9/11/2018 Streets & Screens | Mediapolis

(http://www.mediapolisjournal.com/)

A JOURNAL OF CITIES AND CULTURE

BY IVÁN VILLARMEA ÁLVAREZ

(HTTP://WWW.MEDIAPOLISJOURNAL.COM/AUTHOR/IVALVAREZ/) / OCTOBER 18, 2018

STREETS & SCREENS

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[Ed. note: this post is part of a Roundtable discussion on “The Essay Film and The
City.” For more background on the discussion and to view other posts in the series,
see here(https://wp.me/P6zYkX-1k3).]

T
he essay lm is one of the most subjective lm genres. It usually builds
personal discourses from its author’s thoughts and feelings, avoiding the
temptation of developing totalizing statements. This form of lmmaking
seems particularly appropriate for counteracting hegemonic discourses with
critical insights, so the outsider’s perspective should help to release lmmakers
from any ideological or economic constraint. All lmmakers, however, have their
own agenda and point of view regarding the city, as well as their own style of
writing and reasoning. Accordingly, there is no wonder that their essay lms on
certain cities have been highly in uenced by two types of relations: the relation
between the lmmaker and the city –a speci c relation, based on his or her sense
of belonging to a particular place– and the relation between the lmmaker and
cinema – an abstract relation that relies on both taste and experience.

We should therefore begin by discussing the

pro le of lmmakers who make essay lms on Anyone can say
cities. What are their bonds to these places? Are anything about
they locals or foreigners? Anyone can say anywhere, of course,
anything about anywhere, of course, but the but the depth and
depth and scope of the resulting lm will vary scope of the
depending on the level of knowledge and the resulting film will
sense of belonging that lmmakers have vary depending on
regarding the depicted cities. Actually, there is the level of
no  single ideal position. A local lmmaker should knowledge and the
have more to say about his or her own city than a sense of belonging
foreigner, but it could also be otherwise. It is that filmmakers have
basically a matter of interest, curiosity and regarding the
sensibility. depicted cities.

This debate has been open for a long time. I remember, for example, a staged
sequence in Lightning over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy (Tony Buba, 1988) in
which a local reporter argues with a foreign TV critic about who has the right to
depict what was going on in the Rust Belt in the 1980s. Let me reproduce an
excerpt from their conversation:

“
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TV Critic: Finally, sophisticated media who know how

to tell a story are getting involved. (…) Local people (…)
fail to see the big picture, and also contribute to
misappropriations of political struggle.

Local Reporter: My father worked for the mills for forty

years. You mean to tell me that someone from out of
town can tell the story better than I could?

TV Critic: Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying, because

you can’t be objective. And your subjectivity may be
poetic and well-intentioned but is probably
provincial.

”
This argument actually works as a reductio ad absurdum, that is, a parody to
criticize the haughty position of mass media at a time in which they claimed to
hold the monopoly of the truth. Faced with such an assumption, Tony Buba, the
director of Lightning over Braddock, also claimed his right to depict the plight of
his hometown from the inside, from the local experience, embracing a subjective
approach – an essayistic approach, after all – as an alternative to the supposed
objective truth of journalistic documentaries.

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Lightning over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy (Tony Buba, 1988)

The foreigner’s perspective, however, may also be freer than the local. In fact, it is
somehow closer to the outsider’s perspective. Hito Steyerl, for instance, has made
an excellent lm about urban renewal in Berlin in the 1990s, The Empty
Centre (1998), in which she explicitly aligns her discourse with the immigrant’s
gaze. Steyerl is not exactly a foreigner, because she has become a Berlin-based
artist; but she is neither a local, since she was born in Munich. Moreover, her
Japanese origins distinguish her from most Germans. This hybrid perspective,
which is similar to Chantal Akerman’s in News from Home (1977), allows her to
focus on certain details that may go unnoticed for a local. Thus, both Akerman – a
Jewish Belgian woman in New York City – and Steyerl use their personal
backgrounds to offer a new take on these cities that go beyond the of cial and
well-known discourses about urban crisis and renewal.

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The Empty Centre (Hito Steyerl, 1998)

The relation between a lmmaker and cinema itself also conditions any essay lm,
as I said above, since every lmmaker comes from a different aesthetic tradition
when entering this domain: Akerman, for example, came from structural
lmmaking; Buba from Pittsburgh’s amateur lm scene; and Steyerl from the
German essay lm tradition, represented, among others, by Harun Farocki. All
lmmakers have their own set of practices and references that in uence their
work one way or another: Guy Maddin, for example, has quoted Patrick Keiller’s
London (1994) as a source of inspiration for My Winnipeg (2007), but the major
in uence on his work actually comes from silent lm and classical genres such as
melodramas and horror movies. By using ctional techniques, what Maddin
ultimately does in My Winnipeg is mythologize the city’s local history in order to
depict a mindscape rather than a cityscape, that is, a model of relationship with
our everyday environment in which subjective perception and personal inventions
are valid tools to develop a cognitive map beyond objective representations.

Similarly, we must understand the wandering

Our gaze at the city gaze in two different ways: as a wandering gaze
is, in short, a gaze at through the city, through its urban fabric –its
both streets and streets, squares and spaces – but also as a
screens. wandering gaze through its previous
representations, from maps to lms, which
lmmakers such as Thom Andersen or Peter von Bagh, as well as Terence Davies
in Of Time and the City (2008), have combined and recombined in search of new

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meanings for these spaces and representations. Thus, while Akerman recorded a
geographical drift through New York City in News from Home, Andersen’s Los
Angeles Plays Itself (2003) provided the audience with a model to develop lm
dérives anywhere. Akerman and Andersen represent opposite ways to depict the
city, but their respective models have been followed by other lmmakers all over
the world, such as Alberte Pagan in Bs. As. (2006) – a family portrait that also
works as an urban portrait, just as News from Home – and Tony Zhou in
Vancouver Never Plays Itself (2015) – a meta lmic essay that adapts the tone and
structure of Los Angeles Plays Itself to the case of Vancouver. Our gaze at the city
is, in short, a gaze at both streets and screens.

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