Bright Lights, Big Cities

Abstract

Sarah Morris starts Midtown (1998), her film about New York, with a shot of lights up close. Flashing triangles of different hues fall down the screen, subsequently grouping into a pattern of lines that shift and rearrange with a methodic rhythm. The brightness of these first lights burns in our minds throughout the film, despite the fact that an enormous bottle of Budweiser soon swings into view; their networked geometry finds echoes in shots of crisscrossing streets and the mirrored panels of corporate office buildings. In AM/PM (1999), Morris’s film of Las Vegas, lights dominate as well; they run up the facades of buildings and surround people as they head down moving walkways. The viewer does not see much of the iconic signs of the Strip, which Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown celebrated for their communicative powers in their landmark work of postmodern architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas (1977). Instead, one witnesses close-ups of neon tubes, light bulbs, and LEDs—the seduction of pure light. Most of the film takes place at night, in fact, and in a certain sense the lights burn despite the night, if not in spite of it. (The film’s title, borrowed from the name of a convenience store, points to a similarly aggressive sense of homogenous, sleepless time.)