Films in the Urban Context

In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin mentions a meeting with Gertrude Stein and what she felt about cinema as an art form and how she would like to see Chaplin in a film. “She would like to see me in a movie just walking up the street and turning a corner, then another corner and another.” We can very well infer from Stein’s statement that the visual she imagined was essentially in an urban setting and not any specific urban setting. As a principal mentor of the Parisian avant-garde, Gertrude Stein knew the nuances of a city scene and its relationship with the medium of cinema.

The purpose of this essay is to show how the medium of cinema embraces and transcends the urban setting. In the early days of cinema, the identity of specific cities was of little or no consequence. Film viewers need not have identified with them, even though the themes were essentially urban (unemployment, migration, homelessness, crimes etc.). With the progress of cinema as an art form, all the above concerns have come to be placed in real cities with the viewer able to identify them through landmarks and known urban places. The concerns remain universal, while the contexts are specific.

During the days of early short films, Hollywood greats like Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd and other comedians in the business abundantly used city locations to work out their ‘plots’. There was almost no reference to a specific city, and it was, perhaps, not needed either. What was needed was a city street, people, cars, tall buildings, a railway track, which were ingredients that all these artists needed to perform the gags. Not a single Keaton film could be conceived without a contraption to jump from the roof of a tall building onto an adjacent one only to fall along its wall and eventually reach the basement and land on a car to be carried out instantly on the city streets for a resumed chase by a whole battery of policemen. The viewers of these episodes wanted to see Keaton as much as they wanted to see the city and these unforgettable episodes could perhaps never have been conceived without the essential chaos of an urban setting. The constant ‘action’ scenes had to be essentially urban.

The city has always been an arena of ‘action’ during those early days of two-reel comedies. Chaplin hung on to the silent mode till long after sound came to Hollywood. City Lights, Chaplin’s third full length feature film, shot in Chaplin Studios and urban locations in Los Angeles (Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles was a favourite location and much of the film was shot here), may be considered an example of the ‘universal’ urban as a basis of the diverse ‘real’ constructs in public imagination as well as the specialists’ subject of interest and engagement. Donald W. McCaffrey, the film critic, writes: “The big city seems like a far-off place – somewhere in Europe, possibly. The home of the blind girl, acted by Virginia Cherrill, has the look of a poor Spanish courtyard and is reached by an archway from the city streets. In short, the environment is a synthesis that suited Chaplin’s romantic view.” In Woody Allen’s Manhattan, the final scene is based on the climax of City Lights. The ‘universal’ urban, thus presents distant real images (like the Spanish courtyard) and provides the basis for realism in films shot in actual locations (as in the case of Manhattan).

In the early days of cinema, there was almost no reference to a specific city

In City Lights, the city is not known, but perhaps it is of no consequence. The universal theme of migration, homelessness and the eternal search for a home in the city transcend space and time and remain the key urban concerns even today in most parts of the world.

The city and its images, thus, represent a kind of naturalism imagined in specific terms by artists, writers and the average movie-goer and are perhaps as impactful as the work of James Joyce where naturalism is depicted in the minutest details in his lifelong narratives of Dublin in his epic novels like Ulysses. Counterparts, a story from his only collection of short stories (Dubliners) for instance, is a highly ‘filmable’ tale. It could be placed in any city as long as there is a man employed/caged from ten to five in an office and the city remains a refuge from humiliation and workplace agonies. Only the details worked out in Joyce’s narrative will have to be replaced by the details of another city. The afternoons of freedom portrayed in the story will have to be nuanced differently. The ‘real’ bars (Scotch house, Mulligan’s etc.) mentioned in the story will have to be replaced by ‘real’ bars in another city. And if set in contemporary times, the number of children at home may have to be reduced. Here, one would like to remember Happy Anniversary, a 12-minute film shot in 1962 by Pierre Étaix, which depicts the story of the unending wait of a wife on the day of their anniversary, while the husband navigates through the chaotic Paris traffic as he tries to pick up flowers and cake, to make the occasion special. The film, which is so essentially Paris of the ’60s, may well be a portrait of cities in India or other cities where private ownership of cars in middle class families is so common today. Traffic jams, the central ‘plot’ of the film, is an urban problem cities are grappling with. 

Happy Anniversary could start from anywhere, like nearly all of Franz Kafka’s novels, narrated with the slimmest plotlines without conventional beginnings or ends. The filmmaker of Happy Anniversary, like Kafka, does not take it upon himself to ‘introduce’ the narrative. The film, rather, plays out the events in a style that could be described as a detached commentary with dispassionate humour employing techniques of the French new wave – jump cuts and depiction of parallel narratives in the form of a collage of moving images. The documentary style of the film and the lack of a conventional narrative bring Kafka in this discussion and it will always remain a debate whether Kafka’s novels, which don’t follow the conventional narrative ideal, are the best material for a film or not. His novels too, like the tramp films of Chaplin (ending with Modern Times as the tramp and the leading lady slowly fade out into the landscape towards the hills) are not located in any city, but in the ‘universal’ urban. In The Trial, there is the judge who is elusive. There are assassins who take the main character out of town and finally thrust the butcher’s knife in his heart. There was a glimpse of a window opening on the upper floor of an adjacent house. There was a hint of hope in the story, which seems unfinished. But the images are penetrating. 

Satyajit Ray once said of Godard that, “Cinema is in his bones.” When we watch Breathless, we know that the filmmaker is engaged in the ‘universal’ theme of the man on the run, pretty much in the style of the early comedies of Chaplin or Keaton. But in his treatment of the film he is being able to break out of a narrative, the plot, even the setting: the city of Paris. In his use of the sound montage, in the use of the stills and obsessive movement of the camera, rarely on the track, most of the time hand held, he portrays the city and its people in a whirlwind; in a constant tension in the face of an imminent collapse, as it were. Breathless too, could have started from anywhere. It is only incidental that it starts with the murder. And it is also incidental that the film ends with the death of the murderer, the bragging gangster played by Jean Claude Belmondo. The girl in the lead does not break down, but instead becomes a party to his being hunted down. The remorseless, gender neutral face of crime is again a contemporary portrayal and stems from the complexities and cosmopolitanism of urban crimes committed in large cities across the world. It is a story without a sad ending, but just an ending, unlike City Lights, which is classical in structure (with a beginning, a middle part, an end, reinforced by a strong linear narrative and appropriate background score) and ends on a tragic note. It is evident that the language and treatment of cinema have changed considerably with the French new wave in the 30 years after City Lights was made in Hollywood. The absence of the script in the conventional format in Godard’s films is also a deliberate act of on- location construction of a film. “Godard’s way of filmmaking is like writing a diary. References are made arbitrarily, without a pattern, filming is done without a script, an incomplete idea matures in the process of making a film.” – Roy Arnes in his book Film and Reality. 

Traffic jams, the central ‘plot’ of the film, Happy Anniversary, is an urban problem cities are grappling with

French new wave cinema and its precursor, the Italian neo-realism, employed certain methods and techniques that changed the art of filmmaking forever. These were, on-location shooting, abolishing the star system and minimal use of the studio. Neo-realist filmmakers (De Sica and Renoir in particular) were the main forces to shape Satyajit Ray’s films. They knew that a revolution in the art of filmmaking had happened in the late ’40s and the beginning of the ’50s and followed the basic tenets of the new style of filmmaking to develop a language of Indian contemporary cinema. But for Ray the location was supreme and the importance of the story central. His film scripts, like Kurosawa’s, were works of art. Failures in portraying little details for him were seminal gaps. He writes in the preface to his compilation of essays in Our Films, Their Films: “Looking at Pather Panchali today, I am upset by errors in detail, which keep blurring the social identity of some of its characters. I know this was caused by my lack of familiarity with the rural scene. And yet it is possible for a film to work, as Pather Panchali does, whenever it leaves its regional moorings and rises to a plane of universal gestures and universal emotions.” 

His later films have had an obsessive engagement with details and the urban specific (in his Calcutta series films like Mahanagar and Pratidwandi, for instance) but, most importantly, they have been able to rise above their regional moorings to a plane of ‘universal gestures and universal emotions.’ But apart from the universal appeal of the themes, the city of Calcutta and its problems, primarily of post-war and post-Partition India, have been depicted in these films with superb artistry and humanistic portrayals. The problems of urban migration and unemployment that plagued the country in the 1960s and ’70s form the backdrop of these films, as are the changes in society that emerged as a result, with the middle class woman stepping out of the home (in Mahanagar i.e The Great City) to make a living and contributing to the family income are depicted with utmost sensitivity. These films document the social and economic transformations of urban India and are part of the larger narrative of its history of independence, urbanism and liberalisation. 

The evolution of cinema as an art form has come a long way. Techniques have changed and new genres emerged, but the city as a canvas, and perhaps the protagonist, has held centrestage in the course of its development. The spatial and temporal aspects of the transforming city are best captured through the medium of films unlike the conventional static modes of presentation used in the disciplines of urban planning and design. Literature and films on cities are now at the core of urban studies and critical analyses of these forms and synthesis in the teaching-learning processes of planning and design are essential. Mitigation of urban problems and intervention strategies can be much better orchestrated by an appreciation of these essential urban art forms.