Cities as Characters: a narrative possibility?

Design Context Cities as Characters: a narrative possibility?

Filipe Caeiro MFA1 Film Directing 26th November 2014 Tutor: Dr. Nichola Dobson

Introduction Cities have been a common sight in films since the very beginning. However, not all the portrayals of cities are stylistically similar. While in most films the city is simply a neutral backdrop in which the action takes place, having no effect in the narrative and the plot, there is a considerable number of films in which the city has significant influence in the way the story develops. Film critics and filmgoers alike tend to, time and again, declare that the “city is almost like a character” (Wickman and Berman, 2014). However, this classification may not be accurate or helpful: does it suggest that a city and a person may serve the same dramatic purpose, under certain conditions? Is the definition of “character” flexible enough to accommodate both concepts? These are the questions I hope to have an answer for by the end of this essay. However, my interest in these questions lies within a wider interest about the various ways cities can be portrayed in Film, which is, in fact, a knowledge I hope to gather and use in my creative studio practice. This essay is comprised of two chapters. The first chapter is an attempt to pin down the concepts I’ll use on the rest of the essay, as well as to identify the limitations of the common application of both concepts. The second chapter will see the findings gathered in previous chapter applied to three films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Patrick Keiller’s

London (1994), and Kléber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds (2012). The choice of these three films over many others is partly due to personal preference. Nevertheless, I also consider these three examples to include a very wide set of aesthetic characteristics which will illustrate the myriad ways city can be portrayed in Film. My expectation is that, by the end of the chapter, I will be able to know with a greater degree of certainty whether cities are portrayed as characters or not. As I said above, the investigation undertaken in this essay will also contribute to the development of my studio project at ECA. Even though that project is a short film that will be set in Edinburgh, the choice not to

include any reference to it in this essay is deliberate, and due to trying to keep an open and unbiased perspective on the way Edinburgh has previously been portrayed. In addition to that, my standpoint when writing this essay is that of a creator rather than that of an academic. All things considered, I will be less interested in producing unbiased, objective conclusions and more interested in producing a sort of inventory of the aesthetic choices previous creators made when portraying cities.

Chapter 1: Defining the concepts “Character” and “City” Character The concept of “character” was first introduced in Classical Greek theatre and has since then undergone significant changes of meaning. As Patrice Pavis (1998, p.47) notes, “in Greek theatre, the persona is the mask or role held by the actor; it does not refer to the character sketched out by the dramatist. […] The evolution of Western theatre is marked by a reversal of this perspective: the character is identified more and more with the actor and becomes a psychological and moral entity similar to other human beings”. Even though this shift in meaning has occurred, the fact that the concept of “character” has been deeply linked to some sort of human nature is unavoidably present. The reference to morality and psychology suggests, in my opinion, an indelible impression of sentience attributed to the concept of “character”, which may clearly indicate that there is no possibility of a city ever be properly considered as a character. The definition of “character” proposed by the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory presents an interesting development to this question: “character […] refers to a storyworld participant, i.e, any individual or unified group occurring in a drama or work of narrative fiction” (Herman, Ryan and Jahn, 2004, p. 52). By recognizing a “unified group” as a character, and by offering a definition which is not prescribed by the limits of Theatre as an art form, this definition seems to be appropriate to apply to the study of films. In addition, allowing a “unified group” into the definition of character suggests the possibility of conciliation between the sentience

problem I exposed on the previous paragraph and the obvious insentience of a city. I will nevertheless elaborate on this point when defining the concept of city. In conclusion, the definition of character advanced by the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory is the definition I will use and refer to on this essay, as it is the one that opens up the possibility of a city being in fact a character. City The definition of “city” I was originally planning to use in this essay was “the population contained within the contours of a contiguous territory inhabited at urban density levels without regard to administrative boundaries. It usually incorporates the population in a city or town plus that in the suburban areas lying outside of, but being adjacent to, the city boundaries” (United Nations Division of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014). However, after drafting the definition of “character” I presented above, I realised that the term “city” includes much more than just its geographic or economic dimensions and that applying the definition above without considering the specificities of drama and narrative would be pointless. How could then a definition of “city” open itself up to the idea of “unified group” I presented before, in order to be sensibly applied to Film? In this case, if we understand “unified group” as the inhabitants of the city, does it mean that they are a group only because they live in the same place? In addition, does it mean that they observe the same behaviours and, generally speaking, act the same way? Moreover, if the only way a city can be a character is through a person or group of people who act in a way that reflects the specificities of city life, where is the line between a person who acts “in name of the city” and a person who is, for all intents and purposes, a self-standing character? The reach of these questions is just too wide to be successfully explored in this essay. To simplify, maybe overly so, I will use the term “city” to signify “a set of human interactions that take place in an urban setting and reflect

or are consequence of that same setting”. Therefore, I will consider any action (by a fictional person) holding up to the description stated above as contribute towards confirming the idea of “city as character”.

Chapter 2: Film Analyses Metropolis (Lang, 1927) Metropolis is probably the most analysed film in relation to Cities and Architecture in Film1, which makes it an obvious choice for this essay. Unlike the two other films I will analyse, Metropolis is the only one based on a fictional city. In Metropolis, the idea of unified groups pervades the narrative from beginning to end. The film explores the clash between the ruling class that lives above the ground in a futuristic-looking city called Metropolis and the working class living in the depths beneath the city. While the city landscape clearly reflects this divide, the answer to the question as to whether the city is a character in this film is quite possibly a negative one. The opening credits may offer an insight into what characters of the film are, to the filmmakers: under the title “Die Gestalten des Films” (The Figures of the Film), alongside the cast and the names of the characters they portray, Lang also named “The Creative Man”, “The Machine-Man”, “Death” and “The Seven Deadly Sins” as “figures in his film”, not including “The City” (see figure 1).

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For instance, almost all of books present in the Bibliography section of this essay include at least a reference to this film. Many of them include paragraphs or even chapters dedicated to Metropolis.

Figure 1 – Metropolis (1927) My point regarding Metropolis is that the concept of character may be applied to other elements of the narrative, but it cannot be applied to the city it portrays. The interactions occurring within the story world can generally be considered to take place in an urban setting, but they do not happen because of the setting. Rather, I argue that the setting exists as a consequence of the interactions and illustrates them, existing passively. The class divide at the centre of the film does not exist because of the structure of the city; instead the structure of the city is set as an illustration or as a consequence of the class divide (see figure 2). The City is not a character, but instead a mirror that reflects what is presented to it. A mirror pregnant with meaning, a mirror that helps characterizing the people and the themes it reflects, but a mirror nonetheless.

Figure 2 – Metropolis (1927)

London (Keiller, 1994) Patrick Keiller’s London is a far cry from Metropolis: an unnamed and unseen narrator tells the story of his travels and experiences around London, accompanied by Robinson, his lover, whom we never see or hear, whose goal is to discover and expose “The problem of London”. The fictional narration accompanies a series of documental footage of the streets of London and its surroundings, making it impossible to classify this film as being either a documentary or a fiction film: it is both. There are no characters, in the classical sense of the word, apart from the narrator. However, considering the criteria in the previous chapter, I would regard this film as portraying the city as a character. Writing about the portrayal of real cities in Italian Neorealist films and later Michelangelo Antonioni’s films (in opposition to films set in fictional cities, like Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) or Metropolis (Lang, 1927)), NowellSmith (2001, p. 107) notes that “[the cities] are there before they signify, and they signify because they are there; they are not there merely to be bearers of signification”. While not directly stating that fictional cities cannot “signify” (i.e. be characters), the quote appears to suggest that, more often than not, they only act as a support for other elements of signification2. London is obviously a real city and Keiller portrays it in such a way that is in accord with Nowell-Smith’s quote. The use of fictional narration allows Keiller to approach his subject in a more literary way. As a consequence of that, time becomes very fluid and objects and spaces become “alive”. Two examples come to mind straight away. The first occurs when Robinson, a character we never see or hear, is told to be “searching for the location of a memory. A vivid recollection of a street with small factories backing onto a canal. But they no longer exist, and he has adopted the neighbourhood as a site for exercises in psychic landscaping, drifting, and free association”. While we hear this, we see the absence of this vivid recollection (see figure 3): a park by the water and

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An illustration of this idea can be seen in my analysis of Metropolis, when I argue that the city is a mirror, i.e., a “bearer of signification” of the idea of Class.

people going about their daily lives. Cities are not only what is there but what is not there; cities have an inner life and another side that is not immediately, if at all, manifested and accessible. What lives on in our memory is disassociated from what actually exists; Keiller alludes to this by his amusing reference to “exercises in psychic landscaping, drifting, and free association”, which fill the void between memory and reality. The city acts as a psychological agent on the remaining characters.

Figure 3 – London (1994) The second happens when the narrator describes Robinson’s walks in a park in Vauxhall (see figure 4) and states that Robinson “listens to the gateposts at the entrance of the park”; the sound of children playing emanates from the one on the left, while the sound from the one on the right is that of a police siren. A bit later in the film, we are told that the gateposts became silent as a consequence of John Major’s electoral victory in 1992. The gateposts are imbued with a kind of sentience, and their “actions” contribute to tell the story to the audience. Interestingly, these two examples are only materialized through interaction, or rather, mediation by the narrator. However, this mediation is not always necessary.

Figure 4 – London (1994) In another scene, we see wide shots of the aftermath of an IRA bombing: building with glasses shattered, police lines, a crowd observing what is going on. Suddenly, with a cut, a man is singled out from the rest of the crowd. We can’t hear what he is saying, but he talks and gestures vigorously towards the camera, acknowledging it (acknowledging us?). Another cut, and we are back to the wide shots of the bombing site. The man, who appeared and disappeared in a whim, may very well be the “person acting in name of the city” I mentioned in passing in Chapter 1: a person whose purpose is to give body and action to the City, making tangible the normally intangible character of the city.

Figure 5 – London (1994)

Neighboring Sounds (Mendonça Filho, 2012) This Brazilian film is a study of class, race and power relationships between the rich people living in a suburban area in Recife, Brazil, and their servants. In a way, it follows the same idea set in Metropolis: the tower tops and the terraced houses belong to the whites, descendants of the fazenda landlords and slavers; the service doors and back alleys belonging to the new working class (see figure 6), the descendants of the black slaves from centuries ago.

Figure 6 – Neighboring Sounds (2012) The film ends with the words “Over a fence”3. Whereas in Portuguese the meaning is unambiguous (meaning “because of a fence”), the translation to English introduces an element of ambiguity due to the polysemic nature of the word “over”. Albeit unintended, this ambiguous translation reflects precisely what the film deals with, which is “fences” being crossed over, be it the symbolic fence that divides upper and lower class, or just one’s right to quietness being disrupted by the neighbours’ dog. One way the city makes its presence known is by engaging with the subjective experience of the other characters. These characters’ dreams or desires are a fertile ground for the city to manifest its underlying tension and disruptiveness. Two examples of this happen when a working class

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“Por causa de uma cerca”, in the original (translated by the author)

couple has sex in their employer’s house and when a middle class girl dreams that her house has been invaded by working class people (see figure 7); two situations mediated by the unconscious, the psychological elements of dream and desire.

Figure 7 – Neighboring Sounds (2012) Apart from the use of the psychology of the characters, and the sound design constantly making us, and the characters, aware of the city, the most striking formal choice the director makes is the use of zoom lenses in many scenes. One of those scenes is particularly revealing: on the rooftop of a building (amusingly named “Windsor Castle”), a young estate agent receives a phone call from his grandfather, a real estate mogul in Recife. While the conversation about real estate and other trivial matters unfolds, the camera cuts away from the action and “places itself” close to the edge of the building, facing away from the building (Figure 8). A seemingly unmotivated zoom-in takes us from a wide city view, where we can see tall skyscrapers rising above a sea of rooftops belonging to the houses of the working class, to a tight, even claustrophobic view of the rooftops, no skyscrapers and no horizon in sight. Could this be the City taking over the film, demanding us to look closer? To stop watching and start seeing?

Figure 8 – Neighboring Sounds (2012)

Conclusion Before writing this essay, my personal position was that cities could not be characters. However, as this essay progressed, I found my view starting to change progressively. My research for this essay made me realise that in some cases a city is more than just a well-conceived and elaborate setting; instead, it leaves its own mark in a narrative, by being indispensable to the developing of that story. My biggest frustration with this essay is that the word limit did not allow me to develop my analysis to a deeper level or to include examples from other arts, as I had originally planned to do. Still, I hope that my rather superficial analysis has nevertheless managed to offer some insight on the diversity of ways and techniques filmmakers use to portray cities and to give them a life and “behaviour” of their own. In the examples I used, I found that more than just a physical space, cities are psychological subjects that exert their power on the human characters, influencing their actions and thoughts. My three examples also showed that real cities are possibly more likely to be made into characters. However, the size of the sample is not big enough to be certain of that. In addition, even though I was able to find a great number of academic books about the portrayal of cities in film, none of them, with one exception, seemed to be interested in questioning in the main questions addressed in

this essay. In that sense, my analysis could not make the best use of the academic research I conducted, thus forcing me to follow a more speculative method. It should also be taken into consideration that the concept of “character” is understandably biased towards the idea of person, or rather, sentient being, thus creating some problems when trying to overcome that bias and apply the concept to non-sentient beings. I am partly satisfied with the way I managed to work around it, but I am aware it would require more refinement to be a proper workable concept. The concept of “city” was a problematic one to achieve, since it is such a broad and imprecise one. I am not satisfied with the level of refinement I obtained but at this point I am not certain how to I could improve it further. All things considered, this essay contributed for making me more aware of what the creative possibilities are when portraying a city. In theoretical terms, I hope it offers a very limited but still relevant insight about how the concept of character may adapt to non-sentient entities and how this can influence the development of narrative in many ways.

Bibliography Barber, S. (2003) Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space, Vol. 1. United Kingdom: Reaktion Books. Calvino, I. (1997) Invisible Cities. London: Vintage Classics. Campilho, M. (2014) Jóquei. Lisbon: Tinta da China. Cousins, M. (2011) The Story of Film. London: Pavilion Books.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera (2010). London: Tate Publishing.

Glasgow - 24 Hours in the Life of a City (1990). London: Chapmans Publishers.

Herman, D., Ryan, M.-L. and Jahn, M. (2004) Routledge Encyclopedia of

Narrative Theory. New York: Taylor & Francis, Inc. Howarth, S. and McLaren, S. (2010) Street Photography Now. New York: Thames & Hudson. Keiller, P. (2013) The View from the Train. London: Verso. Klotz, H. and Rappaport, A. (1990) Paper Architecture: New Projects from

the Soviet Union. New York: Rizzoli International Publications. Knox, P. and Pinch, S. (2000) Urban Social Geography. Harlow: Prentice Hall. Kuhn, A. and Westwell, G. (2012) Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackendrick, A. (2005) On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the

Director, Cronin, P. (ed.). London: Faber and Faber. Mennel, B. (2008), Cities and Cinema. London: Routledge. Pavis, P. (1999) Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Penz, F. and Thomas, M. (eds) (1997) Cinema and Architecture. London: British Film Institute. Shiel, M. and Fitzmaurice, T. (eds.) (2001), Cinema and the City: Film and

Urban Societies in a Global Context, Oxford: Blackwell.

Silver, A. and Ursini, J. (2005) L.A. Noir: The City as Character. Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press. Sinclair, I. (ed.) (2006) London: City of Disappearances. London: Hamish Hamilton. United Nations Division of Economic and Social Affairs (2014) Frequently

Asked Questions. Available at: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/General/FAQs.aspx (Accessed: 24th November 2014). Webber, A. and Wilson, E. (eds.) (2008), Cities in Transition: the moving

image and the modern metropolis, London: Wallflower. Wickman, F. and Berman E. (2014), “It’s Almost Another Character in the

Movie.” Is it , though?. Available at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/06/27/in_they_came_together_ne w_york_city_is_almost_like_another_character_in.html (Accessed: 20th November 2014).

Filmography Before Sunrise (1995) Directed by R. Linklater [DVD]. London: Warner Home Video.

Blade Runner (1982) Directed by R. Scott [DVD]. London: Warner Home Video.

Fireworks Wednesday (2006) Directed by A. Farhadi [DVD]. Chicago: Facets Video.

Le Havre (2011) Directed by A. Kaurismäki [DVD]. London: Artificial Eye.

London (1994) Directed by P. Keiller [DVD]. London: British Film Institute. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) Directed by T. Anderson [DVD]. New York: The Cinema Guild.

Metropolis (1927) Directed by F. Lang [DVD]. London: Eureka Video. Naishtat, B. (2014) History of Fear. Screened at Berlinale Film Festival 2014 [Berlinale Palast, Berlin. 9 February 2014].

Neighboring Sounds (2012) Directed by K. Mendonça Filho [DVD]. New York: The Cinema Guild.

Oslo, August 31st (2011) Directed by J. Trier [DVD]. London: Soda Pictures. The Great Beauty (2013) Directed by P. Sorrentino [DVD]. London: Artificial Eye.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) Directed by W. Allen [DVD]. London: Optimum Home Entertainment.

List of figures Cover Image (top) – From: Metropolis (1927) Directed by F. Lang [DVD]. London: Eureka Video, captured by the author (timecode 02:04:51). Cover Image (centre) – From: London (1994) Directed by P. Keiller [DVD]. London: British Film Institute, captured by the author (timecode 00:55:16). Cover Image (bottom) – From: Neighboring Sounds (2012) Directed by K. Mendonça Filho [DVD]. New York: The Cinema Guild, captured by the author (timecode 02:04:46).

Figure 1 – From: Metropolis (1927) Directed by F. Lang [DVD]. London: Eureka Video, captured by the author (timecode 00:02:35). Figure 2 – From: Metropolis (1927) Directed by F. Lang [DVD]. London: Eureka Video, captured by the author (timecode 00:10:38). Figure 3 - From: London (1994) Directed by P. Keiller [DVD]. London: British Film Institute, captured by the author (timecode 00:08:05). Figure 4 - From: London (1994) Directed by P. Keiller [DVD]. London: British Film Institute, captured by the author (timecode 00:06:14). Figure 5 - From: London (1994) Directed by P. Keiller [DVD]. London: British Film Institute, captured by the author (timecode 00:26:29). Figure 6 - From: Neighboring Sounds (2012) Directed by K. Mendonça Filho [DVD]. New York: The Cinema Guild, captured by the author (timecode 00:03:53). Figure 7 – From: Neighboring Sounds (2012) Directed by K. Mendonça Filho [DVD]. New York: The Cinema Guild, captured by the author (timecode 01:40:14). Figure 8 - From: Neighboring Sounds (2012) Directed by K. Mendonça Filho [DVD]. New York: The Cinema Guild, captured by the author (timecode 00:52:07).