm’s narrative often obscures the difference between a slum and a low-income district, however, which is similar to the descriptions of blighted areas in urban planning documents, discourses that persist in the urban renewal period as well (Gans 1968: 211). Importantly, the setting of Dead End Kids flms may be characterized by poverty and despair, but these flms also demonstrate that urban spaces can be viewed as sites of play, dynamism, and encounter (Wojcik 2016: 52). This housing problem is seen in the flm very narrowly as the difference in housing quality between lavish penthouses and decaying and unsanitary tenements. According to Wyler, “everyone marveled at the huge waterfront set, which was constructed as the principal setting for the flm, but to [the director] it looked very phony and artifcial.” Toland used “fat, hard lights” and “open sun-arcs from behind the camera, because they did not wish ‘to make anybody look pretty’,” although a variety of lighting styles could be detected in the flm. A variation between the naturalist, realist, and chiaroscuro, even early noir, styles can also be related to the flm’s ambiguous ideological construct (cited in Phillips 1998: 66; and Cormack 1994: 131–135). The frst cinemas in the U.S. were built in new immigrant and working-class urban neighborhoods; by the 1920s and 1930s, however, movie theater palaces were built for inner-city middle-class audiences, in central amusement districts as well as in the growing suburban areas. Although the origins of cinematic democratic impulses can thus be traced to the early silent flms produced for immigrant audiences, the 1930s were marked by the studios’ awareness of flm as a popular mass medium and the industry’s desire to target middle-class audiences. Dead End’s downplaying of the ethnicity of the protagonists contrasts with its contemporary cinema crime narratives set in ethnic immigrant neighborhoods. See, for example, the comparison between Angels with Dirty Faces and Dead End in Shannon (2005: 58–59). On class and spectatorship, see also Stokes (2001). Dead End screens the neighborhood in a frontal eye-level point of view, resembling a theater play, emphasizing that the protagonists are constrained by the socio-spatial construct and leading scholars to conclude that the decor of Dead End de facto represents the flm’s ideology (Affron and Affron 1995: 175–176). See the chapter on cinematic space in Deleuze and Boundas (1993). Rodakiewicz directed the flm’s New England sequences and the industrial city scenes shot in Pittsburgh, for which sequences he also wrote the script, but faced creative and intellectual differences with Mumford. Alexander argues that it would be an error to hold Mumford responsible for the flm’s content given that he was asked to write a commentary after the initial

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script was completed. Mumford was not actively involved in the shooting of the flm or the writing of the script, although the infuence of his intellectual opus is apparent, especially in the industrial city sequences of the flm (Alexander 1981: 250). 21 Wolfe classifes the flm as a “sponsored documentary” that placated New York audiences and pleased the funders at whose request the garden city sequences were flmed. This compromise allowed freedom to the authors in the shots critical of industrialization and environmental degradation (Wolfe 1993: 377). 22 Rodakiewicz noted that only the shots of anxious faces looking out of the taxis and the close-up images of the “meters with their fares climbing” were staged (Rodakiewicz 2001: 109).

4

In the streets of Harlem

“If I could do it,” remarked James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs.” Agee was perhaps less extolling a visual language than suggesting the diffculty of “communicating about the true nature of reality” (Agee and Evans 1988: 10; Kramer 1991: 21). This interactivity between the impossibility of language and representational (in)capacity of the image would fnd its fully self-aware expression decades later, in the New York photography of his friend, Helen Levitt. In an introduction to her book of photographs, Agee called Levitt’s poetic visual technique “an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing,” praising her sensitivity to spatial representation and her sense of rhythm (Levitt and Agee 1965: x). In collaboration with Agee, Janet Loeb, and Sidney Meyers, Levitt also made two documentary flms in East and Central Harlem, In the Street (d. Helen Levitt, 1948/1952) and The Quiet One (d. Sidney Meyers, 1949). In contrast to the literature that evaluates Levitt’s art as atemporal or acontextual,1 this chapter examines her photographs and the two flms as mediations on public space, racial diversity, and belonging. The East Harlem of In the Street and the Central Harlem sequences in The Quiet One convey spatial tensions and suggest social dislocations within public spaces and neighborhood places.2 The flms visualize the spatial enclosure of the agency of dwellers, exploring the social elasticity of spatial traversals and recalling images3 of inner-city neighborhoods at the brink of transformation preceding urban renewal and white fight.4 The chapter contributes to the body of literature that traces the ways in which urban “material changes” might be intimately, albeit inadvertently, implicated in aesthetic interventions (Tallack 2005: 85). The flms’ pans and tracking shots of the streets recall the “maelstrom of modern life” (Berman 1982: 15–41), echoing with warfare and post-war crises, about which the flms’ narratives are, nevertheless, silent. This set of visual tropes and silences that resonates with material transformations and proposes the alternate aesthetics of seeing the streets is metaphorically named the agitated city. When asked why her photographs from the 1930s and the 1940s New York (see Figures 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3) were so often not dated, Helen Levitt said that

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Figure 4.1 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

that was not necessary as they would all bear the mark of the same year, “Why should I? What should I say: 1939, 1939, 1939, 1939, 1939?” (cited in Boxer, New York Times, 8 April 2004). These snapshots of ordinaryextraordinary, “everyday poetics of street that see it as a stage for imagination and play, sociality, affective encounter and intimacy” (Sim 2016: 43) often taken in low-income, immigrant, minority neighborhoods yet not simply refecting the despair of disenfranchisement,5 seem deeply engulfed in agitating sensations of “1939” amidst the deceptive stillness of the city. The people in the streets of Harlem or Lower East Side that Levitt photographed – often children at play (at times wearing strange, faintly sinister, masks, as we shall see), and adults at rare moments of uneasy leisure – disclose to the photographer their ambivalent identities and sense of belonging within urban communities. One can sense in these urban spaces an invisible risk, a delicate indication that a wrong step or a glance might make the visitor unwelcome or threatened even if the source of tension does not at all

Figure 4.2 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1942. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

Figure 4.3 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1945. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

116 In the streets of Harlem seem to be stemming from this particular neighborhood or people but rather refects that looming, menacing thunderstorm. Levitt presents these grave, weary, concerned, resilient yet not despairing or irate faces trapped in poor neighborhoods behind the magic mountain of the “million-windowed” towers, engulfed within a particularly agitating historical moment in which worldwide social and political currents were being roiled. Yet Levitt’s photographs could be seen as interpretations of the New York of the late 1930s and 1940s precisely because they compel us to have a degree of caution regarding historical specifcity or even visibility (Levitt, above all, “accepts what is withheld and hidden as a part of what is there” [Trachtenberg. Cited in Dean 2016: 40]), as the photographer’s candid and wry remark suggested. Perhaps it is after all that in Levitt’s art the city can, as Alan Trachtenberg (2012: 16) observed, “be known only by and in its elsewheres, its inscrutabilities.”

Ways of seeing the city: Visual styles and social contexts in Levitt’s photographic art Agee compared Levitt’s New York street photography to “the best of jazz,” highlighting her ability to “perceive the aesthetic within the real world” (Levitt and Agee 1965: viii). Agee, however, obscured the fgurations of rhythm, movement, and energy that constituted the jazz of photography of the 1940s, and neglected to engage with the racial and gendered contexts of images of minority residents taken by white photographers. Although he cites the signifcance of urban contexts and Levitt’s spatial aesthetics, his observations taper off towards suggestions of ritualistic communalism. Levitt’s subjects appear to Agee as members of ancient culture[s], “primordial and royal, being those of hunting, war, theater, and dancing” (Levitt and Agee 1965: xiv). Agee’s mixture of exoticism, othering, and ambivalent appreciation for urban life differed, however, from Levitt’s own, even if her aesthetic stance appeared consistent with Agee’s arguments for a synthesis between social realist and avant-garde tendencies (Davis 2007: 97). Inspired by the work of the socially progressive Photo League, of which she was a member in the 1930s, Levitt, however, eschewed active engagement in political and social causes (Phillips 1991: 33–39, 26). Framing residents, social life, public spaces, and the streets of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, Levitt neither presented her subjects as “noble heroes of poverty and desolation” (Marcus 2006: 127), nor intended her photographs to become “social or psychological document[s]” (Levitt and Agee 1965: 7). While her opus contrasts with the discourses of poor urban quarters associated with, for example, Engels’ accounts of Manchester slums, Jacob Riis’ tenement reform advocacy photographs of the Lower East Side, expository documentaries such as Why We Fight (d. Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1942) (Nichols 1991: 34–38), and even Gordon Park’s photographs of Harlem youth and Walter Rosenbaum’s socially committed works,6 Levitt

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remains perhaps the sole female photographer to almost exclusively photograph low-income and minority neighborhoods (Phillips 1991: 20–21). Shot at the edges of New York’s diverse neighborhoods, Levitt’s photographs manifest democratic impulses that avoid embeddedness in identity (Sennett 1998, unlike for example Young 1990). Alan Marcus (2006) has observed that Levitt’s photograph of a group of boys playing on the sidewalk on the Upper East Side promotes an unfettered multicultural ideal positioned outside of society. The photographer directs the viewer to concentrate on the play of children and the multiple frames within the image. A multicultural interpretation might then be inferred retrospectively, yet it seems encouraged by Levitt’s democratic aesthetics (see Figure 4.4).78 Levitt’s public spaces evoke Michael Walzer’s (1995) account of “openminded” urban plazas, engaging with social experiences of the street – yet, they are neither sites of alienation nor trajectories within a village-like community. The subversive aspects of playfulness validate, rather, Marshall Berman’s (1986) interpretation of the carnivalesque qualities of street life.

Figure 4.4 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

118 In the streets of Harlem Levitt’s imagery of urban decay encircles but does not always hinder the agency of urban dwellers,9 appropriating the vitality of the street through an aesthetics of “immemorially routine acts of life” (Levitt 2005: 1). An interaction between urban experiences and a photographic perception, however, questions such routine acts through alternations of gazes, movements, and unexpected street encounters. The subjecthood of children, unaware of, or unconcerned with, social mores, recalls the Baudelairian quest for an outward orientation of the self. Social diversity and the quality of “publicity” (Young 1990: 240), moreover, facilitate the trajectory from the inward towards outward spaces (Sennett 1990: 123). Further, the disrupted boundaries between public and private spaces prompt an aesthetic search for a democratic space beyond the frame. Commonly framing a multi-racial group of children, Levitt’s racial contexts can further appear seemingly accidental, as in a photograph of four girls observing soap bubbles.10 The understated interest in race and neighborhood space escapes the pitfalls of identity-based difference. Instead, the oscillations between the motion of bodies and the immobility of the built environment highlight the tensions between subjectivity and belonging, racial as well as gendered. Unlike Morgan and Marvin Smith’s Harlem portrayals, Levitt’s images view subjectivity as a process of shaping individuality and the photographer’s perception (although perhaps the Smith brothers’ image of a Harlem boy, “Robert Day playing Hi-Li” [1937], may have served as an inspiration). Max Kosloff notes the ambivalence in the photographer’s gaze, as well in the gaze of her subjects, in another image of black men standing by a postbox on a street corner in Harlem, at once self-assured and vulnerable, observing Levitt’s camera and also ignoring her. The imbalance between shunning the self and attempting to interact with others mediates gendered and racial anxieties within public spaces, suggesting the “eroticism” of urbanity (Young 1990: 239) (see Figure 4.5). The senses of the cinematic city here are, moreover, suggestive of the “possibilities for encounter, against the fow, with textured surfaces,” containing as well “life affrming kind[s] of alternative agency” (Webber 2008: 11, 10). Crime photojournalism and the shot-on-location noir flms of the late 1940s often attempt to tame the city, and, indirectly, the woman. Levitt’s spaces of discovery and surprise liberate identities, yet retain a sensation of threat and instability, suggesting the horrifying motif within the “snapshot” of the subject being “lost in space” (Huyssen 2007: 33), as one might anticipate happening to the four girls (see Figure 4.6). Huyssen (2015: 7) attributes to the language of miniature the sensual experience of the city – these experiences are, however, conveyed eloquently by Levitt’s photographs – “sound and tactility besides visions; the feeling of terror and/or exhilaration emanating from space; the loss of boundaries between private and public space, interior living space, and street space” and so on, including indeed dreamlike spaces.

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Figure 4.5 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940s. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

Images of children in disguise, wearing facial masks or hoods, possess oneiric qualities (“resembl[ing] unconscious, a dense system of half buried wishes mingled with half forgotten memories” Trachtenberg 2012: 1), suggesting as well the opaqueness of their identities. Children’s masks deride the forced impositions of difference on the part of the adult world, incomprehensible in its rigidity. These images of uncanny phantasmagoric identities demonstrate Simmel’s notion of urban strangeness and the implied impossibility of fully fathoming complex urban diversity.11 In photographs where the Halloween celebrations are apparent, the children’s identities can be seen as embodiments of urban strangeness (in Figure 4.7). In other images, Levitt renders the scenes of masked children as if they were directly extrapolated from neighborhood space. Performative capacities within public spaces expose the artifce of disguise against the setting of decay, suggesting that the photographs could be interpreted as unsettling social images (see Figures 4.7 and 4.8). Children in black clothing with white hoods in vacant or derelict lots evoke racialized contexts of spatial segregation and

Figure 4.6 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

Figure 4.7 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940s. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

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Figure 4.8 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1940s. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

social neglect of minority neighborhoods. Levitt’s agitated city is shaped by tensions between the intimate and public experiences of the street, between the processes of subjectivity-formation and belonging in the context of marginalized subjects’ claims on public spaces.

The Levitt-Agee flms and the documentary form: Street scenes in motion In the Street and The Quiet One depart from Levitt’s photographic opus. The artist herself has disavowed the flms as art works of collective compromise12 and has perhaps come to view cinema as artistically limiting, constraining her project of freezing within the social imaginaries a moment that deceptively transcends the contexts (see Phillips 1991). The flms, unique for this historical period in their documentary focus on New York’s black,

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Latino, and diverse neighborhoods, in fact offer intricate maps of spaces, subjectivities, and contexts of racial exclusions. In the Street is an observational silent documentary with poetic elements, while The Quiet One represents an amalgam of several different types of documentary genre – expositional, performative, and in select sequences poetic – and includes dialogue and an expository voiceover. In the Street can further be seen as an assemblage of cinematic miniatures, and The Quiet One as a documentary feuilleton, if the terminology that Andreas Huyssen applied to urban spaces in Rilke, Kafka, Kracauer, and Benjamin’s writings could be transposed to the context of flm. The complex documentary network in both flms is illustrative of Benjamin’s distinction between painting and cinema. “The painter maintains his work at a natural distance from reality; the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web” (Benjamin and Arendt 1988: 233). Rather than being drawn into the web of street life as in metropolitan flms such as Berlin, Symphony of the City (d. Walter Ruttmann, 1927), or dancing in the city rhythms of the poetic documentary A Bronx Morning (d. Jay Leyda, 1931), however, the flms chart visual trajectories within public spaces as “the dwelling place[s] of the collective” (Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999: 423). Shot in East Harlem on 103rd and 104th Streets in 1945 and 1946, the sixteen-minute flm In the Street was directed by Helen Levitt; the cinematographers included, in addition to Levitt and Agee, the painter Janice Loeb who fnanced the flm’s production. The Quiet One was flmed between 1946 and 1948 in the streets of Central Harlem and in a rural area of Esopus, upstate New York, and was theatrically released in New York in the winter of 1949. This 65-minute documentary was directed by Sidney Meyers, written by James Agee, Janice Loeb, and Sidney Meyers, and the cinematographers included Richard Bagley for interior shots, and Levitt and Loeb for documentary segments. Meyers, a former violinist with the Cincinnati Orchestra, later collaborated with Ben Maddow, Joseph Strick, and Helen Levitt on an alternative art drama The Savage Eye (1959). The Quiet One won awards at the Venice and Edinburgh flm festivals in 1948, was lauded a “masterpiece” equal to Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, and received Oscar nominations for best documentary in 1948 and for best script and story in 1949 (Horak 1997: 149–150). Walter Rosenblum argued in Photo Notes in 1949 that, “The Quiet One rescue[d] the documentary flm from the hollow shell that Hollywood was forcing it into” (cited in Horak 1997: 150). In the Street depicts a seemingly randomly observed collectivity of urban dwellers, children, women, and the elderly, who are for the most part Latino and black, although the camera captures as well passersby and residents who appear to be of Italian, Jewish, or Eastern European descent. In the Street was flmed with hand-held 16-mm Kodak Cine K and Cine B cameras in an attempt to capture everyday occurrences without the residents’ knowledge of being observed. Most of the shots are in medium or medium-long

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frames13 with the camera held slightly below the view of an average-height adult, as if a child were observing. The Quiet One is a flm about delinquency that concerns Donald, a tenyear old black boy abandoned by his parents and living with his grandmother in Harlem (Horak 1997: 149). The flm is introduced by the following inter-title: This flm was made in New York City and at the Wyltwick School for boys in Esopus, New York. Wyltwick is a school for boys of New York City who have reacted with grave disturbance of personality to forms of neglect in their homes and community, and who for various reasons of age, race, and maladjustment are not cared for by other agencies. According to Robert Sklar (2007: 5), “a central goal of the flm was to valorize the work of the [Wyltwick] School councilors and psychologists.” The flm is divided into four sequences, a shorter one at the beginning taking place in bucolic Esopus, the second, fashing back to the Harlem neighborhood that the boy had to leave temporarily, the next sequence chronicling the boy’s struggles to integrate in the school in Esopus, and the fourth anticipating the boy’s return to the city. The flm features a non-professional actor, as in neo-realist narratives such as Los Olvidados (d. Luis Buñuel, 1950) or The Bicycle Thief (d. Vittorio De Sica, 1948) in which a city boy represents a social type (Kracauer 1997: 98–99). The Quiet One, however, delineates the boy’s uniqueness, setting him apart from the Harlem neighborhood, presented neither as a black enclave nor a New York ghetto, but rather, as the narrator identifes, a poor area of an American metropolis. The trope of the child in the cinematic city is symbolic of the boy’s outsider status, a marker for a social outcast.14 The voiceover commentary, written by Agee and narrated by Gary Merrill, ties the boy’s story to the dissolution of the family, and urban mental health and housing problems, adopting a compassionate but also a didactic tone, often supported by rudimentary psychoanalysis. Bill Nichols (1991: 43) has argued that observational cinema conveys a “sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world.” Documentary narratives allow for broadening the scope of the urban feld of experience by deliberately patterning the contingency, concealing as well as reshaping the urban imaginary under the guise of the incommunicable reality. Through montage, flm stretches the scope of imaginary over actual spaces. Although the environment of In the Street is a largely distressed if not entirely devastated urban area, the flm does not offer a portrayal of poverty, even if the montaged contingency never obscures this context. In The Quiet One, the cinematographers do not pause to highlight inequality or segregation, although several shots suggest an uneasy coexistence of blacks and whites in the streets of Harlem. Racial divisions appear in the back of the frame – the billboards, advertisements, and movie posters feature smiling blond women

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– yet Levitt never shows these images in close-up. The cinematographers present the city from the point of view of a black child who does not yet perceive social obstacles; the voiceover provides a social commentary of the boy’s travails, while remaining silent about racial exclusion. Sklar (2007: 6) has observed that the Harlem street scenes represent “distinguishing elements of the flm’s cinematography.” In capturing contingency in the Harlem neighborhood sequences, the flm presents a panorama in which no sense of hierarchy is accorded to images. As in In the Street, the camera emulates a child’s perception through Donald’s point of view, presenting visual information that seems categorized solely by space. The cinematic city emerges as a set of “fragments of space” (Lefebvre 1991: 97). The segmented spatial perception is tied to Donald’s discovery of the neighborhood boundaries through exploration and experience, as his roaming charts a pathway of an emerging adult identity. This urban “school of life” suggests a public domain in which the social consciousness is shaped, yet which is not devoid of the psychological experience of urban strangeness. The fragmentation of cinematic space does not fragment identity, however, but attempts a process of a reconstitution of the self. Both In the Street and The Quiet One emphasize the primacy of the spatial order in discovering an emergent sense of identity. The urban experience allows for the negotiation between the self and the social environment, suggesting the elasticity of the spatial domain of flm, and the condensation of the temporal dimension of cinematic identity. The emphasis on the stark limits of spatial enclosure of agency in The Quiet One, however, contrasts with Levitt’s photographs. Although the flm does not solely emphasize spatial segregation, the urban normative value of “social differentiation without exclusion” (Young 238) is further delimited in the case of fâneurian traversals in The Quiet One. In contrast, In the Street is more concerned with the fuidity and agitating potential of traversals, in which, as Juan Antonio Suarez Sanchez has noted, the cinematic form as well as the image of restless movement represents a “counterpoint to the teeming life of city streets” (Sanchez 1996: 393). Following the ebb and fow of the sidewalk, the flm suggests that the urban dweller resides not merely within bounded space but also within the alternate public environment created by movement, city sounds, and the gaze. This represents an imaginary domain of the agitated city trope, which in this case probes the elasticity of the spatial constraint. While the camera motion is accelerated in the metropolitan flms of the 1920s, in the case of the Levitt-Agee documentaries, the motion is associated with the perception of the walker, who is split into two, a child fâneur, and a cinematographer fâneuse.15 The hand-held camera aligns the cinematic motion between its lens and an urban experience, by tracks or pans behind a child or a woman walking, matching the speed of movement, suggesting an interchangeable position of the spectator who at once travels through the streets and watches. In the Street deliberately avoids making sense of these images or categorizing them.16 Unlike in Paul Strand’s and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta

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(1921), however, anxiety is not derived from an enchantment with the city, but is mediated by unpalatable spatial and temporal agitating tensions that reside beyond the space of the cinematic frame. Kracauer compared In the Street to the British documentary entitled Housing Problems, contrasting the latter’s disengaged reportage style in which residents of an underprivileged quarter describe in detail housing decay, to Levitt-Agee’s imaginative vision and their “unconcealed compassion for the people depicted” (Kracauer 1997: 203). But Kracauer argued as well that In the Street failed to engage with the material reality of the ghetto through the flm’s lack of structure and its too-random selection of street scenes. Further, behind “unbiased reporting,” the flm revealed to Kracauer a projection of the flmmakers’ inner images and “aesthetic cravings” superseding in this manner veracious representations by “pictorial penetrations or interpretations of the visible world,” rooted in the 1920s avant-garde (Kracauer 1997: 203). Kracauer’s reading seems to have infuenced as well more contemporary evaluations of the flm that further stress subjective cinematography and the flm’s formal characteristics17 that anticipated the 1960s techniques of movement-matches and jump cuts. Kracauer (1997) seemed to tie social engagement to a didactic sociological commentary misreading the flm’s subtle social images.18 The flm and Levitt’s book of photographs, also entitled In the Street, create an impression of being shot in one season (and in some sequences, even in one day) even though its sixteen-minute footage was actually flmed over several years and the photographs date from 1938 to 1948. Above all, the images point to the persistence of the ghetto: over a decade of relative prosperity in the U.S., poverty and urban decay seem to persist in East Harlem. The editing oscillates between still fgures (often women or elderly men) and fgures in motion (children playing, running, dancing; women, traversing the streets). The East Harlem block is an agitated social space and an immobile physical space of abandonment left to decompose as an area of urban blight. The flm withdraws from any attempt to redeem material reality in Kracauer’s sense19 – in effect recording a physically crumbling neighborhood, months before it would be completely obliterated by urban renewal. These tensions can also be discerned in Levitt’s photographs such as 99th Street (see Figure 4.9).

Socio-spatial contexts: Screening the abandoned city Both flms are set in what could be termed the abandoned city. Understood in economic and racial terms, the abandoned city represents the place for the very poor, the excluded, the never employed and permanently unemployed, the homeless and the shelter residents. A crumbling infrastructure, deteriorating housing, the domination of outside impersonal forces, direct street-level exploitation, racial and ethnic

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Figure 4.9 Helen Levitt, 99th Street, New York, c. 1940s. Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

discrimination and segregation, the stereotyping of women, are everyday reality. (Marcuse 2002: 97) In In the Street, dilapidated housing and crumbling infrastructure can be seen in virtually every frame; most of the residents appear partially homeless or trapped in decaying tenements. The structural abandonment contrasts with the intensity of spatial traversals and sidewalk activity, pressing the spectator to follow the motion and to avoid the snapshot effect of the backdrop.20 The material grounds of cinematic imaginaries are not simply the fngerprints of visual evidence. It could be argued that the Levitt-Agee documentaries in fact obscure visual evidence, in particular of racial exclusion, while being rooted in the materiality of the cinematic city. Still, further, these flms were shot in segregated neighborhoods deemed by planners as

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blighted, and share the “structures of feelings” of the counter-hegemonic discourses of “slums.”21 The flms’ city sequences highlight the practices of everyday life absent from the master narratives of urban renewal. While Dimendberg’s (2004) study of flm noir has provided a model for similar analyses, it neglected to adequately consider documentary narratives, racial or gendered contexts, or diverse public spaces. While social contexts cannot be examined in detail here, a brief account of neighborhood settings is in order. In the 1940s, a separation of three neighborhoods, Italian Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and Black Harlem marked a growing racial divide, as white residents continued to leave the neighborhoods (Brandt 1996: 24). Harlem became a black neighborhood following the rampant property speculation of 1903–1905. Black migrants came from southern cities and towns and were for the most part not of rural origin, unlike those who settled in Chicago. Unlike in other cities, Harlem did not experience major racial disturbances before the 1930s, a fact that is attributed to New York cosmopolitanism, political representation of blacks, and their different social status in New York (“a position of wardship”), which although exaggerated in estimate, might have, according to Janet Abu-Lughod, contributed to Harlem’s rise in prominence during the 1920s cultural renaissance period (Abu-Lughod 1999: 84–87). The area, however, started losing its white population during the period 1914–1929 as it was transformed into an almost entirely black neighborhood. The number of native-born blacks in New York grew from less than 100,000 in 1910 to 325,000 in 1930 – most of whom lived in Harlem. Competition for jobs and doubling up in scarce housing were already problems … before the Depression struck. And when it did, the Harlem of the 1920s became the segregated deteriorating zone of the 1930s, increasingly isolated from the city around it. (Abu-Lughod 1999: 84–87) The 1939 Federal Writer’s Project WPA Guide to New York describes the Harlem streets as characterized by extreme poverty, overcrowding, illiteracy, malnutrition, and social dislocation (cited in Gand 2011: 67). The Harlem riots, which took place in 1935 and 1943, are attributed to the detrimental socio-economic conditions (in the 1930s the area was overcrowded with high rates of illness and crime and poor educational facilities), unemployment, and the problem of police brutality (particularly affecting black youth). In response to the confict, several housing units were built, including the 574-unit Harlem River Houses. The 1943 riot is attributed to an even more complex set of factors including the persisting segregation, the disproportionate lack of benefts for black soldiers, and the overall poor living conditions in Harlem. It was considered a “paradigmatic event presaging a series of racial outbreaks” in the late 1960s in American cities (AbuLughod 1999: 196). Although riots never took place in East Harlem, the

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neighborhood experienced an equally turbulent set of transformations.22 In the early 1940s the area was already congested, with 20% of Manhattan’s population occupying 10% of its territory, with unsanitary conditions; in 1950 “ffteen to twenty-fve babies in Spanish Harlem were bitten by rats each week” (Stern, Mellins, Fishman 1995: 863). Unlike North Harlem, East Harlem was always a relatively poor area.23 Stern and his colleagues (1995: 863) refer to the urban renewal projects in East Harlem as “one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of postwar American urbanism.” Robert Moses’ slum clearance program started with James Weldon Johnson Housing, a 1,300-unit housing project completed in 1947 on a super-block between 112th and 115th Streets between Park and Third Avenues. Lewis Mumford deemed the project “grim” and of an “inhuman scale.” This project was only the beginning of one of the largest slum clearance areas in New York. In 1957, The New York Times reported that: the biggest concentration of public housing is cutting a swath through Harlem. In a mass attack on one of the worst areas in the metropolitan area, the New York Housing Authority is leveling 137 acres of slums. Hardly a street from Madison Avenue to the East River, between 97th Street and 115th Street has been left untouched. Blocks of old, dark buildings have been ripped out, letting in sunlight and air. (Stern, Mellins, and Fishman 1995: 864) The language of the news report, which proceeds to praise the super-block model of urban renewal, applies military and war jargon to a poor minority area. The projects are “cutting a swath” in a “mass attack” which is “leveling” areas and “ripping out” buildings. As Patricia Cayo Sexton (1965: 44) has noted, East Harlem has suffered in some ways from public investment. Its life has been, to some extent, sterilized by project living; and old neighborhood bonds have been broken, for good or evil. But the sickness of East Harlem comes much less from public investment than from private and, to a less extent, public neglect. Further, the housing policymakers failed to consult the residents or the social workers. The projects altered the demographic and economic composition of the neighborhood, “tore down diversity and put up a high-rise ghetto” (Sexton 1965: 44).24 Robert Caro (1974: 337) reported further that in the 1930s there were virtually no playgrounds in Harlem. One reformer notes: In winter months, when the sun is most needed, it is no uncommon sight to see herds of children blocking the streets in

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sections where a little sun has been allowed to penetrate because there happen to be a few low buildings on one side of the street.25 This discourse associates childhood with the experience of wilderness, positioning children outside of society; in the Levitt-Agee documentaries, this visual image can be read as a critical discourse of neighborhood decay and neglect. In 1932, only two playgrounds existed in Harlem. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the 1930s and only one in Harlem (Caro 1974: 510), while denying that the neighborhoods of Harlem were neglected or overlooked. Ballon and Jackson argued that the projects built benefted greatly the area in particular by providing construction and maintenance jobs to blacks. A New York Times reporter writing in 1950 could still notice “that playgrounds for many Harlem children were vacant lots, in which ‘bare-legged’ children played ‘on dumps of broken glass, rusty cans and refuse’” (Caro 1974: 512) – a depiction that again recalls Levitt’s photographs. The cinematic form in the two documentaries is suggestive of the resistance potential (see also Trachtenberg 2012: 4) of the practices of everyday life, although The Quiet One also posits the limitations of this trope through the images of urban rubble. The Harlem street sequences in The Quiet One expose the relationships between the built environment within the frame and the socio-spatial universe beyond it, prefguring the spatial geometry of Antonioni’s cinema in which the frame “pre-exists that which is going to be inserted within it” (Deleuze and Boundas 1993: 174). The street scenes in the frst flm are, in contrast, more tension-wrought, flmed by a highly mobile camera. The void seen in the flms’ vacant lots recalls the cinematic city ruins of the bombed European cities.26 “The war brought with it a tabula rasa that was an essential exercise for modern planning” (Jacobs S. 2006: 117). Linkages between social conficts and visual landscape are developed in Virilio’s work (1989), which posits the ocular machine in relationship to the war machine; Bruno (2002) elaborates the argument further to incorporate cinematic mapping and travel in relationship to warfare and conquest. The agitated cinematic city in the sequences of decaying housing, urban ruin, and neglected infrastructure in In the Street might be compared to the Berlin of the “rubble flms” (see Shandley 2001), including Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948). This aspect of the flms questions Kracauer’s emphasis on the redemption of material reality (Kracauer 1997: 202–214), but also challenges contemporary readings of In the Street that downplay the signifcance of social contexts and root the flms solely in the avantgarde tradition (see Horak 1997). Rubble appears in The Quiet One in the eerie sequence of the grandmother’s search for Donald, as she crosses through a vacant lot of the destroyed buildings. In another shot, Donald passes by a group of children

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playing in the sand of a vacant lot and he angrily destroys their trinkets. In one sequence, as the grandmother takes Donald to school, other children can be seen accompanied by parents – the camera displays vacant lots, then rows of tenements and a large Rice Krispies billboard with a blond model smiling (see Figure 4.10). This image remains uncanny in its embeddedness in the neighborhood, as Kracauer (1997: 164) noted, “as if the camera had just now extracted them from the womb of a physical existence and as if the umbilical cord between the image and the actuality had not been severed.” The flm’s Harlem sequences are in this manner positioned within the abandoned as well as the inhabited city. The setting renders The Quiet One as “fundamentally a social flm” (de Moraes 1950: 378), as well as a flm that allows for dream-like impressions triggered by the cinematic engagement with the “stark reality” (Kracauer 1997: 164). Rubble in In the Street appropriates the city’s material structure in a different sense as well, evoking in Benjamin’s terms a recycling motif through the children’s re-appropriation of the built environment (Benjamin and Demetz 1978: 68–69). The rubble is neither fenced off nor a waste-site. Rather, the rubbles are freely traversed, the sites of play. Seen in the contexts of the “abandoned city,” as defned above, their systemic abandonment possesses a haunting quality suggesting Benjamin’s landscape that “haunts, intense as opium” (Mallarmé, cited in Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999: 416). The landscape is haunting because it is at once a part of the socially neglected abandoned city as well as intensely used by the residents.

Figure 4.10 Frame enlargement from The Quiet One (d. Sidney Meyers, 1948).

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The child’s body is intimately connected to the maternal body of the city; according to de Certeau (1984: 109), “[i]t is through that experience that the possibility of space and of a localization (a ‘not everything’) of the subject is inaugurated.” In the Street suggests, in Lefebvre’s terms, the manner in which spaces of representation (the flms’ recording of everyday life) can inadvertently contest representational spaces (the narratives of urban renewal). The slum is a “place of camaraderie,” and a space of creativity – a set of neighborhoods in which “children felt impelled to make various marks upon a given world” (Coles 1987: 6), although this aspect appears more emphasized in Levitt’s photographs than in the documentary flm. The Quiet One presents as well an alternate abandoned city that can be understood in relationship between “natural and social space” (Lefebvre 1991: 101) exemplifed in the contrast between Esopus and Harlem. The flm suggests opposing tendencies present in Agee’s critical and literary opus – a questionable longing for a return to the land, and an apparent understanding of the impossibility of the rural alternative (Lofaro 2007: 13, 17). The social sphere is the space of the street in which encounter, assembly, and simultaneity delineate the environment. The cinematic street offers endless permutations delimited by specifc points of accumulation or sites of consumption, yet neither does it represent an arena of easy connections nor a mere refection of social circumstances. In contrast, the rural scenes have a poetic quality, upholding a typical nature-culture divide in which nature becomes an arena of healing (the river as a nurturer, for example), a place where the self can be encountered, and in part controlled, without the jarring urban visual stimuli. Nature is also the setting of a storm, the place where the boy’s wounds must be confronted, where communal living is learned precisely because a return to nature is ultimately impossible.

Public spaces: The street battleground and theater Material grounds of imaginaries cannot be easily claimed through the juxtaposition of contexts against cinematic spaces. Within the Levitt-Agee opus, however, the materiality of public space and its discursive construction are of particular signifcance. An examination of reception contexts is especially illuminating in presenting the linkages between material grounds of imaginaries and social circumstances. First, the racial problem is at the same time central to, and also silenced in, the flm. Wojcik (2016: 145, 148), for example, argues that flms such The Quiet One promulgate a fantasy of neglect of children within the black community, misrepresent the black family, and erroneously place the blame for a child's misery on supposedly weak family structures, in this case a rejecting mother and grandmother. The frst inter-title in The Quiet One emphasizes that race is not the primary theme, however, but suggests that the problem of delinquency affects different groups (Moraes 1950: 376). The sensitive treatment of a black child’s social and psychological position

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could in itself be seen as an endorsement of integration. The flm engages with the racial divide by recording and relating images of diversity and mixing in public spaces.27 This is particularly striking if contrasted with sociological history evidence. Abu-Lughod noted, “by 1943, Harlem was so large, racially homogenous, and densely settled that during the hostilities [of 1943] only armed police, among the white population dared to enter” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 196). The anecdotal evidence indicates, however, that the flmmakers and the reviewers initially saw the racial contexts in a single-minded fashion. Bill Levitt (Helen Levitt’s brother) reported in an interview that the crew was criticized by an old hard-line Party members who took a good look at the flm and decided that it was a corrupt version of America, and that it was impossible to make a flm about a Negro child in which you didn’t show police brutality, any more than you could show a picture about Nazis without showing barbed wire fences. He was talking about the problem of black people in the United States, and he wasn’t talking about the flm. (Levitt, Loeb, Bill, et al. 1977: 117) While the Party-member’s comment refects a simplifcation of the racial problem and of the flm’s narrative, the flmmakers’ insistence upon evading the racial contexts, as if cinema exists safely outside of the social orbit, appears equally uninformed. Horak’s research showed that during the shooting the crew was “harassed by the police,” who “instructed them to ‘move on’” (Horak 1997: 149), and Loeb, who fnanced the flm’s production from her personal assets, claimed that “one distribution house said that if we’d make it a white boy, we’d make a million dollars … I think that may have been the frst time that we were aware that we had made a flm about Negro children.” Bill Levitt stressed, “[b]ut we never were able to distribute it in the South except in black theaters—absolutely mad” (Levitt, Loeb, Bill, et al. 1977: 138). The flm that did not wish to tackle the race problem found that it had encountered one. In “occupied Germany [the flm] was refused distribution because the Southern colonel who was in charge didn’t want Negro and white children mixed as they were in the flm.” The flmmakers further puzzled European critics, suspicious of the white artists’ Harlem flms – in France, where “underground flm people” supported the flm, according to Bill Levitt, the critics “couldn’t reconcile the flm with us being who we were, so they write up stories about us being a group of American Negroes.” The complexities of the ideological stance are further notable in the audience reception; in France, again, the flm was embraced by groups considered politically in opposition – the Communist Party and the Catholic Church, in the U.S. as well Communist party members at frst endorsed the flm, but

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then argued that “there must be something wrong with [the flm]” when Christian groups have praised it. And for the flmmakers’ avoidance of ideological context, the flm without an ideology proved able to be made to serve such a purpose when it was shown in Russia by the American Embassy to “demonstrate that flm is free in America” (Levitt, Loeb, Bill, et al. 1977: 138). The flmmaker’s downplaying of racial contexts was thus deceptive, as not only the reception of flm, but the segregated cinematic spaces in the flm indicate. The Quiet One’s tropes of connectedness and distance, of the vitality of street life, are shaped by the narrative of the boy’s exclusion. The role of minority children is particularly salient in this context; although the voiceover avoids the emphasis on race, the cinematic city and the audience reception spaces are racialized. As Annette Insdorf (1994: 151) has observed of Francois Truffaut’s flms, cinematic identities of children are shaped by their lack of awareness of accidents, suggesting their outsider position and the precariousness of their condition. The children of In the Street appear fearless; left to their own devices, they do not perceive danger from the street. Even as Levitt repeats the tropes of joyful play and freedom of discovery of space, followed by a painful defeat in violent brawls, and a child’s capacity to bounce back from hurt, the flm tends to avoid apparent juxtapositions. The fearlessness of children and the interactive social existence shapes a critical social discourse, which dispenses with the images of fright of minority areas. “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and salient experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other” (Certeau 1984: 110). This primal notion of othering – here transferred to the contexts of childhood – entails a relationship with the exposure of difference in public spaces. But as a socio-spatially constructed act it is also problematic in two respects. First, writing about East Harlem in early 1960s, Sexton (1965) chronicled urban renewal, concluding that the fact that Puerto Rican, black, and Italian residents of the area “make this an interesting, in some absurd way even an attractive, community is a great tribute to their own personal resources. The physical part of the community, both old and new, seem engaged in mortal combat with its citizens to prevent the emergence of the esthetic, the imaginative, the pleasant” (Sexton 1965: 48). The citation juxtaposes the environment and the community’s resources, positing the impossibility of the aesthetic within contexts of urban poverty, an impossibility challenged by Levitt’s photographs and two documentary flms. Second, as Sorlin has noted, “cinematic images are contrived by middleclass adults who, unwittingly, emphasize the relations of their social circle and age groups, and forget or misinterpret the concerns of other groups” (Sorlin 1999: 108). This raises substantive problems in cinema studies within the contexts of the outsiders’ recordings of minority residents, who might be seen as subaltern objects of representation.28 This notion is echoed

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in the silences of the Levitt-Agee flms, yet not reduced to explicit otherness.29 In the Street and The Quiet One offer rare empathetic and interpretative documentaries made in the 1940s in Harlem. Moreover, unlike many neo-realist and urban reportage documentaries, the two flms do not mythologize place, project a specifc vision of history, or speak on behalf of the residents of Harlem. This recalls the notion of the spatial enclosure of agency and Levitt’s photographs of children actively shaping the very same neighborhood. The camera, for instance, zooms in on a drawing of a doorbell on a wall with an inscription in child’s handwriting, “button to secret passage: press,” suggesting a Lefebvrian intersection of spaces of representation with social practices. This could be seen as a mere imaginary escape but the image does not emanate despair. The spatial environment is not only a container inhabited by the uprooted, impoverished dwellers, but an arena actively reimagined, responded to, or reinvented through everyday practices. In this manner the publicness of the environment, the imaginative acts within it – the spaces of representation – through practices of everyday life socially produce space. The inscription demands haptic contact with the material structure of the wall to activate the imaginary space that would alter the spatial practice. The hand-written note against the materiality of the wall highlights the impermanency and the randomness of the act in contrast to the larger oeuvre of the city (Figure 4.11).

Figure 4.11 Helen Levitt, New York, c. 1939. Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

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The notion of impermanency is central to the critical cinematic cities of the 1940s, as is evident as well in the inter-title that introduces In the Street: The streets of a poor quarter of great cities are above all a theater and a battleground. There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer and in his innocent artistry he projects against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence. The attempt of this flm is to capture this image. The rhetoric of urban war zones, echoing the notion of “mortal combat” in Sexton’s account of discourses of urban renewal in East Harlem, is discernible in the reference to a “battleground.” Further, In the Street’s visual metaphors link a street theater with creativity and a survival capacity (the image of a bird affxed to a cane; children playing “four tag”). The flm expresses, in Lefebvre’s words, the textures of space. Thus the texture of space affords opportunities not only to social acts with no particular place in it and no particular link with it, but also to a spatial practice that does indeed determine, namely its collective and individual use: a sequence of acts which embody a signifying practice even if they cannot be reduced to such a practice. (Lefebvre 1991: 57) In light of the social contexts examined above, Lefebvre’s notion becomes at once apt and problematic. The very claim on the street is a result of a lack of space – for playing, growing up, and learning; the activities of children are displaced on the street as a form of appropriation of space. A macabre vision of agitation appears in In the Street as the play turns into combat: children wearing masks hit each other with stockings flled with four which then tear and burst, as it were, creating an impression not unlike that of explosives. A hyperbolic comparison is intentional given that an evocation of an urban combat zone is suggested by the term “battleground” in the inter-title (Figure 4.12). These acts of children in the flm can be linked to a larger spatial practice in Lefebvre’s terms – the ruination that is taking place around the neighborhood that in the frst postwar decade became the largest urban renewal site in New York. Helen Levitt intended In the Street to be called “I hate 104th Street,” presenting the title-photograph of a child’s note handwritten on a wall in the neighborhood, but decided against it.30 This decision accords with Levitt’s inadvertent suppression of social contexts. But as we have seen, the identities that Levitt captures, while not over-ridden or erased by social constructs, are created and shaped in response to the urban neighborhood – on its walls the dwellers make their mark. The neighborhood space is not a mere container or a dead-end street, yet the fuidity of movement in the

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Figure 4.12 Film Still In the Street (d. Helen Levitt, James Agee, Janice Loeb, 1948/1952). Courtesy: Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

flm counteracts the potential to renew the place. The overwhelming energy expressed by movement is drained, depleted, and extinguished in the streets photographed. The emphasis on motion does not seem suggestive of the children’s necessity to move on or progress (unlike in The Quiet One, for example). Its potential fades behind the stillness, its speed and motion, and self-destructs. The omitted inscription, “I hate 104th Street,” is rendered apparent, questioning the imaginative capacities of spaces of representation proposed by the photographic image of the “secret passage” inscription.

Flâneurie, loitering, and urban decay In the Street visualizes spatial poetics in de Certeau’s (1984) terms; it represents a rendition of a “walking rhetoric,”31 of two stylistic fgures, synecdoche and asyndeton.32 This can be seen in the images of the child who stands in for the fâneur, in which the child’s experience stands for the marginal subject, as well as presents a fragment in multiplicities of urban experiences. Paula Massood (2013: 107) suggests that the Levitt-Agee collaboration in The Quiet One can be seen as a shift towards social determinism of urban spaces, with Donald remaining as the “silent subject” (Massood 2013: 109) witnessing neighborhood deprivation. Apart from Donald’s solitude, children on the street in The Quiet One are always accompanied and cared for

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by the adults, yet these images suggest the restriction of freedom or joyfulness of discovery. The condition of the The Quiet One’s outcast black child thus limits fâneurie as much as it also visually upholds the signifcance of street life. Benjamin (1999: 417) has noted that “[i]ntoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets.” Lefebvre has argued that space unleashes desire (1991: 97) and this can be seen in a nascent adolescent form though the eyes of the child fâneur. But Donald senses intoxication only when he is observing a pregnant woman on the street or actors on movie posters, suggesting his need for intimacy and his search for interior spaces of shelter. Although the trajectories of a virtually homeless black child in the segregated Harlem of the 1940s do not constitute a narrative of resistance, they are suggestive of alternate spatial practices. In contrast to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) critique of urban renewal in which the safety of children is assured by the “eyes on the street,” the streets of East and Central Harlem shown in both flms are at once a zone of freedom, but also of threat and confict; play there is not an innocent activity. Further, Donald in The Quiet One and the children in In the Street appear ignored by the “eyes on the street” (Jacobs 1961: 35). The flms contest the nostalgic discourses associated with the cinematic New York of the late 1940s, the city of white prosperity. Furthermore, although cinematic spaces commonly echo the Simmelian notion of the intensifcation of nervous stimuli, Donald’s character in fact escapes to the streets to settle down, as it were. Donald’s street experience suggests tropes of loneliness, dislocation, and traumas of uprootedness – the conditions that question fâneurie. But the flm does not propose a narrative of social determinacy in the boy’s loitering – the street cannot serve as a substitute for shelter. As James Agee’s narration in the flm articulates: Of course the streets of a city can be a wonderful school, freedom is wonderful too. But if you are as lonely as Donald is all you learn is more loneliness, and Donald’s kind of freedom is solitary confnement. Everybody else has some place to go, some defnite thing to do and after a while you even want to go home. The urban experiences in The Quiet One heighten Donald’s isolation, recalling the chilling gesellschaft suggestive of the cinematic noir cities. As the flmmakers shoot apparently from a vehicle in motion, no one seems to notice the lone boy in the street as he passes by a local market. Benjamin (1999: 420) writes, “dialectic of fâneurie: on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man.” Donald becomes the hidden person, the undiscoverable, marked by racial difference and paid attention to by those who would take advantage of him. Sequences shot on residential streets contrast with those on a commercial block, however. In Benjamin’s (1999: 427) words, “The fâneur is an observer of marketplace

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… He is a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers.” This argument obtains more ingenuous connotations in the case of an abandoned child, as Donald does not seem to desire products as much as interactivity and contact. In contrast to the lively residential streets of the East Harlem documentary, the residential blocks in Central Harlem of The Quiet One again echo the abandoned city trope. The fâneurie questions a romanticized urban liberty; although Donald fnds liberty in the ability to traverse the neighborhoods, the image of the child in the city is a product of family and social neglect. Other aspects of fâneurie are endorsed in the flm. “The ‘colportage phenomenon of space’ is the fâneur’s basic experience … The space winks at the fâneur: what do you think may have gone on here?” (Benjamin 1999: 418). This experience is intensifed in the case of a child’s perception of the street, which distracts him and, for a moment, removes painful memories from view. The experience of the street becomes a souvenir in the memory repertoire that supplements, and subdues, personal memories. The city streets create a psychological space, a shelter for new experiences and memories, even if they cannot provide a response to Donald’s social condition. In this manner, the flm proposes that a Lefebvrian connection between the representation of space and representational space will remain incomplete. The city of the mind-image and the city of social experience cannot be easily aligned. Although the central social image of the two flms is this gap between the promise of the city and the experience of its abandonment and segregation, the flms also contest the call of the Situationists’ Manifesto to exalt the practices of everyday life over artistic expressions. “That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than what changes our ways of seeing painting” (Debord, quoted in Tallack 2005: 85). As if anticipating both the Situationist quest and its limitations, Levitt and Agee suggested that the change in ways of seeing the streets necessitated an alternate optic within photographic and flm art. In the two flms, images and imaginaries of everyday practices adopt a particular shape by being enmeshed with the city streets; they capture, in David Rodowick’s terms, the flm art’s “quotidian dramatic expression” (Rodowick 2007: 108). The cinematic spaces of the Harlem documentary flms sought further within images in motion the possibilities for an expanded scope of agency of everyday acts, without denying the tensions between aesthetic domains and social practices.

Cinematic public spaces: Unintended infrapolitics and the dialectics of fâneurie The Levitt-Agee flms’ dialectic of seeing is evident more in visual images than in rhetorical devices, recalling the impossibility of communicating, in Kracauer’s terms, the “stark reality.” A shot, for instance, in which the still camera observes the solitary child of The Quiet One withdrawing into the back of the frame could be tied to Benjamin’s “angel of history” (Benjamin

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and Arendt 1988: 257–258). The silent violence of this image suggests the “wreckage” of a world in which the social costs of neglect (Donald’s losses) become visualized and apparent precisely at the moment in which they cannot be accounted for. In the Street commences with a short sequence that captures an impossibility of achieving progress – a slow motion traveling shot follows a boy on a bicycle trying to hold the back of a truck, which slowly, gradually escapes his reach; the spectator loses sight of the boy and sees merely decaying streets. In contrast to the anti-urban documentary The City (d. Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939), the Levitt-Agee flms display urban decay and endorse urbanity. It has been noted that the flms’ focus on everyday expressions and activities in the public sphere represents a form of ambiguous cinematic infrapolitics (see Scott 1990), and in Benjamin’s terms, a dialectic of fâneurie (Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999: 420) by making visible the hidden person’s existence. In Kracauer’s words, the flm is “expressive of an outspoken, very cinematic susceptibility to street incidents;” it captures the “fow of life” (Kracauer 1997: 203, 71). Further, Marcus has noted that Levitt “occupies an uninhibited, fragile, dance-like space to avoid imposing on her subjects and risk altering their natural behavior” (Marcus 2006: 124). The candid camera allows for the suspension of performative aspects of identity for the ocular machine, but urban identities observed already perform for the street audience; the cinematic street becomes a veritable “theater of social action” (Mumford [1937] 1996). Levitt’s photographic work in the collection also entitled In the Street (1987) shows, according to Robert Coles, that in the “Spanish Harlem of the 1940s … there were no terrible gang wars;” rather, Levitt depicts streets of “civility and gentility” (Coles 1987: 6). Elements of turbulence are, however, evident in In the Street, presenting as well energy, creativity, and the resource capacity of youth and their warrior spirit. These scenes can be read as forms of Bakhtinian carnivalesque (Horak 1997: 146) in the sequences which include urban performances (Horak 1997: 140–149), as it were, by children in Halloween costumes. But the sequences of street brawls remain far more confictual than scholars have observed. In the Street is suggestive of the aspects of the agitated city trope tied to crises and the discourses of inner-city decline that became pervasive within the American public sphere starting with the closing years of World War Two (Beauregard 1996a: 366). Visualizing the street as a “theater” and also a “battleground,” Levitt, Agee, and Loeb showed the East Harlem dwellers’ assertion of urban existence through everyday expressions of uniqueness. As Kelley (1996: 230) notes in Race Rebels, ghetto residents articulate resistance through unconventional public culture that includes daily acts and forms of opposition in the workplace, residences, and in public spaces. In the Street does not, however, suggest that these acts are motivated by despair. Rather, it highlights the tension between an impossibility of altering the environment (“I hate 104th Street”), and a child’s desire to claim space (the “secret passages”).

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In the two documentary flms, the agitated city trope suggests that sources of contention lie outside of the minority areas. These forces shaping cinematic cities of In the Street and The Quiet One are both discernible and also unpalatable. The last shots of In the Street render an urban uncanny in the latter sense – two nondescript fgures walk away from the camera disappearing down the street. The Quiet One ends with a dubious quest to redeem space in Benjamin’s terms. “Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption” (Benjamin and Arendt 1988: 254). The cinematic city shot introduced by Agee’s fnal words in The Quiet One suggests, however, a quality of “stark reality” that redeems not history but recovers instead the cinematic visual language – the skyline view is one of the most sinister, the most unsettling, and most oddly contemporary among hundreds of noir sequences of the 1940s. The establishing shot is of Harlem at dusk, with its tenement roofs and the elevated train station, with only a solitary human fgure seen. In an open window, as a woman retreats into the apartment, the camera moves closer to examine a back alley, dark window holes, and fnally the street below the elevated platform where two boys seem to be fghting. One of them escapes and runs away into the depths of the city. Only the barely discernible shadows of the streets are visible in this establishing shot. A memory-image of the city of loneliness as remembered by the boy and a documentary shot of the streets of Harlem observed by the cinematographers in late 1940s have merged into one. The Quiet One offers, nevertheless, a visual resolution – among the flm’s last sequences is also a shot of Donald sorting his photographs, suggesting a conscious, emergent-adult arrangement of memory. Making sense of one’s life entails a specifcally cinematic process of editing – the ordering of images, removing from view, setting aside, without perhaps obliterating. The streets of Harlem that provoked rage in one child and where, perhaps, another was inspired to create a “button to a secret passage” form this image-composite of the intensely public, spatially segregated and, set against abandonment and rubble, fâneurie-desirous spaces of modernity.

Notes 1 See for example, Dikant 2003 as well as Horak’s emphasis on subjectivity in Levitt’s flms in Horak 1997: 160. 2 Following Lefebvre, I treat space as a dynamic system, produced and reproduced, in particular by the forces of capital (local, national, or global) and state actions, and representing a site of struggle. Place refers not merely to a geographic area but to local processes and webs of social relations; places are gendered as well as marked by ethnic, racial, and socio-economic differences. See Urry 2001: 7–14. 3 See, for example, Sorlin 1991, Sorlin 1980, and Winter 1995. 4 On New York history and urban theory in this context and more broadly, see especially, Abu-Lughod 1999; see also, Beauregard 2003, LeGates and Stout 1996, and Marcuse 2002. 5 I thank the late Professor Marshall Berman for insightful discussions of Helen Levitt’s photographs.

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6 In Levitt’s close photographic circle, moreover, her aesthetic path followed urban trajectories apart from her colleagues Walker Evans and William Klein. Further, unlike the Harlem photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith who sought “opportunity and cultural richness where others saw simply misery and social despair,” Levitt neither excluded images of poverty, nor did her images juxtapose human misery against a richness of cultural expression (Smith and Smith 1997: 7). 7 Predating struggles for desegregation and also displaying an intense awareness of the racial inequalities in urban America in particular as New York’s other neighborhoods became more diverse, Levitt avoids direct social commentary, yet demonstrates “a profound respect for the hardihood of people suffering and surviving” (Longer 1994: 36. See also Dyer 2017). 8 On the politics and aesthetics of Levitt’s photographs of children, see also, Gand 2011: 64–98. 9 The point is not to question Levitt’s and her critics’ emphasis that the choice of photographing in poor neighborhoods was inspired by the visual attractiveness of liveliness, but rather to investigate how social contexts speak through the type of aesthetic vision that Levitt embraced. Philips notes “her determination to see the streets as places of aesthetic beauty, rather than social contexts.” See Phillips et al. 1991: 25. 10 Her biographers note the appreciation of “the demonstrative, warm culture [she found] represented among black people” and “her affnity to jazz, the active street life and her genuine liberalism” (Phillips et al. 1991: 35, 32). 11 Simmel’s reference here is to the unclassifed diversity of Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. This example is used metaphorically in the context of Levitt’s photographs. See Simmel, cited in Sennett 2002. 12 The two flms represent collaborative projects. While Sidney Meyers’ directorial contribution for The Quiet One and Janet Loeb’s fnancing of both flms from her own assets are not meant to be de-emphasized, this chapter focuses on the urban cinematic spaces in the two flms for which the foremost creative contribution can be credited to Helen Levitt and James Agee. In the Street was directed by Helen Levitt and, according to Robert Sklar, Agee joined Levitt while she was shooting on the streets of East Harlem. Discussion with Robert Sklar, New York, 9 November 2007. 13 The camera avoids establishing shots almost entirely, and only occasionally includes medium close-ups in the shots of children and women looking out of the windows; in one shot, several girls move into the frame, approaching the cinematographer and creating their own close-ups. 14 As Annette Insdorf (1994: 151) has observed in the context of Truffaut’s flms. 15 This is also evident in the camera angles shown, in which the streets of cities in the 1920s are often observed from above, from the rooftops, while the camera in the Levitt documentaries observes almost always from the street level. On urban fâneuses, see Wolff 1990. 16 James Agee’s ambiguous quote at the back of the Arthouse Inc. video cassette of In the Street reads, “It is good to think, better to look and think, best to look without thinking.” See Arthouse Inc. 1996. 17 Such as held-held camera and the editing style. See Horak 1997. 18 Kracauer then proceeded to develop the arguments that favor Vitorio de Sica’s neo-realist semi-fctional urban narratives over detached, albeit socially-conscious, reportage of the British documentary School and the compassionate yet in his view non-judgmental engagement with material reality in In the Street. In reference to Housing Problems, ironizing Joris Iven’s remarks on Borinage, a documentary about Belgian miners, Kracauer quipped, “human suffering, it appears, is conducive to detached reporting; the artist’s conscience shows in artless photographs” (Kracauer 1997: 202, 202–214).

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19 This is not merely because of the flmmakers’ primary concern for their subjects. See Langer’s emphasis on the persistence of the “suffering and surviving” of children (Langer, 1994: 35). 20 In brief shots, women are seen sweeping the streets, and walking the dogs on the sidewalk; elderly residents, Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street,” sit and observe the activities of children, but also forcefully expel a group of unruly kids from the sidewalk. Regarding “eyes on the street” and sidewalk safety, see Jacobs 1961: 35. 21 For instance if compared to references to the discourses of underprivileged areas contained in the offcial documents from the same period of time. Allen, Fitzpatrick, and Bowery Savings Bank of New York 1956, Reynolds and United States Public Buildings Administration 1946, Woodbury 1949. 22 During the 1940s East Harlem changed from a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood to a Latino neighborhood, the number of Puerto Rican residents increasing from 30,000 in 1930 to 250,000 in 1949. By 1940, 20% of the area was native-born black; the ratio increased to 30% in 1950 (Sexton 1965: 9). 23 Stern et al. argue that East Harlem did not have middle-class brownstones or other better quality housing, while Patricia Cayo Sexton noted in the early 1960s that “East Harlem (and Central Harlem even more so) contains many sound and beautiful old buildings … They need renovation and renewal.” See also Sexton 1965: 43. 24 The whites that could move out did and almost half of all tenants in East Harlem’s nine public developments were black by the time Sexton conducted feldwork; about one in three was Puerto Rican, and about one in fve “other.” Sexton further argued that the greatest opponents of urban renewal were the clergy and the professionals and noted that rent strikes and community organizing resulted in rehabilitation of select buildings but that the result of those policies had been limited. See also Ballon 2007. 25 Caro, quoting a Harlem mother from before Robert Moses became Parks Commissioner: “We have to work all day and we have no place to send the children. There are kids here who have never played anyplace but in the gutter … After a building program that had tripled the city’s supply of playgrounds, there was still almost no place for 200,000 of the city’s children—the 200,000 with black skin—to play in their own playgrounds except the streets or abandoned, crumbling, flthy, looted tenements stinking of urine and vomit; or vacant lots carpeted with rusty tin cans, jagged pieces of metal, dog feces and the leavings, spilling out of rotting paper shopping bags, of human means … If children with black skin wanted to escape the heat of the slums, they could remove the covers from fre hydrants and wade through their outwash, as they had always waded, in gutters that were sometimes so crammed with broken glass that they glistened in the sun” (Caro 1974: 337). 26 Charlotte Brunsdon points out the empty spaces of devastated bombsites in British post World War Two cinema – ruins, cleared grounds, debris – suggestive of “disruptions in the social fabric which are both material and metaphoric” (Brunsdon 2010: 96). 27 For example, the frst sequence shows a white boy playing with black boys; a sequence on a Harlem street shows two working class men, one white, one black, carrying in a large couch together; the street scenes include whites and blacks livings side by side yet also apart. 28 These documentaries contrast, however, with many contemporary flms that present conficts in minority areas as inherent to them or derived solely from local actors and conditions. 29 While In the Street represents a lyrical meditation on urban life and includes avant-garde stylistical elements, and The Quiet One is a social documentary,

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both flms challenge mainstream visions of minority residents without claiming to speak for them or represent their stories. Indeed, the flms present a sharp contrast with the imaginaries of black neighborhoods in flms of the period, including in critical noir. See Stam 2000. 30 Levitt’s reasons for this are not known. Cited in Horak 1997. 31 Levitt’s visions are a result of her own fâneusian experience. As Wolff (1990: 41) notes, “the dandy, the fâneur, the hero, the stranger—all fgures evoked to epitomize the experience of modern life—are invariably male fgures.” The photography that Levitt created depended upon the ability of her solitary strolls. Noir, more than any visual style of the period, presents lone female strollers but they are stereotypically the femme fatale or the murder victim. Women seen in the Levitt flms are idlers, strollers, housewives, vendors, students, eccentrics, charmers, lively girls, dancers, grandmothers, etc. Moreover, the rapport of children towards Levitt in In the Street is striking they smile for her, adjust themselves for a group portrait, dance in front of the camera, make faces and walk into close-up, yet there is no suggestion of an explicit nurturing aspect. 32 The former “expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a “more” (a totality) and take its place (the bicycle or the piece of furniture in a store window stands for a whole street or neighborhood). Asyndeton, by elision, creates a “less,” opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics. Synecdoche replaces the totalities with fragments (a less in the place of a more); asyndeton disconnects them by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive (nothing in place of something)” (de Certeau 1984: 101).

5

The agitated city

This chapter introduces in the study of flm noir the new trope of the agitated city, which is now linked to social anxieties related to class, ethnic/ racial integration, and gender emancipation. The description agitated urban modernity in noir indicates a set of ambivalent representations of the simultaneous glory and allure, and peril and danger, of the modern city, and of agitated urban identities within it negotiating these tensions. The city is recast in two ways: frst, through senses of entrapment, loss, enclosure, bewilderment, and the second, through the need to reveal, document, expose, and control the city. This chapter proposes a new topology of the cinematic New York: the illicit, the decaying, the controlled, the corporate, and the networked city.1 Finally, heightened ambiguities of the metropolis, a site of a complicated mixture of exposure and erasure of social anxieties, are examined by analyzing Force of Evil (d. Abraham Polonsky, 1948). This chapter tackles frst the relationship between discourses and representations of urban decline2 and the cinematic city of flm noir.3 The term urban decline refers to visible signs of economic downturn, housing deterioration, unemployment conditions, rising crime, and the overall collapse of urban land values, especially in the downtown districts (see Beauregard 1993 [2003]). Scholars of flm noir have outlined its socio-political dimensions (Naremore 1998, Neve 1992a; 1992b), but the relationships between visions of the city and the socio-political contexts, beyond the emphasis on the on-location cinematography, visions of urban alienation (Krutnik 1997, Krutnik 1991), or anticipation of urban renewal and discourses of modernity (Dimendberg 2004, Dimendberg 1997), have not been delineated in the literature. Films noir which were overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, set in the big city environments (Krutnik 1997: 100, fn 1; Silver, Ursini, and Duncan 2004), contain what might be termed visions of urban decline, although of course not in the ways that can be entirely equated with the noted characteristics.4 Big city themes in noir can be seen as a critical component of an inquiry into “the ways in which society’s cultural tensions and political and economic tendencies have been fltered through an urban lens.”5 Shiel (2010) has argued that New York City neighborhoods dominated flms noir until

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1947, when Los Angeles became the predominant cinematic city, which coincides with a “rightward drift in politics and anti-union actions by the Hollywood studio moguls” (Cited in Prakash 2010: 7). In addition: [f]rom 1940 to 1948, New York was the more prevalent setting, with the exception of 1944 when it and Los Angeles were equally numerous. In those, New York featured in approximately one-quarter to one-third of all flms while Los Angeles featured in very few flms until 1944 and then became gradually more prominent until 1949. (Shiel 2010: 83) After this (with the exception of 1952) Los Angeles dominated the noir imagery. According to Richard Lingeman: New York flms, in contrast [to those flmed on the West Coast], emulated the Rochemont documentary model. They were shot (in good part) on location, rather than on the studio sets. The city seems ideally suited to flming in black-and-white with natural lighting in actual locations. The swarming streets served as a living backdrop. In making Force of Evil, Polonsky chose a similar but more expressionistic realism: he instructed his cameraman to study prints of Edward Hopper’s urban types—detached souls foating in an urban limbo. New York was more closely associated with the gritty urban realism of late forties than any other city. Many of the flms featured corrupt politicians and lawyers or hardworking ordinary people defeated by fate or chance. Their stories crisscrossed class lines, moving from soaring Park Avenue penthouses to shabby Lower East Side slums. (Lingeman 2012: 207–208) Yet the Los Angeles flms include narratives of suburbanization that present even more dangerously exploitative worlds, and include distressing renditions of individual alienation, social disembedding, female entrapment, and murderous criminality, suggestive of the rejection of the suburban prototype of the American dream (Double Indemnity (d. Billy Wilder, 1944), Mildred Pierce (d. Michael Curtiz, 1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (d. Tay Garnett, 1946) – these narratives of the 1940s remain signifcantly more critical of the extra-urban environments than planning discourses of the garden city movement.6 Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce, for example, narrates about her marriage to a real estate agent: He and Wally Fay were partners. For a long time, they made good money. They built a lot of houses. Suddenly, everybody stopped buying. The boom was over … Then one day, they split up. Wally was in and Bert was out. They weren’t partners anymore. That day when Bert

146 The agitated city came home, he was out of a job … We lived on Corvallis Street where all the houses looked alike. Ours was number 1143. I was always in the kitchen. I felt as though I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life, except for the few hours it took to get married … I married Bert when I was seventeen. I never knew any other kind of life. Just cooking and washing and having children. The focus on individual violence placed in this setting allowed the narratives to exit the environmental determinacy of the supposedly evil city and proposed to expose greed and ruthlessness spatially heightened, culturally shaped, gendered, and systemically produced. The Los Angeles noir and suburban narratives presented interdictions upon roaming or loitering, hindering urban anonymity, and disabling de Certeau’s (1984) fâneur and Dimendberg’s (2004, see chapter 3) “walking cures,” while the social community in which everyone was watching and being watched problematized the voyeur stance. Suburban visions suggested alternate relationships between spaces of representation and social practices, completing in a manner the cinematic cycle of appropriation of space in this period. The cinematic suburb amidst times of prosperity suggested another invisible landscape of power with its more complex boundaries of gender and class divisions. In contrast, in New York City narratives, the city is more often presented as containing blighted areas or harboring criminal groups or individuals as a form of collective social disengagement. As noted, in this cycle of flms, characterized by an opposition to “forced optimism in American cinema” (cited in Neve 1992a: 146), discourses and visions of urban ambivalence take a tension-wrought shape in relationship to crises (in particular World War Two), social anxieties (related to urbanity and mass society), and urban transformations (renewal and suburbanization). Importantly, cinematic noir New York of the 1940s period resonates additionally with the crises of modernity. Here was born the hoodlum, the city dweller driven mad by the city, the gangster, that poor boy trapped in those back alleys on the wrong side of the American dream, who clawed his way to the top only to discover that he was still a prisoner … “not [of] the real city, but [of] that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.” (Grossvogel 2003: 7) This “sad city of imagination” entailed a range of perceived negative social and physical characteristics of, for the most part, its downtown districts, but also poorer ethnic neighborhoods, such as: a) social pathologies linked to the urban criminal underworld, b) detrimental characteristics of impersonality, anonymity, and routinization of labor within downtown inner-city

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work environments, c) physical characteristics of day-time inner-city districts such as congestion, density, crowding, and pollution as well as its after hours’ emptiness, loneliness, and void, d) tensions related to cross-class or to an extent, inter-racial contact, d) anxieties over changing sexual mores and gender dynamics, e) the ways in which class and gender tensions were particularly manifest in the supposedly seedier streets within urban amusement districts, f) discourses of urban “blight” associated with poorer sections of tenement areas, often inhabited by immigrant or minority residents, and g) the city as an environment of social corruption. The focus here is frst on the problem of relating noir themes to historical contexts; the discussion then categorizes several different aspects of agitated urban modernity in flm noir – the metaphor highlights ambiguities and conficting values associated with the metropolis apparent in the narratives of urban decline. The trope of agitated urban modernity can further be elaborated as a critique of Kracauer’s theory of accidentality (1997) in New York’s noir cities by showing how accidents shape the discourses of city fears by disrupting the “fow of life” rather than asserting it – the sight of a beautiful woman signals peril in Woman in the Window (d. Fritz Lang, 1945); a theater troupe rescues a female victim from an assassin, although she is ultimately doomed in The Seventh Victim (d. Mark Robson, 1943); the collapsing tenements disrupt trajectories of protagonists in The Window (d. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949) and Street of Chance (d. Jack Hively, 1942), and so on – and how, in contrast, the threats and violence are cinematically framed within the interior spaces of the illicit, the corporate, and the controlled city in which agitated streets are often absent or removed from view (see Kracauer 1997: 73). “I wanted money,” Jean Gillie asserts in extreme close-up in Decoy (d. Jack Bernhard, 1946), as her fashback narration recounts the logic of a “simple arithmetic” that led to several murders in pursuit of money, charting the heroine’s trajectory away from “the street” she could never forget (“the same rotten street … that … runs all over the world”). As Paula Rabinowitz (2001: 241) has observed about Detour’s Ann Savage, “the femme fatale possesses a power offered by the street that is never available to the maternal women of postwar Hollywood flms who is planted in the kitchen.” Decoy is set in San Francisco, Detour on the road from New York to L.A., yet New York’s noir spaces contain that every city’s street and also represent an even more heightened domain of allure and fear. Fear is projected into “the ordinary world” (Polan 1986) through these streets within which realms of desire are spatialized, gendered, and socio-economically framed. Unlike de Certeau’s (1984) streets, “haunted by narratives” (de Certeau, cited in Telotte 1989: 216), New York’s noir narratives are, in reverse, haunted by fears within/of the streets. Charting the streetscapes of New York’s noir map, the chapter argues that the material grounds of New York imaginaries cannot be simply read through contrasts between the documentary-style city and the “airless studio” city (Hirsch 1981), nor do

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they blow a “kiss of death” to the city doomed by the modernist planning narratives (Dimendberg 2004, Dimendberg 1997). Rather, they articulate a discourse of urban ambiguity imbued with both the fright of, and longing for, lost or unclaimed space. This space is commonly subsumed by desire for a woman who would escape the streets and yet who embodies the city the most. Critiquing briefy Kracauer’s (1997) theory of urban accidents, as noted previously, allows the chapter to offer snapshots of a perilous accidentality that takes place in the agitated cinematic noir streets. Urban noir accidents often trigger paranoia, despair, cynicism, or nihilism, thus charting the narrative trajectories of protagonists that heighten discourses of fear in/of the city, even if the most gruesome noir violence actually more often occurs in seemingly respectable indoor or suburban spaces. Transposing the thriller and detective narratives of the Great Depression period, New York noir discourses were shaped by resonances with wartime anxieties projected onto the cityscape, heightening visions of decline, and articulating fears of urban destruction and alienation (Douglas 1998). Douglas (1998: 83) writes: World War II had established the city as the logical object of bomber raids intended to demoralize and destroy civilians as well as defense factories, and commentators began warning Americans shortly after Hiroshima and Nagaski that an atom bomb could “wipe out [a city] in thirty minutes … New York will be a slag heap … Radioactive energy … will leave the land [around it] uninhabitable” for up to fve hundred years … Ghastly pictures were drawn and horrifying tales told of New York and other cities in ruins. Even if flm noir “bear[s] witness to cinema’s historically conditioned displacement of history” (Harris 2003: 4, 5), the fear, and also the allure (often, in the guise of a femme fatale), of the city streets is historically shaped (see also Naremore 1998). In a view that questions relationships between noir and social contexts, Paul Schrader (Cited in Naremore 1998: 34) argues that noir is characterized by “a pervasive gloom that hints at some unredeemable evil” and with its “emphasis on corruption and despair, was considered an aberration of the American character” (Schrader [1972] 1996: 62). Nevertheless, Schrader’s defnitions still allow for sociological interpretations, although stressing that noir is largely an aesthetic style. Further, even if the flms’ focus on fate and despair can be seen as “evidence that social interpretations [of flms noir] are generally misplaced,” studies of political contexts point to the contrary (Neve 1992a: 145). The strict delineation of historicity in flm noir is, moreover, complicated by the fact that the flms can be seen as structured by a “paradoxical relationship between material referent and physic reality” (Harris 2003: 4, 5) that engages the spectator’s fantasies with the facts

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of flm. This ambiguity between historicity and ahistoricity is apparent in a range of protagonists associated with the cycle, including the detective fgure and the femme fatale.7 It is also embodied in visual referents such as broken mirrors, haunting portraits, dark alleys, as well as in a number of spatial motifs associated with the metropolis, entailing contrasts between light and darkness, abstractness and specifcity, and neighborhood life and the increasing standardization of urban functions. Noir visions of heightened gloom, paranoia, despair, and nihilism can also be seen at once as positioned outside of history in the atomic individualism of their protagonists, and also at the same time conveying historically signifcant modes of seeing, for example, in their senses of disconnect, amnesiac delusions, or freight, often associated with the social and psychological consequences of World War Two; to use Abraham Polonsky’s quote on The Best Years of Our Lives: “seeing through false promises of peace and prosperity for all, made in return for past sacrifces and in response to the restlessness of postwar society” (cited in Lingeman 2012: 205–206). In other words, applying Blanchot’s (cited in Lingeman 2012: 6) metaphors on philosophy, flms noir could be seen as “pursuing knowledge that lies behind the truth of the visible,” shaped at once by resonances with, as well as the avoidance of, traumas of World War Two. Even in the flms focused on narratives of individual struggle against fate, obsession, or temptation presented outside of historical contexts (Out of the Past [d. Jacques Tourneur, 1947] and The Killers [d. Robert Siodmak, 1946]), the urban, suburban, and rural motifs not only situated but also facilitated the flms’ treatment of social themes, such as class divisions, criminality, or corruption, as much as they also provided a spatial container in which under pressure World War Two traumas and related anxieties emerge.8 Urban spaces are further suggestive of trauma, entrapment, and loss in flms that, underscore their narrator’s subjectivity with the soundtrack presence of that person’s voice interwoven with scenes dramatizing events in that story … of doomed people struggling to contain escalating panic, often foreground[ing] distortions of perception as well as states of paralyzing despair. (Luhr 2012: 5) World War Two contexts also enabled the projection of fears associated with modern life and political upheaval onto the urban landscape, thus heightening visions of decline, and presenting the city as a setting for social ills or crises.9 It would be impossible, however, to ascertain whether American audiences who overwhelmingly attended flm screenings in the mid-1940s attained a specifcally negative view of the big city from these narratives, although visions of hopeful urban coexistence were rare. Noir represented only 13% of the flm production of the 1941–1958 period, moreover, and while the flms presented critical visions, few suggested that the metropolis

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ought to be abandoned in the ways that the documentary flm The City (1939) did. Engagements with social contexts in flm noir are discernible in flms with semi-documentary or social realist approaches to cinematography towards the end of the cycle, in the flms’ critical treatment of a variety of social themes from prejudice, alienation, war trauma, and urban crime, to gender relations and family structure, and in noir narratives focused on the “psychological injuries of class” (Neve 1992a: 147). Political analyses of flm noir have focused on the persecution of many of the progressive directors and screenwriters by House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the flmmakers’ attempts to challenge the censorship norms (Naremore 1998: 96–135; see also, Naremore 2019). While authors identify the urban environment as a key narrative setting, the analyses more often emphasize visual style and the ways in which architectural spaces heighten the cinematic mood, and more rarely attempt to relate these visions with urban or social change (Davis 2001). With the exception of the discussion of urban renewal, Dimendberg’s (2004) emphasis on urban decay as well as the loss of the urban center in his sections on “centripetal spaces” also draws more from the discourses of modernity than from interactions with urban change, spatial planning, or discourses of decline.10

Cinematic discourses of urban decline: Five noir cities This book identifes several distinct ways in which noir visualizes agitated urban modernity and in which it resonates with discourses of urban decline.11 The illicit city First in the flm noir categories is the illicit city. These flms construct the discourse of urban decline in reference to the portrayal of the city as a crimeridden environment, as an extension of gangster narratives of the 1930s removed from the sole focus on individual pathologies (a motif that nevertheless remains prominent) and transposed within the urban social laboratory. Whereas the narratives of criminality involve the most extensive focus on on-location shooting, often presenting stories about the city, the relationships between flms such as The Naked City (d. Jules Dassin, 1948) and Side Street (d. Anthony Mann, 1950) and urban conditions are ambiguous.12 In Side Street in particular “[t]he audience becomes complicit in the crime; it feels sympathy with [the main protagonist] as an ordinary guy with recognizable, if unsavory, motives” (Lingeman 2012: 199). Borde and Chaumeton – who are credited with having coined the term flm noir – argued that themes of criminality “derived from the everyday reality of the USA” (Borde, Chaumeton, and Hammond 2002: 20). Further, according to the authors’ citation of records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2,036,000 crimes were committed in the U.S. in 1952, which

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was then a record number, with a serious crime committed every 14 seconds. These data suggest that flm noir might have responded to a sense of an increasing criminalization of society, especially after the temporary period of prosperity during the war years in the U.S. Nevertheless, while these authors argue that crime genre noir was infuenced by cinematic realism13 (and thus reports on actual urban conditions), they note that it also represented an unusual synthesis of “realism and cruelty” (Borde, Chaumeton, and Hammond 2002: 22). By this Borde, Chaumeton, and Hammond seem to indicate that violent tendencies in flms noir such as Brute Force (d. Jules Dassin, 1947) or Kiss of Death (d. Henry Hathaway, 1947) represent a projection of displaced war trauma from the European continent and fantasies of cruelty related to American social contexts. As Naremore (1998: see chapter 1) has argued, however, these views are more refective of the two French scholars’ projections of, and identifcations with, their assumed visions of America. What is signifcant in these accounts, however, is that neither the mere situatedness (New York as the cinematic setting, for example) within, nor the references to, the conditions associated with the big city denote fully the relationship between social contexts and urban visions in crime genre noir. Rather, the crime genre noir seems to relate more to the perceptions of urban decline and ambivalences about the urban prospect, as will be discussed in the fnal section of this chapter in the case of the spatial motifs of the skyline, the slum, and the street. Urbanity becomes a cinematic arena that allows for social critique and visualization of social anxieties even though the concern of noir is urban form (often equated with dystopic imagery) (see Prakash 2010: 1) rather than with the substance of urban problems. As the images reveal the city’s darkness, they hide its substance, which is erased by the images that stand for the “betrayal of its utopian promise” (Prakash 2010: 3) ranging from abandonment of the urban narrative in Killer’s Kiss (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1955) to the class narratives of social decline and impossibility of progress or anticipated failures of modernist projects. Narratives of the criminal underworld further dramatize an urban class divide, present a critique of affuent decadence, and express sympathies for working class protagonists, as can be seen in the flms of Jules Dassin and Anthony Mann. This focus can also be seen in a variety of urban settings, coded by class – for example, the boxing rings in Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949) and especially, Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) – where these environments represent sites of brutal battle that point to the diffculty of class mobility within a system dominated by corruption and greed.14 Urban decline is in these narratives signifed through visions of slum life and the protagonists’ desperate attempts to escape it. Kiss of Death, for example, which commences with a female voiceover narration, Stuart Klawans (1995: 736) points out, was shot on location, “its extreme economy of technique emphasized the sense that this was a story played out under a harsh glare,” featuring a presentation of a victimized,

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vulnerable Italian American community15 (Bertellini 2010: 99) and an unglamorized portrayal of criminals (Straw 2007: 133), especially the notable performance of Richard Widmark. The illicit city in Kiss of Death is represented in the nightclub and brothel in which Victor Mature’s Nick Blanco and Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo meet. The flm follows, however, in Dimendberg’s terms, the centripetal direction outside of the city and towards a state penitentiary outside of New York. The decaying city Second, the decaying city: Scenes of downtown clubs and apartments at night as harbors of the criminal underworld, along with images of housing dilapidation or of skid row, presented visions that devalued the urban center, as well as the already abandoned manufacturing districts in cities where production appears absent. It should be noted, however, that flms noir vary greatly in the ways in which, for example, housing decay is represented (Dark Corner [d. Henry Hathaway, 1944], Phantom Lady [d. Robert Siodmak, 1944], Criss Cross [d. Robert Siodmak, 1949]) as well as regarding the range of inhabitants in these areas (artists such as Irena [Simone Simon] of Cat People [d. Jacques Tourneur, 1942], who will, however, deny that she is an artist, Joan Crawford’s designer Daisy Kenyon [d. Otto Preminger] in the 1947 flm of the same title,16 working class residents, veterans), although rarely do housing conditions have as signifcant a narrative role as in The Window, based on Cornell Woolrich’s story “The Boy Who Cried Murder” and directed in 1949 by Ted Tetzlaff (who served as a cinematographer for Hitchcock’s Notorious [1946]) and flmed in East Harlem on 105th and 106th Streets near 3rd Avenue. The Window shows neighborhood deterioration, including abandoned, boarded up, and even collapsing buildings, and a decrepit, decaying working class urban space of tenements and mom and pop stores (see Figure 5.1). The porousness and permeability of the tenement restructures the public/private dimension, traversed by an independent and resourceful child who has been abandoned by his parents (Wojcik 2019). The second aspects of agitated city visions in the crime genre noir can thus be found in the contrast between, for example the daily routine, the offce workday, downtown shopping districts, and nocturnal criminal activity. The metropolis is not the realm of the cinematic traversals or the narratives of mobility of the 1920s, but neither is it merely an arena of the economic divide of the 1930s visions; rather, it dramatizes conficts absent in both visions of the previous decades. Further, social consciousness of Dead End (d. William Wyler, 1947) is absent in these narratives, as the decors of decay or ruin become metaphors for temporal and social disconnect, as much as it can also represent a comment on the social divide. Another related aspect of the metaphor of urban darkness can be seen in a number of flms that exoticize multi-ethnic neighborhoods or multi-racial sites, even though these sites

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Figure 5.1 Frame enlargement from The Window (d. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949).

are also spaces of working class and interracial solidarity, as can be seen in the flms Pickup on South Street (d. Samuel Fuller, 1953) and Edge of the City (d. Martin Ritt, 1957). The agitating tensions presented in many of the cinematic narratives set within the working class districts are similar to the Levitt and Agee documentary narratives: the connotations of urban decline are apparent, but the flms frame both forms of the protagonists’ resistance and endurance (Pickup on South Street and Dark Corner) as well as a sense of loss of space (Criss Cross and Phantom Lady). The movement of characters between different locations including those outside the city is absent here: the protagonists and their narratives are contained within the New York of Dark Corner, as a “clearly identifable city where all events of the narrative transpire” (Dimendberg 2004: 210). Dark Corner “tracks private investigator and ex-convict Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) through his attempts to foil Cathcart’s plan to frame him for the murder of Galt’s ex-partner Tony Jardine, who once framed Galt for manslaughter and is now having an affair with Cathcart’s wife, Mari.” Osteen (2010: 21) points out that Dark Corner “employs numerous internal frames—boxes created by doors, windows, and the like—to embody Galt’s and Mari’s entrapment in Cathcart’s machinations.” Murphet (1998: 31) describes how violence is inficted upon a white man in Dark Corner in which Mark Stevens’ Bradford Galt exclaims, “I feel all dead inside … I’m backed up in a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me.”

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Here, masculine identity is seen to be lacking, in need of a female protagonist to extract a man in peril (see Studlar 2013). Yet the female roles that complete these male identities are the subject of war-time anxiety and trauma, in this case a form of Pygmalion game (Clifton Webb’s Hardy Cathcart as a “nominally straight character with a queer shadow” [Leff 2008: 10], whose parties represent “a nauseating mixture of Park Avenue and Broadway” which he claims make him “a liberal” restaging his role in Laura [d. Otto Preminger, 1944]) that takes place in which an old, rich, sophisticated but impotent man wishes to control a younger wife (see Jacobs and Colpaert 2013). The controlled city Third, the controlled city: visions of surveillance and the controlling gaze over the urban universe attain new forms of embeddedness with the changing urban context, as can be seen in the transposition of Fritz Lang’s flm M (1931) from 1930s Berlin to Joseph Losey’s (1951) remake of the same title set in Los Angeles. In this sense Losey’s flm particularizes and re-defnes urban space. More systematic forms of the apparatus of spatial monitoring can be found in the semi-documentary flms that champion federal authorities in crime prevention (T-Men [d. Anthony Mann, 1947], House on 92nd Street [d. Henry Hathaway, 1945], Port of New York [d. Laslo Benedek, 1949), and whose actions suggest uniformity, routinization, and formalization applicable to any urban environment. The American city in these flms, which is any city, is no longer an asphalt jungle or a series of uncanny dark spaces, but rather a navigable and governable arena. These flms are different from standard police procedurals, even if they might contain similar stylistic tropes such as the authoritative “voice-of-god” narration that describes the action in the expository documentary manner. These narratives demystify the urban environment of the detective genre or the neighborhood-based police procedurals, and also de-particularize it, simplifying urban conficts or tensions. The flms suggest that stronger forms of police or government control are the best remedy for urban or social problems, which are not seen as oppressive but necessary forces. (These flms can be contrasted to the noir narratives in which the voice-over can be attributed to an uncertain, wounded, or confused male protagonist betrayed by the urban promise and by the authorities.) Shiel (2010) argues that the shift from these narratives to police procedurals coincides with the rise of Los Angeles as the more prominent flm setting, although some of the more prominent West Coast narratives such as Tourneur’s 1947 flm Out of the Past and D.O.A. (d. Rudolph Mate, 2003), Detour (d. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), and Kiss Me Deadly (d. Robert Aldrich, 1955) suggest otherwise. Interestingly, in some of the Los Angeles narratives the police authorities appear to surveil and in fact set the narratives in motion to erase their own surveillance as an apparent act in which the government

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would remain distant, its overreaching surveillance invisible, although this act is apparent to other protagonists equally framed to maintain the illusion (Dark City [d. William Dieterle, 1950], Cry Danger [d. Robert Parrish, 1951]). These discomforting narratives can be contrasted with the confdence of authorities in other narratives (T-Men and House on 92nd Street; see the counterfeit narratives). Auerbach (2011: 24) argued that there “could be no flm noir without the FBI … built into the very center of its modus operandi for the state was an extensive network of surreptitious monitoring in fearful anticipation of imagined acts of conspiracy and treachery.” The reference is to the activities of the HUAC and the Hoover’s initiatives and directives (documented, for example, in The Street with No Name [d. William Keighley, 1948],17 shot on location and photographed in Washington, D.C., and which included FBI staff [Dimendberg 2004: 28]), but the concern here is with the police or government agency procedurals. The criminal activity is primarily seen as a violation of the law, in complete opposite to Wyler’s Dead End. The government agents become everymen, and the urban settings, any place, as can be seen in the very flm titles such as The Street with No Name. In these semi-documentary narratives, the city is devoid of the mystery of dark spaces or alluring irresistible temptations, seemingly an arena of clear choice between right and wrong, between law and disorder. These narratives in fact present a stronger emphasis on discourses of modernism than those that focus on mere spatial planning and go beyond the critique of the modernist aesthetics of the 1920s, for example, to emphasize the “moral uncertainty in which broad overviews, clear judgment, and empathic response are complicated by the culture of seriality” (Dimendberg 2004: 77). Similarly, the policed modernist environment is surveilled by more insidious forces that the narratives allude to, but hardly ever identify, as plots resolve to the beneft of the forces of order or dissolve with the main protagonist’s paranoias, disillusionments, and disassociations from the environments that the protagonist cannot actually inhabit, leaving “the uneasy mixture of secrecy, power, fear and suspicion” (Auerbach 2011: 26) as symbols of noir. Simultaneity, immediacy, and mobility of surveillance mechanisms exert control over space and territory, shifting narratives increasingly from New York to Los Angeles. Ironically, exiled authors of flms noir were themselves surveilled: They were seen by the FBI primarily as the enemy aliens and potential subversives. One might think that their fight from the Nazi persecution would have given them some kind of “home free” card. To the contrary, the FBI sizing up the liberal and socialist ties inevitable among this staunchly antifascist group, invented a subversive name for them— “communazis.” The bureau shadowed a number of exiles, including the literary giants like Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Hermann Broch. They were

156 The agitated city subjected to surveillance; agents interrogated them about their politics and sex lives; they were threatened with deportation. (Lingeman 2012: 194–195) Dimendberg (2004: 35–36) has argued in relationship to the detective story narrative that it contains protagonists such as Marlow who reject and resent the city because of its open spaces that can be surveilled. At once a rejection of the modernist utopia of transparency, stripped of any utopian prospect and revealed as potentially malevolent, the articulation of such a space that is neither too insubstantial nor too constricting, neither too anonymous nor too visible, pervades the flm noir cycle. (Dimendberg 2004: 36) Dimendberg proceeds to develop this trope in relationship to the naked city revealed to the aerial and military gazes,18 when in fact what the gaze reveals is the relationship between the space of the city and the insidious sphere of confict, corruption, failed aspirations, and an uncertain impulse towards a just resolution. The trope of surveillance is enacted on screen attempting to recapture in motion pictures what Weegee photographs did for the crime scenes: “Weegee did not cause these misfortunes, yet his photographs and statements promote disavowal of this knowledge and the uncanny resonances of his work” (Dimendberg 2004: 50), including that crimes could not be prevented, that crimes were in fact allowed to happen in some cases, and that the surveillance mechanism had failed citizens and the city, who are mourned on the cinema screen. In Sorry, Wrong Number (d. Anatole Litvak, 1948), for example, New York police will fail to prevent an announced murder of an invalid aristocrat played by Barbara Stanwick, as Litvak’s camera shows a window with Manhattan apartment buildings in the foreground and three smoke stacks in the distance, and, as Stanwick relates, “a human being, a woman is going to be killed somewhere, somewhere in this very city and this murder is going to happen tonight, tonight … all this idiotic red tape, you just sit there and let people die.” Listening to her is an elderly police offcer of the 17th precinct, swinging a pocket watch at a female black baby (who appears to be separated from her parents) dressed in her Sunday best with a ribbon saying “olive branch 13,” holding an American fag. The corporate city of alienation Fourth, the corporate city of alienation: Urban noir narratives also include a critique of the rise of the corporate dominion, embodied in the imagery of the offce tower. While the narrative might be set in New York, for example, in The Big Clock (d. John Farrow, 1946), the offce tower does not remain an

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abstract spatial rendition, akin to that shown in The Fountainhead (d. King Vidor, 1949) but envelops several corporate magazines entitled Styleways, Airways, Futureways, Urbanways, and Pictureways. The universal futurist tone redefnes the tropes of the 1920s metropolis within the corporate interior of the urban tower. In contrast to the 1920s’ Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (d. Walter Ruttmann, 1927) and Man with a Movie Camera (d. Dziga Vertov, 1929) an “urban order of reason, transparency, and technology” which contains elements of “discontinuity, instability, disorder, and chaos” is now associated with the corporate environment (Prakash 2010: 6). While the city of neighborhoods is completely absent in The Big Clock, for example, it is nevertheless embodied in a variety of protagonists that pose opposition to it or resist it with their rejection of depersonalization. Finally, urbanity as mass society emerges as in part a novel theme (Billy Wilder’s Big Carnival [1951] and Lost Weekend [1945]) in contrast to the narratives of the 1930s, but these flms also posit an individual protagonist in futile resistance to it or corrupted by it, were it not for the ultimately unseverable social ties. The traversal of the city as a social realm as well as a critique of class divisions are absent in these visions because social amelioration is seen as problematic or non-existent. The trope of the foreignness of the city is further prominent in these narratives of “disassociation [between the protagonist] and his urban surroundings” (Auerbach 2011: 20). As in many narratives of protagonists returning from the warfront, a former convict in Tomorrow is Another Day (d. Felix E. Feist, 1951) appears “as if he were an immigrant landing on U.S. soil for the frst time, compelled to undergo a harsh initiation process of assimilation or naturalization” (Auerbach 2011: 20). This approach further connects us to the surveilled cities trope in which the war veterans encounter upon return “the magic fruit of strangeness” (Dimendberg 2004: 41), suggesting that there was no home to return to but also that the only meaningful recuperation involved an “unmediated” (Dimendberg 2004: 41) engagement with the real city, which needs to be inhabited and canvassed, walked through to be understood and inhabited, regardless of the omnipresent gaze of surveillance in a city where a casual encounter (at times a stand-in for the audience) appears to reveal a protagonist’s secret and every turn has the capacity to alter the narrative, as the perpetrators are eventually caught by “the perfect,” as it were, system of surveillance (Dimendberg 2004: 229). These narratives could be further contrasted with the automotive or “centrifugal gaze” of the Los Angeles narratives in which the “technological gaze” dominates the camera view at the expense of the “human sight” or point of view shots versus aerial shots of the New York narratives (Dimendberg 2004: 223). Dimendberg (2004: 211–212) is correct, however, that in the case of both the centripetal and centrifugal narratives, the authorities of observation are less signifcant than the mechanisms of surveillance. The male gaze is the dominant gaze of surveillance, and the city is often equated with the female body subject to surveillance (Dimendberg

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2004: 22), as if it were complicit with criminality for offering a shelter of anonymity, although in many narratives criminals appear to be anti-urban (Phantom Lady, The Naked City) (e.g. the skyline associated with allure and seductiveness, and Central Park with a female detective in an attempt to challenge the male gaze in The Tattooed Stranger (d. Edward Montagne, 1950) (Dimendberg 2004: 67). The networked city The ffth category represents the city that challenges views of decline: the networked city.19 Notwithstanding the anticipation of urban renewal, suburbanization, and increasing spatial standardization, urban noir narratives rely on neighborhood contacts and networks, for example in flms like Night and the City (d. Jules Dassin, 1950), Dassin’s Naked City, Call Northside 777 (d. Henry Hathaway, 1948), with its insistence that “wherever possible the actual locales” were used in the flm, Cry of the City (d. Robert Siodmak, 1948), Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, and also Where the Sidewalk Ends (d. Otto Preminger, 1950) in which the skyline seen through virtually every window stands in for the spectators, not unlike Hitchcock’s skyline in Rope (1948). Although this city is focused on street-life, it does not represent a romantic vision of resistance to the towering metropolis. This category could also be seen as a spectral city that entails an intense interaction between the social and the imaginary (Donald 1999: 14–17). Urbanity is affrmed through the networks; the puzzle of the city cannot be resolved without knowing its social spaces within which routine existence is commonly subverted or transgressed. This point is apparent in police procedural flms, in which the investigator has to be able to grasp urban life (and often to deviate from the routine procedures) to be able to track the criminal. Further, criminal activity is commonly shown as a result of systemic disadvantagement, although neighborhood conditions are never seen as signifcant as in Dead End. In a related motif, Dimendberg has noted the trope of mourning over the loss of space or the neighborhood (Kiss Me Deadly, Criss Cross), yet the performance of this mourning is less captured by the camera’s lingering in space, establishing shots of the neighborhood, or voiceover, and more by the range of protagonists inhabiting Bunker Hill in Kiss Me Deadly, for example. Again, the spatial web of these protagonists counters the increasing emphasis on abstract spaces of modernism, as well as on the narratives of alienation and anomie (contra Dimendberg 2004: chapter 1). If we follow the visual motifs of German Expressionism imported in the cinema of exiles (characterized by “the sense of loss and cultural despair which many German language exile flmmakers experienced in the 1930s and 40s America” (Gemunden, cited in Lingeman 2012: 195) and transposed onto the urban landscape of flm noir in the early phase, we encounter a further transmutation of this imagery into a complex range of leitmotifs in the American social environment in flms, especially those shot on location

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in the postwar era. (And in the context of German Expressionism, these infuences are, of course, not linear, are not typical of exiles only, and can only be associated with select directors at specifc stages of their careers in Hollywood [e.g. Fritz Lang]). Yet flms like Night and the City, Criss Cross, and Kiss Me Deadly chart the spatial patterns of protagonists inhabiting the social underworld solely within the interiors of tenement apartments, clubs or bars, or underground spaces, suggesting a physical separation from the sphere of outdoor urbanity, and a reduced access to the public sphere. Walking, or the experience of outdoor urban spaces, as Dimendberg (2004) notes, is often tied to an experience of trauma and presented as a “cure” or a remedy for the sole main protagonist, but flms such as The Lost Weekend and Phantom Lady also complicate these visions of despairing urban traversals. An additional dimension of ambiguity can be found in the reverse narrative pattern and visual signifcation assigned to the urban environment in, for example, more explicitly socially conscious narratives that highlight class struggle. In flms like Force of Evil and Dark Corner, the city conjures up a sense of dread and fear and includes elements of the urban spatial uncanny,20 which does not diminish the narrative emphasis on social corruption or class difference. Visions of New York as an abstract arena of alienation in Force of Evil serve a distinct cinematic narrative role to highlight social corruption and class difference. Furthermore, despite the emphasis on the big city as a setting for criminal activity, the urban environment of haunted alleys and feared districts also presents in select flms noir a sphere of anonymity that can offer at least a temporary refuge from persecution (Detour, Out of the Past). The discourse of urban ambivalence can in this respect be seen in the tensionwrought relationship between at once a sheltering and threatening urbanity. This category suggests that select noirs could be seen as a critique of urban alienation rather than their embodiment. This aspect remains to be further explored in the literature through the analysis of spatial motifs in the second part of this chapter.

Agitated urban modernity, discourses of urban decline, and spatial motifs in flm noir Resonances with crises are at the same time strongly exposed in noir but also elusive to establish. In the context of the noir period 1941–1958, Dimendberg (2004: see, for example, chapters 3 and 4) associates urban imagery with the traumas of unrecoverable time and space, tracing visions of impending urban renewal and suburbanization. Further, in a study of Val Lewton’s flms, Nemerov (2005: 5) fnds “a wartime sense of sadness and trauma … a sustained memorial imagery in flm, icon after icon.” One of Lewton’s productions, Cat People, for example, features the return of the repressed evident in the flm’s spatial imagination, for example,

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Irena’s (Simone Simon) brownstone, veiled in darkness, which adjuncts the Zoo. The flm plays with the allure and rejection of difference in the city (Kent Smith’s protagonist will comment about Irena, “There is a warmth to her that pulls me … but I don’t really know her … In many ways we are strangers”) by performing the “psychoanalytic work of exorcism” (Linderman, 74) – and in this case literally, through the swift actions of Tom Conway’s cynical New York psychiatrist. Exploring the darkness of racialized others, “unconsciously comment[ing] on patriarchal, nationalist, and racist oppressions in the course of producing knowledge about them, while unable to take a fully resisting (or conscious) stance on those issues,” (Kaplan 1998: 187), Cat People remains caught between complicity and ambiguity (see Doty and Ingham 2004: 236). And echoes of wartime trauma are further evident in the American working woman protagonist Alice, which Berks argues, is the monstrous species of the flm (Berks 1992: 38). These types of flms show a projection of loss onto the cityscape – while the sources of loss are derived from broader social and economic causes, the city is presented as an arena of ruined individual expectations, inaccessibility of areas, incomprehensible spaces, or neighborhoods diffcult to chart or inhabit. But this structure of feeling is complicated by the contemporary reevaluation of urban noir visions. Film noir itself is, as Naremore (1998: see chapter 1) has argued, “an idea projected onto the past” as much as it is a cinematic legacy of Hollywood, a legacy strongly framed by a nostalgic look onto the pre-urban renewal vision of cities, as well as by the contemporary sense of crises, impermanence, and displacement. At once these visions are related to the contemporary “dream image of bygone glamour” (of the city, of urban cultures and night life, and of urbanized capital) and the cinematic narratives which capture “a critical tendency within the popular cinema—an anti-genre that reveals the dark side of savage capitalism” (Naremore 1998: 22). This ambiguity is at the core of the urban noir and is in essence the ambiguity captured by skyline visions. Through aestheticization, a sense of lingering, jazz music (see Figure 5.2),21 visions of affuent decadence, and skyline visions of the 1940s accomplish the pacifcation of vision and emphasize urban glamour and glory, but they never erase forms of tension. The categories of the illicit, the decaying, the controlled, the corporate, and the networked city all contain visions of agitated urban modernity. All of these imaginaries can further be charted in the case of New York narratives by examining the spatial motifs of the skyline, the slum, and the street. In contrast to most of the 1930s flms, skyline visions of the 1940s flms are more than mere establishing shots for urban narratives – their omnipresence and emphasis represent perhaps the most common framing trope in flms of the period. These representations refect the infuence of war technologies suggested by a focus on surveillance and the controlling gaze upon the urban landscape, the effect of which is further heightened by the voice-of-God narration. Bender’s (2002) critique of spatial motifs in early

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Figure 5.2 Frame enlargement from Force of Evil (d. Abraham Polonsky, 1947).

20th-century visual art emphasizes an explicit dichotomy that underpins these visions: “the city of ambition” is the city of the cathedrals of commerce, that of aspiration and success, whereas “the city of making do” is the city of everyday life, the working class city, the everyday city of survival. Translating this duality into a cinematic focus, the frst aspect could be associated with the aerial view whose purpose is to chart the city and understand its socio-spatial pattern linking urbanity to mass society. Both aspects of the dual vision are still prominent in urban representations of the 1940s: the “top-down” aerial vision withdrawn from the city streets – later interpreted by the urban theorist Michel de Certeau (1984) in discussions of the bird’s-eye view of the modernist planner – and the bottom-up city of, in Dimendberg’s (2004: chapter 3) terms, as has been noted, the new fâneurie of the decade of turmoil, the “walking cures.” This could also be seen as rather a simplistic dichotomy,22 but it represents an effective visual trope that is also skillfully altered, questioned, and subverted in flm noir. In noir visions of the 1940s, through aerial views, flms present explicit transpositions of the “double-edged” character of modernity projected onto the urban landscape. In one regard, modernity signifes opportunities and improvements in the human condition; but in another regard, it can represent nuclear catastrophe, wars, and totalitarianism. The “double-edged character” is thus refected in its propensity for progress and amelioration, and its descent into collapse and destruction. While visions of the skyline of the 1930s and the 1940s thus also suggest a social critique of a world that

162 The agitated city has lost its anchor – broader crises projected onto the metropolis become crises of the metropolis.23 This view is one critical aspect of the agitated city trope. The polarity between the skyline and the slum (see Warner 1983) assumes again connotations of the class divide but also of social separation, anomie, and de-individualization in flms of the 1940s. Further, Bender’s (2002: chapter 1) notion of the horizontality and verticality of the built environment, the former representing the civic sphere, and the latter mercantile commerce, is recast in an ambiguous manner within the noir imaginary. Neither the enchantment of the selected 1920s’ visions nor the utopian quest of the 1930s’ cinema could be found in these imaginaries, although continuities with a sense of urban decay and disenfranchisement, as well as the focus on class differences remain. The street becomes the central arena of cinematic contingency in the flms of the 1940s shot on location; as Kracauer ([1960] 1997: 73) has noted, the cinematic street “remains an unfxable fow which carries fearful uncertainties and alluring excitements.” (Following Kracauer, “[f]ragments within flm depend on chance, and carry something that is not digested into the narrative coherence of flm and that might or might not emerge” [cited in Pratt and San Juan 2014: 24]). These aspects of alluring and fearful urbanity comprise the additional aspects of agitated urban modernity. In urban noir narratives, the city thus emerges as a complex arena of exposure of social anxieties and attempts at their uneasy reconciliation.

Side streets, neighborhoods, and skyline views in New York flm noir This section focuses on the skyline, the slum, and the street spatial motifs in Force of Evil (d. Abraham Polonsky, 1948) that exemplify the noted discourses of urban decline, along with the renewed focus on the urban class divide. Force of Evil embodies the trope of agitated urbanity through its representations of a class divided city. The flm uses a motif of an illegal lottery to represent the gangsterism of a market economy, and posits two brothers against each other: Joe Morse (John Garfeld, who along with Humphrey Bogart, was an icon of liberalism and left-wing activism (Naremore 2019: 51), a corporate lawyer, and Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez), a neighborhood racket manager. In cinema studies terms, Force of Evil represents “a study of tensions” in a narrative and thematic sense as well as on a structural/ formal level (Black 1978: 11). The gangster genre allowed Polonsky’s flm to conceal the social critique (Neve 1992a: 133),24 as well as relying on the expectations of audiences accustomed to the genre, to withdraw focus from the plot resolution, and to redirect it into heightening the falseness of the opposition between small and large business, between the legal or “normal” and illegal operations. Apparently misunderstanding the flm, The Time magazine reviewer in 1949 (10 January 1949: 84) thus merely noted that

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the flm “uses too much high-fown language in dealing with its lowbrow characters,” and described the flm as taking a “long, unfavorable look at the numbers racket” which is “notoriously unproftable for suckers,” while The New York Times found in the flm precisely the agitating sense of allure and danger that represents one noted trope of noir (Crowther 1949). But the critics have revaluated the signifcance of the flm (Renshaw, 31 October 1997: 64). Scholars have called Force of Evil “one of the great flms of the modern American cinema” and “Polonsky, along with Chaplin and Losey … one of the great casualties of the anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s” (Sarris 1996: 220).25 The flm presents the illicit city as an economic system, the decaying city in its visions of working class slum areas, and the corporate dominion as that of large-scale gangsterism. The flm’s narrative presents capitalism as a socially corrupting force, evoking the “forces of evil” of the economic system through the characters’ embeddedness in the social and physical environment. This embeddedness is threefold – as Polonsky noted, striving towards a vision in which the image, the actor, and the word are equal (Cited in Pechter 1962: 52). The dramatic and also poetic dialogue is urban in character, the language stemming “from Jewish jokes and street quarrels” (Pechter 1962: 52). In its visions of the poor working class district, the flm could be seen as an homage to a “hub of working class institutions” representing New York of the 1940s (Buhle and Wagner 2001: 129). Buhle and Wagner (2001: 129) reference the signifcance of “the extraordinary vitality of [Jewish] working-class life, even amid masses of immigrants from every nation” for the flm. The vitality and colorfulness of the language, strikingly different from the hardboiled narratives, for example, contrasts with the barrenness of the urban landscape. For contrast, flms such as The Maltese Falcon (d. John Huston, 1941) provide an example: “the private eye flms and crime flms, which emphasized tough talk and violent action, giving them a veneer of verisimilitude. Their cynical dialog was larded with working class slang and irony” (Lingeman 2012: 221). Further, where other noirs pose the challenges to Hollywood’s inability to tackle urban or narrative ambiguity, Force of Evil critiques the flm industry’s avoidance of class issues (see Tangborn 1999: 68).26 This is the networked city of the working class alliances of Leo Morse in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood where he resides. The subjective or private sphere in Force of Evil – the barrenness and emptiness of the slums and Leo’s low-middle-class townhouse, suggest that every aspect of existence has been completely corrupted by the systemic forces (again, the protagonists are trapped, but not by fate or an inexplicable force). However, in Polonsky’s vision, death looms over these characters and the emptiness of their environments only further heightens the ruthlessness of the struggle for survival. Garfeld’s character says cynically at the beginning of the narrative that, “If you don’t get killed it’s a lucky day for anyone,” completely redefning visions of urban danger from both the

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schemes of the crime genre, and the documentary flm The City (d. Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner, 1939), placing the emphasis instead on systemic forces and the existentialist condition. In Force of Evil, the relationship with the urban setting is thus both similar and radically different from the noir repertoire of the period. The establishing shots of downtown Manhattan at the beginning of the flm might be thematically related to the noir representations of the New York City skyline, as a form of rendering of the “city of ambition,” as Bender (2002) noted. The visual representation highlights the architectural verticality of mercantile capitalism. The strongly delimited frame, however, denies glorifcation in the familiar urban trope and acknowledges the characters’ restrictive confnement. As Dimendberg (2004: 13) points out, this vision might have been inspired by the photographs of Laslo Moholy-Nagy or Alvin Langdon Coburn but “flm noir deployed representational strategies of avant-garde photography or modernist painting in the service of an aesthetic transfguration without social transcendence.” Filmed from a window of an offce tower, the frst shot shows a narrow vista of the top of several Wall Street towers beyond which neither the urban expanse nor the streets below can be seen. The shot lasts only seconds before the camera pans down sharply onto a street crossing and a human ant heap below. The sound of bells, presumably from the Trinity Church, can be heard tolling as if for the modern Wall Street building slabs. At the very beginning of the flm, Garfeld’s Joe Morse informs with cynical detachment:27 This is Wall Street and today was important because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my frst million dollars [sharp pan down], an exciting day in any man’s life. Temporarily the enterprise was slightly illegal [the shot dissolves onto the lobby of an offce building where we frst see Garfeld’s character Joe], You see, I was the lawyer for the numbers racket. [Joe in medium shots converses with a bell boy and a newspaper salesman]. (see Polonsky, Schultheiss, and Schaubert 1996: 21) The bellboy jokes that he would bet on the license plate number of a car that almost killed him, “I fgured if I live through this day it’s my lucky number.” As noted, Joe responds that, “If you don’t get killed it’s a lucky day for anyone.” The line is followed by strained laughter. As Polonsky (Polonsky, Schultheiss, and Schaubert 1996: 52) stressed, “every character and situation is compromised by reality” – a sensation that is heightened by telephone surveillance of Joe Morse’s offce. The rendering of Darwinian ruthlessness of competition in the frst shots of Wall Street is contrasted with Morse’s ambivalent social position.28 Neve (1992: 134) is right that the dialogue in the flm “suggests a world in which alienation and despair are conditions of the system,” but urbanity is central to this sense of separation.

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This becomes more apparent if Force of Evil’s skyline is compared to others from the noir repertoire. The Dark Past, a little known B-flm, entails a striking frst sequence of an aerial shot of Midtown Manhattan, followed by a documentary-style voiceover directly addressing the viewer, What does a big city mean to you? [shots of midtown] You may think of the soaring skyscrapers. Monuments to man’s creation. [camera positioned high on a skyscraper window or rooftop pans sharply down] But I think of the people – the one and the many … No names, no faces. [crowds in long shot] I am one of the people too. [medium shots of midtown crowd]. I’ve got my routines, same as all of them, I rush for work, usually just in time to catch the bus. [camera follows a man as he walks down the street and enters a bus] Last bus, always late, part of the last minute crowd [camera becomes his point of view] Yet for all the similarities of our routines, none of us are the same – we are as different as the print of our thumbs. The voiceover in The Dark Past introduces an omniscient narrator but immediately identifes him as “one of the people.” The flm maintains a delicate balance in which Lee J. Cobb’s police psychiatrist is shown as knowledgeable, controlling, yet connected to ordinary people. This flm entails a combination of a controlling and an illicit city; even if the notion of control is tied to a top-down, patriarchal vision, it also places emphasis on social reform and ties the skyline view to the civic realm, the public, and the people. The Dark Past prompts questions regarding the controlled city vision and the notion of social engagement. The latter is the most explicit in flms of the period that comment more directly on the failures of the criminal justice system, from I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (d. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932), to flms like Cy Endfeld’s The Sound of Fury (1950), Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948), and William Keighley’s above noted Street with No Name, all of which include explicit social commentaries, often in voiceover, over images of the city skyline, or low-income neighborhoods, seeking to address social problems through semi-documentary visualizations and often even narratives that make “truth claims.” In Endfeld’s social reform narrative that deals with the theme of crime, punishment, and mob violence, The Sound of Fury, an omniscient narrator and the center of moral consciousness is no less than an Italian socialist visitor who comments on the rising crime in California, “If a man becomes a criminal sometimes his environment is defcient;” and concludes in perhaps a superfuous voice-over at the end of this already clearly disturbing story, “violence is a disease caused by a moral and social breakdown that is a real problem and it must be solved by reason, not emotion, with understanding, not hate.” Aside from the didactic, edifying speech, extreme visions of the controlled city reduce urbanity, that is society, to a mob that requires surveillance by the elite.

166 The agitated city Skyline visions of The Dark Past as well as Force of Evil can be contrasted with Side Street, which entails as well a narrative of an urban class divide and a rendition of the illicit and the decaying city. At the very beginning of the flm, the camera circles around the Empire State Building, as the credits appear. The long voiceover narrative monologue introduces the city through an urban panorama that links class divisions and urban contingency with the criminal environment: New York City, an architectural jungle where fabulous wealth and the deepest squalor live side by side. New York, the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest and the cruelest of cities. I live here and work here. My name is Walter Anderson. I’m one of an army of 20,000 whose job is to protect … this city of eight million. So twenty-four hours of the day you’ll fnd our men on Park Avenue, Times Square, Central Park, Fulton Market, the subway. 380 new citizens are being born today in the city of New York. 164 couples are being married. 192 persons will die. 12 persons will die violent deaths and at least one of them will be a victim of murder; murder a day every day of the year and each murder will wind up on my desk. Which of these people will be the victims? Which will be the killers? New York is all things and all places gathered into one community. Every problem that troubled a man’s heart. Every dream that ever stirred its blood is here. For this city, like any other is the sum of its people – their frailties, hopes, fears, dreams. This one – does he secretly hope to recapture his vanished youth? And this one, a part-time letter carrier dreaming of the unattainable. A fur coat for his wife. These – are they tragedy or comedy? This man looks troubled, he has a problem, might be helpful to a policeman to know the details of some of the problems that walk the streets of New York … There’s a story in each of them. This is New York. Where the two persons living 20 feet apart may never meet. Where the passing of a casual stranger may start a drama that irretrievably alters a life. The flm presents a skyline that comes to haunt the main protagonist who has committed a crime, a rendition of the falsity of the class mobility promise. The skyline is much like the cinema screen – a mirage, a projection against the predominant narrative of urban decline. Signs of decay are visible throughout the narrative – in the ways that the bar owner is saving electricity, in the manner in which he disappears immediately after he greedily opens a package he was asked to safe-keep, or in the way in which it becomes clear that the new bar owners are struggling to keep the business going (they even announce that they would include a TV set to encourage family members to come), in the common person’s wish to win big in a horse race, and in the ways in which children are earning income by selling information. But the on-location shooting and urban circumstances presented in the flm also challenge visions of urban alienation.

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In contrast, in The Naked City, the above noted police procedural, New York visions entail a combination of the viewed discuss in the context of Force of Evil in which the brief Wall Street skyline sequence suggests the epitome of economic and social corruption, as well as the view from Dark Past, in which it is associated with social stratifcation. The skyline vision accompanied by the narration also suggests elements of the controlled city mode combined, of course, with the illicit city type, in which criminality is linked to class divisions. But in The Naked City the skyline view entails as well a projection of the “double-edged” character of modernity onto the urban landscape, which assumes an ominous connotation – a sense of fying is replaced by an uneasy hovering over the city; urban fragility is suggested but it is meant instead to represent the threat of destruction. An element of descent into collapse and destruction is, however, in part challenged by the flm’s narrative and visual focus on the city neighborhoods. New York in The Naked City becomes a vulnerable entity as well because of the social problems contained within it but urbanity is also the central arena in which narrative resolutions are possible.29 Across a range of skyline visions, the main agitating tensions could be located between the skyline view as that of urban collectivity and in turn that of mass society and social separation. The latter view is commonly overemphasized in the case of noir. Dimendberg has indicated that noir visions, in their stress on complex individual identities, often heighten a sense of urban alienation and separation within these representations. The city becomes a place of isolation and loneliness and a metaphor for a range of urban experiences derived from the condition of separation. These include existential, social, familiar, or romantic type of distanciation – the urban arena is often presented as unable to bridge the social distances. In The Lost Weekend, which tackles a writer’s alcoholism, for example, urbanity appears as an abstraction of the same kind. In the skyline views that frame the flm, camera movements from the urban “mountain” to the writer’s window conjure up a haunting, uncanny connection between the individual and the mass. The writer’s alcohol addiction is not framed by social circumstances and indeed he attempts to resist all forms of social pressure. A neighborhood bar in The Lost Weekend becomes a site of social separation, an arena of attempted but failed connection. Alcoholism becomes a futile form of resistance against sameness; a social frustration of difference, and an expression of the individual’s existentialist angst. The skyline looms over the alcoholic protagonist’s desperate walk uptown along Third Avenue, beneath the El, to a pawnshop where he could buy a bottle of whiskey. The shops turn out to be closed in agreement between the Irish and the Jewish storeowners, hinting at the muting of ethnic conficts. This sense of muting of confict is presented as also a silencing of the public sphere. Urbanity in fact attempts to draw the protagonist in, but the abstractness of the built environment separates him from the world.

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This vision of an alienating exterior brings us back to the visualization of open spaces in Force of Evil. The spare visual presentation is further upheld by additional exterior shots, which resemble Edward Hopper’s New York landscapes – a deliberate homage and cinematic interpretation suggested on the part of Polonsky (see Sherman 1970) – and in the interior shots that anticipate Fritz Lang’s sparse, clean, and sinister artifces of The Big Heat (1953). Only two times in the narrative does the camera exit to the streets near Garfeld’s Wall Street enterprises, once to show him and his brother Leo’s co-worker Doris (Beatrice Pearson), in perhaps the most unusually tender moment in the flm, at the steps of the Trinity Church, and another time, in a striking establishing shot of the empty streets when Joe steals the money from the racket and runs away, never to return (see Figure 5.3). The desolation and the cold empty environment of the second shot represent a close cinematic parallel to Hopper’s landscapes. In this manner Polonsky visualizes a decaying city in which public open spaces are rendered devoid of humanity. The flm ends with a visual image of alienation and disconnect, and a sentence uttered by John Garfeld’s character in voiceover, “I turned back to give myself up to Hall because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.” Note also in Polonsky, what Forgacs (2000a: 110) has identifed in a different context, as “the use of spaces waiting to be occupied by body”

Figure 5.3 Frame enlargement from Force of Evil (d. Abraham Polonsky, 1947).

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and “a sense of tension, of mutual estrangement between the place and the body.” This estrangement needs to be broken to engage with the materiality of the city and its structures of inequality; hence, Garfeld’s protagonist will be gripping the stone below the George Washington Bridge, seeing the dead body of his brother, before uttering these words (“And I decided to help”) (see Figure 5.4). This view is consistent with Polonsky’s challenge to fatalistic noir narratives; in Force of Evil, Joe Morse must make a choice; his future cannot be determined by fate. The choice is cast as moral commitment and also refects movements away from selfsh individualism and towards community (Pechter 1962: 48). This approach contrasts with the narratives by Cornell Woolrich which leave an “aftertaste of dread” (Naremore 2019: 42) and in which: [a] sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfxed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard and unaided to face some fnal and fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years toward [the writer and his protagonists] … that was hung over [the writer] all [his] life. (Woolrich, cited in Lingeman 2012: 224) Polonsky’s motionless camera stationed in the ditches below the George Washington Bridge (see Figure 5.4) flms the protagonists played by John Garfeld and Beatrice Pearson walking away, climbing determinedly up from the Hudson River bank towards the lighthouse. Presented in panoramic long

Figure 5.4 Frame enlargement from Force of Evil (d. Abraham Polonsky, 1947).

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shots and medium still shots, the steel bridge splitting the frame and cutting off the horizon, the flm alludes to an altered urban future whose systemic change the narrative does not, however, foresee. With the sole exception of the special prosecutor Hall with whom Joe Morse cooperates in the end, the flm does not depict the role of the government but focuses instead on the ruthless economic forces apparently allowed to persist by the very same government. New York itself remains an abstraction at the end of the narrative, presented through a delimited frame that never opens up to a wide establishing shot, restricted to the slums of Upper Manhattan, and the towers of Wall Street. This very division visualizes the urban class divide, thus recasting Warner’s noted slum-skyline ideological scheme as a social polarization metaphor. There is in effect no open space in Force of Evil. As Walter Benjamin (Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999: 422) noted, “only the revolution creates an open space in the city” and Force of Evil exemplifes this call in its very last sequence. The flm’s fnal sequence, which includes an alternation between long and medium shots as Garfeld frst descends “down, down, down” the stairway of the bridge to fnd the dead body of his brother, a small time illegal lottery owner, suggests the complete dissolution of his character’s identity within the landscape. The overbearing landscape includes only the ditches, the gray river, and the steel bridge that stand for systemic failure and also his newly found resolve. Other than the bridge, as infrastructure recalling rudimentary remnants of urbanity rather than any vision of a resolution, urbanity seems completely removed from view. This image is about the absence of an urban prospect and perhaps the absence of any revolutionary promise of systemic change. Urbanity holds a void that Polonsky saw at the center of the urban America of the 1940s, with the beginning of the signs of urban economic decline and suburbanization, a void that Garfeld’s character has to confront before his new identity can be flled in. Darkness in flms noir not only upholds the notion, to borrow Chandler’s quote from the title of James Naremore’s (1998) book, that streets “were dark with something more than night” but shows that the urban imagination was at the core of noir’s social critique. At stake here is not simply a shift towards the audience, but the very urban political potential of flm (Pratt and San Juan 2014: 181). It would be wrong to assume, however, that all the urban settings contained even in some of the most striking flms noted herein have simple ideological functions or that they possess the clear socio-political connotations that were in fact noted to justify the blacklisting of flmmakers: “Executives complained that these depressing flms were turning off audiences; moreover, in the blacklist years any critical or even pessimistic depiction of American society tended to be labeled unpatriotic and even thus subversive” (Lingeman 2012: 224). Made during the era when “Hollywood’s self-appointed censorship agency, the Production Code Administration” (PCA) controlled movie studios and issued “puritanical

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and ideological” reports, the 1941–1955 flms noir “were probably the most regulated, censored, and morally scrutinized pictures of the kind in American history” (Naremore 2019: 48, 50). Agitation will implode in 1950s noir and anti-communist hysteria will blossom, assuming a prominent narrative strand overtly in Pickup On South Street (d. Samuel Fuller, 1953) and, self-consciously, ironically in Sweet Smell of Success (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957), until fnding its one possible closure in the manipulative The Manchurian Candidate (d. John Frankenheimer, 1962), which thrives on Cold War paranoia (“a McCarthylike senator is shown to be an unwilling dupe of the communists”) and remains “deeply fearful of the Reds” (Naremore 1998: 132–133). Known for Burt Lancaster’s terrifying J.J. Hunsecker (who, as he stands by a midtown gutter, exclaims, “I love this dirty town”) and Tony Curtis’ sleazy Sydney Falco, Sweet Smell of Success, “scripted by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is the American cinema’s most acid commentary on the promoters and show-business types who profted from the blacklist” (Naremore 1998: 132). In its cynicism of fascination and loathing, Sweet Smell of Success echoes H .L. Mencken’s acid observation of 1927, “that New York had passed beyond all fear of Hell or hope of Heaven,” but nobody could accuse it of being dull. “The gorgeous, voluptuous color of this greatest of world capitals” meant that, “if only as spectacle” the city was “superb” and Mencken argued that “this spectacle, lush and barbaric in its every detail, offer[ed] the material for a great imaginative literature.” More still, “the spectacle of New York remains–infnitely grand and gorgeous, stimulating like the best that comes out of goblets, and none the worse for its sinister smack. It is immensely trashy–but it remains immense” (cited in Lees 1985: 296). As Georgakis (1998) has pointed out, “evidence of leftist images and dialogue in Hollywood flms was extremely slim.” Naremore is more precise in stating that noir’s “formative roots were in the left culture of the Roosevelt years”30 (Naremore 2019: 51); following the HUAC investigations in 1947 many of the important noir fgures were blacklisted (Abraham Polonsky), “grey listed” (Vera Casperay), exiled to Europe (Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, Orson Welles), and even imprisoned in contempt of Congress (The Hollywood Ten31) (Naremore 2019: 53, 55). Directors associated with liberal and left-wing Hollywood included John Huston, Orson Welles, Edward Dmytrick, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Nicolas Ray; several writers were socialists or Marxists (Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler), members albeit briefy of the Communist Party (Vera Casperay), anti-fascists (Dorothy B. Hughes), and by some accounts, social realists (Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain) (Naremore 2019: 51). Considering this evidence, even if Georgakis might

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seem convincing, neither are the urban settings mere spatial references of some abstract modern universe that contemporary visual imagination too often appropriates. Locations, whether in studio productions or in actual urban spaces, are sites of critical negotiations of social imaginaries with the American urban world.

Notes 1 Naremore, for instance, lumps all of these different noir cities into one Dark City category. In his view, noir interventions in subjectivity, atemporality, critique of modernity, and indeed, fear of women “came together in the representation of Dark City … which was transformed into mis-en-scene of the male unconscious (as in the Nighttown chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses), or into the shadowy vision of a seductive, American-style metropolis, flled with blind alleys” (Naremore 2019: 21). 2 Beauregard (1993 [2003]: 366) argues that discourses of decline became again pervasive within the American public sphere starting with the last years of World War Two, after a period of urban prosperity and post-Depression optimism. 3 The term flm noir refers to a cycle of flms encompassing a variety of genres, including crime stories, dramatization of hardboiled fction, “blood melodrama,” gothic horror, and dystopian science fction, produced between 1941 and 1958, which were only later recognized by French critics as belonging to the same corpus and characterized by the same dark or gloomy visual style. The noir style, determined in part by low budget limitations and the level of camera technology, drew from a variety of visual and narrative infuences, from the aesthetics of German expressionism (particularly discernible in the flms directed by exiled flmmakers, such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and Otto Preminger), to oneirism and surrealism, as well as from the French flms of the Popular Front in the 1930s and social realism of American flms of the same decade. Films infuenced by the social realist tradition featuring working class protagonists are also known as flm gris. Motifs in noir include “gangsters, cops, criminal adventure, love on the run, bourgeois murder, fatal passion, sexual pathology;” noir protagonists experience “loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style” (Schrader [1972] 1996: 58). These flm narratives avoid happy endings and present a critique of the emphasis on assumed optimism in mainstream culture. Naremore (1998: 11) argues that noir has to be seen in relationship to postmodern appropriations of the genre, and that it essentially represents an idea projected onto the past, as much as it also represents a signifcant critical tendency of the cinematic legacy of Hollywood. See also these sources: Borde, Chaumeton, and Hammond 2002, Chaumeton and Borde [1955] 1996, Christopher 1997, Dickos 2002, Hare 2004, Higham and Greenberg [1968] 1996, Hirsch 2001, Kaplan 1998, Kerr [1970] 1996, Muller 2001, Oliver and Trigo 2003, Place and Peterson [1974] 1996, Schrader [1972] 1996, Selby 1997, Silver and Ursini 1999a, Silver and Ursini 1999b. 4 Rising crime and deteriorating housing conditions are more prominent leitmotifs in flm noir than themes of unemployment, for example. 5 Beauregard (1993 [2003]: 376) notes this work as one of the tasks of urban research related to the discourses of decline. I apply this notion in the case of visions of the metropolis in flm noir. 6 Exemplifed in Lewis Mumford’s studies or in the 1939 documentary flm on which he collaborated, The City, as discussed in the previous chapters.

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7 Beyond the much-discussed male detective or femme fatale fgures, however, remains an entire range of city-bound opportunity-seekers, individuals trapped in poor areas and other downwardly mobile folk, ethnic neighborhood characters, wrongly accused fugitives, shrewd social climbers, struggling couples, cynical secretaries, despairing war veterans, daring children, and others who are simply not mere stereotypes but neither are they entirely subverters. 8 It is nevertheless evident that a number of flms noir can only indirectly be related to social or historical contexts, for example, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). 9 The demise of the war veteran (The Long Night [d. Anatole Litvak, 1947] and Side Street [d. Anthony Mann, 1950] as two very different examples) in either small town or urban noir is thus presented not as a result of traumas associated with warfare, but rather as triggered by the personal or socioeconomic circumstances particular to the environment. 10 These aspects can be seen in chapter 2, in particular. The opposite is the case in chapter 3 on “walking cures” (see especially the section “Bunker Hill”) and chapter 4 on “centrifugal spaces,” both of which entail extensive discussions of urban planning in California. 11 These categories perhaps cannot be expanded to include the entire opus but represent an initial attempt at outlining the ways in which visions of urban decline are represented in flm noir. 12 The city represents an environment in which crime occurs, but crime is not necessarily endemic to urbanity. 13 Although perhaps not as much as other genres, such as war flm or police procedurals. 14 Even in Kubrick’s highly stylized labyrinth-myth noir Killer’s Kiss (1955), which is in many ways a later-day noir homage to these older flms, a savagery of environment surfaces in the foreground, as is discussed in the following chapter. 15 In the flm's narrative, Nick Blanco’s two girls, who reside on 627 Pearl Street, are taken to an orphanage after he is imprisoned and his wife commits suicide. 16 Even if the Greenwich Village loft located in the narrative on 32 West 12th Street does not appear dilapidated, Kenyon’s otherwise married lover (played by Dana Andrews) who resides on 883 Park Avenue asks her ironically, “Why don't you live somewhere civilized?” and she will eventually abandon the city with a war veteran played by Henry Fonda. 17 The flm declares, “The street on which crime fourishes is the street extending across America. It is the street with no name. Organized gangsterism is once again returning. If permitted to go unchecked three out of every four Americans will eventually become its victims. Wherever law and order break down there you will fnd public indifference. An alert and vigilant America will make for a secure America.” 18 According to Teresa Castro (2017: 48) as well, the aerial view of the city captures two tendencies – the descriptive portrayal of the city and spectacularizing representation, which becomes “a matter of sensation;” following Dimendberg, Castro (2017: 59, 61) argues that in the Naked City these tendencies are haunted by “the fear of military annihilation,” the city becoming a target and a subject of social and political control. 19 Or perhaps, the audacious city, especially in the narratives such as Night and the City and Pickup on South Street. 20 On the architectural uncanny, see Vidler 2000. 21 Lingeman (2012: 212) notes that “NYPD vice squad cops regularly raided” jazz clubs, “acting on the presumption that they condoned drug use and racemixing.” Also, “[j]azz engendered its own biracial subculture. After the war,

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there were at least forty clubs in Brooklyn that featured jazz, blues, and boogiewoogie. Many more were in Harlem, most famously the Baby Grand on 125th Street and the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue, birthplace of the lindy hop in the thirties. The dance step was, less acrobatically, copied by white teenagers and spread by GIs overseas” (Lingeman 2012: 213). See Donald’s critique of de Certeau in Donald 1999: 14–16. Throughout the 1940s, representations of the skyline or of aerial views seem to explicitly exclude or avoid any traces of the lyricism of the vision in Manhatta (d. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921) or even Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927). The urban fragility is also present here as in the earlier visions, but it is meant instead to represent the threat of destruction. But the city becomes a vulnerable entity as well because of the social problems contained within it, as the noir classic The Naked City suggests. Neve (1992: 133) reports that the Production Code administrators in Hollywood “were shocked at the depiction of the police, and objected to the ‘completely antisocial basis theme of th[e] story, which presents wrong as right and right as wrong.’” In Polonsky’s own words, however, “Hollywood radicals were mainly moral humanists and their flms when they refected anything at all showed a concern for the suppressed elements in human life” (cited in Pechter 1962: 53). I thank Charles Silver, MoMA Film Archives for this resource. Garfeld’s voiceover later in the narrative alters from brazen confdence to interior confusion, uncertainty, and confict, to fnally emerge with renewed determination. This type of voiceover alteration is atypical of flm noir crime narratives, in which the narrator’s authority is commonly reinforced by the end of the flm. This is not, however, the case with flms noir such as Out of the Past or The Long Night (d. Anatole Litvak, 1947), but neither do these narratives feature the type of identity transformation that occurs in Force of Evil. The narrative builds up Morse’s arrogant lawyerly confdence of his position while gradually setting him apart from that environment: He is the only one in the upscale racket who is able to converse with the working class protagonists or even notice their existence; he is respectful of the black shoe shine man, chatty with the bell boy and the newspaper salesman. This notion emerges as well in Call Northside 777, set in Chicago, which shows that the resolution of a crime relies in part on forms of connectedness. And indeed Naremore even traces noir sensibilities to the years ending World War One (2019: 17). Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

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This book has argued that New York flms noir shape a cinematic discourse of the agitated city – a trope which fuses the contexts of World War Two with contested notions of urban alienation and myriad related social anxieties. Much is at stake here for the history of cinema in the contentious alignment of flm with the photographic base,1 as Kracauer, whose Theory of Film (published in 1960 and contemporaneous with 1950s cinema) argues that flm can be seen as an “expression of and a medium for the experience of a ‘disintegrating’ world,” a part of the broader “experience of modernity as living on the brink of catastrophe” (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxv, xi). As Miriam Hansen (in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxiv) puts it, “[t] he historical rupture of the Holocaust irrevocably changed the terms under which flm could still be imagined as a publicly available medium for experiencing and acknowledging the precariousness of the sovereign, identical self.” The argument here has been that spatial imagination, conveyed by the notion of the agitated city, is at the center of this cinematic experience.

Crises of masculinity and the abyss of the city Early 1950s agitated cinematic New York gazes into the abyss – a gaze in dialogue with 1940s cultural discourses of precariousness, dread, and disintegration of the self (Hutchinson 2018). Standing to take his own life at an upper story window of the Rodney Hotel at 140 Broadway, the lonely and desperate protagonist (Richard Basehart’s Robert Cosick) of 14 hours (d. Henry Hathaway, 1951) (see Figure 6.1) will recite to his abandoned girlfriend (Barbara Bell Geddes’ Virginia Foster), “I remember the empty doorway, the soft dark shadow that said good night … silent footsteps in silent street. Forgive me, Virginia, I am empty … restless lanterns of the dead.” A source notes that the very day the flm premiered in New York, 20th Century Fox executive Spyros Skouras’ daughter died of suicide by jumping from the eighth foor of the Bellevue Hospital; the flm company, under the guidance of Darryl F. Zanuck, immediately re-shot the ending in which Basehart’s leading protagonist jumps to his death, now to show him rescued (Muller 1998: 18). While the inter-title refers to the story as a

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Figure 6.1 Frame enlargement from Fourteen Hours (d. Henry Hathaway, 1951).

“photo play” insisting that the narrative is fctional, 14 hours, which virtually resembles a semi-documentary, is based on the real incident of 26 July 1938 in which John Warde remained on a window ledge for hours, leaping in the end to his death (Muller 1998: 17). Directed by studio craftsman Henry Hathaway and nominated for an Academy Award, the flm was made a year after Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) described inner-directed and other-directed cultural types, and explores themes of mass society, including mob psychology and manipulation by, and exploitation of, a possible tragedy on the part of the media. While Basehart appears in most medium shots and close-ups shown against the domineering Woolworth building as a pseudo “phallic signifer” (Hirsch 2006), in turn, the media reports from beneath the Singer Tower, which will be demolished in 1968. The narrative, however, frames the motif of mass society around a sense of psychological trauma, possibly even caused by suppressed homosexuality2 as the flm historian Foster Hirsch (2006) suggests, although perhaps more overtly by a suicidal tendency shaped by an urban void and an inability to fully inhabit a masculine urban post-war identity. In resonance with the 1940s’ flms noir, 14 hours hints at a war trauma3 and is invested in seeking resolution to family separation (Agnes Moorehead of Citizen Kane [ d. Orson Welles, 1941] and The Magnifcent Ambersons [d. Orson Welles, 1942], as the traumatizing mother), undermining divorce options (Grace Kelly in her frst flm, commenting on divorce, “you make it sound dirty”), seeking perhaps to cover up homosexuality (“[we will] try to straighten him out,” declares a

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concerned psychologist with a diminished authority, after acknowledging that “we have failed”), and to offer instead a narrative closure to two heterosexual strangers who accidentally meet and get separated, in the crowd, only to unite in the flm’s last shot. Hirsch points out in his commentary that the chief artist of the flm is the cinematographer Joe MacDonald (who also shot Call Northside 777 (d. Henry Hathaway, 1948), Dark Corner (d. Henry Hathaway, 1946), Street with No Name (d. William Keighley, 1948), and Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953), among numerous other flms), in his faultless interweaving of the 20th Century Fox studio lot and the actual city. By MacDonald’s camera placing an emphasis on empty spaces at the outset of the narrative, however, space is not simply “created for something ominous to happen” (Hirsh 2006), but rather space echoes the emptiness of the chief protagonist who is commonly shown in isolating shots. In this case, the threat of “alienation, disintegration, and mortal fear” which Kracauer weaves into the flm’s aesthetics (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xv) is here identifed as a sense of trauma in the urban environment as cinema places the viewer at the edge of the abyss to encounter “contingency, lack of control, otherness” (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxi). Ironically, however, and as Kracauer would argue predictably, a real life experience of the suicide of an executive’s daughter will save the leading protagonist and not the fatherly, understanding police offcer (Paul Douglas’ Charlie Dunnigan). But, of course, in this trope of last minute rescue, at stake for the viewer is “the flm’s ability to stage encounters with horror, mortality, and the other” (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxiv). While the larger trope of the Holocaust is tied to an annihilation of a collective subject (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxiv), the failure to establish a sense of, or a threat directed towards, an inclusive urbanity, characterizes cinematic New York of the 1950s. In the case of 14 hours, notable are the flm’s sequences of the diverse group of taxi drivers betting on the actual time that Robert Cosick would jump to his death. A black taxi driver, played by Ossie Davis who will in 1970 direct Cotton Comes to Harlem, is included but always off to the side, mostly listening to the conversations (Hirsch 2006). References to ethnic and racial backgrounds in the flm are suggestive of the assimilation of different white ethnic groups although the flm does not explore, but stereotypes, these ethnic options, as the unsympathetic police chief inquires, “Robert Cosick, what kind of a name is that?” In contrast, Paul Douglas’ character attempting to connect to Cosick will ask, “Did you buy a shamrock [the date listed on the Rodney Hotel’s calendar is Friday 17 March, the day of the St Patrick’s Day Parade] and Cosick will respond, “Are you Irish, I mean, of Irish derivation?” to which Douglas will reply that one does not need to be Irish to enjoy the parade, expressing a hopeful search for a supposedly embracing community of white groups of New Yorkers, in particular, as the mass media sources report within the flm, of New York’s fnest.

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Urban women who knew too much: Gender, class, and urban space If warfare is a shaping force of the male, vicious misogyny is perhaps the strongest shaping force of the agitated female identities in 1950s’ noirs. This is in continuum with the 1940s’ noir victims of male obsession (Dark Corner [1946, Henry Hathaway], Laura [1944, Otto Preminger]), although women now appear even more luridly victimized in The Killer’s Kiss (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1955) and The Big Combo (d. Joseph H. Lewis, 1955), as sadistic bosses employ guards to monitor, capture, and abuse female protagonists – at least until the female protagonist is empowered by possession of a lightning device, as in the closing sequence of The Big Combo. Photographed by John Alton who exemplifed a combination of realism and aestheticism (Naremore 2019: 80, 81), The Big Combo was one of the mid-level productions from the time when the Poverty Row system was in decline, and belongs to the world of, in Manny Farber’s language, “faceless” or “half-polished” melodramas, appearing virtually antiquated by noir standards of the previous decade (cited in Naremore 1998: 143, 156). Dimendberg (2004: 87–88) terms the opening sequence of the flm in which jazz music plays as the skyline appears “a striptease performance” unrevealing the body of the city, and of course, of the woman, for examination, appropriated here in a sadomasochistic context in which Richard Conte’s mobster Mr Brown controls and oppresses Jean Wallace’s Susan Lowell. With a “narrative resolutely urban in character,” The Big Combo’s opening sequence can be seen in relationship to the “growing cultural anxiety that the city had been eclipsed and its concentrated centers rendered inconsequential” (Dimendberg 2004: 89). And, indeed, the scene is that of the implied, supposed decline of the city’s downtown, awaiting urban renewal, and closely identifed with the body of a victimized woman, again, in resonance with The Naked City. Yet while a certain level of visual degradation of the skyline takes place in the opening sequence of The Big Combo in comparison to The Naked City, this has to do more with the solidifed class structure of the metropolis – the skyline no longer representing a dream of prosperity for the ordinary person, rather, becoming a marker of the new metropolitan landscape of power. Fear of women and of female criminality in The Killer That Stalked New York (d. Earl McEvoy, 1950) is represented as a contagious illness coming from Cuba (that is, Cuba before the revolution, but perhaps suggesting that the germs of social change were already present). Perhaps, rather cynically, this cycle, at least as far as New York flms are concerned, could be seen as ending with Cop Hater (d. William A. Berke, 1958), based on an Ed McBain novel set in New York’s fctional 87th precinct, in which an unsatisfed, ambitious woman (the killer of cops, played by Shirley Ballard) is posited against a mute feminine identity of a victim (Ellen Parker’s Teddy Franklin); the flm does not afford a voice or even a sign language to an oppressed

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female identity while promoting empathy for the police offcer (played by Robert Loggia) who dates her. And in parallel to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), New York’s Cry, Terror! (d. Andrew L. Stone, 1958) features a bomb threat upon the city, shown as hardly navigable by car as the suburbanized leading protagonist (Inger Stevens) drives from Queens to the Bronx to avert the catastrophe. In an overt class and sex struggle narrative, Sudden Fear (d. David Miller, 1952), set in San Francisco, the criminal protagonists (played by Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame) are New Yorkers, seemingly failed artists as in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 Detour (in which even despair is spatially coded, as Tom Neal’s protagonist comments in voiceover “Some people just ain’t got any good place”), this time seeking to marry into Joan Crawford’s Myra Hudson’s fortune on the West Coast. More broadly, straddling commercial popular culture and avant-garde art, aesthetic crime contexts (often, although not exclusively, urban) allowed the avoidance of sentimentality regarding the imagery of the poor and further explored the subjects of “sexual license and nighttime sociability,” (Straw 2006: 16, 6) as in, yet again, The Naked City. Similarities with tabloids, in particular the covers designed by Burt Owen for Inside Detective in the late 1950s, can be found in Kubrick’s earlier (yet late, by the standard of noir conventions, as the cycle was already waning) Killer’s Kiss, which show “men and woman as equally anguished participants in rough-edged, unglamorous moments of frozen drama” (Straw 2006: 11). And indeed Kubrick is in dialogue with other tabloids of the 1950s by abandoning the visual glamor of the 1940s and indulging instead in “posing [the female protagonist] in ways that highlight [her] degradation or vulnerability” (Straw 2006: 11). The police are absent from Killer’s Kiss, as is the forensic imagery, suggesting that crimes, in particular against women, go unpunished. The stylized settings of the flm imply a New York different from the actual place, parting from the semi-documentary genre typical of the late 1940s. Even the alluring solitary woman is shown as less glamorized than in the 1940s’ noir imaginary but here, again, she is victimized and oppressed. Cinematic New York contains sites, if often secluded from view, in which this misogyny is freely expressed. In Killer’s Kiss, the chief protagonist’s (Jamie Smith’s prizefghter Davey Gordon) concourse window, located possibly in the Bronx, frames a neighbor (Irene Kane’s dancer Gloria Price), as Kubrick is invested in the corporeality of the city (see Figure 6.2), selecting not accidentally Times Square as the locale in which bodies of boxers and dancers are traffcked, oppressed, even if liberated too, while opting for the Chelsea piers’ abandoned warehouses – the decaying social infrastructure of work – for notable scenes of brutal struggles featuring discarded manikins and resonating with contexts of World War Two. As Cocks points out, Kubrick was born in New York and grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of the West Bronx near the Grand Concourse and his cinema “hark[s] back

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Figure 6.2 Frame enlargement from Killer’s Kiss (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1955).

to a childhood marked by the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War” (Cocks 2010). Cocks (2010) fnds resonances with World War Two in Killer’s Kiss in which: a German Luger pistol is displayed in several scenes. Neither in flm noir nor on the streets of the United States was a Luger the weapon of choice. But the Luger was a common symbol of Nazi brutality in Hollywood war flms. Moreover, the fght with and among mannequins in Killer’s Kiss, which starts with a close-up of the Luger—very similar to a shot in the wartime flm Hotel Berlin (1945)—evokes disturbing associations with the photographs of bodies found stacked in Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Killer’s Kiss cost 75,000 dollars to produce (“flmed so cheaply that it has almost no direct sound recordings or dialogue … [includes] over-theshoulder shots to hide lip movement … and stage[d] conversations on the telephone [to facilitate dubbing]”) and did not feature well known stars (Naremore 1998: 157). Scenes in Times Square were photographed by a hidden camera and “show a couple of clownish fgures in Shriner hats dancing up and down the sidewalk,” (Naremore 1998: 157, 158) a site claimed by the dancer and the prizefghter. Their connection will be mediated by this urban center via cinematic “movement through the detritus of images [and indeed, in particular, images of the feminine] in Times Square [that]

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connects the workplaces of both characters” (Dimendberg 2004: 141). But these images are more closely linked to a “state of alienation” (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxv) that the characters experience – protagonists who are lost to the urban environment that they simply have to abandon. The Times Square of Killer’s Kiss anticipates “a certain ecstatic dynamism facilitated by excess – in consumption, spectacle, and sex” (Gorfnker 2011: 62) that will become a central part of the experience, including cinematic, of this agitated space in the 1960s. It is worth revisiting a history of Times Square of the 1950s, which in public discourses of the time shows signs of a supposed, much debated, decline – a familiar discourse of the presumably lost public realm of cosmopolitan culture within a democratic world of consumption. The city’s illuminated nights of Times Square shown in flm allowed New Yorkers to forsake the strenuous chores of the workday blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, and allowing for transgressions of class and nationality in which white denizens were beginning to “share a common commercial culture of public amusements where social solidarities were emphasized and distinctions muted” (Nasaw, Cited in Filipcevic 1996). Public outcry for cleanup of the area strengthened with an increase in pornographic bookstores, prostitution, and street crimes in Times Square in the 1950s (Knapp, Cited in Filipcevic 1996). In 1953, the Broadway Association complained that “the midway developing in Times Square as a result of the continued intrusion of amusement arcades and garish auction shops is earning New York the reputation of Honky-Tonk Town” (Stone, cited in Filipcevic 1996). Similarly, in January 1954 the authors of an article in Business Week complained that Times Square, with its penny arcades, souvenir shops, and fast-food outlets, was becoming “like a carnival,” a mockery of the public space it once was (Stern et al., cited in Filipcevic 1996). As conditions degenerated, a 1960 New York Times article called 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues the worst block of the city, “unsightly, raucous, offensive and, at times, dangerous;” it declared the southern boundaries of Times Square the city’s “unoffcial red-light district,” and not long after, a symbol of “urban pathology and decline” (Quoted in Knapp, cited in Filipcevic 1996). Importantly, behind these discourses hides in no small part fear of racial transition in the city, evident in particular in its public spaces and in The Killer’s Kiss, apparent in the racialized villain protagonist (Frank Silvera’s Vinnie Rapallo). Dimendberg (2004: 136) situates the condition of fânerie at the core of The Killer’s Kiss’ centripetal space, yet shots of the profoundly objectifed, violated bodies of the leading protagonists (especially of Irene Kane’s Gloria Price), appear rather as visualizations of oppressed, constrained bodies in a city of imploding agitation (contra Dimendberg’s “walking cures” 2004: 147). Dimendberg (2004: 148) is more correct in highlighting the centrality of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station, demolished in spite of protests in 1964, as suggestive too of “flm noir’s encounter with an urban environment undergoing physical alteration.” The narrative framing

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by sequences set in Penn Station invites a comparison with similar scenes in The Clock (d. Vincente Minnelli, 1945), yet the contingency, accidentality, and bureaucratic rationalization of the modernist city are articulated in that flm less by location and more by the wartime despair of its protagonists. The station, which appears in three fashbacks in Killer’s Kiss is, however, not simply Kracauer’s metaphor of chance and contingency (Dimendberg 2004: 137), but a linkage to the history of cinematic travel, in Bruno’s (2002) terms, a site of “cinematic (e)motion,” as the prizefghter anxiously awaits the dancer seeking to escape from the city for a ranch near Seattle – as urban agitation implodes within the protagonists, New York (shown in the prizefghter’s dream in a photographic negative) can only be escaped and not inhabited. The trajectory away from the city is apparent here, as it indeed is in true crime magazines in the second part of the 1950s – “away from big city pavements and apartments and towards regional cities and dusty small towns” (Straw 2006: 13) as “violence … simmered or exploded far from the well-entrenched capitals of crime, like New York or Chicago” (Straw 2006: 14). Straw (2006: 14) explains that 1930s’ banditry, small town and rural violence, signifed a lawless frontier now absent from a 1950s landscape characterized by a pervasive network of corruption and roaming killers in a variety of settings including peripheries (Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]), small towns, and suburbs. Straw locates instead within the true crime magazines, which excluded African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics, a class bias against poor whites “photographed to make their faces seem pale and undernourished.” Indeed, malnourished working- and middle-class New Yorkers unable to achieve decent existence inhabit the city in Side Street (d. Anthony Mann, 1950), as noted in the previous chapter, and, also, The Wrong Man (d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1956). In his famous review of Hitchcock’s work of “bleak realism,” French director Jean-Luc Godard emphasized close-ups of the face of Henry Fonda’s wrongly accused Manny Balestrero, suggesting that “such images pierce, as it were, the fabric of cinematic fction so that— even in flmmaking as controlled as Hitchcock’s—indexical, documentary contingency works as a guarantee of authenticity, of ‘exact truth’” (cited in Steimatsky 2007: 114, 112) which can be linked to “perhaps a more primal, vital doubt in confronting the searching, yielding dimensions of the face, and of the image thereof: in the magnifed but ineffable, projected closeup that illumines our own faces in the movie theater” (Steimatsky 2007: 133). Balestrero, a Stork Club bass player, is an Anglicized, whitened protagonist, mitigating the distancing of the 1950s audience, his Italian background “temper[ed]” even as Hitchcock “preserves his ethnic name, the ‘ethnicness’ of his Italian relatives, and his Catholic beliefs … refusing to offer a protagonist who is both innocent and blatantly ethnic” (Cavallero 2010: 3, 6). If Rear Window (d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)4 could be seen as a metaphor for the surveillance practices of the McCarthy era, The Wrong

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Man could be viewed as an elaboration of the policing and psychological traumas of McCarthyism. “Shot on location in Queens, Hitchcock’s flm was designed to capture in detail the questionable methods used by police authorities in establishing the guilt of an individual” (Genter 2012). In contrast, the shots of the Stork club highlight Manny’s exclusion from the club’s upper class clientele, and shots of his neighborhood, Jackson Heights, emphasize his loneliness, submissiveness, and indebtedness – an environment Manny’s traumatized family will end up escaping for Florida at the end of the narrative.

At the edges of the city: Race and cinematic urban space An inability to form interracial alliances, along with an inability to even express black (and in the leading roles, it is for the most part male) identities, which appear as muted, dormant, and oppressed, characterizes the 1950s imploding agitation. This is the case with Edge of the City (d. Martin Ritt, 1957), Shadows (d. John Cassavetes, 1958), and Odds Against Tomorrow (d. Robert Wise, 1959). Odds Against Tomorrow explores racial tensions among war veterans (see Figure 6.3), ending with an explosion in a small town on the Hudson that suggests that racial confict has mounted to an untenable degree reaching far beyond the city’s limits. The flm’s settings, all pervaded by racial tensions and an inescapable simmering hatred, are shaped by an opposition between Manhattan shown as “bleak, draughty, wintry and inhospitable” and Melton, a modest town on the Hudson, “cloaked in alienating twilight doom” (McDonnell 2007: 60), where the protagonists will be unable to

Figure 6.3 Frame enlargement from Odds Against Tomorrow (d. Robert Wise, 1959).

184 Agitation implodes pull off a bank heist. Naremore (1998: 241, 242) has termed Odds Against Tomorrow, “an allegory of racial confict,” a flm “unsentimental in depicting the wounds of race and social class.” Murphet (1998: 32–33) fnds that the “latent white supremacy of the canonical hard-boiled noir protagonist is at last given bilious expression within a wider cultural frame of black pride and expression, civil rights and agitation” in Odds Against Tomorrow, which in this manner brings to the surface the lack of consciousness about race in noir. The flm included Harry Belafonte as Jimmy Ingram – coerced into crime because of gambling debts, he rejects his wife’s PTA activism as a form of integration with white New Yorkers. In a dialogue with his wife (Kim Hamilton’s Ruth Ingram), when she argues, “I am trying to make a world ft for Eadie [their daughter] to live in. It’s a cinch you’re not going to do it with a deck of cards and a racing form,” Ingram only replies, “But you are, huh? You and your big white brothers. Drink enough tea with ’em and stay out of the watermelon patch and maybe our little colored girl will grow up to be Miss America, is that it?” In speaking as a guest for the flm’s screening: Belafonte [who waived the actor’s fee for the flm and invested a quarter of million dollars in the flm and was seeking to create in a flm a “deeper resonance of black life”] explained that he wanted to depict a black character who would not stand for any humiliation. It was also a way to tell Hollywood that he would not kowtow to their idea of how a black character should behave. (Proyect 1999) The flm is based on a script by the now blacklisted Abraham Polonsky (writing under pseudonym John O. Killens – a black writer, active in the civil rights movement who later became a black nationalist and a supporter of Malcolm X [Proyect 1999]) who had stated that he chose to write a flm about criminals because “American society itself was criminal and the flm’s characters were just trapped within the system” (Cited in Proyect 1999). The flm ends with the morgue attendants unable to distinguish the disfgured bodies of the black and white protagonists, one of whom includes Robert Ryan (Earle Slater) playing a southern racist whose expressions convey racial tensions, recalling his role in Crossfre (d. Edward Dmytryk, 1947), which explored anti-Semitism and hinted at a broader history of racism and ethnic exclusion (Naremore 1998: 116).5 A liberal actor who had spoken out for economic and racial justice in the 1930s and the 1940s, Ryan here portrays a World War Two veteran unable to reintegrate into society, recently released from prison on a manslaughter charge (Proyect 1999). In its nightclub scenes, Odds Against Tomorrow does not neglect the centripetal urban landscape (contra Dimendberg 2004: 175; see also, Frey 2006). Reviewing the music for Odds Against Tomorrow in Fanfare, Bayley (2014: 114) discusses the frst jazz composition written for a flm by John Lewis and terms it a brilliant score, suggesting that the music makes the

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reviewer even inquire, is it really (or still) jazz? (A different implosion, imbued with a kind of sensitive agitation around the creative processes in cinema and music making, is found in Shirley Clarke’s Connection (1961) which concerns drug-addicted jazz musicians and their friends waiting for a score in a New York loft.) In another urban feature which commences with a striking musical (party) sequence (see Figure 6.4) and which plays with “[i]dentit[ies] [as] shifting, combinatory fgure[s], musical phrases in the score of being” (Chambers 1997: 233), John Cassavetes’ Shadows explores the beat generation and race. Cassavetes exemplifed independent flmmaking in the U.S. and was symbolic of the American New Wave, critical of mainstream cinema’s focus on the surfaces of representation, artifciality of expression, lack of ambiguity, and predetermined identities. Cassavetes focused instead on subjective realism, on actual, tangible, observable realities – the “dirty, unanalyzed, raw data” (Carney 1994: 17) shaping cinematic meanings “anchored in … actual tones, gestures, and social expressions” (Carney 1994: 16). His cinema was further characterized by class consciousness, focusing on vulnerable, fringe, socially excluded characters, “honor[ing] minority imaginative positions” (Carney 1994: 33). In Shadows, Cassavetes created urban identities that were fexible, unformulated, loose, open, yet also volatile, tensionridden, explosive, extremely impulsive, even self-destructive, attempting to reclaim the city even if their projects were perhaps futile. A young woman (Leila Goldoni), possibly of a bi-racial identity who appears to be passing as white, claims that she cannot walk safely in the streets of New York – the flm will show her walking to the Liberty theater where she is pursued by a passerby then defended by a bystander played

Figure 6.4 Frame enlargement from Shadows (d. John Cassavetes, 1958).

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by John Cassavetes; daydreaming (she insists) of kissing perfect strangers on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, but choosing instead to kiss Tony (Anthony Ray), a white boyfriend who will turn racist. Racial animosity is unspoken in the flm and limited to glances (“I saw the way he looked at you and I also saw the way he looked at me”) and shown as a black shadow over Leila’s face. The flm will identify “just a problem with the races” and Tony’s apology (“There is no difference between us”) will be ridiculed by Ben (Ben Carruthers), whose stroll through the streets of New York starts and ends the narrative; in one sequence, the flm shows Ben passing by and ignoring perhaps a protest strike in the streets. The sequence of fâneurie, which ends the flm, echoes flm-city theories: “Film corresponds to profound changes in the perceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffc” (Benjamin, cited in Clarke 1997: 2). But as Leila dances now with a black boyfriend, he will undermine her identity (“where I come from, men do the asking”), leaving her further away from her dreams of liberty. Carney (1994: 286, 48) praises the flm not for the theme of race-relations (referring to Cassavetes as “color-blind”), but for the “breakthrough into new ways of knowing and feeling” and for pressing the viewer “into a less certain relationship with artistic conventions of representation.” But Cassavetes’ improvised art in Shadows (his flms other than Shadows were, however, scripted [Charity 2001]; nevertheless, the reference here is to the use of “non-actors, a hand-held camera, cinema verité style extreme closeups,” etc. [Viera 1990: 40]) captures the experience of everyday urban life. Here, as Kracauer ([1960] 1997: 303, 304) states, as if writing about Shadows, [s]treet and face … open up a dimension much wider than that of the plots they sustain. This dimension extends, so to speak, beneath the superstructure of specifc story contents; it is made up of moments within everybody’s reach … form[ing] a resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and revolutions. Edge of the City (see Figure 6.5) is more explosive with its overt exploration of racism and the limits of racial solidarity, echoing as well the settlement house movement and the subject of Puerto Rican integration in New York. The flm is unique in its attempt to explore a racial-hatred act of violence among longshoremen (the setting similar to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront [1954]), imagery completely absent from the 1950s true crime magazines that focused solely on white criminality (see Straw 2006: 14). Racism itself is, however, evident in the promotional posters for the flm: the MGM press-book for Edge of the City (1957) … neglect[ed] to show any African Americans in the poster art and relegat[ed] discussion of Black themes to the ‘special audiences’ … The exhibitors from

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Figure 6.5 Frame enlargement from Edge of the City (d. Martin Ritt, 1957).

Baltimore’s Met Theater, however, played up Sidney Poitier’s presence in the plot rather obviously and somewhat ominously, promising an action-flled confict between him and a white man. (Scott 2013) “This was my fght,” John Cassavetes’ Alex Nordmann will cry as he holds his friend Sidney Poitier’s Tommy Tyler’s dying body in a shot which seemingly makes it unclear whether the former is in fact holding the latter’s body or choking him (see Figure 6.6).

Figure 6.6 Frame enlargement from Edge of the City (d. Martin Ritt, 1957).

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Urban alienation: Blast of Silence and Something Wild An epitaph perhaps on (the corpse of) noir, two most unsettling flms (shot on location in New York City) Something Wild (d. Jack Garfein, 1961) and Blast of Silence (d. Allen Baron, 1961), suggestive of urban alienation and an inability to cope with urban change, were both made in 19616 – the very same year that Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. No trace of the 1930s and the 1940s agitation is present here, no identity that needs to be flled or that has “decided to help,” as in the ending to Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), is even palatable in the cinematic cities of Something Wild and Blast of Silence, whose protagonists seem unable to inhabit the urban environment (see Figure 6.7). Rather, the solitary victim (Carroll Baker) in Something Wild, based on the Alex Karmel 1958 novel Mary Ann, and the lonely criminal (Allen Baron) in Blast of Silence, can only be lost to the city, lost within its crowds, remaining apart from the neighborhoods that they traverse. In Something Wild, rape occurs in a park which is shown as empty and this emptiness will haunt the leading protagonist who is often visualized in isolating shots. The flm will continue to unsettle given that, as Sobchack points out, the victim “fall[s] for her would-be attacker” (Sobchack 1977: 13); citing Kracauer’s theory of flm and references to the dream state of the viewer watching this narrative unfold, Sobchack (1977: 14) points out that the traditional rape narrative forces a passivity upon a viewer, absolving him/her of a sense of complicity and social responsibility.

Figure 6.7 Frame enlargements from Blast of Silence (d. Allen Baron, 1961).

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Jack Garfein, whom Film Quarterly described in 1963 as “America’s angriest director” of the moment, a Holocaust survivor and a disciple of the Actors’ Studio, shot the flm for $350,000 (Garfein and Johnson 1963: 38), although The New York Times claimed that Something Wild cost $900,000 (Horak 2014: 244). Designed by Saul Bass, the opening sequence prominently features the United Nations building, “[modernist] urban architecture, traffc, and teeming masses of pedestrians in the frst three-quarters and city lights in the last quarter” (Horak 2014: 243). The sequence is divided into three sections of 65 seconds, 65 seconds, and 35 seconds, and includes images of the city, nature, and again the city (Horak 2014: 245–246). As Horak describes this menacing modernism of the city which dwarfs a woman, the opening shot: ends with the camera panning down a building, the movement accelerating by switching to longer focal lengths, as the above-the-title credits for the production company and Carroll Baker appear onscreen in white sans serif type. The movement comes to an abrupt halt on a bird’s-eye view of a city street; trolley tracks slice the image at the horizontal axis, and the flm’s title appears centered just above as Aaron Copland’s blaring horns signify city traffc. (Horak 2014: 245) Garfein sought to convey the “poetry” and “not documentary” of the city, positioning the main protagonist outside of the possibility of human connection as she navigates the “horror and beauty” of urban life (Morgan and Garfein 2017). Following the rape sequence, Carroll Baker’s Mary Ann Robinson seeks “self-rehabilitation in the New York slums … working in a fve-and-ten cent store” (Garfein and Johnson 1963: 36) only to abandon those pursuits, attempt a suicide, yet be saved by a truck driver who subsequently assaults her in a drunken state. While she escapes and goes on a “walking cure” through the city, she eventually returns to her assaulter to have a child with him; the narrative ends with her reunion with her middleclass mother who asks, “What has happened?” In explaining his preoccupation with violence and sadistic domination, Garfein (Garfein and Johnson 1963: 39) in an interview referred to himself as a product of the violence of concentration camps in Auschwitz and Belsen (“One’s whole life is literally changed by making oneself cope with violence... We live in an age of violence.”), and this projection of war trauma onto the main protagonist and the urban environment is central to the flm. Huyssen (2015: 19) criticizes commentators on Kracauer who depict him as interpreting the city “exclusively as emblem of alienation, ego loss, reifcation, and anomie, as catastrophic space of modernity gone awry and

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overwhelmed by abstract forms of empty time and empty space,” as is apparent in the opening sequence of Something Wild. Huyssen warns that in Kracauer urban space is not coded solely as negative, and neither is it in Something Wild or in Blast of Silence in which the protagonists also undertake “walking cures.” And in this manner too in both flms “space leaves its marks on bodies and subjectivities.” It is signifcant that, as is the case of Something Wild, “[p]sychic experiences are more than simply internal as they are always embodied and related to the urban environment” (Huyssen 2015: 6). In Something Wild, Mary Ann, after she collapses in the subway, gives her address, 614 Greene Street (in what is now Soho) to the police offcer who will bring her home to her mother (Mildred Dunnock’s Mrs Gates) to nurse her, and the narrative continues with the following indoor scene: Mary Ann’s mother wearing a dress and a white embroidered half apron, looking out of the window: “[T]here … some more of those dirty people [who] have moved in the next block. Honestly, I do not know what is going to happen with this neighborhood.” Mary Ann, in bed, yells back: “Everyone is dirty.” Mother continues: “Eat some more. How can you expect to get well? … I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. Honestly, you cannot even go out in the streets alone at night.” Mary Ann, cynically: “Why? What could happen?” Mother: “Anything could happen. People do all sorts of things. This used to be such a nice neighborhood. People in the shops were so polite. People on the streets were decently dressed. On Sunday, everybody went to church. Now all of those people have moved out. Nothing left but dirt and noise and people sitting on the steps staring at you. Oh, I know it’s not their fault. Honestly, I don’t feel at home anymore. I feel like a positive stranger. It is terrible, terrible.” Garfein describes shooting in the Lower East Side (see Figure 6.8): While I was working on Something Wild, the Screen Actors Guild closed me down for a day because I went down the street on which we were shooting on the Lower East Side and talked actual people on the block into portraying themselves. The excitement of making a flm lies in using people in their neighborhoods, and capturing the actuality of drama going on without people being aware of it. The people were much better than extras. They didn’t give a damn and paid absolutely no attention to the camera. I went down and found that grimy rooming house [where Mary Ann briefy resides], rented a room for six dollars a week, and the landlord did not even care who I was or who Carroll was, or why she wanted to live up there. The indifference of the big city

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Figure 6.8 Frame enlargement from Something Wild (d. Jack Garfein, 1961).

dweller is a very rare thing … But by shooting on actual locations in the city, the visual essence of what might happen to Mary Ann on those streets, when walking through those neighborhoods, adds to the tension of the flm. (Garfein and Johnson 1963: 40) And in turn, the promotional poster for the equally, albeit differently, disquieting Blast of Silence describes a killer “on a murder safari into the dark depths of the asphalt jungle.” Shots of Harlem (with the Apollo Theater in the background), which in the words of its flm director contained a “certain kind of mystery and intrigue, certain kind of excitement that you couldn’t fnd downtown” (Cited in Fischer and Reichart 2007), include a school teacher and a civic service employee who play New York gangsters. Stander’s narrator explains, while the camera tracks Allen Baron’s Frankie Bean’s walk on 125th Street (see Figure 6.9): The streets of Harlem are busy enough. No one notices you. The hate of Harlem. You catch a danger signal. Your hands are sweating, but that’s all right, because you know what it is: you hate them and they hate you, like another Harlem where you grew up. The police stopped the flmmakers in Harlem, as the director Allen Baron explained in the documentary about the flm, “The biggest diffculty we had was from the New York Police Department. They saw us continuously circling the block and they pulled us over and they accused us of doing secret

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Figure 6.9 Frame enlargement from Blast of Silence (d. Allen Baron, 1961).

photography of the New York Police Department” (Cited in Fischer and Reichart 2007).7 This existentialist flm about a contract killer that explores the subject of loneliness in the city (“You are alone. But you don’t mind that, you are a loner. That’s the way it should be”) is inspired by the director’s life and work in Manhattan, near 34th Street and Third Avenue. The alienated fgure of a gangster entertains delusions of making his mark upon the cityscape. The flm’s uncredited narrator – a blacklisted actor Lionel Stander – tells the viewers and the leading protagonist alike, “You could have been an engineer, you could have been an architect too.” The “gritty feeling” of the city is underscored by the soundtrack which includes a racially diverse groups of musicians performing at The Village Gate, singing, “The sky is faming orange and the streets are golden brown. And I am gonna fnd my baby in this torrid, torrid town.” Then, playing a conga drum, the singer continues, “Clear the streets of gold and brown before I lift my head then I’ll fnd my baby and her lover I’ll shoot her very dead.”

Jane Jacobs, uses of sidewalks, and cinematic New York In 1961, the same year that Something Wild and Blast of Silence were shot in New York, Jane Jacobs (1961: 55) argued that a “profound misunderstanding of cities” underlies attempts to plan the city or reform city life. Jacobs had in mind the mistakes of urban planning but her canonical

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reading of the Village of the 1950s is illustrative for the flm discussions here. First, according to Jacobs, the chief characteristic of cities and their sidewalks is publicness and this is apparent in the endless strolls through the city of the leading protagonists in Blast of Silence and Something Wild. We might here even recall Simmelian social “effects of particular forms of connectivity, assemblies, fows, proximity, closeness and presences” (Pløger 2006) and Jacobs (1961: 56) indeed would argue that what underlies these forms of connectivity “is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust … [that] implies no private commitments.” As Marshall Berman points out, streets, according to Jacobs, contained a “complex order:” a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. Its essence is the intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city, and liken it to dance. (Berman 1982: 150; see also Page and Mennel 2017 and Gratz 2010) Jacobs (1961: 56) argues, similarly to Simmel and Wirth, that cities cannot be compared to small towns; life in them would become stultifed, if all contact were based on primary ties. Both protagonists in Blast of Silence and Something Wild fnd lone, empty rooming houses, where they remain isolated although not cut off from forms of connectivity. Carroll Baker’s Mary Ann Robinson’s privacy is constantly violated by noisy neighbors in Something Wild and Allen Baron’s Frankie Bean will eventually break down in his isolation seeking to reconnect to old girlfriends, and his inability to do so will foster his demise. Second, in Jacobs (1961: 58), informal public sidewalk life bolsters a more formal, organizational public life through delicate balancing of publicness and privacy. “A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around” (Jacobs 1961: 59). Instead, the protagonists of these two flms, who attempt to engage in “walking cures,” will be unable to inhabit the city since their sidewalks will represent the danger of human contact, of discovery, of absence of enjoyment, and impossibility of help from a passerby who may in fact become a questionable ally as in Something Wild. Public spaces in the city contain, according to Jacobs (1961: 57), tangible enterprises such as gathering spaces – the places of commercial retail (bars, candy stores, bodegas, restaurants). “Formal public organizations in cities require an informal public life underlying them, mediating between them

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and the privacy of the people in the city.” Jazz clubs and bars in flm noir represent such tangible enterprises (such as, for example, in When Strangers Marry [d. William Castle, 1944]) but scenes in The Village Gate jazz club in Blast of Silence in effect ironize that – clubs and bars have become seedy sites of criminal networks, while the criminal underworld does not appear to exist in Jacobs’ romanticized Village of the 1950s. Jacobs argues that privacy is indispensable in cities: unlike in the small towns, people in cities do not know each other’s private affairs. People are not supposed to investigate one another or meddle in each other’s privacy. This shield of privacy in the city allows Allen Baron’s Frankie Bono to briefy attempt to inhabit the city and for Carroll Baker’s Mary Ann Robinson victim to hide in the city. Another characteristic of cities identifed by Jacobs most sharply divides the cinematic New York of the 1940s and the 1950s from Jacobs’ (1961: 59) account – the notion of public character. Public characters know who is trusted in the neighborhood, “who is defant of the law and who upholds it, who is competent and well informed and who is inept and ignorant.” Jacobs emphasizes trust in public characters citing stores (a deli, a grocery, a candy store) where people leave their keys for friends and where public characters such as store owners who have an “excellent social status” perform informal service for neighborhood residents. They further maintain the delicate balance between publicness and privacy by not introducing neighborhood residents to one another but rather by bringing up matters of common interest (Jacobs 1961: 61). Jacobs seems to argue that class differences are muted by the public characters who have a good social status but who are not symbolic of class difference. Nonetheless, she does not discuss class differences although many of her examples include streets which have poor residents, including those who reside in public housing projects, which she sees as spaces that cannot contain tangible enterprises of public sidewalk life. Together with the tangible enterprises and the sidewalks themselves, there is a great deal of opportunity for public contact; there is no need for public characters to do anything but to unconsciously enforce “the line between the city public world and the world of privacy” (Jacobs 1961: 62). Jacobs notes that public characters are storekeepers or barkeeper and describes how “word gets around” in the neighborhood, but also shows how she became a public character fghting the construction of Robert Moses’ proposed highway which would have destroyed the West Village. The Village was, in her words, “waging an interminable and horrendous battle to save its main park from being bisected by a highway.” She was depositing in local stores “petition cards protesting the proposed roadway” (Jacobs 1961: 70) and was able to mobilize neighborhood “homespun insurgency … [that could also] play hardball city politics, publicly attacking agency heads for corruption or confronting the mayor with scathing ultimatums” (Klemek 2008: 315). Contrast all of this now with, for example, the agitated New York of the 1940s in Phantom Lady (d. Robert Siodmak, 1944), produced by Joan

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Figure 6.10 Frame enlargement from Phantom Lady (d. Robert Siodmak, 1944).

Harrison (formerly Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary), which is indeed Simmelian in its visual confrontation of the gaze with strangers and its emphasis on urban anonymity, as Dimendberg (2004: 32) does not fail to point out. Alan Curtis’ engineer Scott Henderson will comment in a taxi to Fay Helm’s Ann Terry, an elegant woman with a hat picked up in a bar on Broadway, “There is something that gets me about this town. Did you ever walk down Broadway and watch the people’s faces … ? Here is your typical New York character.” As Peter Dreier (2006) describes Jacobs’ urban vision, “[c]ities, she believed, should be untidy, complex, and full of surprises. Good cities encourage social interaction at the street level … They get people talking to each other.” And seemingly, a decade earlier than Jacobs’ account, cinematic New York allows for strangers to establish contact and maintain the delicate balance of publicness and privacy, with Fay Helm’s protagonist making, however, a condition to her accidental date, “No names, no addresses,” just two strangers spending an evening together at the theater, allowing for an uneasy connection between the two protagonists (see Figure 6.10). According to Jacobs: it is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity of excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships. It is possible to

196 Agitation implodes be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different from oneself, and even, as time passes, on familiar public terms with them. (Jacobs 1961: 62) This is the 1940s noir city of Phantom Lady in which, it bears restating, the killer (Franchot Tone’s Jack Marlow) declares that he hates cities and “the people in them” (“I never liked cities. Noise, dirt, and the people in them. They hate me because I’m different from them”) but not, of course, the 1950s noir city of Killers’ Kiss (in which two strangers who are alike will connect and try to escape the city). Yet, importantly, Alan Curtis’ Scott Henderson of Phantom Lady will be betrayed by “eyes on the street” – no one will be able exonerate him until his secretary Ella Raines’ Carol Richman or “Kansas” as he calls her, perilously traverses the streets. With some notable exceptions, public characters are absent from both flms noir and cinema of the 1950s and are in many cases ironized, such as Phantom Lady’s unreliable bartender (who can be compared with a suspicious bartender in Criss Cross (1949), also directed by Robert Siodmak), taxi driver, or jazz drummer (all of whom appear to accept bribes) who will fail to provide an alibi for the wrongly accused protagonist. Perhaps the most outstanding cinematic public character is, however, Thelma Ritter’s Moe Williams in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street yet her character is narratively appropriated to highlight an anti-communist agenda (“What I know about commies? … Listen, I know one thing, I just don’t like them”) and she will in the end become a victim of crime suggesting the waning of an impoverished public character who cannot afford a decent funeral. “[Ritter’s] lips visibly tremble, and her voice cracks as she laments, “I gotta go on making a living so I can die” (Smith 2018), before she is murdered by a communist. The segregated, policed Harlem of 1961 in Blast of Silence sharply contrasts with Jacobs’ accounts. Jacobs, who was inspired by the vitality and diversity of New York and celebrated the Village of the 1950s and early 1960s when it was mostly a white middle and working class area, claims that segregation and racial discrimination is inversely proportional to sidewalk life. But improving sidewalk life seems unlikely to end segregation and racial discrimination (see also Laurence 2016: 11). Jacobs (1961: 72) argues still that “building and rebuilding big cities whose sidewalks are unsafe and whose people must settle for sharing much or nothing, can make it much harder for American cities to overcome discrimination no matter how much effort is expended.” Moreover, Jacobs (1961: 72) argues that “[o]vercoming residential discrimination comes hard where people have no means of keeping a civilized public life on a basically dignifed public footing, and their private lives on a private footing;” “allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignifed and reserved terms.” This is shown as impossible in Blast of Silence, even as the criminal underworld crosses the racial divide and gathers in clubs such as The Village Gate where diverse musicians play sordid songs.

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Figure 6.11 Frame enlargement from Something Wild (d. Jack Garfein, 1961).

And none of the flms unpack the problem of racial segregation, not even Odds Against Tomorrow or Edge of the City – the flms in which black female protagonists in minor roles join efforts together with white neighbors to integrate communities, yet these efforts are seen as insuffcient or are rendered futile by the fate of the leading black male protagonists. Yet perhaps a singular contribution of the New York cinema of the 1940s and the 1950s, when juxtaposed against Jacobs’ accounts, is that flms do expose the economic insecurity of residents, as in The Wrong Man, and show how some have turned to crime, as in Side Street: something that Jacobs’ romanticized view fails to comprehend. In Something Wild, as Carroll Baker’s traumatized heroine passes by park benches in New York, countless ones are occupied by homeless men apparent in the foreground of the tracking shot; in another shot, Garfein flms a homeless man’s outstretched hand in the foreground (see Figure 6.11). In seeing merchants as guarantors of safety, Jacobs failed, according to Herb Gans (2006), to note the ways in which they too engaged in crimes such as the numbers racquet or participated in the underground economy, as can be seen most poignantly in Force of Evil, discussed in the previous chapter, or accepting bribes, as is the case with Phantom Lady. Jacobs somehow imagines that there will be no crime if local level surveillance by eyes on the street worked. “But it was clear by the late 1960s that amid the class disparities and racial polarities that skewered American city life, no urban neighborhood anywhere, not even the liveliest and healthiest could be free from crime, random violence, pervasive rage and fear” (Berman 1982: 153–154) – the contexts that late noir with its imploding agitation brings into the foreground.

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Urban renewal and a critique of the rationalist project in planning The cinematic urban spaces of late noir contrast sharply with the offcial discourses of 1950s urbanization. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 1956 documentary flm The Dynamic American City, for example, uses imagery of New York to show the “obsolescence” of “outmoded” multi-story structures, and declares that we must “clear away the structures that block progress,” ending with the shots of “the rubble of demolition at the feet of Columbus.” Showing bulldozers demolishing buildings, the documentary flm’s narrator intones, “getting needed space in our cities for modern structures is the only way to meet the competitive force of growing suburban strength,” declaring further that “we are steadfast … the hammer of demolition will be sure to swing with determination.” Jane Jacobs, who naively embraced neighborhood self-suffciency, was a crucial critic of urban renewal, in particular public housing and highway development projects in the Village (see Alexiou 2006: 5–6). Yet to understand the documentary flm The Dynamic American City, Jacobs, and legacies of the modernist project, it is important to come to terms with the rationalist project in planning. René Descartes, the 17th century rationalist philosopher, used the metaphor of the city to describe the history of philosophy before him. In his description, the city appears as building layered and following upon building without a sense or order, without any precise or coherent “whole.” While some individual structures possess beauty or sense of proportion, the whole appears distorted. Descartes perceived the task of his philosophy to be the razing of this jumbled city, eliminating its problems by starting from scratch and building a modern city upon an entirely new foundation. According to Descartes: ancient cities that were once merely straggling villages and have become in the course of time great cities are commonly quite poorly laid out, compared to those well-ordered towns that an engineer lays out on a vacant plain as it suits his fancy. (Descartes 1980: 6–7) A striking resemblance can be seen between the writings of Descartes and those of the preeminent modernist architect Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier, who proclaimed, “We must build on a clear site!” similarly proposed demolition of all “disorderly” parts of historic Paris north of the Seine River.8 Although Descartes obviously admired certain historic buildings but not perhaps entire “historic” districts while Le Corbusier didn’t, they both shared an admiration for the individual talent of architects, as well as a belief in the rationality, objectivity, and power of a plan. According to Le Corbusier, “the architect by his arrangement of forms realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he affects our

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senses to an acute degree and provokes plastic emotion” (Cahoone 1996: 200). Furthermore, according to Le Corbusier, “everything would be determined by the plan, and the plan would be produced objectively by experts” (Cited in Hall 1988: 10). Moreover, Le Corbusier argues: the Plan is the generator. Without a plan, you have lack of order, and willfulness. The Plan holds in itself the essence of sensation. The great problems of to-morrow, dictated by collective necessities, put the question of “plan” in a new form. Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan both, for the house and the city. (cited in Cahoone 1996: 201) The modernist city has become in many ways associated with Le Corbusier’s designs, but its theoretical roots lie much further back in history.9 The institutionalization of planning as a state intervention embodies “the modernist project of planning,” in particular in the rational comprehensive paradigm which has roots in the early Chicago School of Urban Ecology that has infuenced early 20th century planning movements like the City Functional, and to some extent the City Beautiful, and Garden City movements. Universalism, functionalism, neglect of diversity of conditions and people, and disregard for culture and heritage – these “values” already established by the Chicago School were appropriated and reshaped by the rationalcomprehensive planning model. In Death and Life, Jane Jacobs makes this connection explicit. Just as the Garden City movement was marked by a profound anti-urban bias or at the least ambivalence about the urban environment, similarly Le Corbusier’s design is “paternalistic, if not authoritarian” (Jacobs 1961: 19). Mumford’s writing off the diverse, many-faceted life of the city as the “poison of vicarious vitality” and the Regional Planning Association of America’s (RPAA’s) plan to create self-continued decentralized communities in “garden” suburbs (see Luccarelli 1995: 3–4) becomes in Jacobs’ eyes similar to Le Corbusier’s vision of the “vertical” garden-city: suppose we are entering the city by way of the Great Park. Our fast car takes the special elevated motor track between the majestic skyscrapers: as we approach nearer, there is seen the repetition against the sky of the twenty-four skyscrapers, to our left and right on the outskirts of each particular area are the municipal and administrative buildings; and enclosing the space are the museums and university buildings. The whole city is a Park. (Jacobs 1961: 21) The most similar aspect of the two movements is, however, the fact that “good” planning is in both cases perceived as “a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes” (Jacobs 1961:

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19). These notions became embodied in the rational-comprehensive model, which emerged in the 1950s at a time when the role of the public sector in planning was increasing and is still, especially in transportation planning, considered as one of the most infuential paradigms in planning. The need to coordinate complex public interventions (such as urban renewal projects and integrated land use-transportation networks), led to the use of a functional scientifc method derived from transportation engineering and computer technologies. “Planning, it was argued, could be based on rational choice among alternatives, using quantifed techniques” (Hall 1988: 19). In this manner, the rational-comprehensive model is similar to the neo-classical economic model that treats individuals as autonomous subjects that act upon their choices. Patsy Healey’s (1996a: 148) communicative action paradigm provides this critique of the rational model: “public policy facilitates this allocatory process by authoritative structures (rules) based on ‘market information’” (see also Healey 1996b). In the “Science of Muddling Through,” Lindblom (1996) points out the limitations of the rational-comprehensive model: an inability to deal with complex situations, problems in deciding what values to give preference to, diffculties with the means-end approach when the values are not agreed upon, and problems with degrees of comprehensiveness. In Beauregard’s (1984: 257; see also, Beauregard 1996b) phrase, the rational-comprehensive model reduces planning theory (and planning solutions) to “an abstract process applicable to any problem.” It is as if the rational planner aims for a moment to “step out” of the world of values and political interests, as a sort of detached god. The rational-comprehensive model assumes the rationality and objectivity of the planner, who supposedly acts by fairly estimating and evaluating alternatives upon which he (much less frequently she in the 1950s) makes the right choice. Although there have been numerous critiques of this approach (such as Davidoff’s “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning”), the assumed “objectivity” and “rationality” of the planning approach seems unfortunately deeply rooted. Banfeld (1959: 362, 363) sees a plan as a rational “decision with regard to a course of action,” but admits that the process by which planners arrived at this decision is less rational, since the planner “must somehow strike a balance between essentially unlike intangibles.” Even though Banfeld (1959: 362) seems to accept a broader view of planning as decision making, he still argues that planning is supposed to lead to a fxed “image of a future state of affairs towards which action is oriented.” It seems as if Banfeld simply assumes that planning is a top-down process where “decision makers” somehow evaluate (no matter how uncertain and partial) alternatives and then execute the plan. But Banfeld, whose analysis seems to refect pluralist theories, does not really explain how the decisions are arrived at.10 In this manner, the rational-comprehensive planning brings us back to Le Corbusier’s ideal of the plan as a “generator,” a force of order. In its attack on this model, planning theory argues that a rational planner operates under

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a pretense of objectivity, and that in fact “objectivity” is merely an ideological screen marking the “hidden” interests planners supported. More explicitly, following Foucault’s theories, theorists such as Boyer state that the rational comprehensive model is a force used to rationalize and “discipline” the problems of the American city. By imposing “disciplinary order” on the city, rational planning works to dampen social opposition and at the same time to serve the purpose of increasing the accumulation and circulation of capital (argument in Boyer’s [1983] Dreaming the Rational City). Foglesong (1986) even more explicitly states that through mediating different interests, planners merely serve the interests of capital. Critics of planning also deconstruct the language used in actual plans or during the planning process to reveal certain hidden political messages. This analysis reveals “planning [as] a deeply politicized practice, and no technical fx or ideal speech community is going to overcome that” (Throgmorton 1996: 358) risking the alternative merely for planners to give up elements of control (for example, in Hillier 1996). As part of their critique of modern planning, Paul and Percival Goodman writing in 1947 criticize the type of unrooted planning exemplifed by Le Corbusier in Chandigarh. They describe this type of planning as functionalist, in that the form of the plan is dictated completely by its abstract ends. In the Goodmans’ (1960: 222) prophetic words: ignorant and philistine planning long ago saddled us with many of our present problems. It continues to do so. Ameliorative plans are then proposed–a new subway, a new highway, slum-clearance–which soon reproduce the evil in a worse degree. We then have the familiar proliferation of means, of feats of engineering and architecture, public goods, when what is needed is human scale. Against this, they call for a new neo-functionalist approach: We, therefore, going back to Greek antiquity, propose a different line of interpretation all together: form follows function, but let us subject the function itself to a formal critique. Is the function good? Bona fde? Is it worthwhile? Is it worthy of a man to do that? What are the consequences? Is it compatible with other, basic, human functions? (Goodman and Goodman 1960: 19) The Goodmans call for a planning methodology that makes communities and neighborhoods serve as many human needs as possible: social, aesthetic, and communal, and not just physical. While there are few cities like Chandigarh or Brasilia, almost every modern 20th century city has on a smaller or larger scale incorporated structures, superblocks, or entire neighborhoods planned according to this “vision of the modern.” Rooted in “our identifcation with progress, with renewal and

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reform, with the perpetual transformation of our world and of ourselves” (Berman 1982: 294–295). In New York City, the work of Robert Moses in the 1950s embodies this modernist project. While for Le Corbusier it was tradition, customs, and context that stood in the way of progress, for Moses it was “the people” and “houses.” The human cost of Moses’ large scale projects (some of which displaced thousands of people and ruined viable neighborhoods) caused only “a little discomfort” for Moses, who claimed, “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way through with a meat ax.” But “[t]o oppose Moses and his “bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers, was – or so it seemed – to oppose history, progress, modernity itself” (Berman 1982: 294). A powerful public offcial who planned New York during the 1945–1960s period, Moses “dominated planning and redevelopment of the city” (Fainstein 2010: 87) and was responsible for the Cross Bronx Expressway, “the Triborough Bridge, the West Side Highway, dozens of parkways in Westchester and Long Island Jones and Orchard beaches, innumerable parks, housing developments, Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport, a network of enormous dams and power plants near Niagara Falls” (Berman 1982: 132). Yet Moses’ career has also been reevaluated and theorists in planning have realized that they have often neglected the strengths of the modernist project – “the focus on the city, the commitment to reform, the mediative role within [the] state;” as well as the fact that even if the modernist planning project has perhaps disintegrated, it has not quite vanished (Beauregard 1996b: 227). Using the example of Stuyvesant Town/Cooper Village, Susan Fainstein (2010: 88) emphasizes hallmarks of Moses’ planning – “total demolition of existing structures, the displacement of residents; private-sector control of design; … the absence of citizen involvement; and restriction of the new housing to a white tenantry.” Moses’ approach to planning was undemocratic and did not take into consideration the criteria of diversity, however, [i]ts impact on equity is somewhat more complicated to establish: income restrictions and rent regulation made decent apartments in nicely landscaped surroundings available to working- and lower-middle-class families, many of them including returning veterans – but at the cost of displacing residents. (Fainstein 2010: 88) The Stuyvesant Community eventually became more diverse and included a range of income groups as a result of lawsuits but was then sold to a developer who further reduced the number of rent stabilized apartments. Moses planned in the interest of the middle class but his efforts were particularly destructive to lower classes. “He notoriously ran expressways through closely knit neighborhoods, destroyed housing to allow expansion of institutions, and as the director of the city’s Committee on Slum Clearance

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(CSC), displaced low-income communities in order to construct apartments for middle- and upper-income households” (Fainstein 2010: 89). As the head of NYCHA, “he oversaw the building of 135,000 new public housing units.” Moses, however, demolished a signifcant amount of low-income housing through slum clearance projects; thus he did not expand the supply of low-income housing. He “nevertheless did produce social housing on a much larger scale than his counterparts in other American cities” (Fainstein 2010: 89). According to Fainstein (2010: 89), New York thus expanded low-income housing (through public housing programs, middle-income construction subsidies, and rent regulation); however, during the postwar period racial segregation increased (“scattered sites of black residency, while the ghettos of Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, and Jamaica enlarged and consolidated”). Community opposition in the 1960s halted Moses’ projects with a change of emphasis to neighborhood preservation and rehabilitation, and community participation and involvement in planning. This nevertheless did not translate into a commitment to public housing in spite of the Mayor Robert Wagner’s commitment to increasing the number of low- and middle-income units (Fainstein 2010: 89). Although numerous other problems with the rational-comprehensive model can be cited, they become perhaps made most obvious if we consider the applications of citizen-participation models within the rational-comprehensive paradigm. In a rational-comprehensive model the possibilities for citizen participation in planning seem very limited and highly questionable. As Healey (1996a: 157) pointed out, within the rational-comprehensive paradigm “citizens contribute to the process, but only by ‘feeding in’ their rationalized goals;” their concerns are then “translated into technical scientifc language of policy analysis” (See also, Healey 1996b). At its best this paradigm may only be applicable in transportation planning in a case when a very narrow set of factors is considered. A social worker told Jane Jacobs (1961: 17) that the people of the East Harlem housing projects said: “Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don’t have a place here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow ffty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big man come and look at that grass and say, “Isn’t it wonderful! Now the poor have everything!” This is precisely where the strengths of the critique of the modernist project lie, in its focus on human scale and bottom-up solutions (see Goodman and Goodman 1960). In the Goodmans’ (1960: 224) phrase, community planning, “is this diffcult art, the people are not philosophical, they do not know the concrete and central facts. Yet only people can know them.” Jacobs (1961: 223) calls planners to look beyond questions of “simplicity” or “disorganized complexity” (“dark and forbidding irrationality”); instead she argues that planners should ask themselves what type of

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community their plan will result in, how it will serve “the human beings, the citizens of the city, their concrete behavior and indispensable concerns.” The Goodmans (1960: 141) too think it the responsibility of the planner to encourage all types of diversity, of uses and of people, “intricately mingled in mutual support.” “The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop … cities that are congenial places for this great range of unoffcial plans, [to allow] ideas and opportunities to fourish, along with the fourishing of the public enterprises” (Goodman and Goodman 1960: 141), thus emphasizing the humanizing process by which the ends of planning are shaped and realized. “For cities,” writes Jacobs (1961: 440), “processes are of the essence,” which is perhaps still a paradigm to build upon. Yet the focus on equitable outcomes is equally, and it could be argued even more crucially, of essence. Fainstein emphasizes that New York was more egalitarian before the fscal crisis of the 1970s than any American city: Trade unions had a strong voice in city politics; the free city university system was unique; the extensive network of public hospitals made healthcare widely accessible; social service programs were well developed; the size of the public housing program dwarfed that of other U.S. municipalities; the city’s public transit system was unequalled; and hundreds of thousands of moderate income families were able to take advantage of the Michell-Lama housing program. (Fainstein 2010: 111) The post-fscal crisis restructuring of New York is beyond the scope of this book, but at least this work can pose, if not fully resolve, the puzzle of the critical 1950s cinematic representations that indeed lie so far apart from this actual egalitarian, yet racially segregated, city, signaling perhaps a trajectory of separation – Kracauer’s fnally severed umbilical cord that connected flm to the material grounds of the city.

Agitated cinematic “fow of life”: Urban renewal and flm As has been noted in the previous chapters, the processes shaping urban neighborhoods come to the foreground in the Levitt-Agee documentaries made in the late 1940s, vital street life occupied by children playing in the ruins of East Harlem where public housing will be built. Even as these narratives might press a palimpsest of nostalgia, this is nevertheless the agitated 1940s landscape of displacement and abandonment, a trope largely absent in the 1950s cinema. Gans (2006) notes the irony of the public housing that Jacobs criticized: “Now, much of what is left is being torn down, some of it being replaced by low rise structures and a multi-class population, although not as testament to Jane’s ideas but as another way of displacing the poor from the gentrifying city.” Levitt-Agee flms show in turn the poor who

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were there, who inhabited and embodied the abandoned city, before they too were displaced. Dimendberg (2004) seems to suggest in Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity that we can view shots of noir flmed in housing subsequently demolished (in for example Kiss Me Deadly) as a palimpsest of urban memory, cinema as a preservationist site. (Although perhaps James Donald [2020: 55] is more accurate in concluding that cinematic cities have not only a historic preservation role but “free us to imagine the cities we know otherwise than they are”.) Yet New York’s structures are already ruins, in Levitt-Agee and in The Window, perhaps more in synch with the ruined cities of the post-war German cinema, echoing contexts of warfare, urban abandonment, and indeed also segregation. There are no lingering tracking shots over these ruined sites. A preservationist streak is most apparent in the romanticized shots of racially integrated jazz clubs from Force of Evil to Odds Against Tomorrow, and even Blast of Silence. Cinema of the 1950s fails to provide the sense of home that pervades Jacobs book. Death and Life showed how the smallest of a city’s physical parts – streets, blocks, and districts – can be microcosms of vitality and variety, providing support for people’s everyday activities and offering a sense of security that makes a neighborhood feel like home. (Zukin 2006; see also Hirt 2012: 4) The book was written during the time of suburbanization and this context is apparent in flms discussed here, with the protagonists escaping from New York in The Wrong Man, The Killer’s Kiss, Deadline at Dawn (d. Harold Clurman, 1946), When Strangers Marry, etc. Finally, in relationship to 1950s flms, it is imperative to review Marshall Berman’s (1982) critique of Jacobs’s Death and Life in which “the street was experienced as the medium in which the totality of modern material and spiritual forces could meet, clash, interfuse and work out their ultimate meanings and fates.” Berman (1982: 149) contrasts this with the giants of modernist architecture such as Le Corbusier whose mantra was to “kill the street.” Streets started to symbolize “everything dingy, disorderly, sluggish, stagnant, worn-out, obsolete – everything that the dynamism and progress of modernity were supposed to leave behind.” As the documentary The Dynamic American City proclaims, streets were abandoned and/or destroyed; instead highways, shopping centers, and dormitory suburbs were built. In Berman’s (1982) view, Death and Life represents a woman’s view of the city. He emphasizes Jacobs’ role as an activist, heralding a new wave of community engagement. “She knows all the shopkeepers, and the vast informal social networks they maintain, because it is her responsibility to take care of her household affairs.” Yet ironically, Berman (1982: 151, 152) fnds Death and Life, “lovingly domestic and dynamically modern” and sharply criticizes

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Jacobs’ view of city life – “for the sake of neighborhood’s integrity, all racial minorities, sexual and ideological deviants, controversial books and flms, minority modes of music and dress, are to be kept out.” Jacobs work is imbued with a “nostalgia for a family and a neighborhood in which the self could be securely embedded … a solid refuge against all the dangerous currents of freedom and ambiguity in which all modern men and women are caught up” (Berman 1982: 152). Gerda Wekerle (2000), however, evaluates Jacobs views as more complex than commonly discussed and argues that her notions regarding the role of ordinary citizens’ perceptions have infuenced a movement to create safer cities. Jacobs focuses on everyday life experiences and ways in which planning and design can work to diminish or enhance safety, arguing, for example, against more open space in cities pointing out that “parks could be ‘volatile places’ some of them downright dangerous” (Wekerle 2000: 45). Jacobs work, according to Wekerle, presaged the work of feminist scholars who studied violence against women and urban design (Wekerle 2000: 46) and women’s perceptions of fear in the urban environment from “women’s standpoint[s]” (Wekerle 2000: 49, fn 10). Wekerle fnds that “women were twice as likely as men to report feeling unsafe, even though men are far more likely to be the victims of crime in public places” (Wekerle 2000: 47). Berman (1982: 153), however, concludes with the focus on race, “This is what makes her neighborhood vision seem pastoral: it is the city before blacks got there. Her world ranges from solid working-class whites at the bottom to professional middle-class whites at the top.” Jacobs is writing at the time when “millions of black and Hispanic people would converge on America’s cities – at precisely the moment when the jobs they sought, and the opportunities that earlier poor immigrants had found were departing or disappearing” (Berman 1982: 153). The Village itself included an increasing number of Puerto Ricans and African Americans, LGBTQ individuals, as well as white collar professionals, by the time Jacobs was writing Death and Life (Flint 2009: 98). Berman importantly ends his chapter with the image of protesters blocking the highway: We were working to help other people, and other peoples – blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, Vietnamese – to fght for their homes, even if we fed our own … So the 1960s passed, the expressway world gearing itself up for ever more gigantic expansion and growth, but fnding itself attacked by a multitude of passionate shouts from the street, individual shouts that would become a collective class, erupting into the heart of the traffc, bringing the gigantic engines to stop, or at least radically slowing them down. (Berman 1982: 157) These passionate shouts are nowhere to be heard on the streets of the 1950s cinematic New York. Instead, the decade ends with a “blast of silence,” a

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void in which agitation implodes only to reappear in the subsequent decade appropriating new forms. But the kind of resonance with the Great Depression of the 1930s and war-time trauma of the 1940s will fade from cinematic view, depleting the fused trope of simultaneous allure and peril that informed so much of flm noir. The agitated New York flms of the 1940s and the cinema of imploding agitation of the 1950s do not always amount to social critique, yet in their engagement with the urban environment and its racialized and gendered identities, the flms discussed here show the explosive tensions that were shaping America’s cities at the time when urban planning schemes to bring order to supposedly blighted neighborhoods profoundly misunderstood, and again perilously re-segregated, the urban environment. These flms further agitate viewers providing for a sense of mobilized identity that responds to the past of American cities whose downtowns were profoundly altered by the processes of urban renewal. This is what Kracauer’s theory had in mind when he referred to: [the] state of self-abandonment and dissociation [that] becomes the condition of a perceptual movement in the opposite direction, away from the flm, when a material detail assumes life of its own and triggers associations, “memories of the senses,” and “cataracts of indistinct fantasies and inchoate thoughts” that return the “absentee dreamer” to the forgotten layers of the self. Film viewing thus not only requires a “mobile self” as Kracauer says of the historian’s “job of sightseeing,” but it also provides a framework for mobilizing the self.11 (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxviii) Thus “the detail[s] … incident[s]” and “the fow of life” of the cinematic city have taken on “a life of [their] own, to precipitate processes in the viewer that may not be entirely controlled by flm” (Hansen in Kracauer [1960] 1997: xxxi): to perhaps most acutely agitate identities, to facilitate the melancholic, haunting (as Kracauer would have it) encounters with(in) the cinematic city, to encourage the recognition of “this texture of everyday life” (Kracauer [1960] 1997: 304) and the taking possession of the capacity to radically change urban worlds that in turn shape the spectators under circumstances not of their own making.

Notes 1 For example, semi-documentary flms noir produced in the postwar years (The House on 92nd Street [d. Henry Hathaway, 1945], Boomerang! [d. Elia Kazan, 1947], T-Men [d. Anthony Mann, 1947]) include non-professional actors and on-location shooting, revealing the mutual infuence of still photography on fction flm. This is evident in Weegee’s photographs which “[c]apture the aftermath of crimes, the point at which they had already congealed into metaphor’s of life’s futility or human indifference” and which most notably infuenced Dassin's Naked City (1948) (Straw 2006: 13).

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2 Although, as Naremore (2019: 59) emphasizes, the PCA of the 1940s forbade depictions of homosexuality, the repressed returned in latent forms, in stereotyped protagonists and in portrayals of seemingly homosexual villains (Laura [d. Otto Preminger, 1944], Rope [d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1948], The Big Heat [d. Fritz Lang, 1953], Strangers on a Train [d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1951]) as noir most substantively projected anxieties of masculinity (Dyer, cited in Naremore 2019: 59). 3 For example, a policeman explains to the superior offcer, “If we can fnd out what’s eating him? Maybe he was in the army …;” one of the ethnically and racially diverse derailed taxi drivers comments, “Ah, let him. Who cares? Think of how many guys gets killed in wars. Nobody stands around watchin’ ’em. And the guy’s nuts enough, let him. He is better off. Everybody is better off. I fgured on a good day today;” further in the narrative – “[t]he army said he was no good, that made it offcial” – acknowledges a psychologist, again, likening a masculine identity crisis to participation in the army. 4 And it should be remembered that Hitchcock's Rear Window, beyond the scope of this chapter, is set in the doll house Village of the 1950s and could be seen as an example of a crime plot positioned as close to the participatory apparatus as possible (the thrill and danger of voyeurism in the city) and as far as possible from the ideological or social constructs (exploring actually the causes of urban crime). 5 In Crossfre, Robert Mitchum’s character will wryly comment that “snakes are loose” and Naremore (2019: 55) reports that a year after the flm was released, “it was listed by HUAC as a key example of communist infuence in Hollywood.” 6 It should not be omitted that West Side Story which “refects the tragedy of bigotry” (Rodriguez 2004: 121), directed by Orson Welles’ editor Robert Wise and also completed in 1961, provides for yet another urban renewal setting which construes the public space of the city as largely a male territory. Yet this flm is beyond the scope of this chapter which focused on late noir, given that it is a musical, a genre which “serves up a utopian world of abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, and community, in everyday social inadequacies of scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, and solitude” (Stam and Shohat quoted by Negrón-Muntaner 2004: 74). In its portrayal of Puerto Ricans, the flm engages in stereotypes and offers for the most part an ‘ethnic pageant’ as a superfcial display. “References to the flm tend to convey a sense of shame or pride in the speaker’s ethno-national identity, a desire for valorization, and/or struggle to articulate an oppositional voice in American culture” (Negrón-Muntaner 2004: 59). Made during the era when options for Latino actors included “Europeanize their images” or “play up the stereotypes” (Rodriguez 2004: 110/111) of Latin lovers, bombshells, spitfres, and sultry Latinas; “Others” in need of help; helpless Latina women can only be “saved” by white men. Negrón-Muntaner’s (2004: 84) queer reading of West Side Story argues that “what in the end made [Rita] Moreno [the only Latina recipient of all of the major entertainment industry awards–Oscar, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy] persist, create, and above all, inspire many with the tale was the deep, bellydown, raucous laughter of all who seek to transform worlds not made for us.” And partaking perhaps in a different kind of laughter, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (d. Blake Edwards, 1961) was also released in 1961, with its New York as a “chic center of cosmopolitan style, energy, exuberance, and attractive nonconformist behavior of the kind that escapes the implied, oppressive morality of the straitlaced American heartland” (Lehman and Luhr 2007: 31). 7 Prior to Mayor Lindsey’s Executive Order 10, New York, where flming “required as many as ffty different permits and productions could face daily

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fnes and police shakedowns of as much as $400 a day,” was “a notoriously corrupt location for flm production” (Clutter 2009: 61). Le Corbusier’s ideas can in a way be seen as a reaction against Paris, which he thought should become “an orderly Geneva.” Rooted in notions of rationality and progress, the planning profession assumes that human society is capable of continuous improvement along defnite, measured, lines towards certain common ends that are objectively desirable and defnable. Incorporating this legacy of the Enlightenment, planning as a “modern” profession emerged as a part of the reform movement to improve the industrial city. Planning was created at the intersection of diverse social improvement groups and organizations that represented often conficting interests – the concerns of commerce chambers, government institutions, civic groups, charity organizations, architectural professionals, and beautifcation movements. Faludi’s theory, as explicated in “Rationality, Critical Rationalism, and Planning Doctrine,” is similar to Banfeld’s in that it describes the planner as arriving at a decision through a rational albeit imperfect process; as with Banfeld’s, Faludi’s (1996) theory does not seem to provide true insight into the nature of planning. Kracauer’s view here contrasts with the Frankfurt school theory which envisions a limited scope of human agency as the individual has surrendered his/her powers to the machine or the technical apparatus of society – the more the individual can rely upon the apparatus, the more he/she fades before the apparatus. The masses are lulled into obedience; accepting schematization, classifcation, cataloguing; the masses accept copies, thus becoming a copy – an interchangeable unit, in Mumford’s words, Mr and Mrs Zero. The idea of mechanization, the after-image of work processes transferred into entertainment is similar, however, to Kracauer’s mass ornament, exemplifed in the Busby Berkeley flms. Shaped by the fear of descent of the world into barbarism and the threat that the masses will be mislead by tyrants or totalitarian leaders, the Frankfurt school questions the role of science and theory under the circumstances of crises, appearing to adopt a lamenting tone, suggesting the diminished signifcance of elites and expert systems, neglecting the symbolic creativity of cinematic art and its collective processes and the possibility of resistant readings and critical approaches to flm viewing.

Coda Of urban remains

Citing Kracauer’s recollection of a cinematic shot of “a residential street that made such an impact that the memory of it stayed with the [author] throughout his life,” Sutcliffe (1984: 169) ends his review of visions of New York in flm from the turn of the century to 1940, with the following question: “Might not then such [an] elusive message, acting upon the emotions rather than intellect, lie at the fountainhead of much of the planning of cities after 1945?” The author does not answer this question, and while it would be diffcult, if not impossible, to trace causal linkages between planning and visions of the city in popular art, a complex set of dialectical relationships nevertheless emerges in the period of study. The two spheres of inquiry – the focus on urban transformations and the study of flm amidst the world-wide crises of the Great Depression and World War Two – offer a dual prism to unearth and illuminate these new, unexpected, and conficting and, at times, not easily comparable, dynamics of agitated urbanism. As Maria Hellström Reimer argues, “there is ‘no real borderline between cinematic work, life rehearsal and live urbanity, the one constituting the raw material for the other.’” In this view, cinema can be perceived as a “political battleground between cinema as an institutional apparatus, with its power to immerse and subdue the audience, and the cinema as a performative, life form of resistance” (cited in Penz and Lu 2011: 17; See also Reimer 2011: 233). But Hellström Reimer (2011) fails to challenge Benjamin’s notion of the shattering of spatial constraint with which this book started or to link to his hope for cinema’s revolutionary potential.1 The agitated cinematic city affrms the notion of a cinema as a site where “life – both in its precarious and its most mundane forms – constitute[s] new foundations for the exercise of power, for the exertion of infuence and for the delivery of transformative and empowering effects” (Reimer 2011: 234) but it does so by situating Benjamin’s notion of cinematic travel amidst (not outside) the socio-spatial constraints of the economic and political turbulence that seeps through the cinematic frame. This argument here is aligned with Geraldine Pratt’s and Rose Marie San Juan’s (2014: 5; See also ibid.: 4) focus on the critical possibilities of cinema (including among these possibilities a democratic aesthetics, discussed in Chapter 3 on the 1930s New York flms) that emerge out

Coda 211 of the encounter with urban space, tracing the political effcacy of cinema by stressing the “liveliness and the continual openness of space [as] key to its political potential.” A key leitmotif of urban agitated modernity, as has been noted, is the intertwining of the spectacle, glory, and allure of the modern city with the danger, peril, and imminent self-annihilation (via urban renewal, for example) of the urban environment. This ambivalence is perhaps most evident in representations of New York City. The key shift in the urban vision from the late 1920s metropolitan flms to early flm noir takes representations away from the promise of technologically-driven urban innovation to visions of simultaneous disillusionment and disequilibria, as well as of both fascination and reckoning with the urban environments. The period of study is characterized by the escalating tension along the spectrum of the ambivalent poles of this dual urban perception. New York City, which amidst the economic impoverishment and social turmoil of the 1930s completes its skyline and enhances its infrastructure, becomes, at the same time, a site of competing, irreconcilable ideologies of urbanity at once enhancing and destroying it. This too is what is meant by the agitated urbanism of this period. Representations perform the symbolic work, assuming the element of culture that has the capacity to work for change and to question the already “dead” or deadening, as it were, aspects of culture. These relationships between the “real” and the “discursive,” and indeed the fascinating array of cultural ambivalences about urban space and society, can be discovered through the study of flm. Whether or not culture in general could be seen as “a place where different explanations always collide” (Spivak 2006) this notion seems to me an apt description of imaginaries of American cities in flms of the period of study. The American cinematic urban arena became a canvas of these agitating collisions whose exposure was enabled by the specifc social, economic, and political circumstances in the 1930s and the 1940s movie industry in the U.S. Perceptive critics like James Agee (2000) were able to point to strands of these currents that included visions actively colliding with what Hollywood was increasingly becoming or what the mainstream American culture of the 1950s indeed transformed into. It is perhaps not an accident that the entire era of American urban imaginaries ends not merely with the HUAC crackdown and the blacklist, but also with the indictment and vindication of Hollywood in In a Lonely Place (d. Nicholas Ray, 1950) in which Gloria Grahame’s Laurel Gray protagonist tries to escape to New York only to have her fight cancelled in the fnal minutes of the narrative by Humphrey Bogart’s Dixon Steele; and with the marvelous decay represented in Sunset Boulevard (d. Billy Wilder, 1950) – an urban title, indeed, for a particular kind of space, which is also a space of our memories. The full scope of comprehension of the signifcance of these imaginaries in their challenge, creativity, and also complacency is perhaps better fathomable if viewed from a historical distance, but Wilder’s flm also reminds us that the contemporary notions of nostalgia-for-the-old-cinematic-space were

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nothing new even then (“They don’t make faces like that anymore!,” cries Gloria Swanson). It is this, perhaps unintended, awareness as well as the witty distance that made daring cinematic imaginaries such as this one the critical component of “culture alive” (a sort of an irony that Wilder might have appreciated given that Sunset Boulevard’s overture and epilogue alike are framed by images of death). It has become perhaps too easy to say that every reality holds in its womb a discourse, especially as some discourses seem so savvy and smug that to them all real is a fake. Further research is needed to explore fully the linkages between planning “visions” and urban representations in social thought, literary texts, movies, or art works. The claim here is though, that to understand American urban experiences and economic and political crises in general as well as in the period of study in particular, an entire range of imaginaries and representations has to be taken more seriously, indeed not in a simple sense of searching for pro-, anti- or ambivalent urban visions but rather in the complex ways in which they convey and construct symbolic meanings of urban landscapes.

Note 1 Films noir might ironize this potential. “Waiting for the revolution?” utters the wrongly accused fugitive (Victor Mature) in I Wake Up Screaming (d. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) as he speculates as to why a diverse group of impoverished New Yorkers is spending an entire night in the cinema, seemingly a site where everyday life might evade, if not contest, hegemonies.

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Index

Page numbers in italic indicate fgures. 14 Hours 175–177, 176; Charlie Dunnigan 177; Robert Cosick 175, 177; Virginia Foster 175 20th Century Fox 36, 86, 175, 177 2A.M. in the Subway 71 42nd Street 38, 83–85, 88, 90–95, 93, 100, 107–108, 110n7, 110n9 Abu-Lughod, Janet 2, 16, 23n3, 29–30, 33, 48n11, 127, 132 Academy Awards (Oscars) 97, 122 Actor’s Studio 189 Adolf, John G. 37 Agee, James 13–14, 26n31, 26n32, 113, 116, 121–126, 129, 131, 134, 136–140, 136, 141n12, 141n16, 153, 204–205, 211 agitated city 1, 6, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 88, 113, 121, 124, 139–140, 144, 152, 162, 175 Aldrich, Robert 29, 47n2, 154, 179 Alton, John 178 Ambler, Eric 171 American Film Institute Catalog 78 American: cities 2–4, 16, 18, 29, 31, 48n22, 80, 127, 196, 203, 207, 211; culture 2, 27n46, 208n6, 211; metropolis 1, 3, 19–20, 35, 46, 48n11, 52, 97, 123; society 2, 8, 19, 94, 170, 184 Angels with Dirty Faces 84, 96, 111n17 Antonioni, Michelangelo 49n31, 129 Applause 36 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty” 36 architecture 3, 5, 45–46, 61, 63, 79, 91, 189, 201, 205 Aristarco, Guido 108 Armitage, Frederick S. 36

Asphalt Jungle 21 audiences 4, 6–8, 11–13, 25n29, 37, 39, 47, 49n18, 54–55, 59, 67, 70, 72, 77, 90–91, 100–101, 108, 110n6, 110n7, 110n10, 111n10, 111n17, 112n21, 132–133, 139, 149–150, 157, 162, 170, 182, 186, 210 Auerbach, Jonathan 155, 157 Bachelard, Gaston 60 Baker, Carroll 188, 189–190, 193–194, 197 Ballard, Shirley 178 Ballon, Hillary 129 Balshaw, Maria 1, 4–5 Baron, Allen 25n25, 188, 188, 191, 192, 193–194 Basehart, Richard 175–176 Bass, Saul 189 Bathrick, David 3 Bayley, Lynne R. 184 Bazin, André 12, 37 Beauregard, Robert 2, 23n4, 23n6, 23n9, 24n12, 25n26, 31, 41, 49n20, 139, 144, 172n2, 172n5, 200, 202 Belafonte, Harry 184 Bell, Daniel 103 Bell Geddes, Barbara 175 Bender, Thomas 32, 51, 89, 98, 110n6, 160, 162, 164 Benedek, Laslo 154 Benfeld, 200, 209n10 Benjamin, Walter 1, 3, 22, 41–43, 52, 62, 68, 72, 74, 90, 122, 130, 137–140, 170, 186, 210 Bergman, Andrew 7, 12, 90, 93, 96, 99–100 Berke, William A. 178

236

Index

Berkeley, Busby 83, 85, 92–94, 209n11 Berks, John 160 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City 43, 60, 103, 122, 157 Berman, Marshall 23n8, 34, 94, 113, 117, 193, 197, 202, 205–206 Bernhard, Jack 147 Best Years of Our Lives, The 149 Bicycle Thief, The 123 Big Carnival 157 Big Clock, The 156–157 Big Combo, The 178; Mr Brown 178; Susan Lowell 178 Blacklist 170–171, 184, 192, 211 Blackton, Stuart 36 Blaché, Herbert 36 Blast of Silence 25n25, 188, 188, 190–194, 192, 196, 205; Frankie Bono 191, 193–194 Blondell, Joan 37 Body and Soul 84, 151 Bogart, Humphrey 25n29, 96, 162, 211 Borde, Iain 150–151 Bourdieu, Pierre 4–5 Bowery, The 36 Boyer, M. Christine 96, 201 Brecht, Bertolt 42, 108, 155 Breen, Joseph 99 Broadway 32, 36, 53–54, 82n4, 94, 154, 175, 195; Association 181 Broch, Hermann 155 Bronx Morning, A 85, 122 Bronx, The 77, 179 Brooklyn 77, 174n21; Bridge 61 Bruno, Giuliana 3, 8, 19–20, 47, 56, 91, 96, 129, 182 Brute Force 151 built environment 4, 23n2, 28, 33, 45, 53, 65–66, 88, 91, 118, 129–130, 162, 167 Buñuel, Luis 123 Burgess, Ernest W. 57, 66, 79–81 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 60 Cagney, James 12, 90 Cain, James M. 43, 171 Call Northside 777 85, 158, 174n29, 177 Cameraman 36 Cantwell, Robert 83 capitalism 51, 58–59, 67, 70, 74, 89, 106, 108, 110n9, 160, 163–164 Capra, Frank 116 Carney, Ray 185–186

Caro, Robert 128–129, 142n25 Carruthers, Ben 186 Casperay, Vera 171 Cassavetes, John 183, 185–187, 185 Castle, William 194 Cat People 152, 159–160; Alice 160; Irena 152, 159–160 Caws, Mary Ann 44 censorship 4–6, 99–100, 108, 150, 170–171 Central Park 37, 84, 158, 166 Central Park 37; Dot 37 Chandler, Raymond 170–171 Chaplin, Charles 26n32, 85, 163 Chaumeton, Étienne 150–151 Chicago 2, 13–15, 22, 23n3, 29, 49n11, 51, 84, 127, 174n29, 182 Chicago School of Urban Ecology 52, 55, 57, 61–62, 64–65, 70, 79–80, 199 children in the city 99, 103–104, 114, 117–119, 122, 125, 128–137, 139, 141n8, 141n13, 142n19, 142n20, 142n25, 143n31, 204 Chisholm, Brad 86–87 Chrysler building 28, 33, 48n5, 110n6 cinematic representation 12, 20, 204 Citizen Kane 176 city symphonies 28, 52–53, 60 City, The 13, 83–85, 88–89, 101–108, 104, 139, 150, 164, 172n6 Clark, Tom C. 88 Clarke, Shirley 185 class: difference 34, 37, 68–69, 84, 99, 108, 159, 162, 194; divide 36, 98–99, 107–108, 151, 162, 166, 170; lower 71, 163, 202; middle 31–32, 42, 48n5, 49n18, 71–72, 75, 77–78, 99, 106, 108, 111n17, 142n23, 163, 182, 202, 206; upper 77–78, 99, 183; working 13, 16, 25n24, 49n18, 59, 64, 72, 75, 77, 88, 98–100, 111n17, 142n27, 151–153, 161, 163, 172n3, 174n 28, 182, 196, 206 Clock, The 182 Clurman, Harold 205 Cobb, Lee J. 165 Coburn, Alvin L. 164 Cocks, Geoffrey 179–180, Cold War 32, 171 Coles, Robert 131, 139 Committee on Slum Clearance (CSC) 202–203 communist 88, 100, 171, 196, 208n5; anti- 163, 171, 196; Party 132, 171

Index

237

Coney Island 36, 74–75, 82n6 Coney Island 36 Connection 185 Conte, Richard 178 controlled city 144, 147, 154, 165, 167 Conway, Tom 160 Cooper, Merian C. 85 Cop Hater 178; Teddy Franklin 178 Copland, Aaron 189 Corbett, David, P. 61–62 Corn, Wanda M. 54 corporate city 144, 156 Cotton Comes to Harlem 177 Crawford, Joan 145, 152, 179 crime 12, 15, 19, 23n5, 39–40, 94, 96, 99, 101, 111n17, 118, 127, 144, 150–152, 154, 156, 163–166, 172n3, 172n4, 173n12, 173n17, 174n27, 174n29, 179, 181–182, 184, 186, 196–197, 206, 207n1, 208n4 criminals 2, 12, 15, 21, 23n5, 25n25, 90, 96, 100, 145–146, 149–152, 155, 158–159, 165–167, 172n3, 178–179, 184, 186, 188, 194, 196 Criss Cross 26n41, 152–153, 158–159, 196 Crosland, Alan 29 Crowd, The 52, 68, 69, 70–72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 82n7; John Sims 68, 70–71, 73–74, 76 Cry Danger 155 Cry of the City 158 Cry, Terror! 179 Curtis, Alan 195–196 Curtiz, Michael 84, 96, 145

decaying city 144, 152, 163, 166, 168 de Certeau, Michel 51, 92, 131, 133, 136, 143n32, 146–147, 161 Decoy 147 de Sica, Vittorio 122–123, 141n18 Deleuze, Gilles 61, 129 democracy 51, 70, 83–85, 88–89, 95, 101–102, 105–109 Dennis, Richard 63–64, 68, 76 Denton, Nancy A. 17, 30, 80 Descartes, René 198 Detective Story 40 de Tocqueville, Alexis 57 Detour 147, 154, 159, 179; Ann Savage 147 Devine, Michael 53–55, 64, 66 Diawara, Manthia 8 Dieterle, William 155 Dimendberg, Edward 8, 18, 20–22, 39–40, 44, 96, 127, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152–153, 155–159, 161, 164, 167, 173n18, 178, 181–182, 184, 195, 205 Dmytrick, Edward 171 Doane, Mary Ann 39, 100 Double Indemnity 26n43, 145 Douglas, Ann 51, 67, 148 Douglas, Paul 177 Down the Hudson 36 Dreier, Peter 195 Duchamp, Marcel 55 Dunnock, Mildred 190 Dwan, Allan 35–36, 52, 76–77, 78, 82n9 Dynamic American City, The 198, 205

D.O.A 26n39, 154 Daisy Kenyon 152 Dark City 155, 172n1 Dark Corner 13, 152–153, 159, 177–178; Bradford Galt 153; Hardy Cathcart 153–154; Mari Cathcart 153; Tony Jardine 153 Dark Past, The 165–167 Dassin, Jules 13, 85, 150–151, 158, 171, 207n1 Davis, Ossie 177 Dead End 13, 83–85, 88–89, 95–101, 98, 107–108, 111n17, 111n18, 152, 155, 158; Baby Face Martin 96; Dave 99–101; Drina 99–101; Francey 97 Dead End boys 99, 111n14 Deadline at Dawn 205 Debord, Guy 75, 138

East Side, West Side 52, 68, 76, 78–80, 78 Edge of the City 153, 183, 186, 187, 197; Tommy Tyler 187 Eisenstein, Sergei 61, 85, 88, 108 Elsaesser, Thomas 79 Empire State building 28, 33, 48n5, 67, 83, 166 enclaves 57, 77, 80, 98, 123 Equitable building 60, 63, 66, 68, 73 Evans, Walker 83, 113, 141n6 Evergood, Philip 83 exiles 7, 24n19, 39, 155, 158–159; European 6–8, 39 Fainstein, Susan 202–204 Farber, Manny 178 Farrow, John 156

238

Index

fascist 88; anti- 6, 86, 88, 155, 171 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 88, 150, 155 Feist, Felix E. 157 Fejos, Paul 36 femme fatale 26n37, 26n41, 143n31, 147–149, 173n7 Ferris, Hugh 97 Feuchtwanger, Lion 155 flm: genre 12, 49n19; music 43, 53, 83, 178, 184–185; noir 7–8, 18, 23n5, 25n21, 29, 35, 39–40, 43–44, 48n2, 52, 85, 127, 144, 147–152, 155–156, 158–162, 164, 170–171, 172n3, 172n4, 172n5, 173n8, 173n11, 174n27, 175–176, 180–181, 194, 196, 207, 207n1, 211, 212n1 Fitzmaurice, Tony 3, 19, 47, 84, 96 Flaherty, Robert 53 fâneurs10, 41, 51, 58, 61–62, 65, 70, 92, 95, 124, 136–140, 141n15, 143n31, 146, 161, 186 Fleming, George S. 36 Fonda, Henry 173n16, 182 Footlight Parade 83, 94 Force of Evil 144–145, 159, 161, 162–170, 168–169, 174n27, 188, 197, 205; Doris 168; Joe Morse 162, 164, 169–170, 174n28; Leo Morse 162–163 Ford, Wallace 37 Forgacs, David 13, 50n29, 168 Foy, Brian 36 Frankenheimer, John 171 Fredrick, Christine 17 Friedberg, Ann 46–47, 50n32, 50n32 Frisby, David 59 Fuller, Samuel 13. 153, 158, 171, 177, 196 Fussell, Paul 9 Gabriel Over the White House 85 Gaines, Jane 85–86, 88, 108–109 gangster 7, 12–13, 84, 90, 96, 146, 150, 162–163, 172n3, 191–192 Gans, Herbert J. 11, 31, 39, 79, 82n8, 111n13, 197, 204 Garfein, Jack 188, 189–191, 191, 197, 197 Garfeld, John 84, 162–164, 168–170, 174n27 Garnett, Tay 145 Georgakas, Dan 171 GermanyYear Zero 129

Gershwin, George 83 ghettos 13, 30, 57, 77, 80, 123, 125, 128, 139, 203 Giddens, Anthony 56, 59–60, 67 Gillie, Jean 147 Gish, Lillian 35 Glick, Josh 74 Godard, Jean-Luc 182 Gold Diggers of 1933 85, 93 Gold Diggers of 1935 85 Goldoni, Leila 185 Goldwyn, Samuel 84, 98 Gomez, Thomas 162 Goodman, Paul 201, 203–204 Goodman, Percival 201, 203–204 Grahame, Gloria 179, 211 Great Depression 6–8, 11–12, 17–18, 22, 23n3, 28–30, 34, 37, 39, 47, 48n3, 73, 77, 80, 83–85, 88–89, 91–92, 94, 96, 100, 108, 127, 148, 172n2, 180, 207, 210 Greene, Graham 171 Griffth, David W. 35, 69 Grossvogel, David 91, 146 Gunning, Tom 55–56, 75 Hallelujah, I’m a Bum 84 Hamilton, Kim 184 Hammett, Dashiell 43, 171 Hansen, Miriam 71–74, 175, 177, 181, 207 Haran, Barnaby 86–88 Harlem 33, 36, 88, 114, 116, 118, 123–124, 127–132, 134, 137–138, 140, 141n6, 142n25, 142n27, 174n21, 191, 196, 203; Black 127; Central 113, 122, 137–138, 142n23; East 14, 77, 113, 122, 125, 127–128, 133, 135, 137–139, 141n12, 142n22, 142n23, 142n24, 152, 203–204; Italian 127; North 128; Spanish 127–128, 139 Harrison, Joan 194–195 Harvey, David 5, 17, 24n16, 97, 107 Hathaway, Henry 85, 151–152, 154, 158, 175–178, 176, 207n1 Hayden, Dolores 17, 31 Hays Code 29 Healey, Patsy 200, 203 Hearst Magazine building 48n5 Hearst, William Randolph 36; organization 86 Heath, Stephen 46 Hellman, Lillian 97

Index Helm, Fay 195 Heroes for Sale 85 Hine, Lewis 67, 83 Hirsch, Foster 147, 176–177 Hitchcock, Alfred 11, 152, 158, 182–183, 195, 208n4 Hively, Jack 147 Hobsbawm, Eric 10, 32 Hollywood 1, 6–13, 20, 24n19, 25n21, 25n24, 25n29, 25n30, 26n32, 29, 35, 37–39, 44, 46–47, 64, 70, 74, 83, 88–89, 91–92, 94–95, 97–100, 110n7, 110n9, 111n10, 122, 145, 147, 159–160, 163, 170–171, 171n3, 174n24, 174n25, 180, 184, 208n5, 211 Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) 6 Holocaust 175, 177, 189 homelessness 86, 97, 125–126, 137, 197 homosexuality 110n8, 176, 208n2 Hopper, Edward 145, 168 Horak, Jan-Christopher 46, 53–55, 60–61, 66, 122–123, 129, 132, 139, 140n1, 189 Hotel Berlin 180 House on 92nd Street 154–155, 207n1 House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 7, 14, 26n32, 29, 49n16, 88, 150, 155, 171, 208n5, 211 Housing Problems 125, 141n18 Hughes, Dorothy B. 171 Hunger 85–86, 86–87, 109 Hurley, Andrew 31 Hurwitz, Leo 85–86 Huston, John 21, 163, 171 Huyssen, Andreas 3, 28, 42–44, 52, 56, 118, 122, 189–190 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang 90, 165 illicit city 144, 150, 152, 163, 165, 167 Image of the City, The 41 immigrant 7, 15, 48n3, 49n18, 51, 55, 57, 61, 77–78, 80, 111n17, 114, 147, 157, 163, 206 In a Lonely Place 211; Dixon Steele 211; Laurel Gray 211 In the Street 113, 121–126, 129–131, 133–137, 136, 139–140, 141n12, 141n16, 141n18, 142n29, 143n31 Insdorf, Annette 4, 133, 141n14

239

integration 21, 30, 32, 78, 132, 144, 184, 186 Isaacs, Stanley 98 Ivens, Joris 85 Jackson, Kenneth 14–15, 30–33, 35, 96, 129 Jacobs, Jane 29, 137, 142n20, 188, 192–199, 203–206 Jacobs, Stephen 53, 129, 154 James, William 67 jazz 19, 43, 83, 116, 141n10, 160, 173, 174n21, 178, 184–185, 194, 196, 205 Jazz Singer, The 29 Jefferson, Thomas 57 Jewish 77, 82n9, 86, 122, 163, 167, 179 Kafka, Franz 20, 56, 122 Kalb, Peter R. 54–55, 61–62, 65 Kane, Irene 179, 181 Kaplan, E. Ann 19, 160 Kazan, Elia 186, 207n1 Kazin, Alfred 94 Keaton, Buster 36–37 Keeler, Ruby 90–91, 95, 110n10, 111n12 Keighley, William 155, 165, 177 Kelley, Robin D. G. 139 Kelly, Grace 176 Kennedy, David 30, 94 Killer That Stalked New York, The 178 Killer’s Kiss, The 151, 173n14, 178–182, 180, 205; Davey Gordon 179; Gloria Price 179, 181; Vinnie Rapallo 181 Killers, The 26n39, 26n44, 149 King Kong 85 Kingsley, Sidney 97 Kirby, Lynne 69, 71, 74, 76 Kiss Me Deadly 29, 48n2, 154, 158–159, 179, 205 Kiss of Death 151–152; Nick Blanco 152, 173n15; Tommy Udo 152 Klawans, Stuart 151 Klein, Norman M. 18, 21 Kosloff, Max 118 Kracauer, Siegfried 13, 37, 42–43, 53, 71–72, 74, 76, 82n5, 93–94, 100, 122–123, 125, 129–130, 138–139, 141n18, 147–148, 162, 175, 177, 181–182, 186, 188–190, 204, 207, 209n11, 210

240

Index

Krutnik, Frank 10, 144 Kubrick, Stanley 151, 173n14, 178–179, 180 La Cava, Gregory 85 LaGuardia, Fiorello 33 Lambert, Louis 60 Lancaster, Burt 171 Landmarks Preservation Commission 79 landscape: of power 3, 15, 146, 178; social 53, 62, 65; visual 3, 45, 110n6, 129; see also urban Lang, Fritz 7, 24n19, 147, 159, 172n3 Laura 154, 178, 208n2 Lazarsfeld, Paul 11 Le Bon, Gustav 69 Le Corbusier 198–202, 205, 209n8 Lefebvre, Henri 4–5, 8, 21–22, 24n16, 40, 79, 89, 94, 101, 107, 124, 131, 135, 137 Lehman, Ernest 171 LeRoy, Mervyn 13, 84–85, 165 Levitt, Bill 132–133 Levitt, Helen 42, 113–114, 114–115, 116–119, 117, 119–121, 121–122, 124–126, 126, 129, 131–136, 134, 138–139, 141n6, 141n7, 141n9, 141n12, 141n15, 143n31, 153, 204–205 Lewis, John 185 Lewis, Joseph H. 178 Lewton, Val 159 Leyda, Jay 85, 122 Lights of New York 36 Lindblom, Charles 200 Lingeman, Richard 145, 149–150, 156, 158, 163, 169–170, 173n21, 174n21 Little Caesar 13, 84 Litvak, Anatole 116, 156, 173n9, 174n27 Lloyd, Harold 72 Loeb, Janice 113, 122, 132–133, 136, 139, 141n12 Loggia, Robert 179 Lonely Crowd, The 11, 176 Lonesome 36 Lorentz, Pare 85, 102 Los Angeles 2, 7, 18, 22, 23n3, 29, 145–146, 154–155, 157 Los Olvidados 123 Lost Weekend, The 157, 159, 167 Lower East Side 33, 35, 53, 55, 77–79, 88, 114, 116, 145, 190

Lubitsch, Ernst 7, 24n19 Lynch, Kevin 41, 45, 100 M 154 McArthur, Colin 4 McBain, Ed 178 McCarthyism 171, 182–183 MacDonald, Joe 177 McEnvoy, Earl 178 Mackendrick, Alexander 171 McKenzie, Roderick D. 57 Magnifcent Ambersons, The 176 Maltese Falcon, The 163 Mamoulian, Rouben 36 Man with a Movie Camera 61, 157 Manchurian Candidate, The 171 Manhandled 36; Tessie McGuire 36 Manhatta 52–56, 56, 60–68, 63–64, 79, 124, 174n23 Manhattan 2, 7, 15, 23n5, 24n18, 63, 66, 70, 72, 77, 82n4, 98, 103–105, 128, 156, 164–165, 183, 192; Lower 51, 53, 68, 77, 82n3, 96; skyline 33, 39, 55, 60, 91, 103–104; Upper 77, 163, 170; see also Harlem Mankiewicz, Herman 25n20, 38 Mann, Anthony 26n44, 150–151, 154, 173n9, 182, 207n1 Mann, Klaus 155 Mann, Thomas 155 Marcus, Alan 116–117, 139 Marcuse, Peter 17, 48n6, 80, 126 Martin, Angela 19 masculinity 26n37, 110n10, 154, 175–176, 208n2, 208n3 mass: culture 46, 74, 76, 84; society 2–3, 9, 17, 71, 84–85, 103, 146, 157, 161, 167, 176 Mass Ornament, The 93 Massey, Douglas S. 17, 30, 80 Massood, Paula 136 Maté, Rudolph 26n39, 154 Mature, Victor 152, 212n1 Mencken, H. L. 171 Merrill, Gary 123 Merton, Robert K. 11 Metropolis 89 Metropolis of Tomorrow 97 Metropolitan Museum of Art 32 Metropolitan Opera 32 Metz, Christian 38 Meyers, Sidney 113, 122, 130, 141n12 Mildred Pierce 26n43, 145 Milestone, Lewis 84

Index Miller, David 179 Minnelli, Vincente 182 mobility 20, 45, 55, 57, 59–60, 67–68, 71, 80–81, 152, 155, 173n7, 194, 207; class 68, 151, 166; social 15, 19, 51, 72, 74, 76 Modern Times 85 modernity 2–3, 8, 10, 15–16, 24n19, 26n37, 28, 32, 44, 51–52, 55–56, 59–60, 62, 64, 66–67, 74–77, 104, 111n13, 140, 144, 146, 150, 161, 167, 172n1, 175, 189, 202, 205; agitated urban 1, 3, 10, 14, 18–19, 22, 29, 33, 35, 41, 47, 50n28, 147, 150, 159–160, 162, 211 Moholy-Nagy, Laslo 164 montage 5–6, 13, 43, 53, 61, 91, 93, 102, 104, 123 Montagne, Edward 158 Moore, Deborah 77 Moorehead, Agnes 176 Morgan Trust Company building 54, 63 Moses, Robert 16, 33, 105, 128–129, 142n25, 194, 202–203 Mouat, Cecilia 52–53, 61–62 Mumford, Lewis 21, 23n5, 40, 49n11, 51–52, 59, 61, 64–65, 68, 72–74, 101–102, 106, 111n19, 111n20, 112n20, 128, 139, 172n6, 199, 209n11 Muni, Paul 90 Murnau, Friedrich W. 7, 24n19 Murphet, Julian 153, 184 musicals 7, 38, 53, 83, 85, 90–93, 95, 110n7, 110n9, 110n10, 111n10, 185, 208n6 Musketeers of Pig Alley, The 35 Myers, Zion 37 My Man Godfrey 85 Naked City, The 13, 40, 85, 150, 158, 167, 174n23, 178–179 Naremore, James 8, 14, 19–20, 39–40, 144, 148, 150–151, 160, 162, 169–171, 172n1, 172n3, 174n30, 178, 180, 184, 208n2 Native Land 85 Neal, Tom 179 Nemerov, Alexander 159 networked city 144, 158, 160, 163 New Deal 16, 28–30, 94, 110n9; in Entertainment 90, 95, 107 New York City Ballet 32

241

New York Police Department (NYPD) 156, 173n21, 191–192 NewYork the Magnifcent 54, 67 Newmeyer, Fred C. 72 Nichols, Bill 116, 123 Night and the City 158–159, 173n19 nostalgia 3, 22, 34–35, 96, 137, 160, 172n3, 204, 206, 211 Notorious 152 O’Keefe, Georgia 83, 97 Odds Against Tomorrow 183–184, 183, 197, 205; Earle Slater 184; Jimmy Ingram 184; Ruth Ingram 184 Odets, Clifford 171 Oehlrich, Kristen 54, 61, 63, 65–66 On the Waterfront 25n32, 186 Open City 13 Our Daily Bread 85 Out of the Past 27n45, 149, 154, 159, 174n27 Palance, Jack 179 Park, Robert E. 57–58, 62, 66, 70, 79–81 Park Avenue 145, 154, 166, 173n16 Parker, Ellen 178 Parrish, Robert 155 Pearson, Beatrice 168–169 Phantom Lady 152–153, 158–159, 194, 195, 196–197; Ann Terry 195; Carol Richman 196; Jack Marlow 196; Scott Henderson 195–196 Photo League (1936–1951) 83, 85–88, 116; see also Workers Film Pickup on South Street 13, 153, 158, 171, 173n19, 177, 196; Moe Williams 196 Pittsburgh 101–102, 111n19 Plow that Broke the Plains, The 85, 102 Poitier, Sidney 187 politics 6, 48n4, 63, 84, 95, 105, 107, 141n8, 145, 156, 194, 204; -infra 138–139 Polonsky, Abraham 43, 144–145, 149, 161, 162–164, 168–171, 168–169, 174n25, 184, 188 Port of New York 154 Porter, Edwin S. 36 Postman Always Rings Twice, The 145 Powell, Dick 90 Power and the Land 85 Pratt, Geraldine 19, 162, 170, 210

242

Index

Preminger, Otto 7, 24n19, 152, 154, 158, 172n3, 178 Production Code Administration (PCA) 99, 170, 174n24 Prohibition 94 Psycho 182 Public Enemy 13, 84, 90 Puerto Rican 2, 33, 133, 142n22, 142n24, 186, 206, 208n6 Queens 98, 179, 183 Quiet One, The 113, 121–124, 129–131, 130, 133–134, 136–138, 140, 141n12, 142n29; Donald 123–124, 129–130, 136–140 Rabinowitz, Paula 147 race 11, 18, 31, 33, 48n2, 58, 80, 118, 123, 131–132, 183–186, 206 racial: discrimination 2, 34, 80, 196; hatred 186 racism 80, 184, 186 Raines, Ella 196 Raw Deal 165 Ray, Anthony 186 Ray, Nicholas 211 Rear Window 182, 208n4 Regeneration 36 Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) 199 Reimer, Maria H. 210 Remarque, Erich Maria 155 Riesman, David 11, 25n29, 176 riot 18, 29, 33, 127 Ritt, Martin 153, 183, 187 Ritter, Thelma 196 River, The 85, 102 Robson, Mark 147 Rockefeller Center 33, 48n5 Rodakiewicz, Henwar 101, 111n19, 112n22 Rodowick, David 138 Rogers, Ginger 93 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 6, 84, 90, 94, 107, 171 Rope 158, 208n2 Rosenberg, James 83 Rosenblum, Walter 122 Rossellini, Roberto 13, 129 Rossen, Robert 84, 151, 171 Rube in the Subway, A 71 rural environment 21 Ruttmann, Walter 43, 60, 103, 122, 157 Ryan, Robert 184

Safety Last 72 San Francisco 22, 147, 179 San Juan, Rose M. 19, 162, 170, 210 Sandburg, Carl 83 Sanders, James 12, 19, 37–39, 68, 96, 99 Saphead, The 36 Savage Eye, The 122 Schleier, Merrill 51, 54, 69, 72 Schoedsack, Ernest B. 85 Schrader, Paul 148, 172n3 Schuman, Tony 30 Sclar, Elliott 30 Screen Actors Guild 190 Sedgwick, Edward 36 Seltzer, Leo 86–87 Selvyn, Edgar 85 Sennett, Richard 57–58, 62, 83, 117–118 set design 26n32, 38 Set-Up, The 151 Seventh Victim, The 147 Sexton, Patricia C. 128, 133, 135, 142n23, 142n24 Shadows 183, 185–186, 185; Ben 186; Tony 186 Sheeler, Charles 52, 54–55, 56, 60, 62, 63–64, 68, 124, 174n23 Shiel, Mark 3, 19, 47, 53, 72, 84, 96, 144–145, 154 Shoeshine 122 Side Street 150, 166, 173n9, 182, 197 Sidewalks of New York 37 silent flm 7, 46, 68, 76–78, 100, 111n17 Silvera, Frank 181 Simmel, Georg 36, 41–42, 52, 57–59, 62–63, 70–71, 100, 119, 137, 141n11, 193, 195 Simon, Simone 152, 160 Singer building 60, 176 Singer, Ben 53, 59, 68, 75–77, 82n6 Siodmak, Robert 7, 26n39, 26n41, 26n44, 149, 152, 158, 172n3, 194, 195, 196 Sklar, Robert 12, 90, 96, 123–124, 141n12 Skouras, Spyros 175 skyline: image 15, 37, 61, 89, 96; incomplete 55, 67; trope 15, 40, 67; view 51–52, 55, 67, 140, 162, 165, 167; vision 15, 37, 39–40, 53, 78, 110n6, 160, 166–167; see also Manhattan

Index skyscraper 14–15, 32–33, 37–38, 48n5, 51–54, 61, 66–68, 72, 78, 82n4, 91, 97, 103–104, 110n6, 165, 199 Skyscraper Souls 85 slum 6, 8, 13, 21, 23n9, 24n18, 28, 84, 88–89, 95–101, 107, 111n13, 116, 127–128, 131, 142n25, 145, 151, 160, 162–163, 170, 189, 201, 203 Smith, Jamie 179 Smith, Kent 160 Smith, Marvin 118, 141n6 Smith, Morgan 118, 141n6 Smith, Winchell 36 Sobchack, Vivian C. 188 social anxieties 8–9, 15–16, 20, 25n25, 144, 146, 151, 162, 175 Something Wild 187–190, 191, 192– 193, 197, 197; Mary Ann Robinson 189–191, 193–194; Mrs Gates 190 Sorry, Wrong Number 156 Sound of Fury 165 space: representational 5, 8–9, 22, 52, 89, 94, 96, 101, 131, 138; representations of 5, 21, 89, 93;social 8, 28, 42, 50n31, 59, 125, 131, 158; see also urban spatial: imagination 4–5, 7, 12, 14, 20, 42, 96, 159, 175; practices 5, 21–22, 52, 76, 107, 134–135, 137 Stander, Lionel 191–192 Stanwick, Barbara 156 Staten Island 53, 66, 82n4 Steiner, Ralph 13, 83, 101, 104, 139, 164 Stella, Joseph 83 Stern, Robert A. M. 33–37, 48n8, 53, 73, 83, 91, 98, 128, 142n23, 181 Stevens, Inger 179 Stevens, Mark 153 Stieglitz, Alfred 54, 97 Stone, Andrew L. 179 Strand, Paul 52, 54–55, 56, 60, 63–64, 63–64, 68, 82n3, 85, 124, 174n23 Street of Chance 147 Street Scene 84 Street with No Name, The 155, 165, 177 Suárez Sánchez, Antonio S. 124 Suarez, Juan 53, 65–66 suburban environment 26n43, 105 suburbanization 1–2, 16, 21, 23n4, 24n9, 29–32, 35, 49n20, 145–146, 158–159, 170, 179, 205 Sudden Fear 179; Myra Hudson 179

243

Sunset Boulevard 211–212 surveillance 64, 154–157, 160, 164–165, 182, 197 Sutcliffe, Anthony 13, 210 Swanson, Gloria 36, 212 Sweet Smell of Success 171; J. J. Hunsecker 171; Sydney Falco 171 Tafuri, Manfredo 28, 51 Tattooed Stranger, The 158 Taylor, William 34, 51, 72, 95 tenements 13, 59, 77, 88, 96–99, 111n15, 116, 126, 130, 140, 142n25, 147, 152, 159 Tetzlaff, Ted 147, 152, 153 Thieving Hand, The 36 Times Square 28, 34, 94–95, 107, 110n7, 111n11, 166, 179–181 T-Men 154–155, 207n1 Tomorrow is Another Day 157 Tone, Franchot 196 Touch of Evil 29, 48n2 Tourneur, Jacques 27n45, 149, 152, 154 Trachtenberg, Alan 116, 119, 129 Trevor, Claire 97 Truffaut, Francois 133, 141n14 Tucker, Anne 88 Twenty-Four Dollar Island 53 Ulmer, Edgar G. 24n19, 154, 179 unemployment 11–12, 49n20, 72, 84, 86, 88, 99, 125, 127, 144, 172n4 United Nations building 189 urban: ambiguity 35, 148; corporeality 131, 178; crowd 62, 66, 73; documentary 85, 102, 139; images 3, 24n14, 35, 42, 44–45, 65, 159; imaginaries 3–4, 7, 9, 12–13, 22, 24n14, 28, 41, 44, 90, 123, 170, 211; landscape 2, 10, 48n7, 65, 67, 77, 149, 158, 160–161, 163, 167, 184, 212; memories 3, 22, 205; planning 2–3, 5, 14–16, 18, 22, 29, 31, 33, 35, 84, 88, 104, 111n13, 173n10, 192, 207; setting 7–8, 42, 151, 155, 164, 170, 172; sociology 2, 49n11, 49n17, 57–58, 79, 84; space 1, 3–5, 7–9, 34, 40, 42, 47, 79, 84, 89, 91, 104, 111n14, 114, 122, 136, 149, 152, 154, 159, 172, 178, 183, 190, 198, 211; studies 3, 21, 34, 97; transformation 1–3, 8, 10, 16, 18, 21, 28–29, 146, 210

244

Index

urban renewal 1–2, 13–17, 21–22, 23n8, 23n9, 26n41, 28, 31–32, 34–35, 41, 47n1, 111n13, 113, 125, 127–128, 131, 133, 135, 137, 142n24, 144, 150, 158–160, 178, 198, 200, 204, 207, 208n6, 211 Van Dyke, Willard 13, 84, 101, 104, 139, 164 Vertov, Dziga 61, 108, 157 Vidor, King 52, 68–73, 69, 73, 75–76, 84–85, 157 violence 17, 19–20, 22, 26n40, 133, 139, 146–148, 151, 153, 163, 165–166, 182, 186, 189, 197, 206 Virilio, Paul 12, 129 voyeurs 4, 51, 65, 67, 92, 146, 208n4 Wagner, Robert F. 96, 98, 203 Wall Street 53–54, 63, 104, 164, 167–168, 170 Wallace, Jean 178 Walsh, Raoul 36 Walzer, Michael 117 Ward, Janet 60, 75 Warner Brothers 29, 84, 90 Warren, Harry 90 Wave, The 63 Weaver, John V.A. 72 Webb, Clifton 154 Weed, A. E. 36 Weegee (Arthur Fellig) 23n5, 40, 156, 207n1 Wekerle, Gerda 206 Welles, Orson 10–11, 29, 48n2, 171, 176 Wellman, William A. 13, 84–85 What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City 36 When Strangers Marry 194, 205

Where the Sidewalk Ends 158 White, Jules 37 Whitman,Walt 52, 54–55, 61, 65–66 Why We Fight 116 Widmark, Richard 25n29, 152 Wilder, Billy 7, 24n19, 145, 157, 211–212 Williams, Raymond 41, 44, 50n24, 59, 89, 108 Window, The 40, 147, 152, 153, 205 Winter, Jay 9 Wirth, Louis 49n11, 65–66, 71, 82n8, 102, 193 Wise, Robert 151, 183, 183, 208n6 Wojcik, Pamela R. 131, 152 Woman in the Window 147, 173n8 women in the city 17, 26n37, 34, 91, 105, 111n12, 122, 125–126, 141n13, 142n20, 143n31, 147, 178–179, 206 Woolrich, Cornell 152, 169 Woolworth building 36, 51, 60, 176 Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) (1931–1936) 83, 85–89, 86–87, 109 World War: One 9, 52, 72, 174n30; Two 2, 6, 8–9, 10, 12, 17–18, 22, 23n3, 24n12, 28–32, 35, 37, 40, 102, 139, 142n26, 146, 148–149, 172n2, 175, 179–180, 184, 210 World’s Fair 2, 84, 105 Wrong Man, The 182, 197, 205; Manny Balestrero 182–183 Wyler, William 13, 83, 96–98, 98, 111n16, 152, 155 Yiftachel, Oren 16–17 Young, Iris Marion 109, 117–118, 124 Zanuck, Darryl F. 175 Zimmermann, Patricia 109