City Symphony Films

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The article analyzes the various ways in which Godfrey Reggio's experimental documentary films, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), tend to incorporate narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with neo-modern aesthetics of slow and sublime cinema. The former concept, defined as a "varied strain of austere minimalist cinema" (Romney 2010) and characterized by the frequent use of "long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday" (Flanagan 2008), is often seen as a creative evolution of Schrader's transcendental style or, more generally, neo-modernist trends in contemporary cinematography. Although predominantly analyzed through the lens of some common stylistic tropes of the genre's mainstream works, its scope and framework has been recently broadened to encompass post-1960 experimental and avant-garde as well as realistic documentary films, which often emphasize contemplative rather than slow aspects of the projected scenes (Tuttle 2012). Taking this as a point of departure, I argue that the Qatsi trilogy, despite being classified as largely atypical slow films, relies on a set of conventions which draw both on the stylistic excess of non-verbal sublime cinema (Thompson 1977; Bagatavicius 2015) and on some formal devices of contemplative cinema, including slowness, duration, anti-narrative or Bazinian Realism. In particular, the images' evocative oscillation between nostalgic neo-modernist natural and technological sublime might stem from its employment of extended shot duration subjected to slow motion as well as panoramic, accelerated and long panning shots enhanced by the atmospheric scores of Philip Glass.

The classical city symphony was an experimental, non-narrative film genre structured as a dawn-to-dusk, cross-sectional representation of everyday urban activities in a particular locale. In city symphony films, the city is a collectively constituted entity in which linear film time is placed in dialectic with natural solar time and mechanically manipulated temporalities. Viewed through the lens of film grammar, this genre suggests a uniquely present tense viewing experience, absent the influence of past events and cause-and-effect narrative consequence.  Although much as been written about the city symphony’s relationship to modernism, little has been theorized about postmodern city symphonies and their development on contemporary urban film aesthetics. In this paper, I explore the under-examined film Organism (dir. Hilary Harris, USA, 1975, 19m) a key influence on Koyaanisqatsi (1982).  Demonstrating ways that Organism illustrates key aspects of Jameson’s theories, this paper examines the long lensed birds-eye and panning time-lapse techniques that are synonymous with contemporary city cinematography. It contextualizes Harris’ pioneering and influential technical innovations to examine how Organism expresses an ecological ethos informed by both the Space Age and the “World Trade Center moment” when global neoliberalism was appeared.

"Soviet, Moscow, São Paulo: Symphonies. Similarities and differences between "Stride, Soviet!" (1926, Dziga Vertov), "Moscow" (1927, Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin) and "São Paulo, a sinfonia da metrópole (1929, Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Lustig).

In November of 2015, I presented my research on "City Symphonies in Reverse" for the Symposium on experimental cinema, "Symposium: créer/montrer/conserver," at the Cinémathèque québécoise. It was then translated into French for the online publication, Hors Champ.

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This paper situates the recent Cuban film Suite Habana (Pérez, 2003) in relation to the city symphony film tradition. I argue that Pérez's preoccupation with the question of individual self-realization within a socialist society constitutes an elaboration of García Espinosa's main theoretical contribution to the aesthetics and politics debate. That Pérez turns to the tradition of the city symphony film – the first film genre to systematically treat the nature of labor and leisure in capitalist modernity – underscores the film's engagement with another premise of García Espinosa's manifesto – namely, that authentically socialist art cannot exist unless work and leisure are reorganized. In Suite Habana, the questions of work, leisure, and technology come together in the film's style and narrative, but this time with a difference from the first city symphony films. If the early city symphony films tried to mimic for the spectator the sensorial experience of capitalist modernity, Suite Habana goes after the experience of an alternative modernity – one in which work, leisure, and technology have been configured along the lines of García Espinosa's utopian vision.

This paper situates _Suite Habana_ (Fernando Pérez, 2003), a recent film by one of Cuba’s establishment filmmakers, in relation to García Espinosa’s 1968 manifesto, “For An Imperfect Cinema,” and in relation to the city symphony film tradition. _Suite Habana_ follows twelve contemporary Habaneros over a 24-hour period as they go about their quotidian work-leisure activities. I argue that Pérez’s preoccupation with the question of individual self-realization within socialist society constitutes an elaboration of García Espinosa’s main theoretical contribution to the aesthetics and politics debate. That Pérez turns to the tradition of the city symphony film—the first film genre to systematically treat the nature of labor and leisure in capitalist modernity—underscores the film’s engagement with another premise of Espinosa’s manifesto—namely, that authentically socialist art cannot exist unless work, and leisure are reorganized. In _Suite Habana_, the questions of work, leisure, and technology come together in the film’s style, narrative, and material substrate. But this time with a difference from the city symphony film. If the city symphony films tried to mimic for the spectator the sensorial experience of capitalist modernity, _Suite Habana_ is going after the experience of an alternative modernity—one in which work, leisure, and technology have been reorganized along the lines of Espinosa’s utopian vision.

In the wake of an Oscar nomination for his 1960 short 'A City Called Copenhagen', Danish documentarist Jørgen Roos accepted invitations to make similar films from the city authorities of Hamburg and Oslo. Though the commissioning processes were different, the resulting films can be seen as a kind of trilogy: all three use forms of art as an organising principle, all three focus on the everyday lives of the people of the city, and all three put emphasis on walking in the city. On the basis of archival research in Copenhagen, Hamburg and Oslo, and drawing on Michel de Certeau’s essay ‘Walking in the City’, this article tries to trace how the lived city emerges in each film from the negotiations between filmmaker, commissioning authorities, and the city streets themselves.

In this article I present and analyze various ways in which Peter Hutton’s Lodz Symphony (1993) develops the concept of urban landscape by incorporating narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the city symphony as well as sublime, slow and contemplative cinema aesthetics. Focusing mostly on natural scenery and realities of urban life, Hutton’s silent portraits often pay homage to the Hudson River School tradition of sublime and luminist painting and hence tend to provide a highly immersive cinematic experience. Albeit the latter traits become particularly apparent in Hutton’s landscape work, it may be also argued that his evocative depictions of metropolises “resonate with the same meditative approach evident in the landscape films” (MacDonald 283), which seems to be the case in such notable pictures as New York Near Sleep for Saskia (1972), Budapest Portrait (1986) or the New York Portrait series (1978-1990). Meanwhile, a less known Lodz Symphony, though rather typical of Hutton’s urban films in terms of editing strategies, provides its audiences with an almost equally transient, yet distinct imagery. Namely, the project’s audiovisual and narrative content offers an avant-garde portrait of Łódź as existing “in a time-warp of sad memory” (San Francisco Cinematheque Program 1998 Notes), and, most importantly, documents an intriguing psychogeography of the 19th century industrial city, hence making a valuable contribution to the history of American-Polish filmmaking.