By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Cities as narrative: what early films tell us
Filmmaker Patrick Keiller, whose marvelous London and Robinson in Space are loving landscape studies of latterday England, muses on ‘motion’ pictures in the Guardian: “Much of what has happened to cities since 1900 can be seen in terms of technological transformation. In the UK, most of us live longer and are wealthier and more mobile than our predecessors, but the built environment, largely unimproved by automation, appears problematic… Films of the early 1900s offer glimpses of comparable landscapes: there are three Mitchell and Kenyon films that together make up a seven-minute tram ride through the centre of Nottingham, a continuous virtual cityscape more extensive than any I can recall elsewhere in UK cinema. What do these films mean for us? One can imagine the symbiosis of electric tram and cine-camera as a harbinger (like the “dragon sandstrewer” in ‘Ulysses,’ or the tram that knocked down Gaud�) of modernity, of fragmentation, after whose passing nothing was ever the same again. Film space was itself fragmented during the political, economic and artistic turmoil of the years around 1910—but film space was always virtual space, and early films seem to have become, suddenly, very topical: documents of a transformation of the kind we are living through today. They also exemplify what seems to me the most enduring attraction of the cinema, which is that it offers a way to visit other times, other worlds. Cities are increasingly seen as processes structured in time. In films we can explore the spaces of the past in order to anticipate the spaces of the future.”
