cinema, city, modernity part-i dr. nilgun bayraktar hum 102 spring 2014
TRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITYPART-I
CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITYPART-I
Dr. Nilgun BayraktarHUM 102
Spring 2014
![Page 2: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
The founding myth of cinema, or the “train effect”
• Paris as the site of the founding myth of cinema: “On December 28, 1895, cinema begins in the basement of the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris.”
![Page 3: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
The Lumière Brothers• Two French
engineers who invented the cinematographic process and gave the first public film projection in 1895
• They produced many non-fictional or “actuality” films that showed ordinary aspects of everyday life
CINEMATOGRAPH
![Page 4: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
• “In L’Arrivée d’un train, the locomotive, coming from the background of the screen, rushed toward the spectators, who jumped up in shock, as they feared getting run over.” (Georges Sadoul)
![Page 5: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) by Lumière Brothers
![Page 6: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Truchet’s poster for the Cinématographe Lumière screening in 1895
![Page 7: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
train affect: urbanity, speed, cinema, and the city
• “The on-rushing train did not simply produce the negative experience of fear but the particularly modern entertainment form of the thrill, embodied else- where in the recently appearing attractions of the amusement parks (such as the roller coaster), which combined sensations of acceleration and falling with a security guaranteed by modern industrial technology” (Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 1989).
![Page 8: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
movement&
vision
modern experience
![Page 9: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
modernity-cinema
• the rise of a metropolitan urban culture leading to new forms of entertainment and leisure activity
• the centrality of the body as the site of vision, attention, and stimulation
• the recognition of a mass public, crowd, or audience
• the impulse to define, fix, and represent isolated moments in the face of modernity's distractions and sensations (i.e. photography or poetry)
• the increased blurring of the line between reality and its representations
• the surge in commercial culture and consumer desire
![Page 10: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Early film in cities and cities in early film
• Artistic and technological exchange also took place between London, Berlin, Moscow, and New York
• The growth of cinema--the growth of cities
• The development of movie theaters as urban sites of entertainment and distraction
![Page 11: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
![Page 12: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris in 19th century
• Urban reconstruction turned Paris into an emblem of modernity by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann
• Transformation of the city from an organically grown town to a planned metropolis
• A vertically organized city--the underground world of sewer systems and later subways embodied a hidden modernity
![Page 13: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
![Page 14: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
old Paris
![Page 15: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
New Paris
![Page 16: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
Haussmann's boulevards crisscross Paris, seen from the top of the Tour Montparnasse
![Page 17: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
Eiffel Toweremblem of modernity
![Page 18: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
Modernity and the City Film Berlin
• In Germany, the genre of city film emerged during the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first and ill-fated democracy, from 1919 to 1933.
• Modernity was simultaneously experienced as violent shock and embraced for its technological and aesthetically innovative opportunities.
Berlin 1926
![Page 19: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
Street Cafe and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, 1920-1929
![Page 20: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
Berlin in the 1920s
![Page 21: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
![Page 22: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
City Film in Weimar Republic• A growing fascination with metropolitan motifs, motion, and
development
• The assumption that the camera could capture visual evidence of a city
• Karl Grune’s The Street (1923), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Robert and Curt Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1928), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Fritz Lang’s M (1931)
• Themes: crime, anonymity, a loosening of morality, unemployment, and class struggle; movement, speed, entertainment, and liberated erotics
![Page 23: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
Theories of Modernity and Urbanity
• Thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, who had a keen interest in the city and the cinema, insisted that modernity must be understood in terms of a fundamentally different subjective experience, characterized by the physical and perceptual shocks of the modern urban environment
Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
![Page 24: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
“The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)
by Georg Simmel
• “The rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impression: These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life” (Simmel, 1903).
• “The metropolitan type” is characterized by a rational and intellectual response to uprootedness, the increased speed of information and impressions, and the “intensification of nervous stimulation.”
![Page 25: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
![Page 26: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)
![Page 27: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/27.jpg)
''Horse Smashed Cable Car Window," New York World, 1897.
''Horse Smashed Cable Car Window," New York World, 1897.
![Page 28: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/28.jpg)
![Page 29: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/29.jpg)
"When Unlicensed Chauffeurs Are Abroad," Cartoons, 1913.
![Page 30: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/30.jpg)
Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
(1927)• Images, events, and
encounters seen as representative of urbanism become the raw material of the film
• It reproduces the sensory experience of the city through its “associative montage,” a method which can capture the fragmented aspects of modern life in the metropolis
![Page 31: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/31.jpg)
![Page 32: CINEMA, CITY, MODERNITY PART-I Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar HUM 102 Spring 2014](https://reader036.vdocuments.net/reader036/viewer/2022062515/56649d0a5503460f949dd3b7/html5/thumbnails/32.jpg)
Modernist aestheticsThe city symphony
• Berlin: Symphony of a Great City responds to experience of modernity as fragmented and abstract through its aesthetic choices of editing, rhythm, and rejection of traditional narrative