The city has long been a muse and inspiration for filmmakers, from the dawn of moving image to the present day. Literal symphonies have been conducted to its hallucinatory visions and pieced together from its perpetual motions. In the 1920s a score of films were made that we came to know as the city symphonies. Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) is perhaps best known; a patchwork of rhythmic images, fragments of lives, reflections of reflections, swelling through the city streets like blood pumping through a vein. These films made the city the star of the picture, in all its cacophonous glory. Mark Cousins recently revived this heritage of city symphonies with his masterpiece I Am Belfast (2015), a poetic ode to his hometown, which he embodies as a woman, exploring the history and future within.
The cinematic city has come to mean many things through the years. In the 1940s the directors working in film noir used the dark corners of Los Angeles to express the fraught tensions and fragmented psyche of America during wartime. In France at the time of the Nouvelle Vague and auteurs such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, the city of Paris became condensed and then expanded into an explosive sensation, its cobbled streets immortalised with the lyricism of a poem. Filmmakers have used cinema as a window to look into their visions of the utopian/dystopian megalopolises of future days. From Metropolis (1927) to Akira (1988) to Babeldom (2013), cities drawn out from deep within the imagination cast a foreboding shadow over much of cinema history.
Patrick Geddes elaborated, “The city is more than a place in space. It is a drama in time.” Throughout the symphonic portrayals of cities within cinema, we’ve witnessed radical transformations, waves of change coming and going with the tide of perception. Using two case studies, that of Rome and of Paris, an illumination to this metamorphosis will hopefully be cast here, revealing how even the most classical of cities can become warped by the kino-eye. In both cases becoming touched by a postmodern condition.
Rome: From Fellini to Sorrentino
From the opening images of The Great Beauty (2013), in which a man washes himself with the lapping water of a fountain, an Asian tourist takes photos of a stunning aerial view of Rome before collapsing from the heat – or perhaps the grandeur - and before a wild neon-infused party breaks out, it is clear that the Eternal City is no longer the same as it once was, back when Federico Fellini roamed its streets. A postmodern virus is seeping through the cracks of classicism. The changes range from subtle to flagrant, from a Baudrillardian overdose of simulacra to an incongruous society Fredric Jameson would say was dominated by a mix of high and mass culture. These aren’t the most obvious cases however, more so is the echoed call and response from Fellini to director of The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino. The latter displays a referential knowledge of how Fellini perceived Rome, and perhaps suggests that his visions no longer convey truth. He personifies these visions of antiquity as the character of Jep Gambardella and his group of high-class amoral socialites, relics of a distinctly modernist disposition. Fingernails clinging to the past. Statues crumbling into dust.
In her essay on postmodernism in Rome, Léa-Catherine Szacka introduces the architectural concept of Rome Interotta, or the interruption of the city’s singular grand narrative because of the fragmentation of the urbanscape and the shattering of objectivity. She states that from the end of the 1970s, twenty years after Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, there was a shift towards a narrative of plural subjectivities, typical of postmodernity. In The Great Beauty, an abstract tapestry of displaced images occurs. Sorrentino’s camera swoons after a group of socialites seemingly at odds with the transformational city around them. A series of fragmented narratives begins as they split towards different destinations, mentally and physically, until they all lose sight of any other view but their own, and their worlds fall apart, as main protagonist Jep Gambardella laments as he reaches the end of his path: “I’m not fit for this life or this city. Everything around me is dying.” Claude Levi-Srauss advocated that this type of fragmentation, or collage, should be seen as a mental structure. In The Great Beauty the city of Rome is portrayed as a giant cerebral membrane, in which every character, every fragment, embodies a completely adverse perception of itself. These segments of the city communicate with each other but ultimately function autonomously. In La Dolce Vita, however, the character of Marcello moves in a swathing grand narrative, personifying the city’s old objectivity, the one that Szacka says has now been smashed into shards. Marcello resignedly accepts what he believes is his city’s own master plan, his job as a gossip journalist highlighting the powerlessness he feels to the wants of the world surrounding him. He is like the angels of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), touching the world from a distance, recording life but only living a hollowed out version. Inversely, in Sorrentino’s film, the omnipresent author, the master builder, of the city is dead. Each character writes their own definition of Rome.
One symptom of the postmodern city, writes Laura Racaroli, is the pulsating power of mass media and culture. Whilst La Dolce Vita shows Rome locked in a battle between public and private space, with the locust-like cameramen of Marcello’s publication leading the charge of a rabid, celebrity-obsessed society - the word paparazzi actually stems from a character in Fellini’s film – the inhabitants of Sorrentino’s Rome have become utterly desensitized to the tidal wave of technology. It has become an almost invisible part of life. In a potent moment, a paparazzo wearily takes a photo of a nameless celebrity outside of a restaurant. The celebrity acknowledges neither the presence of the cameraman nor the flash that shimmers across his dark sunglasses. And the paparazzo trudges on. Only Jep, his wary view of the postmodern, noticed when he bats away an offer to look through photos on Facebook, shows any knowing rebellion to this unseen presence.
Another symptom is the disparate nature of the urban environment. Another collage, this time of the oxymoronic communities pressed against each other within the city. In a striking sequence, after the party at the beginning of the film, with its jarring clash of high and low, or mass, cultures – conversations on Marcel Proust are obliterated by an electronic chart song, all played out under the presence of a huge Martini billboard, like the bespectacled eyes of Dr. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, or the eyes of God – Jep immediately stumbles across a group of children being ushered along by a cloaked nun behind the gates to an untouched religious community, and as the pop music from the party still rings in the ears of the audience. A prominent discord which displays the fractured and dislocated habitat of the city.
Rascaroli’s final symptom is perhaps the most severe: a desire driven by nostalgia to relocate the past, but an inability to do so, because it is hidden a reproduction of stereotypical images. In The Great Beauty, Jep’s friend Romano performs a moving monologue before a theatre audience: “What’s wrong with feeling nostalgic?” he asks, “It’s the only distraction left for those who’ve no faith in the future.” Romano, then, is doomed. Nothing is sacred for him anymore. The future holds nothing, but his own past and the historical past of the city of Rome that he is gazing back on is now simply a mirror reflecting that same nothingness. He and the city are stuck in a void, devoid of memory or progress. There appears to be no such nostalgia in La Dolce vita, in which the ravenous society is racing towards this new condition with ferocity.
We must acknowledge that the representation of a city in cinema is a vital part in the construction of perception itself, and how that city’s identity is seen across the world, as well as the lived experience of the city’s inhabitants. In The Great Beauty, much more so than in La Dolce Vita, the lives of Rome’s natives form much of the identity and perception of the city. In Sorrentino’s film, Rome is not only fragmented, but is also struck by a nature of duality; of past and present, of old and new, and how these forces are in constant battle for the heart of the city. Also, how these forces are personified by certain characters within the film. A young woman in an early party scene states bluntly, “I’m no longer an actress, I’m a writer now… Maybe I’ll direct a film.” Emblematic of a postmodern identity which is liquid, shifting with the winds of change, and dismissive of the singular nature of the modernist artist, she typifies a new generation of Romans with their planned obsolescence and rapid rhythm of stylistic changes, as Fredric Jameson would have it.
If the young woman represents the new generation, then Jep ultimately personifies the old. He belongs to the generation whose loss of a central identity, both in city and in self has forged a mix of scepticism about the future and nostalgia for the past – which, as we’ve noted, only replicates a hollow vision of the future. His apartment and his balcony, perched overlooking the Coliseum, acts as a clinging hope to his own nostalgia, a hopeful vacuum in time in which he and his friends can be immune to the virus seeping in. As one of his friends says as she sits on his balcony, “it’s like you’re in the country.” Here, with only the ancient Coliseum and a patchwork of religious communities to stare out at, Jep’s mantra of “the old is better than the new” can remain intact, unchallenged by the forces of the new world. But he has to descend. And the new world begins to envelop him.
Early in the film, the struggling writer can barely comprehend the city around him, the architecture especially. He floats through a museum speechless, not in wonder but in a certain detachment. Yet towards the end of the film there is a significant moment in which the writer (Of a book called The Human Apparatus, a line lifted from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse) begins to connect with the city. And this is only because of the looming influence of the postmodern world around him. A young artist sticks thousands of Polaroid photos – a portrait for everyday of his life thus far, from innocent infant to rugged adult - onto a wall of an archaic Roman building. What could be considered a jarring mix of archaism and new technology - a wonderful example of what Baudrillard defined as the hyperreal, a shiny new surface atop the burnt out old world – is actually viewed as a great beauty in the eyes of Jep. In the most famous scene of La Dolce Vita, Sylvia throws herself into the city with exuberance, leaping into the Fontana Di Trevi, becoming one with Rome’s architecture. Jep, however, now interacts with the city only through the lens of postmodernism.
Yet, Jameson argues:
I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, in part because our perceptual habit were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism.
He believes that those, like Jep, relics of the old world, those who have practiced a blind rejection of the postmodern transformation, will perhaps never be able to fully mutate like the built space around them. However, as a member of the younger generation who has presumably grown up with this transformation has done, is almost force this mutation by blanketing Jep’s world in that of the postmodern. The metamorphosis occurs right in front of his eyes. And in this process Jep finds beauty. Perhaps because Jep sees present and past in these photos of a young boy slowing growing into a man, he is more willing to witness his own transformation, and that of the city. Jep’s new perception of the world and of Rome is henceforth associated with how people make him see the city and its architecture differently. The artist made him acknowledge an ancient wall using modern technology. Later, a magician surreally places a giraffe in the middle of a ruin for a magic show called The Disappearing Giraffe. When Jep asks him how he will do it, the magician simply says, “It’s just a trick.”
Richard Meier, abstract artist and architect, once said, “Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.” Whilst his first sentence may be true, his second is surely not. Just because the city’s architecture remains the same, it does not mean our perception of it will stagnate too. It can mutate and transform before us, as we gaze on through tinted eyes. And whist the city is always likely to be in the throes of metamorphosis – Augustus, first emperor of the Roman Empire, famously said: “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble” – this transformation is perhaps becoming less physical, less objectively true. More and more, our perception of a city will change according to our reaction to a cultural or secondary personal experience. Just as Jep Gambardella’s did when he witnessed a lifetime of change against something he thought never would. Polaroids on a wall. A giraffe amongst ruins. Yes, it’s just a trick.
By Joseph Gilson
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