Cities Made of Cinema

Cities built the cinema. Subways, ports, skylines, and urban crowds provided many of the most vivid spectacles of the nascent medium, and the nickelodeon was a product of densely populated working-class and immigrant neighborhoods in the first decade of the twentieth century. While plenty of nonurban forms accompanied this, from studio-bound science fiction and melodrama to Westerns shot in wide-open spaces, the association between film and the city runs deep, paralleled by the similar material and associative resonances between television and the suburbs. From Edison’s kinetoscopes to the 1910s cycle of white-slavery films, 1940s noir to 1970s Blaxploitation, Spike Lee’s hyperlocal block-sized community studies to Christopher Nolan’s dark Gotham, the allure of urban imagery has proven irresistible to filmmakers. ¹

How, though, has the cinema built the city? It’s a daunting question for cultural historians, particularly those who want to move beyond mere textual analysis and into the concrete dialectics of film and urban history, where recourse to the abstractions of imaginaries or poetics cannot quite address the political economy that binds image to material reality. The quartet of books under review here offer not a comprehensive portrait but rather an eclectic cross-section of recent work thinking through the regulatory and representational relationships between film and city from wildly different angles. ² Together, they show that film constructs how we understand specific cities as well as the urban more generically but does so within a framework shaped by regulation/government policy, race/racism/white supremacy, and capital. While film was at least largely invented in the United States, its tropes about the city circulate globally, reflecting and refracting these ideas in widely different locales.

Jennifer Fronc’s Monitoring the Movies examines censorship debates primarily of the 1910s, as film matured into its dominant place in mass culture. Field, Horak, and Stewart’s L.A. Rebellion offers a major recovery of Black filmmaking that exploded out of UCLA’s film school in the early 1970s and has persisted in various shapes through the present day. Joshua Gleich’s Hollywood in San Francisco looks four hundred miles to the north and charts the course of location shooting through the postwar heyday of 1945 to 1975, from picturesque tourism through the so-called “urban crisis.” And Gyan Prakash’s Noir Urbanisms challenges any U.S.-centric gloss on noir or urbanism, its essays exploring the joint themes from Tokyo to Berlin. Collectively, they highlight concretely embodied historical textuality, the kind that shows how cinematic imaginaries linked to material practices: the expansion of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood and beaches to working-class Black neighborhoods, the transformation of San Francisco from situated place to a more fungible urban space, the boundaries set on early film exhibition, and the ways we understand the urban today through the lens of noir. They seed fertile new ground for future work in film and urban history.

Fronc faces an immediate challenge: that of familiarity. From Paul Boyer’s landmark social-history studies of urbanization and cultural contestation, through the feminist reinterpretations of Andrea Friedman, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Nicola Beisel, early twentieth-century censorship is an oft-covered topic. ³ And indeed, scholars in this area will recognize the general arc of Monitoring the Movies, as it moves from early Progressive reformers such as John Collier, with their belief in the educational and uplifting potential of film, to the push for censorship as sensationalistic imagery generates bourgeois concern about the susceptibility of the hoi polloi to its disorderly vortex. We get flare-ups over D.W. Griffith’s white supremacist epic Birth of a Nation (1915) and the mid-decade cycle of films that sought to expose “the white-slave traffic” of sex work while sneaking some lascivious peeks into their upright moral messages. It all ends with the Hollywood studios importing former Postmaster General Will Hays to avert scandal and state censorship by imposing a self-censorship regimen—a system that mostly worked until its dissolution in the 1960s.

What Fronc adds to this story is a fine-grained study of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, which, from its organization in 1909 until Hays superseded it in the early 1920s, played a central role in mediating film standards. The body actually began as the Board of Motion Picture Censorship, but, as public opinion soured on that term, shifted to “Review” in 1916. It consistently argued against legally enforced state censorship but for voluntary regulation, and since the burgeoning film industry saw that as “the lesser of two evils,” it tended to cooperate—a bit too closely, as some critics noted, cynically but not entirely inaccurately seeing the board as something of an institutional buffer for the studios (p. 25).

Fronc excavates the internal workings of the board, with an impressive research base that tracks its operations from new standards responding to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ campaign against onscreen animal violence, to the board’s close ties to the labor movement, including American Federation of Labor head Samuel Gompers joining its advisory committee in 1915, as some states curtailed early pro-union works such as Strike at Coaldale (1914), banned in Ohio in 1916. All of this enriches our understanding of the nebulously informal and ad hoc operations of early cinematic regulation, although it does not always bear out the subtitle’s promise regarding The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America. As Fronc shows, many of the early struggles over film censorship occurred at the state level, in places like Ohio and Virginia. Indeed, Monitoring the Movies is at its strongest in chronicling the rising tensions between the Board of Review and the pro-censorship (albeit ambivalently so) General Federation of Women’s Clubs, as the board tried to co-opt some of the federation’s energy by hiring staff out from it, and Fronc’s coverage of female board emissaries such as Mary Gray Peck and Louise Connolly navigating the fraught social topographies of the American South as they spread the message of “better films” offers her most vivid writing.

Joshua Gleich begins his history of San Francisco location shooting with a different film-industry crisis of the 1920s: the expensive train wreck of Erich von Stroheim’s San Francisco epic Greed (1924), whose chaotic production was such a debacle that it helped discredit location shooting—to the point that John Huston’s highly regarded noir The Maltese Falcon (1941) created a vivid San Francisco setting without its crew ever setting foot there, piecing it together from stock footage and some Los Angeles locations in disguise. Only in the postwar era did location shooting seriously recommence, but in Gleich’s critical assessment, it barely need have. In contrast to the scholars who chart New York City social history through the films shot there, or the almost Oedipal relationship some see in which Hollywood constantly destroys the actual history of its enveloping Los Angeles through its relentless cinematic lies, Gleich finds a purely instrumental relationship between Hollywood and San Francisco. ⁴ For the former, the latter served as mere substratum, its scenic geography one node in a supply chain where technology and budgeting shaped representation far more than any local specificity. Urban history was largely repressed in Hollywood film, as mostly urban scenery registered.

Gleich has a sharp eye for pairings, and Hollywood in San Francisco tracks the development of location shooting through the “cine-tourist city” with a joint 1958 case study of Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo and Don Siegel’s The Lineup that shows how color films tended to luxuriate in scenic imagery (while Vertigo is today regarded as a masterpiece, Variety at the time found it slow and imbued with “a travelogueish effect at times”) while black-and-white films employed city locations for more gritty realism (p. 57). The two films Blake Edwards made in San Francisco in 1962—the grim alcoholism drama Days of Wine and Roses and the perverse thriller Experiment in Terror—show increasingly dark views of the city, aided by technological developments that allowed for better nighttime shooting. Indeed, throughout Gleich carefully tracks the development of shooting technologies, showing how changing film stocks and lighting equipment, from Kodak’s Double-X to the halogen Sun Gun, both constrained and facilitated modes of depicting urban space. It’s a strength of the book that Gleich’s exegeses on cameras and film never read as technical manuals but always feed into careful analysis of the resultant representations.

Only in 1968 did any Hollywood films shoot entirely in San Francisco, with Richard Lester’s Petulia and Peter Yates’s Bullitt, which combined with John Boorman’s partly local Point Blank (1967) constituted a directorial British Invasion of sorts. The duo reveals “two remarkably different cities, demonstrating how location filmmaking transformed rather than reflected San Francisco” (p. 136); in the case of the action-thriller Bullitt, “as cars careen through the city, there is a far greater articulation of motion than place” (p. 182). With that and other high-grossing late-1960s films drawing more film production toward the city, San Francisco nonetheless remained a cinematic cipher, useful for its proximity to Los Angeles, such scenic locales as the Golden Gate Bridge and the then-enticing cachet of Haight-Ashbury, but ultimately a site for raw spatial input rather than any engaged sense of historicity for Hollywood filmmakers. When Woody Allen shot the third fully-San Franciscan studio feature, Take the Money and Run (1969), San Francisco stood in for everything from 1930s Camden, New Jersey, to the Midwest.

Urban policy critics bemoaned the “Manhattanization” of the city with its rising skyscrapers, but the hit Clint Eastwood police thriller Dirty Harry (1971) Manhattanized it in another way, transforming San Francisco (which had largely resisted dominant narratives of urban decay) into a New York City–inflected visual grunginess. Mayor Joseph Alioto’s policies, emulating New York mayor John Lindsay by incentivizing film production, acted as a magnet, but by the time of Gleich’s final pairing, the 1974 odd couple of Francis Ford Coppola’s moody, downbeat character study The Conversation and the big-budget disaster spectacular The Towering Inferno, San Francisco itself had completed a protracted fadeout. Coppola’s inward-dwelling film “express[ed] a larger American urban anomie rather than a story specific to the city,” while Inferno’s city exists merely as “a pretext for the disastrous tower” (pp. 246, 255). The film used a few generic scenery shots and little more.

In sharp contrast to this generic use of city space, the filmmakers who came to be known as the L.A. Rebellion zoomed in toward the granular neighborhood textures of Watts, Compton, and greater South Central Los Angeles. Growing out of the Black Power movement and its impact on UCLA’s film school, a multigenerational cohort built community, working on one another’s films in various capacities while offering a wide aesthetic range united mostly in its collective rejection of standard Hollywood racism, the then-prevalent sensationalism of Blaxploitation, and the suffocating whiteness of arthouse cinema. With L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, editors Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart offer a suitably sprawling recovery of this rich cultural terrain. Treating the rare L.A. Rebellion crossover such as Charles Burnett’s now-canonical Killer of Sheep (1977) with the same attentive care as short student films currently confined to archival prints, they offer everything from formal readings of affect and music in L.A. Rebellion films to oral histories with key figures.

Urban history is not the book’s primary focus, and indeed, co-editor Stewart’s earlier landmark Migrating to the Movies had more to say about film and “Black urban modernity,” as too did Field’s co-authored article on the remarkable short documentary Felicia (1965) and Paula Massood’s Black City Cinema chapter on spatial confinement in leading Rebellion filmmaker Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1975). ⁵ Yet in recentering Los Angeles filmmaking away from Hollywood and toward Black-independent perspectives, the book cannot but intervene in dominant narratives of cinema’s most reflexively represented city. Stewart’s own essay addresses this theme, noting the photos of protest against the LAPD’s 1979 killing of Eula Love in Bernard Nichols’s Gidget Meets Hondo (1980), while Alessandra Raengo highlights Barbara McCullough’s carefully textured images of “sunlight filtering through the holes of an abandoned shack cleared for highway expansion” in her adventurous Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979, p. 308). While Burnett and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) have drawn extensive commentary and Thom Andersen concluded his epic L.A. essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) with attention to Billie Woodberry’s masterpiece of postindustrial working-class Black life Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), L.A. Rebellion points to an enormous archive of Black urban representation, with women filmmakers figuring centrally in its coverage as well. If Gleich’s goal is to deconstruct hegemonic imagery by hewing close to Hollywood studio productions, L.A. Rebellion offers a complementary social history of grassroots cultural work outside the dominant institutions—except UCLA, which failed to tenure foundational program-builder Elyseo Taylor for what Black students understood as “racist reasons,” as per the closing credit of Ben Caldwell’s I & I: An African Allegory (1979, p. 11).

Of course, Monitoring the Movies, Hollywood in San Francisco, and L.A. Rebellion all maintain a largely U.S.-based approach. Noir Urbanisms helps round this out; while its cover image is by the quintessentially American artist Edward Hopper, its essays span from Weimar modernity to Chinese “postsocialist urban dystopia.” Editor Gyan Prakash places the book under the sign of Walter Benjamin, whose belief in “the centrality, the constitutive force, of the image within the modern” animates many of its essays (p. 10). Like a good flaneur, Prakash’s selections walk us through the varieties of noir urbanism’s disparate incarnations. In Mexico City, Rubén Gallo notes, the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex aspired to fuse modernist and utopian urban design but instead wound up “caught in an apparently endless cycle of demolition and rebuilding” extending from the 1520 razing of Tenochtitlan through the 1985 earthquake that hit 8.1 on the Richter scale and left dozens of fallen buildings and 4000 dead (p. 54). By then, utopian architectural dreams had given way to an “architecture of control” that allowed the state to trap students in the design during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, which carried over into filmic representations of the housing complex as a dystopian trap, such as Rojo Amanecer (1986-1989) and Temporada de patos (2005).

Noir Urbanisms does swing by Los Angeles, where Mark Shiel makes a spirited case for bringing urban history to bear on noir, replacing traditional reliance on psychoanalytic theory as lens. Noting that Hollywood moguls contracted with the Chicago mafia to suppress labor radicalism, he argues that L.A. superseded New York in film production “in large part, because of an unmistakable rightward reorganization of both cinema and of the physical and social character of the city,” like Gleich insisting that political economy shaped urban representation in not just symbolic but very material ways (p. 97). In another energetically argued piece, William M. Tsutsui posits that Tokyo, which has borne more fictional apocalypses than any other city, has been widely misread. Too often, cultural critics captivated by Godzilla and its many successors “overstate the psychic legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (p. 122). In fact, Japanese culture’s “endlessly and automatically regenerating urban landscapes” may be “the ultimate celebration of modernity and expression of faith in the sure hand of progress and the resilience of the Japanese nation” (p. 114). The essays here employ more conventional culture-studies methods than the archivally driven books but add a crucial global lens to both cinematic urban history, and also that of noir, so often imagined as U.S. American but operative in shadows and fog across continents.

In the end, this quartet of books operate less in dialogue with one another than as a patchwork quilt, but one that fits cozily over a broad historiographical bed. To understand how Hollywood “overpowered the local complexities of physical place,” as Gleich writes (p. 10), it helps to see how independent filmmakers reclaimed Black Los Angeles from its clutches; all of this occurred within regulatory structures built around early cinema, and from Humphrey Bogart studio pictures to Wang Bing’s nine-hour documentary about industrial decline in northeastern China’s Shenyang West of the Tracks (2003), grim scenes of the city have shaped our global view of urbanism. The cities built by cinema have never been uniform, ranging from studio fabrications to an almost haptic social realism, but Fronc, Gleich, and the authors assembled by Field, Horak, Stewart, and Prakash push us to consider more closely the political economies of those flickering urban images.