Cities and Film

Georg Simmel wrote Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903 influencing critical theorists. During the Dresden Exhibition later on in the same year, Simmel was asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city. Instead of following the subject matter according to the brief, he reverses the idea and talks about the city’s effect on an individual.

The Guaranty Building was built in 1894 and has influenced the character of a city since then. It represented business opportunity, the city life and that bigger is generally better.

Simmel states that an individual begins to resist the effects of the city. The bulk and the expansiveness a city possesses towers and dominates over the people walking through its streets. Instead of a community of people gathering in a city, these people tend to be solitary. People begin to resist by developing their own individual processes in their head to keep them company while walking in a city.

The Flaneur

The concept of the Flaneur has been brought up several times and it can be applied here although in a different manner. Walter Benjamin suggests that the flaneur can be seen as an analytical tool in order to observe day to day life in the city. Susan Sontag states that a photographer is an ‘armed’ version of the flaneur.

The term Flaneur is a masculine term meaning to stroll around leisurely. The connotations of the masculine term usually conveys a man that is wealthy and happy. Susan Buck-Morrs on her views on the Flaneuse, the feminine term, states that the connotations of a Flaneuse are that of a prostitute or a ‘bag lady’.

An End to the Observer

Liz Wells stated that images of the 7/7 bombings were on the internet within an hour of the event. The advent of mobile phones means that we can upload and gain access to information whenever we want. One could argue that this easy access to knowledge is taking the flaneur to a new level. A person with access to this information can view what is happening on the other side of the world.

However, Wells states that we are developing machines in order to observe for us. Since the ‘war on terror’, there has been an increase in machine analysing technology. ‘If the nineteenth century saw the automation, in the 21^st century we now seek machines to look at pictures on our behalf’ Wells: 09:339.