As the origins of this book project go back to a series of lectures and seminars by Steven Jacobs and Anthony Kinik, we would like to thank the organizers and participants of these events, particularly of the “Avant-Garde City Symphonies” summer course at HISK in Ghent (July 2008) and of similar seminars at Sint-Lukas College of Art in Brussels (December 2008) and the University of Antwerp (March 2010). These seminars were accompanied by screenings at venues such as ArtCinema OFFoff Ghent, Filmplateau Ghent, Cinematek Brussels, and Cinema Zuid Antwerp, and we would like to thank these institutions for their generous support.
Because this book deals with many lesser-known, forgotten, or neglected films, organizing screenings became an important research tool. Over the years, we organized screenings of city symphonies in collaboration with institutions and organizations such as KASK Cinema Ghent, Courtisane, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, and, particularly, Le Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, Italy. We would like to thank the organizers of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, in particular David Robinson and Jay Weissberg, for making this possible. Watching these films under such ideal conditions and with live musical accompaniment was not only a joy, it also helped us to discover previously hidden works, making new connections, and gaining original insights.
We also would like to thank the archives that preserved and restored the city symphonies and made them available for our research and screenings, including the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels, EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, Archivo Luce in Rome, Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne, Georges Eastman Museum in Rochester, Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and Filmoteca Buenos Aires, among others. In addition, we also owe a great debt of gratitude to several archives and libraries, in particular to the following individuals and institutions: the staff of Columbia University Archival Collections holding the Robert Flaherty Papers; Brook Silversides at the University of Toronto’s John P. Robarts Research Library, who manages the Sparling Archives; the staff of the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room at the New York Public Library (especially Tal Nadan), who oversee its 1939–40 New York World’s Fair collection; Martin Lanthier at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa; the staff at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; Rommy Albers, Jata Haan and Simona Monizza at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam; and Jean-Paul Dorchain at Cinematek Brussels.
This book would not have been possible without the support of the BOF Research Fund of Ghent University that funded a four-year research project (2013–17) enabling Eva Hielscher to write a PhD thesis on the historiography of the city symphony concept, with Steven and Anthony as supervisors. This research project also made possible the symposium Beyond Ruttmann and Vertov: Minor City Symphonies, which took place in December 2014 at KASK Cinema in Ghent. Thanks to the support of VDFC, Cinematek Brussels, the Embassy of Switzerland in Belgium, Research Fund Flanders (FWO), and the Faculty of Letters of Ghent University, we were able to organize a series of screenings of (often rare) 16mm and 35mm prints of city films within the context of this event. We are grateful to the BOF Research Fund for this unique opportunity. At Ghent University, we also would like to thank the members of the Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST) for their support and for many stimulating discussions on the topic of representations of the city.
In addition, our ideas were further sharpened in the context of several conference panels such as a city symphony panel at the 2009 conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada at Carleton University, Ottawa, where Anthony and Steven presented papers on the films they discuss in their chapters in this volume. Likewise, Anthony and Eva presented papers in a city symphony panel at the 2015 Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montreal. We thank co-chairs, other presenters, respondents, and audience members for their critical comments and valuable suggestions. This also applies to the many other conferences, panels, venues, and institutions that invited one of us to lecture on city symphonies—in particular we would like to mention the City in Film conference (2008) organized by the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool, the Inter[Sections] Conference on Architecture, City, and Cinema (2013) in Porto and the sessions Cinematicity: City and Cinema after Deleuze at the 2014 conference of the Royal Geographical Society on Geographies of Co-Production.
We also owe thanks to Ana Araujo, Flavia Barretti, Elena Beltrami, Franziska Bollerey, David Bordwell, Leontien Bos, Lisa Colpaert, Willem De Greef, Davide Deriu, Johan Derycke, Hilde D’haeyere, Edward Dimendberg, Bart Eeckhout, Alex Föhl, Stef Franck, Oliver Hanley, Adelheid Heftberger, Steven Humblet, Tatjana Karabegovic, Frank Kessler, Bart Keunen, Rubens Machado, Jr., Hans Martens, Kurutz Márton, Bruno Mestdagh, Hilde Nash, Tom Paulus, Fernando Martín Peña, Céline Ruivo, Robert Stam, Will Straw, Dan Streible, André Stufkens, Catherine A. Surowiec, Andreas Thein, Luis Urbano, William Uricchio, Frank Vanderkinderen, Sofie Verdoodt, Bart Verschaffel, and Bart Versteirt.
Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to all contributing authors for their essays, to Rachel Gruijters for the design of the grids of the images, and to Routledge and series editors Charles Wolfe and Edward Branigan for supporting this project.