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This is a remarkable book in terms of its subject matter, approach, and research by the thinker and artist Nizar Sayyad. Nizar Sayyad is a professor of architecture, planning and urban history at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. He served as director of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies there for two decades. In 1988, he founded the International Society for the Study of Heritage Environments. He has written more than twenty books in English, many of which have been translated into other languages, including Arabic.
His books include Cairo: A City of Cities, Cities and Caliphs: The Origins and Development of Arab-Islamic Urbanism, The Nile: Cities and Civilisations on the Banks of a River, and Cinematic Cairo: The City and Modernity Between Image and Reality. His works in Arabic include Cairo and its Urban Development: History, Rulers and Places, and Cairo: A City of Cities, and others. He has also published a collection of poetry entitled From Fisherman to Fisherman. History, Rulers and Places” and “Cairo: A History,” among others. He also has a collection of poetry entitled “From Hunter to Hunter.” He has edited many books, including “The Fundamentalist City,” which I wrote about earlier. His love of cinema is not limited to his writing, but also extends to his documentary films, such as “Cairo Between Two Palaces” and “Our Mother Earth.”
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Here, he explores the city and cinema in a book of about 400 pages published by Dar Al-Ain entitled “Cinematographic Cities: A History of Western Modernity from Screen to Reality.” The book is also richly illustrated and was translated by Hala Hassanein, a researcher and architect who previously translated his book “The Original City.” .
Here we are on a journey through films about the city. The city has been a subject of poetry, novels and theatre throughout history, but here we are on a different journey with cinema. In short, the book can be summarised as presenting the history of Western modernity from the screen to reality, an analysis of the form of cinematic urbanism and the urban history of modernity and postmodernity through the lens of the camera and the cinema screen, drawing on films that occupy the nine chapters of the book after the introduction, which occupies the first chapter.
In the introduction, we learn about his interest in cities and films, and how his studies and life came to be divided between writing, production and film directing, until he came up with the idea of presenting the history of cities as depicted in cinema. He also explains how the book took five years to write and how he went about writing the chapters.
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Let us dive into the book. He returns to the discussion of 20th-century modernity, which had its origins in the 19th century when French poet Charles Baudelaire observed the new way of life in the modern city, or what later became known as modernity. In his time, wide streets, or boulevards, were opened in Paris by Napoleon III, and the city was planned by Baron Haussmann to be a new city that would allow for new forms of industrial growth through the accumulation of capital. Baudelaire realised from the transformations in Paris that a modern life was on the way.
This was discussed among thinkers such as Marshall Berman and Walter Benjamin, and whether this contributed to the misery of the slums that were removed to build these streets, where cafes became a place where relationships between those sitting there were exposed, for example. The industrial transformation in the early 20th century. Time became the driving force behind workers since the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century.
Here we have the engineer and thinker Frederick Winslow Taylor and his studies on time and its importance, and opposite him Henry Ford, the industrial magnate whose principles included rewarding workers for submitting to new forms of control by granting them sufficient income to enable them to consume the goods they produced. However, this Fordist utopia remained elusive, and cinema, which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, also criticised both Taylorism and Fordism, as the reality was different.
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Book cover
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Here come two silent films about Berlin and New York, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Modern Times. The Berlin film was directed by Walter Ruttmann in 1927. The film is about the city itself and the details of the film’s scenes. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, released in 1936, is about New York in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and how people search for happiness under the industrial capitalist system. Details of the film and its scenes, as well as the tramp Charlie Chaplin. The scene where he eats with a machine instead of his hands, which sums up the state of exile that humans have fallen into with industry and its mechanisms, and how machines dominate humans and predict the future.
Comparison between the two films: consumerist features in the Berlin film, from food to entertainment and the interconnection between transport networks. Both films take a critical stance towards the growth of industrial cities and their dependence on mass consumption.
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The journey continues in the following chapters, where we find discussions about small rural towns in cinema. How do most urbanisation studies view small rural towns as entities different from large cities, and how have dichotomies such as proximity versus distance, individual versus group, community versus society, stability versus change, public versus private, integration versus isolation, and pure versus impure been used to prove this difference?
As usual, it is a fascinating journey that cannot be covered in this article, with thinkers and sociologists such as Lewis, Dorothy Roe, George Simmel and others. Here, he chooses two films that show two towns: Bedford Falls in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, and Giancaldo in the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore.
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Details of the two films, their composition, the development of their characters and their impact on the audience lead us to conclude that the small town of Giancaldo can only apply to small European towns, whereas the situation is different in America, both in terms of activity and prevailing values. Here we are talking about the impact of modernity on three social worlds: the home, places of commerce and work, and the town community. The home is the centre of warmth and shapes American identity, which is different from Europe, where it signifies origin. How did the sense of home emerge in the two films, as well as in places of commerce and work, and then in the social entity, i.e. the neighbourhood community and social relations?
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Cinema Paradiso covers the period between 1940 and 1980, while It’s a Wonderful Life covers the period between 1919 and 1946. Both directors considered the 1940s, the years of World War II, to be a major turning point in small towns, although they had different concerns. In both films, with the advent of modernity, the protagonist seeks to break free from the constraints of his small town. In the end, the two towns, Giancaldo and Bedford Falls, are presented as falling under the spell of big cities.
We walk with modernity and beyond, and how it manifested itself in films in its various aspects. Modernity in the Orwellian city, in reference to George Orwell. Between utopia and dystopia in the cinematic city of the future. There is a detailed discussion of utopia or the ideal city in philosophy throughout history, and novels that refer to it and dystopia, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, published in 1888, and Herbert George Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes, published in 1899. Or George Orwell’s novel “1984”.
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Let’s move on to two science fiction films: “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang, a silent film from 1927, and Brazil by Terry Gilliam, released in 1985, to discuss the optimistic utopian and dystopian features that characterise the modernity of the 20th century. The title of Metropolis refers to a highly complex city, but its skyline is inspired by Manhattan in New York, and its shape is inspired by Berlin.
At the time, both cities were the scene of heated debate in the United States and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s about modernity, urban society and the role of architecture and urban planning. The story, events and implications of each film are, as usual, self-explanatory.
The difference is that Brazil is about an imaginary city. How does Metropolis offer any criticism, given that its symbolism allowed the Nazi party to rise to power between the First and Second World Wars, among other things, while Brazil raises the question of where this city is located? Is it real or imaginary? The song in the film, or the protagonist’s dreams, his refuge in this world, do not refer to Brazil as a country. The director said he wanted to call it “1984 and a Half” as a double tribute to George Orwell, but Michael Ford’s film adaptation of Orwell’s novel came out, so he looked for another title. The setting is most likely England during Margaret Thatcher’s rule in the 1980s, which saw the collapse of the welfare state.
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The protagonists of both films are upper-class men searching for themselves in the shadow of Orwellian modernity. Both resort to dreams, which put them in danger due to the monopolistic capitalist conditions in Metropolis and the bureaucracy of the capitalist system in Brazil. Science fiction may help because it allows for the embodiment of a futuristic urban space that does not exist in reality. The two films show us that there is no utopia without a parallel dystopia, as city society and its urban fabric are divided between the rich and the poor, with the poor living underground.
Let us move on to modern urbanism and ironic modernity, to the cinematic city of the 1960s. Here are two films by French director Jacques Tati about this modernity and his mockery of modern architecture and urbanism. Since the mid-1950s, the housing crisis in Paris has been the subject of considerable media attention.
Since the 19th century, Paris had suffered from a shortage of housing, and after World War II, many people flocked to the city, which was already densely populated. Many of them occupied the “bidonvilles”, or slums on the outskirts of the city, while the old inner neighbourhoods, with their old and dilapidated buildings, remained inhabited by the Parisian working classes.
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The situation began to change in the 1950s with the economic recovery, and the poor inner neighbourhoods were transformed into popular commercial districts. A new law was passed in August 1961, establishing the Paris Circonscriptions, responsible for the planning and development of the city. A number of high-rise buildings were constructed on the outskirts of Paris, and much of the working class was relocated to these suburbs. This was criticised because the high-rise buildings lacked the lively features that characterised Paris, such as cafés, markets and street life.
American aid also led to a wave of industrial and commercial growth in France, increasing the number of cars and televisions, for example, which replaced radios. One of the main objectives of this aid was to create new markets for American products.
New building materials such as glass, plastic and nylon appeared, which also became part of everyday life in the form of cooking utensils and food. The United States contributed to the spread of a new global style in art, architecture, furniture and design through hotel chains such as Hilton and trade fairs.
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There was criticism of the social alienation this caused, and the films of director Jack Tati in the 1950s and 1960s criticised this American consumerism and offered a satirical view of American-style modernity that the author saw as ahead of its time. Tati created a cinematic character, “Mr. Hulot,” based on himself, and introduced him for the first time in the 1953 film “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.” Hulot is distracted by the empty materialism that characterises the modern city with its glass structures and other features. Hollo is a wandering bohemian, both dreamy and indifferent, resembling the tramp character played by Charlie Chaplin.
Two films offering a satirical view of modern city life and urbanisation followed: Empty House and Playtime. All we see in the world are glass buildings, plastic appliances and a life mechanised by electricity, such as refrigerators, washing machines and so on. The relationship between the city’s superficial rationality and its original rationality was an important theme in Tati’s work. In these two films, the real Paris disappeared in the face of this consumerist society and the emptiness of glass architecture, i.e. the excessive use of glass in facades, for example.
Thus, architectural modernity demanded that we change our very perceptions or the way we live, and cynical modernity emerged in cinema, as if foreshadowing the student and worker riots of 1968.
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Let us move on to the fragmented neoliberal city. A cinematic image of the postmodern economy and an analysis of the postmodern city. Time, decentralisation, militarisation and surveillance are among the most important features of the postmodern city. In such a city, utopian aspirations repeatedly turn into dystopian hell. The city of Los Angeles in cinema is an example of this. Here, neither the wandering vagabond nor the indifferent bystander can help us in this controlled space.
The metaphor of the “cyborg,” coined by feminist scholar Donna Haraway, serves as a key actor and analytical tool for this postmodern space. The cyborg is a hybrid being, part mechanical machine and part biological human. It is not the robot that appeared in the film Metropolis; it is a creature that challenges humanity and the city with its supernatural abilities.
This brings us to two films: Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott in the 1980s, which depicts a vision of Los Angeles in 2019, where the city appears to be in a state of urban, moral and psychological decay due to economic disintegration, decentralisation, constant surveillance and outsourcing, and the film “1992” directed by Joel Schumacher. In both films, the protagonists are human remnants produced by the postmodern city or cyborgs, as proposed by Harraway.
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This brings us to the city under surveillance, through voyeurism from the lens to the screen in the modern era. The idea has been around in cinema since Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, set in New York, to Philip Noyce’s 1993 film Silver, also set in New York, and Wim Wenders’ 1997 film The End of Violence, set in Los Angeles. Voyeurism, cameras, human alienation, violence, class division and urban fears.
In all three films, the virtual evocation of the scene within the frame of a window, camera lens or screen was a metaphor for the real world. The relationship between voyeurism and surveillance is neither new nor a product of modernity itself, but modernity and postmodernity have contributed to their existence and adaptation to their current form.
We move to the cinematic city through its social strata. Modernity between urbanisation and marginalisation. As a media industry, film production is heavily dependent on capital and is usually closely linked to power relations. Talking about capital naturally leads to social classes. These classes are not static but are shaped throughout history.
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Here we talk about New York and its essence through the films of Woody Allen. Films such as Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
Here we see the sophisticated upper class in Woody Allen’s films and the tormented outcast in Taxi Driver. In Manhattan, for example, New York is a tolerant place, while in Taxi Driver, the view is completely opposite. We arrive at an alternative modernity for the lives of ethnic minorities in the cinematic city through Stephen Frears’ 1984 film The Color of Money, about racism in London, and Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, about New York.
The book concludes with a discussion of the ideal city in the age of hyper-modernity, urban representation between utopia and dystopia, an urban study of small towns and cities, and films about them, which I will leave to you as usual. and about the utopia lost with modernity and the longing for an ideal life in America and nostalgia for a bygone era or fantasies about an ideal town.
In the end, this is a book worthy of celebration, which is not surprising for an Egyptian creative and thinker who lives far away from us and makes Egypt’s presence remarkable with his research and work all over the world.
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