Context of Practice Lecture 5: Cities and Film

Today's lecture was about cities and film, and the city in modernism through to post modernism and how it has been displayed in photography and film including the beginnings of urban sociology and the effect of the city crowds in relation to the individual.

Architect Louis Sullivan played a major role in the rise of the city as the creator of the skyscraper, and in 1871 the great Chicago fire made way for many new buildings of of Sullivan's which became the hugely popular and influenced every major city in the world, and inevitably and eventually, film, comics and game.

L.A. Noir used the genre of film Noir in game and was the first video game to be shown at the Tribecca film festival, this undeniably displays the convergence and similarities in these subjects. L.A. Noire used 'Motion Scanning' which records actors with 32 surrounding cameras to capture their facial expressions. This was essential to gameplay as players can detect lies in interrogation scenes and if successful can solve more cases.

In the late 1930's, New York became a central part of comics, providing a perfect landscape and environment for seemingly urban restricted superheroes. "We have always been fascinated by huge American cities, simply because they are so much larger than life in every respect. They are gateways into wonderful, imaginary worlds. Artists look at New York and it becomes Metropolis, or Gotham City, unique, real, and fantastic at the same time." - Narrator - Once Upon a Time, The Superheroes! DVD, ILC Prime Time Ltd. 2002.

"I think its no accident that the best superheroes stories take place in an urban setting, there's something about the kind of rigid, grid-like prison block felling of the modern city that responds very well to having a athletic figure freely jumping across it, completely oblivious to gravity." - Comic book artist Dave Gibbons - Once Upon a Time, The Superheroes!

This suggests its the layout and the landscape of the city that allows for effective free-running and fights, as well an interesting, more detailed environment for characters to fly around, overall it seems that it is the visual and interactiveness of the buildings that makes it such a good setting for superheroes. Sociologist Harry Brod goes on to explain it is this grid-like prison block layout that creates a feeling of entrapment and vulnerability and panic amongst people, but a from where a superhero stands, above the city, it is accessible, interesting, and easy to spot abnormalities or danger from afar...

"If you in your mind transformed buildings into the natural environment it would be canyons and valleys, so the feeling of being closed in on this extreme level, but if you could rise above it, it was a huge open space so superheros could fly above the confides of the city out into the open space." - Harry Brod, sociologist. Comic book writer and character creator Stan Lee goes on to explain that its not only this, but using a city like New York for a setting also it adds realism in settings and accessibility.

"I used New York for most of the stories because almost any type of background you wanted, you could find in New York City. It made for a very interesting background material. Also I lived in New York, so it made it very easy for me to be authentic, I could mention what neighbourhood something was taking place and I knew this was true because I knew the neighbourhoods." - Stan Lee

Comic book artist Alex Ross indicates its also for the undeniable rise in crime in cities that make it a good home for superheroes. Away from crime, in the county side a spandex wearing caped crusader looks silly and out of place, but in the city its acceptable, because its part of the comic book world where readers view this as a normal and acceptable way to dress in this fantasy world..

"Cities like New York are supposed to represent our greatest achievements of humanity up to this point, so that's were most things are going to be going at. So the estate of a city is to supply that superhero to be as best effect. So like if you took Batman and put him in where I came from Lovett Texas, there's not much for him to do down there, he's gonna roll around looking for hillbillys to beat up so there's not much of a point to taking characters like these urban heroes and removing them from the more urban society that we've come to visualise them in, superheroes seem out of place when you take them out into the middle of the countryside." - Alex Ross

Watchmen

Alan Moore opens the critically acclaimed graphic novel Watchmen with the following passage from Rorschach (main character's) Journal: "Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I've seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us" and I will whisper "no"."

This is a much darker take on the representation of a city, where the hero has no sympathy for society. He views the city as broken, dirty, noisy, diseased and hopeless. "Beneath me, this awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children. New York... Dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences." The only reason for his paranoid, borderline psychopathic heroes heroic endeavours is for his black and white outlook on good and evil, and more concentrated on punishing the evil than protecting the good.

Though this world exists in a parallel universe, where Nixon didn't resign and won another term,
Watchmen is written with strong viewpoints criticising cities like New York for the kind of society it produces. High in crime, prostitution, pollution and with a bleak outlook of people, Moore writes metaphorically but obviously about his own view points on politics and with his unique heroes all flawed, and not so 'super,' but ironically trying to save society from itself.

"Blake understood. Treated it like a joke but he understood. He saw the cracks in society and saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together. He saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke, that's why he was so lonely."