City Symphony

This course fulfills the "Category I: National Cinemas and Filmmakers" Film and Media Studies requirement.
 
The city symphony film emerged in the 1920s, when filmmakers were experimenting with the mobility of viewpoint enabled by the portable film camera and more sensitive panchromatic film stock. The city, in particular its interwar technologies of urban transport and machinery, provided the ideal testing ground for the newly sensitive and mobile camera. It demanded to be seen, and shown, in a new mode that for Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, only film could provide. But of all the international cities that were given the symphony treatment in the 1920s – New York, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Sao Paulo – London was missing. If London lacked its own ‘city symphony’ film in the 1920s, what were the significant representations of the urban experience? This course looks at the ways in which London both invited and defied the filmmaker’s gaze in this critical period of early cinema, and considers how a contemporary city symphony for London might be composed.
The city has been an integral part of the filmmaker’s vocabulary since cinema’s genesis in the late nineteenth century. The urban environment and the craft of film grew up together in the twentieth century, seasoned by various convergences of technology, one notable one in the 1920s with broadcast radio, telephony and the talkies, and another over the last fifteen years, with broadband, smartphone cameras, and digital media. This course bridges these two periods, drawing on history and theory to interrogate the form of the city symphony film essay, and develop an urban filmmaking practice that allows students to gather and formulate their own reflections on London.
The course will be run alongside Urban Scavenger, in which students will develop and make their own film within a taught theoretical framework. Students will be strongly encouraged to bring ideas from one to the other, and to combine critical analysis with practical filmmaking.