Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (The Suny Series, Horizons of Cinema)

"Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York"-- Provided by publisher Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Carving Out an Island Constructing the City Symphony To Glimpse the Here and Now 1 Tomorrow Has No Smell: The City, Regional Planning, and the National Day Regional Planning and Cinematic Technologies at the World’s Fair The Dual Nature of Urban Space and the Reception of The City The City and the Utopian Uses of Rhythmanalysis New York and the Incongruous Present The City as Progenitor of the New York City Symphonies 2 City/Text: Weegee’s New York, Urban Renewal, and the Miniature-Gigantic The Secretariat and the Willow: Urban Renewal and Visual Culture New York as Tall Letters: Naked City and the Narration of Space Weegee’s New York and the Reinvention of the City Symphony Together in the Crowd 3 Secret Passages: Symphonies of the Margins, Slum Clearance, and Blight The Motionless City Press Here for Secret Passage: In the Street A River, A Trench: Under Brooklyn Bridge On the Bowery: Eddies in the Urban River Little Fugitive and the Dressage of the Nickel Empire Secret Passage as Cinematic Infrastructure 4 Spectacle in Progress: Symphonies of the Center and Advocacy Planning The Right to the Center and the Possessive Spectator Jazz of Lights: The Exploitation of St. Francis Wonder Ring: The Infrastructure Ballet N.Y., N.Y.: Surface Tension Shirley Clarke’s Subversive Commissions The Empty Image and the Abandoned Island 5 Image/City/Fracture: The Cool World, the Urban Crisis, and Nostalgia for Modernity Out of Scale: The Appropriated Symphonies of the 1964–1965 World’s Fair Static City: The Abyss and the Nostalgia for Modernity False Narrative: The Cool World and the New Rhythmanalysis At the Border Coda: Repair Notes Bibliography Index Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.