Seeing Symphonically

Erica Stein

Description

Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.
Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Carving Out an Island

1. Tomorrow Has No Smell: The City, Regional Planning, and the National Day

2. City/Text: Weegee’s New York, Urban Renewal, and the Miniature-Gigantic

3. Secret Passages: Symphonies of the Margins, Slum Clearance, and Blight

4. Spectacle in Progress: Symphonies of the Center and Advocacy Planning

5. Image/City/Fracture: The Cool World, the Urban Crisis, and Nostalgia for Modernity

Coda: Repair

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Película fotográfica
• Popular culture
• Visual culture
• Media studies
• History of film
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438486642
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Seeing Symphonically
Seeing Symphonically
Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York

Erica Stein
Cover image: The final shot of Bridges-Go-Round parodies and critiques the touristic views of the city used by Circle Line and other engines of possessive speculation. (Shirley Clarke, Dir. Bridges-Go-Round . 1958; New York: Milestone Films, 2016. DVD. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Theater and Film Research.)
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Stein, Erica, author.
Title: Seeing symphonically : avant-garde film, urban planning, and the utopian image of New York / Erica Stein.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021016729 (print) | LCCN 2021016730 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438486635 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438486642 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: City symphonies (Motion pictures)—United States—History and criticism. | City and town life in motion pictures. | Rhythm in motion pictures | Utopias in motion pictures. | Independent films—United States—History—20th century. | City planning—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Urban renewal—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | New York (N.Y.)—In motion pictures. | New York (N.Y.)—History—1898–1951. | New York (N.Y.)—History—1951–
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.N49 S74 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.N49 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/627471—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016729
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016730
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother, who drew my first maps of New York, and for my father, who taught me to walk in it
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Carving Out an Island
1 Tomorrow Has No Smell: The City , Regional Planning, and the National Day
2 City/Text: Weegee’s New York , Urban Renewal, and the Miniature-Gigantic
3 Secret Passages: Symphonies of the Margins, Slum Clearance, and Blight
4 Spectacle in Progress: Symphonies of the Center and Advocacy Planning
5 Image/City/Fracture: The Cool World , the Urban Crisis, and Nostalgia for Modernity
Coda: Repair
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
I.1 The attenuated graduation ceremony in Go! Go! Go!
I.2 Lobby cards for Little Fugitive exemplify the relative popular exposure and success independent cinema could achieve in late modern New York .
1.1 An artist’s rendering of Democracity at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair emphasized viewers’ elevated vantage point .
1.2 A point of view shot provides a survey of the town of Shirley, Massachusetts in the opening section of The City .
1.3 A Black miner, wearing a prosthetic leg, enters a shack in The City ’s Pittsburgh section .
1.4 The second shot of The City ’s New York section, which composes an internal, embedded viewpoint .
1.5 A school from the Greenbelt section of The City . It closely resembles the other municipal and office buildings in the section .
2.1 A “bright hot light” shines on a midtown crowd in the “New York Fantasy” section of Weegee’s New York .
2.2 Det. Halloran ponders the case from an elevated vantage point that mimics an urban planner’s position and miniaturizes New York in Naked City.
2.3 Optical effects diffract light around the lion sculptures that guard the New York Public Library in “New York Fantasy.”
2.4 The opening shot of “Coney Island” asserts the normality of the huge crowd it features .
2.5 One of the casual threesomes that populate the middle section of “Coney Island.”
3.1 Black children playing in a vacant lot at the end of In the Street appropriate the camera as a toy .
3.2 The first shot of the bridge in Under Brooklyn Bridge defamiliarizes this iconic structure .
3.3 Ray and other indigent Bowery residents are seen through the prison-like bars at the local mission .
3.4 Joey goes on a quest for Pepsi bottles to turn into nickels and pony rides in Little Fugitive .
4.1 The first shot of Penn Station in N.Y., N.Y. eschews the optical effects for which the film is otherwise known .
4.2 The performance artist and composer Moondog plays the role of a modern-day Times Square saint in Jazz of Lights .
4.3 Floating capital in N.Y., N.Y .
4.4 Clarke depicts a series of caring, communal gestures that contest the empty movements of the spectacle in Melting Pot .
4.5 The final shot of Bridges-Go-Round parodies and critiques the touristic views of the city used by the Circle Line and other engines of possessive speculation .
4.6 St. Patrick’s Cathedral glimpsed through the unfinished floor of the Tishman Building, linking past and future in a single image in Skyscraper .
5.1 The Fair Corporation published many promotional images like this one—a photograph of the diorama exhibited in the American Express pavilion—that erased the city and its environs .
5.2 The Panorama of the City of New York was one of several exhibits that appropriated aspects of the city symphony to communicate a nostalgia for modernity .
5.3 The artists’ rendering of the exterior of the Johnson Wax Pavilion, in which To Be Alive! was screened for more than 8,000 people a day .
5.4 The white police officers in The Cool World challenge the camera and the African American boys whose perspective it embodies .
5.5 The Cool World evokes the utopian aspects of liminality in its Coney Island scenes, particularly in Duke and Luanne’s conversation by the ocean .
Acknowledgments
This project began at the University of Iowa, where Lauren Rabinovitz showed me new ways of thinking about the city and inspired my study of American independent film. As my dissertation chair, Lauren generously shared her own research notes from earlier projects on Shirley Clarke and World’s Fairs, made me rewrite chapter 4 twice (it needed it), and line-edited the entire manuscript. I am indebted to her beyond measure for her guidance, infectious enthusiasm, and high standards in all things. I am also grateful to many other Iowa faculty: Rick Altman, Paula Amad, Corey Creekmur, David Wittenberg, Louis-Georges Schwartz, and Rosalind Galt. In the years since we both left Iowa, Rosalind has offered endless advice and support. I am so fortunate to have her as a teacher and a friend.
At Iowa I was exceptionally lucky to be part of an expansive and caring community of peers, including Peter Schaefer and Margaret Schwartz, Kevin MacDonald and Gina Giotta, Gerald Sim, Claudia Pummer, Jennifer Fleeger, Anastasia Saverino, Allison McGuffie, Leslie Delassus, Kyle Stine, Mike Hetra, Michael Slowik, David Oscar Harvey, and Alison Wielgus. Sushmita Banerji offered insight and commentary that invigorated every class we took together and sharpened my thinking about the politics of cinematic space. Her conversation, tough-mindedness, and encouragement have been highlights of the last fifteen years. Ofer Eliaz read each draft of this book and shaped my thinking and writing, while reminding me that they are the same thing, at every turn. At Iowa, the highlight of my week was walking over to Nilo Couret’s apartment on Sunday afternoons for takeout and TV. Over a conference breakfast years later, he not only untangled a major structural problem that led to the current organization of this book but also shared his beignets. Each time I see him, in Ann Arbor or Seattle or Rio, he introduces me to something new, extraordinary, or just plain fun.
As this project evolved from dissertation to book, my thoughts on media and urbanism have been profoundly influenced and improved by discussions with colleagues like Brendan Kredell, Paula Massood, Mark Shiel, Shannon Mattern, Stan Corkin, Germaine Halegoua, Malini Guha, Merrill Scheleir, Josh Gleich, Lawrence Webb, Anna Viola Sborgi, S. Topiary Landberg, Josh Glick, Liz Patton, Nathan Holmes, Ling Zhang, Floris Paalman, Anthony Kinik, and Noelle Griffis. Noelle, Ling, Nathan, and Kathrine Model also helped revise the introduction and chapter 1 in our local writing group. A brilliant writer and an endlessly supportive mentor, Sabine Haenni first introduced me to many of the concepts central to this book. I am also grateful to the members of the 2019 SCMS Expanding and Reconsidering the City Symphony Seminar.
I was and am supported by the scholarly community at Vassar College. Mia Mask, Sophia Harvey, Shane Slattery-Quintanilla, Denise Iris, Alex Kupfer, and our staff make the Film Department a great place to work and teach. My research assistants, Lucy Rosenthal, Dylan Lynch, and Lena Stevens, contributed to every part of this project. Tahirih Motazedian, Osman Nemli, Krystle McLaughlin, Anne Brancky, Jasmine Syedullah, and Lori Newman have created a wonderf