Among the most famous of the social documentaries of the 1930s, The City was a sponsored film produced for the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair by Civic Films Inc. in conjunction with the American Institute of Planners and with the financial assistance of the Carnegie Institute, and, as a whole, it isn’t technically a city symphony. But, like the vast majority of the films that made up this international cycle, The City is a project that had strong ties to the artistic and political avant-garde and that emerged out of the art, film, photography, and design nexus that was such an important feature of these overlapping scenes. Its fourth chapter (“Men Into Steel”) amounts to a ten-minute city symphony of New York couched within a 43-minute critique of the failure of urbanization and the absence of carefully planned urbanism in America. This film-within-a-film contains many of the semantic hallmarks of the city symphony genre, including a fascination with modern architecture and infrastructure, modern transportation and traffic, and modern labor and business, and it stands as a virtuosic example of cinematography and editing so typical of this cycle. Other parts of the film also display a fluency with the city symphonies style and a willingness to use these techniques in order to augment the film’s visual and affective impact, most notably the fourth chapter (“City of Smoke”), which deals with industrial towns. For these reasons, as well as for its release date in 1939, right on the verge of the outbreak of World War II, the conflict which brought an end to the city symphony’s classical era, and because of its attempts to turn the city symphony form against the modern metropolis, as it were, Steiner and Van Dyke’s The City stands as the film that brings the city symphonies phenomenon to a close.
The team that created The City is a veritable who’s who of leading figures in the realms of documentary film, experimental cinema, modernist photography, urban planning, and contemporary music. Both Ralph Steiner (1899–1986) and Willard Van Dyke (1906–86) were accomplished photographers and cinéastes, whose cinematic work bridged the realms of experimental and documentary filmmaking and who were both closely connected with Pare Lorentz and the New Deal filmmaking efforts of the Resettlement Administration and the Works Progress Administration, and the somewhat more radical work of the Frontier Films group. Other figures directly associated with the production of The City include Pare Lorentz, who came up with the film’s outline, Henwar Rodakiewicz, a talented experimental filmmaker who elaborated upon Lorentz’s outline and was part of the cinematography team, Aaron Copland, the talented composer who contributed the film’s powerful score, and Lewis Mumford, who provided the film’s historical and theoretical grounding.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
MacDonald, Scott, “Ralph Steiner,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 205–33.
Wolfe, Charles, “Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social Documentary and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 234–66.
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