| Interlude: cities
& worldviews & cinema
Cinema, from its earliest days, has been a wonderful medium for
projecting worldviews in the form of screen cities. In particular,
many science-fiction films have given exacerbated form to the
city within the different paradigms they portrayed, while simple
fiction or historical movies have just romanticized it.
Fritz Lang’ Metropolis
(1927) comes to mind first. This early German expressionist movie
remains one of the most violently visual representations of the
mechanical/industrial city, with its towering ghost-like skyscrapers
linked by bridges, biplanes and zeppelins, looming over an under
ground world of machine-like workers. A few decades later, the
modernist take on the city was represented by the risible (yet
highly enjoyable, at least aesthetically) screen adaptation of
Ayn Rand’ The
Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949), also in glorious black and
white. In the age of Technicolor, Hollywood moved to historical
dramas, recreating the most grandiose of settings to represent
the Roman urban lifestyle centred (apparently) on the arena (there
wasn’t enough spectacle in the forum). Stanley Kubrick’
Spartacus
(1960) is a great example, and of course its 1990s descendant,
Gladiator,
which was directed by Ridley Scott (2000).
Scott also gave us the epitomous screen version of the extreme
pessimistic postmodern city. The Los Angeles of Blade
Runner (1982), with all its messy chaos, is a futuristic Chinatown
– actually it is China, but with giant Japanese electronic
advertising billboards and pyramid-like mega-towers.
Its dust-corroded downtown buildings are constantly shrouded in
darkness, and when they are not manufacturing or hunting humanoid
‘replicants’, its people scream at each other in a
mishmash of Western and oriental languages. But that was the early
1980s; a ‘lighter’ take on the postmodern Heteropolis
comes from the mid-1990s. The
Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) borrows the sky-avenues from
Metropolis , but replaces the biplanes with wheel-less yellow
cabs, and the zeppelins with a jet-engine propelled flying Chinese
boat (for home delivery of Chinese food of course). It’s
all very French and cartoon-like. Which is also the case in Jacques
Tati’s Mon Oncle
(1958), which confronts the ‘house as a machine’ to
the livelihood of rural towns, with a lot of behavioural connotations
and support from the soundtrack ...
Batman
(1989) and Beetlejuice
(1988), both directed by Tim Bur ton, are based on comic-book
originals. The former is set in another sinisterly dark city,
the aptly named Gotham City, with its take on a gothic worldview
of Good and Evil brought into the twentieth century. The latter
opens up with a (almost) caricatural version of suburbia, with
perfect little houses in perfect little gardens, and a toy-like
set of colourful cars lining up every morning at the exact same
time on the way to the city and back in the after noon. A less
dramatized version of perfect little lives – although no
less dramatic – can be followed ‘live’ on The
Truman Show (Peter Weir , 1998), set in the most perfect little
town of Windsor. In the film, the little town in question is ‘the
world’s largest stage set’, englobed in a giant dome
beyond which is reality. Truman does not know that, because his
world is complete, with a fake ocean, fake moon and fake weather.
It is only when a stage light falls on his head in the middle
of the street that he realizes something is wrong. I doubt anything
will fall on anyone’ s head in the ‘real’ Windsor
, which is a New Town in Florida designed in 1989 by the champions
of New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
While the Americans were making film-like towns and cartoon-like
films, the Japanese were making film-like cartoons. Manga
films are extremely detailed, action-packed, well-scripted, feature-length
animations. The unmissable
Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995) has the most atmospheric
rendering (not to mention the soundtrack) of the megalopolis of
the Far East, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Another brilliant Manga film
is the less known Wings
of Honneamise (Hiroyuki Yamaga, 1987). This sumptuous movie
has the particularity of describing a world where the scientific
revolution has not brought about any form of mechanization. It
is set in a culture where space travel has become a possibility,
but where even the manufacture of spaceships remains an artisanal
craft. This means the whole aesthetics of the city of Honneamise
are extremely craft-like: cars, buildings and everything else
(down to the electric lampposts) are beautifully detailed without
being ornamental. Without mechanization, everything seems to have
retained the memory of a human touch.
Memory itself is the key actor in Dark
City, which visually and atmospherically has many elements
from Metropolis, Blade Runner and Batman, while the observer–observed
concept is similar to The Truman Show. In this hypnotic film noir,
aliens live underground researching human consciousness. Through
advanced mind-over-matter capabilities, they stop time every night
and ‘inject’ new ‘manufactured’ memories
into the minds of all the inhabitants of the city. The new memories
mean, for the oblivious citizens, new lives past, present and
future, and this of course requires new settings (although in
this city the future only goes on until the next night). This
is the most spectacular part of the film, as our aliens re-shape
the city, transforming it every single night, growing buildings,
creating streets, tearing down bridges and relocating people,
all in a matter of minutes. With their control over time, space
and society complete, they then resurrect the city and lie watching
until the next project, a little like contemporary urban designers
... who can do worse than watch the film Mindwalk
, centred on a discussion between a poet, a politician and a quantum
physicist. In fact, I strongly suggest all readers try to find
that film on video and watch it at this point of this book. In
spite of its dated ‘New-Agisms’ (and an unfortunate
ending), it does present a good recap of the post-Cartesian paradigm
as popularized in the late 1980s. I am not sure what director
Bernt Capra’s relation to Fritjof Capra*, the author of
The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point , is, but you might find
Liv Ullman more eloquent in her exposition of quantum physics
101 than I am!
*UPDATE: SURPRISE, FRITJOF CAPRA TURNS OUT
TO BE THE FILM'S SCREENWRITER...
|
