OUAN501 - Cities & Film:
In this lecture, we looked at the city in both modernism, post-modernism, ourselves in relation to the city and crowds of which we are engulfed in, the idea of urban sociology, and the city as both a private and public space.
The lecture featured Georg Simmel (a German sociologist) quite heavily and talked about how his works on the city and how it affects us. He was asked to perform a lecture on "the role of intellectual life in the city", but reversed it completely and writes about how the city affects us - a behemoth, technological mess of cultures, races, and beliefs swallowing us up! The Metropolis and Mental Life (Georg Simmel - 1903) talks plenty of this.
We talked of the development of skyscrapers throughout the ages and how many architects (Sullivan and Adler to name a few) perfected this design over many years in order to accommodate the idea of the economical and social worlds coming together and coexisting. This first brought about the creation of the Guaranty building, showing that a very public space such as shops and cafés were available on the ground area, with offices and private areas existing on the next floors. Soon after, the Carlson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904) was built giving a whole new lease of life to the city. Skyscrapers were to "represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity."
Modern Times (1936) by Charlie Chaplin looks at how the city is essentially suffocating its inhabitants with the ever-growing technological advances it is acquiring, Chaplin is depicted as a factory line worker, having to deal with such indignities as being force fed by a "feeding machine", trying to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of the assembly line, and then eventually having a mental breakdown causing him to run amok, wreaking havoc within the factory. Although Chaplin is know for his very silly and humorous works, he must have been making a serious and threatening point that one day the city we live in, the city we believe to protect us, could indeed end up killing us.
