Figure 16.1 The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939)
If Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta is the film that launched the city symphonies phenomenon in the period between 1919 and 1921, it is perhaps fitting that it was another New York film that brought an end to the cycle in 1939–40: Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s The City. Of course, strictly speaking, The City is not a city symphony. For one thing, its concerns are greater than simply the modern metropolis, beginning with an earnest portrayal of the traditional New England village that formed such an essential part of early American democracy, and ending with a highly polemical sequence on carefully planned model cities built according to the principles of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, a far cry from the highly industrialized metropolises that were the principal focus of the vast majority of the city symphony films. For another, its dominant mode of representation is not the poetic, as is generally the case with the city symphonies, but, instead, the film is quite emphatically an expository documentary, driven by the use of persuasive voiceover narration. Erik Barnouw’s account of The City and how it came into being is instructive in this regard. According to Barnouw, The City should be understood as a project whose lineage began with the formation of the New York chapter of the Workers Film and Photo League in 1930, and that the film was closely tied to a group of photographers whose aesthetics bridged the realms of modernism and social realism, including Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott, Strand, and, indeed, Steiner and Van Dyke. Barnouw also stressed the fact that the film was an outgrowth of the work that Pare Lorentz produced in tandem with the Resettlement Administration and other New Deal agencies, and that it was a direct offshoot of the politically radical Frontier Films group. He noted, “The City was full of experiments, some highly successful,” but, in the end, Barnouw framed the film quite specifically as a social documentary—as “an exposition of the urban crisis”—not an experimental film, and the impression he gave was that the project had been generated by the filmmakers themselves, even if it had been sponsored “by the American Institute of City Planners.”1 Only in passing did Barnouw mention that The City “was produced for use at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.”2
But Steiner and Van Dyke’s film contains a city symphony, a film- within-a-film that focuses on New York City quite specifically, one that adheres very closely to many elements—both semantic and syntactic—of the city symphonies tradition. And this treatment of the metropolis was a key part of an intervention on the part of an increasingly powerful urban planning lobby that was intended to take the largely unplanned and unregulated megalopolis of New York to task in a very public manner. In Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas argues that between 1890 and 1940 Manhattan had been unconsciously chosen to be a “laboratory” for the Machine Age, one where, “the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture,” had been vigorously pursued. Koolhaas called the principles on which this movement was based “Manhattanism,” and for him it was quite clear that Manhattan was the ultimate emblem of twentieth-century modernity.3 Ironically, it was the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40 that brought an end to this experiment. Though it had been planned within the headquarters of the Board of Design on the top floor of the Empire State Building—one of the crowning achievements of Manhattanism—the fair was “conceived as an anti-Manhattan,” Koolhaas argued, and its central exhibits, its iconic Trylon and Perisphere, were actually monuments to Manhattanism’s demise.4 Koolhaas makes no mention of Steiner and Van Dyke’s The City, which was screened daily in the Little Theatre inside the Science and Education building, but he does write at some length about two other exhibits dealing with urbanism: Democracity, the ultra-planned, ultra-rational Corbusian city of the future that was featured inside the Perisphere, as well as the quasi-cinematic “City of Light” exhibition mounted in the Consolidated Edison pavilion, which compressed a full 24-hour day-in-the-life-of- Manhattan into a 24-minute spectacle.5
When Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta initiated the city symphonies cycle in 1921, it did so by drawing from and participating in the discourse of Manhattanism, with its “shameless” Verticalism and its “Culture of Congestion.”6 Manhatta is by no means a naive celebration of Manhattanism, but for the most part it is a film that seems awestruck by the forces that had created (and were creating) the unprecedented landscape of Lower Manhattan. By contrast, Steiner and Van Dyke’s The City is the film which brings the cycle to an end because of its savage critique of the modern metropolis and because of the significant role it played at the “anti-Manhattan” that was the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. Adding to the attractiveness of this pair of bookends is the fact that it was in 1922, one year after the release of Manhatta and just as Manhattanism was hitting full stride, that the Regional Plan for New York was announced, a document that simultaneously placed Manhattan at the center of a metropolitan agglomeration that encompassed large portions of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, and initiated the process of radically decentralizing New York City.7
Roughly ten years later, a committee of the American City Planning Institute began to lobby in favor of the production of a film that would address the topic of “Rebuilding the American City,” an effort that was endorsed by the Regional Plan Association of New York.8 One of the instigators behind this project was Catherine Bauer, whose Modern Housing (1934) had been inspired by Lewis Mumford and financed in part by the Carnegie Corporation, and whose vision of planned, non-speculative community housing that would provide residents with air, light, space, good views, and easy access to recreation and play was a major contribution to the American planning movement.9 Another was Mumford himself, who, in a 1935 address on the topic of the proposed 1939 World’s Fair, cautioned against allowing the fair to become the product of the same kind of unregulated and aggressively speculative impulses that had created the modern megalopolises of America,
because only dullards are unaware of the fact that we are living on the brink of a civilization which will either have to learn to plan itself, plan its industry, plan its environment, and plan its cities, or which will be before we know it in the midst of chaos and death.10
By 1937, discussions of a “talking film” on urban life in America had gained considerable momentum, spearheaded by the American City Planning Institute and the Regional Plan Association of New York, along with Robert D. Kohn, the Fair’s Chairman of the Committee on Theme.11 In fact, by September 1937, this committee had reviewed and effectively approved a proposal by Steiner for this “city planning movie.”12 Over the course of the next year, with a $50,000 budget having been secured from the Carnegie Corporation, Steiner’s production moved into high gear, eventually involving a veritable who’s who of artistic and intellectual talents, including Van Dyke, the noted photographer and cinematographer who would become Steiner’s co-director; Henwar Rodakiewicz, the brilliant experimental filmmaker whose singular Portrait of a Young Man (1931) was widely discussed within experimental and amateur film circles; Lorentz, who had quickly become the single most important figure in American documentary filmmaking of the New Deal era, and who contributed the scenario for the film; Aaron Copland, the famed composer, who created a memorable score for the project, despite the orchestral limitations he faced;13 and Mumford, who contributed a historical and theoretical framework that paralleled key aspects of his latest opus, The Culture of Cities (1938).
Plans for the proposed “city planning movie” underwent a number of different iterations even before Lorentz became involved with the project, all of them associated with different proponents of the urban planning lobby. Thus, Clarence Stein of The American City, who was an integral part of the preparations behind the film, and would become the founder of Civic Films, Inc., The City’s production company, submitted an outline for his vision of the film in August 1937.14 The script that was prepared by Lorentz maintained key aspects of Stein’s original—a scathing portrayal of the urban-industrial sphere, a sense of history, a triumphant final chapter—but he expanded the original three-part structure into a five-part one.15 Here, in this new version, the film began with a portrait of life in a pre-industrial New England village—Shirley, Massachusetts—a segment that provided a glimpse of “urban life as it was in the beginning,” as well of the foundations of American democracy. It then shifted to a depiction of the industrial town, in this case focusing on steel mill towns in western Pennsylvania. The film’s middle act was a study of the modern metropolis, one whose lens was firmly placed on New York City in particular. The fourth section amounted to a brief interlude, one that looked at car culture and the spread of urban malaise in the region surrounding New York. Finally, the longest segment, the one that was meant to indicate the future of urbanism in America, was a study of highly rationalized “Green Cities,” ambitious planning projects that sought to reestablish manageability, livability, and communitarianism within urban America. The message was clear: something had gone terribly wrong between the earliest years of the nation and America’s industrialization; America’s cities had become mechanized, polluted, and dangerous, an affront to community and to the human spirit; and this crisis was existential in nature, threatening the future of America unless bold steps were taken and urban planning was fully embraced. This pronounced fear of impending crisis was clearly modelled on Mumford’s The Culture of Cities, which features an account of the lifespan of urban groupings that begins with village communities and peaks with the metropolis, before describing three stages that capture the decline and fall of great cities: Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, and, lastly, Nekropolis.16
Though The City as a whole is not a city symphony, its creators borrowed liberally from the style and conventions of the genre at numerous points in the film, and in the case of Chapter 3—“Men Into Steel”—the audience is presented with what amounts to a ten-minute city symphony, one that captures the frenetic activity of the modern metropolis, while simultaneously emphasizing its tensions and conflicts. It is this attempt to take the city symphony form and turn it against the city, as it were, that makes The City so significant. Though this tactic is seen most extensively in Chapter 3, the first signs of the city symphony style come at the very beginning of Chapter 2, “City of Smoke,” a section dedicated to the Industrial City that was shot in the region surrounding Pittsburgh. Here, strikingly framed shots of monstrous and infernal steel factories, and of smokestacks of all kinds belching smoke into already heavily polluted skies, recall similar sequences from films like Manhatta, Twenty-Four Dollar Island, Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, and others, as well as an entire history of modernist photography stretching from Alfred Stieglitz and A.L. Coburn, to Bauhaus, Constructivism, the New Objectivity, the New Vision, and Precisionism. What’s radically different about The City is the way it highlights environmental destruction, including air pollution and white-hot waste being dumped down hillsides. Whereas the narration was quiet and contemplative during the film’s opening chapter, here it is exclamatory and ecstatic—theatrically so, ironically so. And as this critical take on the symphonie industrielle comes to a close, the film makes another dramatic break from the city symphonies tradition—it adopts an elegiac tone and shifts to the topic of the abysmal housing conditions in industrial towns: shabby, hastily constructed, crowded, polluted, disease-ridden, and dehumanizing. Instead of a celebration of modern industry, the film suddenly becomes a powerful social documentary, one that has more in common with Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey’s Housing Problems (1935), and one that is consistent with the style of photography and films sponsored by the Resettlement Administration in the 1930s and early 1940s, including the documentaries of Lorentz.
“Men Into Steel” begins with an extreme low-angle shot of a Manhattan skyscraper, shot through the lattice work of an elevated subway line, before proceeding to a sequence that highlights the skyscraper- lined “canyons” of New York, and emphasizes the way these monstrosities have utterly diminished mankind. Here, the narration begins almost immediately, and once again it adopts an exaggerated tone, one that’s meant to be understood ironically, and one that characterizes the modern metropolis as a site of shameless greed and materialism, reckless and unchecked growth, fashion and novelty, and automation and alienation. What ensues is a nine-and-a-half-minute study of life in a modern metropolis, one that features many of the icons and tactics that one associates with the city symphony genre. Extreme low-angle shots of skyscrapers are captured in stark chiaroscuro; slow downward pans emphasize the sheer height of Manhattan’s skyscrapers and how they loom over the city streets; and extreme high-angle shots provide a bird’s-eye view of the frantic movements of pedestrians on the sidewalks below. Commuters scurry out of ferries, up and down stairs, along sidewalks, and across streets, dodging traffic and making their way to work. Typewriters, typists, and massive, highly-regimented office spaces housed in gigantic skyscrapers, as well as a cacophony of voices expressing the thousands of business letters being produced, create a powerful sense of the modern business environment as a hive of activity. Elevated subway cars, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and taxi cabs, along with thousands of other assorted cars and trucks convey what modern transportation in a major metropolis entails, while pedestrians attempt to navigate their way across busy city streets against all odds, while traffic cops try valiantly to manage this bedlam. Throughout, there is an interest in portraying the modern metropolis as a “city of contrasts,” as an urban space defined by its sharp juxtapositions: old and new, rich and poor, fast and slow, young and old, et cetera. Virtually all of these sequences, all of these concerns, can be found in Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, and many of them appear repeatedly in so many of the other films that make up the city symphonies phenomenon. What sets The City apart from the vast majority of the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s is its dark, foreboding tone, and the way these iconic sequences are framed within a discourse that attempts to turn them against metropolitan modernity.
Where others saw dynamism and energy, The City presents its audience with the impression of dysfunction and entropy. Whereas other films reveled in the Culture of Congestion, here the emphasis was placed on chaos and arterial sclerosis—not only was New York’s traffic threatening lives, but it had reached such extremes that the city’s famous grid was now defined by gridlock. According to this vision, New York was a city that was very much in decline: driven by servitude to the market; characterized by a rat-race existence that was chaotic, anxiety-inducing, and absurd; emblematic of mankind’s hubristic attempts to subdue and conquer nature; fundamentally anti-human and completely unsuitable for children or for childhood; and defined by negative reinforcement, by the presence of danger at every turn, and by a death drive that seemed to point to the ultimate fate of Megalopolis as Nekropolis.
One might have thought that The City’s preceding three chapters would have created the ultimate set-up for its fifth and final chapter—“The Green City”—the long-awaited culmination to its thesis. A certain harmony in American culture was lost when industrialization accelerated and factory cities appeared across the land, the film argues. In the age of the Megalopolis, the nation is at a critical juncture. It can continue on its present course, unplanned and unregulated, recklessly into the future, tempting fate, or it can embrace the direction that had already been put into action by the American planning movement in such model communities as Greenbelt, MD, a New Deal project that is heavily featured in this final section of The City. Children figure prominently in this final section—the film reminds its audience time and time again that these children are the future, and that the audience should prioritize their future above all else. Late in the film, a boy is seen in a classroom, working on a painting of an idyllic planned community like the one he inhabits, as seen from a bird’s eye view. Three attractive houses are spaced apart properly along a road lined with grass and flowers, they are served by a post office and a community center of some kind, and the scene is dominated by tall, leafy trees. The camera pans to the right to reveal another painting—this time of a cramped, crowded, and polluted tenement district in an industrial city. This initiates a contrapuntal montage where shots of dilapidated factory towns are juxtaposed with shots of the sunshine, openness, and greenery of modern planned cities. As Copland’s score underlines the starkness of the juxtaposition, the narrator tells the audience,
You take your choice—each one is real, each one is possible.
Shall we sink deeper, sink deeper in old grooves, paying for blight with human misery?
Or have we vision, have we courage? Shall we build and rebuild our cities, clean again, close to the earth, open to the sky?
Doubtless, there was great validity to this juxtaposition. Many did live in misery in crowded, polluted, debilitating towns and cities. Unregulated and unplanned market-driven development had created abominable conditions for millions of Americans. There’s no question that The City’s overall argument resonated deeply with some audiences. The film was a very popular and well-received attraction at the New York World’s Fair,17 and when the fair closed its doors in October 1940 the film remained a sought-after rental that was screened widely, especially in non-theatrical venues.18 Clearly, many viewers were sympathetic to The City’s loosely historical critique of urbanization, and its vision of a vast network of carefully planned Green Cities held appeal to many who had just experienced the desperation of the Great Depression. But there were many others who saw The City differently, responding negatively to its manipulative images of children, and schools, and playgrounds, to the utter lack of diversity captured in the film’s depiction of suburbia, and to the flatness of its concluding chapter. Ironically, for some, it was Steiner and Van Dyke’s New York City chapter that stood out as the most compelling chapter in The City, because it was here that the collaboration between the filmmakers and Copland reached the greatest heights of artistry. In many ways, this issue is consistent with other Lorentz-related projects from the period, which also featured a problem-solution structure to them, but tended to convey the problems in a more compelling manner than the solutions.19 Even though Lorentz was only involved in devising the original script for The City and the key aspects of the production were in the hands of Steiner and Van Dyke, and a few close associates, like Rodakiewicz, the film’s solution struck many viewers as unconvincing.
Thus, although John Grierson was highly ambivalent about the city symphonies phenomenon in general, he seemed to have been impressed by The City’s “Men Into Steel” section, and he came away from the film feeling that it was this section that revealed the true sympathies of its directors, not the film’s triumphant conclusion. To Grierson, it was clear that the filmmakers were actually “metropolitans,” like himself, that they preferred making the portions of the film set in the modern metropolis, even if they’d been hired to excoriate the city, and that, consequently, when they filmed such material, “their cameras [had gotten] an edge on and [defeated] their theories.”20 It is precisely these tensions—between Steiner and Van Dyke’s modernism and The City’s homespun wisdom, between their metropolitanism and the film’s critique of Megalopolis, between their fluency with the city symphonies style and the film’s promotion of suburbia (no matter how carefully planned)—that continue to make The City such a fascinating cultural artifact and an emphatic conclusion to the city symphonies phenomenon of the interwar years.
