City Symphony Research Articles

Music and Politics in Kosovo: Three Lives of the City Symphony Orchestra in Prishtina, 1950-2020

Music and Politics in Kosovo: Three Lives of the City Symphony Orchestra in Prishtina, 1950-2020

Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montage

Sylvain George is one of the most interesting French filmmakers working today. He has made a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and has brought together migrant figures and Occupy movements in his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). The principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin. This article shows how certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But it also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, they show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.

City Symphony

City Symphony

On film and territory: Treading ground with Sacro GRA

In this article, I change the lens through which we normally look at space in film, transcending at once the national/transnational cinema dichotomy and hierarchical geographical scalings and generic categories that are sometimes unfit to account for a film’s production of space. I propose that the geopolitical notion of ‘territory’ can focus our attention on the critical situatedness of a certain type of cinema while also facilitating formal and industrial types of film analysis. The notion of territory, intended as a geographical space shaped by humans and a geographical expression of power, can be mobilized to analyse films that reveal and critique the social actualization of the material potentialities of specific places. Gianfranco Rosi’s cinema is a case in point. Set along Rome’s ring road, Rosi’s Sacro GRA (‘Holy GRA’) (2013) sits uncomfortably in both the city symphony or road movie genres and calls for different categories of analysis.

De-imaging New York: cognitive mapping and the city symphony

De-imaging New York: cognitive mapping and the city symphony

Jennifer Peedom's Mountain as a City Symphony

This article explores Jennifer Peedom’s film Mountain (2017) through the lens of the city symphony in view of structural, aesthetic, and thematic parallels between mountain and city symphony films. Analyzing Mountain in the generic context of the city symphony film draws attention to the deep structural links between urban centers and mountains, and their shared technological and urban infrastructures. This appraoch also harnesses the potential of film studies to revise dominant perceptions of mountains and can help viewers understand mountains as places of density and as dense networks that are developed by technological infrastructure and informed by dense technological, social, and cultural networks. By drawing on media ecology, actor-network theory, and media archeology, I will show that, similar to city symphonies, Mountain explores collective networks beyond the human realm to shed light on mountains as cultural spaces, geological manifestations, and eco-social realities. In so doing, Mountain tries to help humans to come to terms with the deep temporalities of alpine spaces and their technological mediations.

Telling one another’s stories: the city symphony and cine-genre narrative

ABSTRACT The city symphony, which explores the new arrangements of space and time in modernity through montage and photogeny, displays the core characteristics of a cine-genre. However, this famously non-narrative form also contains stubbornly narrative elements, expressed as rhythm, that open onto possibilities for reflexive as well as urban critique. By exploring these elements in Tan Pin Pin’s In Time to Come (2017), I show how the city symphony as cine-genre encompasses a striking heterogeneity of form, offering an excavation of the rules that regulate urban existence.

Sinfonias Urbanas: Utopia e Semiose Documentária

In this 21st century, city symphonies encompass great reference titles in a remarkable hundred-year-production. As having an experimental nature related to the documentary approach, they seem to propose a sort of utopia revealing a crucial work of the visual. This study aims to investigate the similarities and the differences between the first titles from the 1920s and the more recent ones from the 1990s and 2000s. For such, a universe of semiosis shall be realized in a concern about all events of life in a metropolis. More accurately, Peircean semiotic and Semiology offer a coherent and systematic field in the study of signs which may elucidate the complex connections between city symphonies’ filmic aesthetics. If they can be examined in their innovations and firstness, which establish and reinforce their avant-garde profile, in addition to the aspects of the historical world; a group of urban codes may also be focused evoking the secondness and thirdness – that is the power of the triadic system of signs. Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927, 2002), by Walter Ruttmann and Thomas Schadt, the meta-city symphony The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), by Dziga Vertov, its prior Kino-Eye (1924) and Vertov’s circle, for instance, Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (1927), Douro, Faina Fluvial distinct versions (1931, 1934, 1996), by Manoel de Oliveira. These titles shall constitute references of our findings.

Paul Hindemith’s Cantata “Frau Musica” in the Context of the Participatory Musical Art Development

The article analyses the cantata “Frau Musica” by the German composer P. Hindemith. This work has come to be widely understood as an example of Gebrauchsmusik in the works of O. Leontieva, K.-D. Krabiel, M. Breivik. Gebrauchsmusik is often identified as utility music, which means that it is created for some specific purpose; but the purpose does not have to be utilitarian. In order to assess the profoundness of the composer’s concept and to clarify specifics of the descriptive term, it is necessary to go back to the basics of the theoretical debates about the social role of art that unfolded in the 1920s. Their main participants were H. Besseler and T. Adorno. A valuable source of information is the programs of music festivals in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden, where Gebrauchsmusik was evolving as a multi-genre artistic experiment. Hindemith played the leading role in this process. It is also important to understand the reasons that prompted the composer to use M. Luther’s text in the cantata “Frau Musica”.Today the Gebrauchsmusik’s ideas — revitalization of the audience, expanding access to musical education and practical musical activities that evolve collaborative work — have gained the most relevance. According to the author’s hypothesis, “Frau Musica” can be regarded as an illustrative example of a work that combines different views on the nature of musical participation: a spiritual act, a collective work, the highest level of musical accessibility. In this particular composition, Hindemith intuitively found the most promising ways for the development of creative interaction between the composer and the listener, which subsequently led to the creation of a whole corpus of participatory works, including Tod Makover’s “City Symphonies”, Alexander Radvilovich’s “Baltic Music”, Paul Rissman’s “Supersonic”.

"Biohaus": The Bauhaus and the Biopolitics of Global Space

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians and urban studies scholars have been pleading for a more nuanced analysis of the Bauhaus in order to divorce from the one-sided affirmative reading of the iconic German art school. Yet, within the prevailing heroic narrative that still dominates contemporary public discourse after the 100-year anniversary of the school, the Bauhaus is praised for its affordable as well as working class-oriented design and it is thus depicted as intrinsically antithetical to today’s neoliberal housing market and bourgeois planning practices. To complicate this somewhat lopsided account, this paper draws on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of functionalist architecture and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to examine the late Bauhaus through a biopolitical lens. It first presents the Törten working-class housing estate in Dessau, Germany to scrutinize how biopolitical socio-spatial practices crystalize in Bauhaus urban planning and architecture. The second part of the paper turns to the film screen to discuss how the Weimar-era narrative of bio-functional modernism materializes in Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy’s late 20s, early 30s filmic works on urban life, the so-called “city symphonies.” Considering the postwar afterlives of the Bauhäusler, the Conclusion places these findings in a broader historical perspective and reflects on the contemporary implications of a Foucauldo-Lefebvrian rereading of the Bauhaus. It is within this final contextualization that the paper inquires into the possibilities of people-centered urban dwelling in the age of biopower.

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars

ПОЭТИКА ГОРОДА В ФИЛЬМЕ «ВИБРАЦИИ ГРАНАДЫ» (1935) Х. ВАЛЬ ДЕЛЬ ОМАРА

The article reviewed the main cinematic techniques, themes and motives used by J. Val del Omar for the lyrical conceptualization of the image of the city in the film “Vibrations of Granada” (1935) and analyzed their semantics. It demonstrates how the documentary narrative splits into pure representation and an area of allegorical tension, supported by key metaphors as sources of expanded motives. The metaphor of the Garden of Eden represents Granada as an image of Paradise; the use of the motive of water as the main element of drama contributes to the actualization of philosophical semantics and in combination with the green filter through which the film is projected, forms the fabulous-onyric character of the narrative; the visual motive of verticality created by camera angles, editing, etc, acquires the axiological meaning of the city's spiritual aspiration upward. It is revealed that the film’s style was influenced by the optics of cinematic impressionism, the R. Flaherty’s documental aesthetics and the poetic images of F. Garcia Lorca. This artistic program permits consideration of the film as an ethnographically and existentially accentuated version of the films of the “city symphony” of the 1920s and 1930s.

Urban, Historical, and Musical Loops: László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Kluge, and the City Symphony Film

Abstract Focusing on Alexander Kluge’s short film Chicago im Zeitraffer (Chicago in Time Lapse), this article inserts his work with moving images into a larger genealogy of the city symphony film. Elucidating his relationship with the historical cinematic avant-garde, as Kluge borrows and departs from both László Moholy-Nagy’s urban vision and Bertolt Brecht’s conception of urban capitalist modernity, the article shows that Kluge’s film reorients time-lapse cinematography and opens up a new form of perception. By incorporating transnational techno music, the film suggests a concept of body and subjectivity that appears as a consequence of an increasingly voracious capitalist modernity while embedding a sense of obstinacy and self-propulsion. Nonetheless, the film’s reliance on transatlantic techno risks excluding the Black musical and social contexts that inspired it. Throughout the article the “loop,” or the traffic circle (Kreisverkehr), is understood as a governing metaphor that helps explain Kluge’s vision of contemporary urbanity, historical connectivity, and musical influence.

Eisenstein: Revolutionary and International Modernist

Early Soviet filmmakers’ relationship with modernism, like that of film generally, is problematic. Yet Sergei Eisenstein’s challenging productions utilised Constructivist and Eccentrist principles evolved from pre-revolutionary Futurism and Symbolism. Core to the project of the Moscow State Film School, they were lauded internationally as avant-garde before distribution and exhibition difficulties, matters of taste, and politics compromised their accessibility, reputation and broader appeal. Piecemeal publication of Eisenstein’s translated writings have continued to maintain his centrality as a theorist whose insights, particularly into montage as a structuring principle, extend beyond cinema. This chapter argues for recognition of Eisenstein’s centrality to modernism, even though the term is imprecise, does not necessarily embrace most films, and is complicated by the political context, mass address, and status as propaganda of his output. It identifies affinities in his work with modernist Western literature, about which Eisenstein was highly knowledgeable, such as his attempt to realise interior monologue audio-visually. Having already completed his most formally experimental projects, he worked and travelled extensively in the West, and met leading writers, artists, and other intellectuals. This was during the height of modernist creativity, a period that nevertheless also saw consolidation of Stalinist dogma in the USSR as well as frustration of serious artistic ambitions for cinema everywhere with commercial imposition of expensive and unimaginatively conceived sound techniques. In particular, the proto-modernist influence of Walt Whitman on Eisenstein’s vision is traced through the American ‘city symphony’ short film Manhatta by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art and Modernity between the Wars by Steven JacobsAnthony KinikEva Hielscher

Reviews 111 Let the old man prattle!’ in the same breath as confessing her simplicity and lack of education, this difficulty reminds us to imagine that these conversations are happening in Konkani. That combined with excellent decisions such as to include a mix of Konkani and Portuguese titles and place names encourages us to engage with the linguistic complexity of Goa that is the product of different colonial entanglements. The introduction by Jason Keith Fernandes, explaining the context in which the book was written, helps us do this while also making an argument for the relevance of the book for contemporary Goa through what we can learn from both, the contents of the stories themselves as well as from the positioning of the author that they reveal. I believe that these same reasons make it equally relevant for India today. At the time of its first publication, Monsoon saw a Goa recently annexed to India — a time when its identity was being redefined and Goans had to reckon with Indianness and were finally forced to choose between being Indian or Portuguese. Its English translation comes at a time when Indian Citizenship is being decided in a way that echoes Fernandes’s observation about Goan politics of that time being ‘a game of musical chairs — when the music stops, those least approximating savarna Hinduism are ousted’. Finally, Monsoon offers nostalgia to those looking into the past and hope to those looking into the future, but keeps both in check with a constant sense of unease. These are an enjoyable set of stories despite the dark clouds under which they are gathered. The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art and Modernity between the Wars, edited by Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik and Eva Hielscher (New York: Routledge, 2018). 341 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) One might not associate ‘the city symphony phenomenon’ with the Lusophone world, yet this genre of silent film boasted important contributions from Portugal and Brazil during its heyday between the 1920s and the 1940s. Divided into three parts, Jacobs, Kinik and Hielscher’s important new edited volume provides a penetrating conspectus of this genre, useful close readings of individual films — eschewing obvious choices like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City for lesser-known examples — and an itemized overview of films they ascribe to this genre. In the editors’ long introduction, the prototype of the genre is expressively yet accessibly presented. In essence they define the city symphony as a film in which urban life plays the role of a collective protagonist. Combining experimental, documentary and narrative elements, city symphonies draw together a fragmented, kaleidoscopic view of everyday figures and routines in the city, employing techniques of rhythmic and associative montage that often evoke musical structures. Reviews 112 Of the eighty or so titles indexed in the authors’ survey, four are from Portuguese-speaking countries, two from Brazil and two from Portugal (with the Brazil-born Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures [1929], filmed in Paris, also being a notable, if sui generis example of the genre). One of these films merits a chapter in the second section. Written by Cristina Meneguello, a specialist in urban space and industrial heritage based at the State University of Campinas, it is dedicated to São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole (1931), directed by the Hungarian immigrants Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig. If the model city symphony engages with an industrializing space characterized by centralization and congestion, it’s no accident that this genre was brought across the Atlantic to depict Brazil’s emergent megalopolis. Meneguello essentially reads the film as an attempt to place the swiftly burgeoning city on equal footing with the more established, and heralded, metropolises of America and Europe. It is interesting to note that, alongside the classic tropes of the genre, São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole also features small staged scenes, performed anecdotes from everyday life, and a dramatized historical insert based on Pedro Américo’s painting ‘Independence or Death’ (1888), an aspect that opens up a productive comparison with a coeval Portuguese counterpart, Lisboa: Crónica Anedótica (1930), and its more extensive use of...

From master narratives to DIY stories: on the post-digital sublime and database documentary in two city symphony films

ABSTRACT The emergence of post-media aesthetics and hybrid media culture marked by media convergence as well as diachronic and synchronic hybridization has resulted in an ongoing re-evaluation, re-contextualization and re-mobilization of the city symphony film’s practices, which offer novel cinematic experiences by abandoning the genre’s traditional narrative trajectory or editing patterns and replacing them with new digital forms. Following this trend, I analyze the ways in which Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill and Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake operate within the post-digital sublime and database documentary framework, and consequently play with or critique the standard city symphony format and message centered around the concept of decay or kino-eye. Particularly, both works oppose the genre’s traditional montage and postmodern aesthetics by means of database and interactive storytelling, and instead rely on the mutability of the digital image and image-altering software, which seemingly lacks or merely imitates the sublime. To counteract this effect, the post-digital sublime takes a participatory form and is based on enquiry and discovery (Tracing) or novelty, invention and surprise (The Global Remake) rather than boredom and repetition traditionally associated with an unbounded potential of technology and the banal.

Film's Religious Algorithm

This article explores Simone Weil's concept of ‘affliction’ and the black poetics of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten in relation to two nonfiction films: Artur Aristakisyan's Palms (1993) and Forough Farrokhzad's The House Is Black (1962). The films’ contentiousness springs from their provocative depictions of suffering, presented not as a social ill but as a defiant mode of being outside of institutional power. Supplanting the search for a cure with the search for salvation, the films transcend the socially-conscious logic of documentary in favour of a ‘religious algorithm’ of profound but recalcitrant weakness. As alternative ‘city symphonies’, Palms and The House Is Black's municipal visions complement Hartman and Moten's vivid accounts of insurgent black life in American cities.

From Weimar to Winnipeg: German Expressionism and Guy Maddin

Abstract The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.

Lisa Vancauwenberghe Performing the City: Urban Discourses and the Representation of Italian Cities in the Music Videos of Italian rapper Capo Plaza

This article analyses how various contemporary urban discourses are performed and negotiated in the visual work of Italian hip hop artist Capo Plaza. The modern metropole, the postmodern society of the spectacle, tourist authenticity discourses around ‘couleur local’ and a focus on ordinary life are all dealt with in his music videos. By analyzing how cinematic strategies and choices are able to bring those images into dialogue, as well as subvert them, this article aims at an exploration of this new medium as a reincarnation of the genre of the city symphony. As his work deals with both the small southern city Salerno and the metropole Milan, questions of scale and the international urban imagination, come into play as well.

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars, edited by Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher

Book Review| June 01 2019 The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars, edited by Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher BOOK DATA Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik and Eva Hielscher, eds., The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars. New York: Routledge, 2018. $49.50 cloth; $27.48 e-book. 342 pages. Charles Musser Charles Musser CHARLES MUSSER teaches courses on documentary and film historiography at Yale University. His most recent book is Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s (2016). His feature-length documentary Our Family Album (2019), directed with Threese Serana, is currently on the festival circuit and will soon have a book counterpart through Indiana University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2019) 72 (4): 111–112. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2019.72.4.111 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Charles Musser; The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars, edited by Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher. Film Quarterly 1 June 2019; 72 (4): 111–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2019.72.4.111 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.