"CityScape"
Whether in early silent films, or later song and dance films, drama films and other types of films, the city opens up again and again in front of the audience's eyes, not only becoming the narrative background, but also becoming a unique role
In 1935, the film "Cityscape" produced by Shanghai Dentsu Company and directed by Yuan Muzhi had a surreal beginning: four countrymen watching "dioramas" at the railway station, through the lens, they saw the colorful life of Shanghai metropolis; through the lens, they transformed into a family of urban petty bourgeoisie.
Their dreams in the metropolis were eventually shattered, but the movies of the 1930s succeeded in interpreting the dreamlike thrills of urban life. Individuals in modern society have lost the certainty of family and community and are destined to create their own narratives of a biographical nature. Movies are the best tool for modern people to imagine and create themselves after entering the city.
As a left-wing film, "CityScape" is by no means a dream for the sake of dreaming, and the game attitude is exactly what Filmmakers such as Yuan Muzhi oppose, but the various real situations they want to portray, the degeneration of capital, and the alienation of people's hearts still need to be expressed with the help of urban symbolic characters and landscapes.
Objectively, "urban scenery" created the urban character of Shanghai in the 1930s, even if this feature is completely based on appearances. All the materialized "scenery" lays the most basic viewing and acceptance effect of the film, which is the basis for the continuous relationship between the city and the film.
As a result, the cities in the film are both colorful and have a certain functional convergence. Whether in early silent films, or later song and dance films, drama films, and various mainstream and non-mainstream films, the city opens up again and again to the audience, not only becoming the narrative background, but also becoming a unique role.
The history of the modern Shanghai city is almost as long as the history of the film itself, and the cultural traditions of most cities in the world are much longer than those of the film. Only in the 20th century, film and urban development are closely integrated, and we can explore the growth of cities in the process of film dreams.
"Tribute to the City"
From "The Blue Bridge" to "Roman Holiday", from "Breakfast at Tiffany'" to "The City of Beauty", it is impossible to imagine that these popular films that have conquered audiences almost all over the world do not appear in London, New York, Rome, paris. The film pays homage to the city than the same creation of a city as the object
For some films as early as the early 1920s, the concept of "urban film" was proposed.
Many of the films that are familiar and loved by the public are based on cities, from "The Blue Bridge" to "Roman Holiday", from "Breakfast at Tiffany" to "The City of Absolute Beauty", and it is impossible to imagine that these popular films that have conquered audiences almost all over the world do not appear in the cosmopolitan cities of London, New York, Rome, and Paris.
Stills from Breakfast at Tiffany's
The two most important themes of popular movies, love and crime, make the city an inexhaustible source of material for movies. The Sherlock Holmes detective film strives to delve into the details and secrets of the River Thames; Fritz Lang's "M is the Murderer" shows the shadows and evils hidden in the streets and crowds of Berlin in the process of becoming a metropolis; Hitchcock's "Rear Window" can be used as a textbook for urban space.
Needless to say, every big city has a film history behind it, and they have even become the premise of filmmaking.
The film pays homage to the city than the same creation of a city as the object. Filmmaker Emmanuel Bambi produced two short film collections in 2006 and 2008, "Paris, I Love You" and "New York, I Love You". From the director to the actors to the shooting methods, these short films fully reflect the spatial mobility and diversity of the two global cities.
The 11 directors in the theatrical version of "New York, I Love You" include Turkish and Pakistani ethnic groups, which obviously reinforces the distinct urban atmosphere that cross-cultural New York brings. The 18 clips of "Paris, I Love You" were filmed in 18 districts of Paris, and the only central city relative to the "provinces" was carefully split and represented.
The theme of both films is love. In New York, love manifests itself as wandering and wandering, people rubbing sparks in homogeneous and heterogeneous wandering, and the urban scene exists because of these sparks. Paris is known as the "City of Love", from the beginning of the New Wave film, the various stages of love, tenses, language, achievable and unattainable, will unfold but not unfold, has been refined to the extreme. In contrast, 2006's "Paris, I Love You" is like serving more than a dozen desserts after a delicious meal.
After garnering good word-of-mouth, the producers were ambitious to expand his city tribute films to Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai. In 2014, the movie Rio, I Love You was released, but it looked more like a musical scene. In addition to the stunning scenery, rio de Janeiro's urban character is not as universal as that of Paris and New York. Seeing the famous director Fernando Merrills involved is even more reminiscent of his shocking "City of God", a film that shot the slums of Rio.
Rio has in common with Shanghai, they are cities with a thick and rich history, and their advanced nature belongs to the late-developing modern countries of South America and East Asia. In the face of this complex accumulation of meaning, the difficulty of control inevitably increases.
Even in Paris, the dessert-like urban atmosphere is only one side of it. It is said that there is a disease of "Paris syndrome", which refers to the fact that I have seen too much of the Paris landscape in movies and novels, and after visiting Paris, I am disappointed, so that I am restless and delirious.
As early as the 1980s, American director Woody Allen satirized people who confused movies with real life. Between 2008 and 2012, he made a series of city-related films, such as Midnight in Paris, Midnight barcelona, Love in Rome, and others, which are also full of satire.
"Midnight in Paris" ostensibly tells you that the fascinating thing about the city of Paris is that it was once a "feast of flow", a space for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Dali. However, the film's ending deconstructs the significance of contemporary people's historical journey through Paris. Because people in each era are dissatisfied with their own times and want to travel to other eras, including the "golden age" characters in the movie.
Nevertheless, the film's rich and detailed presentation of the old Paris scene is enough to make people forget the director's intentions and still indulge in hypothetical. Continuing to watch movies is not a great way to save movie fans' delusions.
I would like to point out another classic film route that pays homage to the city, from Yasujiro Oz's Tokyo Story to Wenders' In Search of Ozu to Sophia Coppola's Lost in Tokyo.
In Ozu, the most special thing is the presentation of a city perspective, the 30-degree elevation camera position makes the little people and the little citizens all become tall, and the empty mirror that is constantly delayed is quiet, stoic, and long-lasting, intended to express the natural ethics of the city and the family.
In 1985, Wenders went to Tokyo to shoot the documentary, originally titled Tokyo Painting, which was no longer the city under Ozu's camera. Two years later, in "Under the Berlin Sky", Wenders turned the entire weight of the city of Berlin into a story of spiritual disappearance, black and white pictures, coarse-grained film, and a reproduction of the Berlin Wall, but it had the same thing as post-war Tokyo.
Here in Sophia Coppola, the 2002 "Tokyo Painting" extends further into the high-tech, highly commercialized and landscape society of the city. At the beginning of the film, Bill Murray, who comes out of the airport, sits sleepily in a taxi, looking through the window of the car into Tokyo late at night, a sea of neon lights. He saw himself in a small whisky advertisement and rubbed his eyes in disbelief.
After Ozu, more directors portrayed Tokyo as a city of desire, far more decadent than Western cities. The combination of the appearance of postmodern society and the illusion of Orientalism has led to the repeated appearance of Japanese elements in science fiction films depicting the post-human era, the most classic of which is Blade Runner. It's no wonder that two Americans, a man and a woman, in Lost in Tokyo, are re-examining their lives in a city that seems familiar and extremely unfamiliar.
"In the City"
Some small cities do not have such a high-profile diversity, and their presence in the film needs to be explored with a more artistic eye, such as Tehran in "Fireworks Wednesday", Saigon in "Taste of Green Papaya", and Kamakura in "Sea Street Diary"
In 1998, Wenders' "Under the Berlin Sky" was remade by Hollywood as the romance film "City of Angels", which grossed $200 million worldwide. The background of the story is changed to Los Angeles, where wingless angels walk high above this beautiful and strange city, with hard skyscrapers, palm trees, the majesty of the Hollywood Hills, the charming beaches and sunsets... Although it is only a love story, no one can be picky about this adaptation. The city's T-shirts are printed with "I leave you and go to Los Angeles", where are the fairy tales not happening here?
In 2016, another Los Angeles movie "Philharmonic City" smeared with sunset and long beach colors refreshed the sad love index of "City of Angels". But beyond the peachy love story, Los Angeles is also the city that incubates black and crime movies. From "Long Nights" to "Pulp Fiction", some of the most complex and memorable plots of film noir are set in it.
My favorite is Polanski's Chinatown, an empty street that wafts with the air of confusion, emptiness and nostalgia. The same city has an intricate character, and the inherent contradictions and reflexivity are enough to produce a very different but equally immortal masterpiece. That's the city.
Some small cities do not have such a high-profile diversity, and their presence in the film needs to be explored with a more artistic eye.
The 1971 film Venice brought together two of the leading artists of the 20th century, the novelist Thomas Mann and the film director Visconti, as well as a third man: the composer Mahler.
Visconti changed the protagonist Oceanbach from a novelist in the original to a musician, in addition to wanting to take this opportunity to discuss the properties of Mahler's music, but also because music can be used in movies to help portray the mellow and mysterious atmosphere of Venice.
Like all unsatisfactory vacations, the city's changing waterways, strange figures make Oschenbach even more restless, the dark and hot water vapor steaming his body and mind, and he cannot be sure of what the city means to him unless he can see a true embodiment of beauty here.
And when Tazio appeared, the plague also came, beauty, sin and disease entangled middle-aged intellectuals, Venice was no longer a symbol of a resort, but another "resort" of perceptual production outside German reason.
The image of the city, which needs to be further excavated, also often appears in Middle Eastern and Asian films, such as Tehran in "Fireworks Wednesday", Wuhan in "The Mystery of the Floating City", Saigon in "The Taste of Green Papaya", and Kamakura in "Sea Street Diary".
Stills from The Sea Street Diaries
In this type of film, you can often see the synaesthesia between cities: "Love in Hiroshima" is dominated by the devastated Hiroshima scene, and there are also small French towns such as Neville presented through the memories of the heroine, which share a broken fate in the war; Hong Kong films in China, from "Sweet Honey" to "Chongqing Forest", are all full of overlapping shadows of mainland cities; Taiwanese director Xu Anhua's films in Taipei, Shanghai, Hanoi, New York, etc., are the contrast between nostalgia and memory.
Stills from "Sweet Honey"
In addition to superposition and contrast, the film also makes the confusion and rifts within the city flash out. Anyone who has seen the movie "Paris, Texas" knows that Paris here refers to a barren land in central Texas, where the hero was born, and one of the only few road signs in his memory.
Hollywood in Chen Guo's "There's a Hollywood in Hong Kong" is an apartment on the edge of the poor Village of Tai Hom, and its existence makes everything that exists collapse more quickly.
There is also Rome in the 2018 Mexican movie "Roma", which refers to a wealthy area in Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, around which the story tells the intersection of completely different lives in the same time and space, which is an excellent entrance to the entire city and even the social space.
"Creating a City"
Of course, movies create dreams and desires at the same time. In this sense, cities can be produced, not simply by fictitiously a place name, but by creating a city-state with all its symbolic meaning and function
"Notting Hill" makes people aware of the existence of the small town of Notting Hill, and "White Night Pursuit" makes people remember the white night in Alaska.
Of course, the most classic example is Casablanca, the café that everyone knows about Rick, the only one among so many cafes in the world. In fact, most of the film was filmed in Warner's studio, and almost no one among the actors has ever been to Casablanca, but it represents a city of special importance in a special period.
At the end of 1942, the same year that the film was completed, the Allies entered Casablanca, ending its historical significance as a transit point for refugees in Europe.
In addition, this heartbreaking city also reflects the shadow of Greater Paris, where Rico and Eliza once spent a time of love and intoxication. Without Casablanca's "Internationale", Paris's feast of love would be as frivolous as the passions of all encounters.
Casablanca tells us that, on the one hand, the city is made of landscapes; on the other hand, the city is spatial because it always produces a specific meaning, constantly defined by space.
Taiwanese director Hou Xiaoxian was unable to shoot in Shanghai during the filming of "Flowers on the Sea". As a result, the Shanghai in "Flowers on the Sea" exists completely indoors, either in the small living room and bedroom of Changsan Shuyu, or in the liquor bureau and card table of the night song. Hou Xiaoxian spent a lot of effort on the interior furnishings, allowing us to see the most characteristic city in China in the late Qing Dynasty, flowing in the women's clothes and sideburns, and the men's tongue-in-cheek dialogue.
In the era of the film industry, the polyphony of the city maximized the space for sensory entertainment, and more and more commercial films regarded the city as a unit of meta-narrative. Overseas blockbusters from the "007" series to the "Mission Impossible" series, and domestic films from the "People on the Road" to the "Detective Chinatown" series, are all parasitic on the city, but also based on our viewing and consumption of the city.
Detective Chinatown 3 poster
When watching the movie, people try to identify the biggest features of the city in front of them, hoping that it can provide a coordinate to satisfy desires, and the characteristics of the city have become the selling point. Of course, movies create dreams and desires at the same time. In this sense, cities can be produced, not simply by fictitiously a place name, but by creating a city-state with all its symbolic meaning and function.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis ( 1927 ) is the most iconic film of great-city expressionism. This metropolis is a fictional product, not only a high-tech urban conception belonging to the category of science fiction, but also involves issues such as class, gender, ethnicity, domination and domination, and social politics is the theme of its focus.
As a result, the vertical three-dimensional giant buildings in the film, full of decorative and futuristic aesthetic styles, the praise of industrial society and the imagination of the use of robot labor, have left a position that is still difficult to cross in the history of art and the history of ideas.
In the portrayal of this future super-metropolis, there are some interesting details. For example, a bar called "Yoshigen" appears, which is an early use of Japanese/Oriental elements in the urban wonders of science fiction movies. This has become a common tactic after the successful reinvention of Blade Runner.
In 2014, Disney and Marvel co-produced the animated film "The Amazing Marines", which is set in a city called "Old Jingshan". Technological innovation and robotic society remain the themes of this sci-fi anime, except that the Japanese/Oriental elements no longer symbolize the fate of a decadent, dilapidated, and abandoned earth, as in Blade Runner, but have become a gentle aesthetic choice in an orderly modern society.
In the second half of the 20th century, the great sense of doubt and anxiety about the future survival of mankind, which is only expressed in the film, seems to have been quickly calmed in the 21st century. In the last 20 years of cinema, nostalgia for cities has generally been more than subversive imagination.
In any case, the dream of cinema will continue, and the city is becoming the most important reality in our lives. Therefore, films related to the city show a documentary attitude regardless of the angle from which they are shot.
At the same time, the film's shaping of reality is manifested in the increasingly specific and fixed image of the city in the film, and even becomes a kind of power under light and shadow. But everyone will embrace this power and wait for it to bring more euphoric dreams of different colors into our understanding of ourselves.
(Author: Zhang Pingjin, Professor, School of Humanities, Tongji University)
Column Editor-in-Chief: Gong Danyun Text Editor: Xia Bin Title Image Source: Visual China Image Editor: Su Wei
Source: Author: Pingjin Zhang