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There are two New Yorks: the real one and the mythic city depicted in film.
By Phillip Lopate
April 2002
Urbanism and film studies have long flirted with and hinted at
marriage. The two fields have so much in common--so many mutual admirers--that
it is tempting, if tricky, to fold one into the other as a single entity:
cinemarchitecture. Until now, however, the merger has shown more promise
than reality. But James Sanders, a Manhattan architect, has finally
tied the knot with his thorough, smart, informative, entertaining, beautifully
illustrated and designed coffee-table tome, Celluloid Skyline.
The book's premise is that New York, thanks to its photogenic, dramatic,
and iconic qualities, has been used so often in films as photographed
location or reconstruction that its on-screen existence adds up to a distinct
"dream" or "mythic" city. In order to tell the history
of that "movie city," which intersects with the real New York,
the author has performed an act of analysis on the filmed metropolis
by dissecting it into spatial elements: streets, public spaces (especially
Central Park), and landmarks; building typologies (row house, tenement,
skyscraper, penthouse, train station, nightclub); neighborhoods and specialized
districts (the Lower East Side, Fifth Avenue, Harlem, the Great White Way);
and so on.
The author also tells a clear historical narrative: how the early silent
films regularly used images of New York, partly because the industry
began there and partly because Americans were fascinated with the big town;
how the relocation of the motion-picture industry to Southern California
did nothing to diminish the public's appetite for New York stories, causing
the Hollywood studios to construct their own "New York streets"
on back lots, which were used and reused with slight changes; how the end
of World War II saw a return to location shooting in New York, with grittier,
more neorealistic results, alongside the continuing production of an imaginary,
artificial Gotham.
All this is laid out very cleanly. Sanders brings an architect's structural
logic to what could have been an overwhelming muddle. His most inspired
chapters may be those on Hollywood's re-creation of New York, perhaps because
the set designers did something akin to what the author himself has done--they
broke down the city's streetscapes and interiors into component elements,
with the aid of photo archives of real loca-tions, and built them up again
in a stylized manner.
Although the book generally hews to a chronological linearity, it doubles
back to consider films that illustrate some element of the cityscape
under discussion. Sanders is particularly adept at showing how a movie's
particular look might result from a conjunction of historical factors, technological
advances, industry pressures, and evolving aesthetic tastes. The author,
who cowrote Ric Burns's PBS series New York: A Documentary Film,
knows his local history cold. He is quick to explain, for example, how changes
in zoning laws altered the skyline, which then created different opportunities
and problems for cinematographers (in the remake of King Kong, "the
flat tops of the Twin Towers offer nothing to grab onto."). One
of the best sections of the book revolves around Hollywood's ambivalent
relationship with the tenement. On the one hand, "the tenement was
not just a setting but a subject: the greatest scandal, and tragedy, of
the modern city." On the other hand, the structure was photogenic and
the crowded ghetto street had the pulse of life. In discussing the 1931
Street Scene, which took place on a single exterior set, Sanders
writes: "There was an inherently 'theatrical' quality to the tenement
front, not unlike that of its patrician predecessor, the row house. Like
the row house (from which it had historically evolved), the tenement fronted
the street squarely, met its neighbors shoulder-to-shoulder, and provided
a continuous street-wall, thus shaping the street itself into the same kind
of well-defined outdoor room. Like the row house, the tenement put
special emphasis on its street facade, using much the same inventory of
architectural devices: decorative treatment around the doors and windows,
an ornamental cornice, and a wide stoop, rising a half-flight from
the sidewalk to the front door. The detailing was likely to be clumsier
than that of the chaste row house, but the end result was the same: the
street became a kind of outdoor auditorium--the decorated facades serving
as a backdrop, the stoops as bleachers, and the upper-floor windows,
overlooking the entire space, as 'boxes.' The theatrical parallel was obvious."
While idealistic characters on-screen clamored for the slum street--"the
cradle of crime"--to be blown to bits and replaced by shiny towers,
Hollywood turned its back on the new public housing when it finally
arrived. Sanders notes: "Wasn't this precisely the landscape of grass
and trees, paths and playgrounds they had been calling for all along? But
they didn't. Not once. Instead, of all things, they kept returning again
and again to that old tenement street."
Something of an architectural traditionalist in the Jane Jacobs vein, Sanders
makes clear his preference for the unbroken street wall and the set-back,
ornamented Art Deco skyscraper. He is at heart a romantic and subscribes
to the Joan Didion quote he places at the beginning: "New York was
no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious
nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream
itself." One may gag a bit at the gassy invocations of larger-than-life
Gotham, but the book makes a strong case for the city's "habit of actively
mythologizing itself." In his splendid analysis of 42nd Street,
Sanders shows how the first part of the movie, with "its keen
rendering of backstage life," yields to the Busby Berkeley-directed
musical sequences of the Broadway show, which expand to impossible excess:
"For all its appeal, the top shot presented a conceptual conundrum.
It is, after all, part of a number that is supposed to be occurring in a
Broadway theater. If so, how is the audience viewing it? Have they
suddenly been carried up to special seats in the fly loft, directly
above the stage?" Rather than disapproving, Sanders loves this giddy
artifice, just as he appreciates the fake coffee shop and building
that went up temporarily on a real Tribeca street for the 1994 It Could
Happen to You.
Despite my admiration for the book, I do have some criticisms and qualms.
Although the writing is clear and evokes screen images well, it sometimes
falls into a hortatory circus barker's spiel. "Welcome to the dream
city. Settle into your seats. Now sit back as a striking image fills
the screen, our first glimpse of this extraordinary place." And
though Sanders has done his cinematic homework, the architect's viewpoint
tends to dominate the film lover's. Lengthy respectful analyses are
devoted to minor entertainments such as The Out-of-Towners, Ghostbusters,
or Batteries Not Included because they fit the author's thesis
about the changing city, whereas more important films such as D. W.
Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley, Abraham Polansky's Force
of Evil, and Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street get short
shrift.
The emphasis on the city as a set fails to illuminate why certain classics,
such as Force of Evil or The Wrong Man, seem echt New
York more because of temperament and social mood than architectural detail.
Another way of putting this is that Sanders is more comfortable talking
about the contributions of art directing and set design than film direction.
Several films by George Cukor, William Wyler, and Vincente Minnelli
are cited without drawing any connection to the larger role of directorial
personality. And many hackneyed movie plots are summarized too respectfully;
here readers could have used a more independent, irreverent authorial viewpoint.
But Celluloid Skyline is not film criticism, after all. It is
a powerful, almost three-dimensional way of looking at moviemaking as somehow
parallel to the art of city making. Sanders has nailed what he set out to
do: he has written what should be the definitive study on the subject,
and he has also left us with a strong model for any future research on the
meeting between the metropolis and the movies.
Phillip Lopate is writing a book about the New York waterfront.
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