Film And The Humanities

COURSE OUTLINE: FILM AND NEW YORK CITY

 

"Film and New York City” meets for four sixty-minute periods once a week. Typically, we go for 150 minutes, break for lunch, then have 90 minutes. This course is paired with a course on “American Film”. (All students take both.)

This course analyzes the various cultural, historical, ethnic, class and artistic dimensions of New York in commercial films from New York, Brooklyn Bridge (1896) and The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) through Hester Street (1974) and Do the Right Thing (1989), as well as in selected documentary, independent and experimental films. It also considers the crucial part New York has played as the most important film exhibition area in the country and the long-time role New York has had as the corporate center of the American film industry, well after the production center shifted to Hollywood.

The chief text for this course is James Sanders’s Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (Alfred A. Knopf), often supplemented by Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (Dover), and sometimes by John Kasson’s Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. There are also about thirty handouts.

 

SCHEDULE

 

PART I: HISTORICAL OVERVIEW, 1890s-1950s

 

WEEK 1—MASS CULTURE AND THE CREATION OF MOVIE NEW YORK

Topics:
The city in history
Pre-cinematic conceptions of leisure in New York
Picnicking among the tombstones
Central Park: an archetype of mid-nineteenth-century leisure
Civic vs. carnival virtues
Coney Island: precursor of the motion picture age
Screening the city in early motion picture days
A "Cinema of Attractions" (per Tom Gunning)
Immigration and entertainment circa 1900

Screenings
Slides of Greenwood Cemetery and Central Park
" Coney Island" (incl. Cakewalk on the Beach, 1896, & Electrocuting an Elephant, 1903)
" Edison and Co." (incl. Star Theater, 1901, & The Flatiron Building, 1903) [exs]
New York, Brooklyn Bridge (1896)
New York: Broadway at Herald Square (1896)
Sky Scrapers of New York from the North River (1903)
The Georgetown Loop (1903)

 

->Assignment for Week 2: Read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 3-42

WEEK 2—NEW YORK BECOMES FEATURED

Topics
Stimuli, censorship and the creation of feature films
The drama of "the street"
Entertainment, mechanization, chaos and comedy
Bucking the trend: Paramount's Astoria Studios, 1920-33
The first sounds heard
The evolution of the studio system

Screenings
Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
Speedy (1928)
The Coconuts (1929) [ex]
The Emperor Jones (1933) [ex]

 

->Assignment for WEEK 3: Read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 43-92, 142-156 & pp. 185-218, and complete the "Theatrical Questionnaire" (handout)

WEEK 3—NEW YORK ON THE PACIFIC

Topics
The significance of the "New York Street" as standing set
The New York Row House as domestic archetype
Why were they all Loews theaters?: New York and exhibition
Screwball capitalism
The Frog Prince of Sutton Place

Screenings
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) [ex]
Follow Me Quietly (1949) [ex]
The Heiress (1949) [ex]
My Man Godfrey (1936)

 

WEEK 4—ROW HOUSE AND SUBWAY IN THE FILM AGE

A Walking Tour of nineteenth-century Brooklyn Heights, with a stress on its domestic architecture—which has been used as a model, both directly and indirectly, in many films. This will be followed by a visit to the Transit Museum, to view a collection of subway cars—icons in many New York films—from the nineteenth century to the present.

 

->Assignment for Week 5: Read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 185-218 and John Hollander’s "Movie-Going" (handout)

WEEK 5—HERE MADE THERE

Topics
Panthers in Central Park: New York and metamorphosis
New York, film and the voyeuristic impulse
The multiplex of life
Intimacy and murder in Greenwich Village

Screenings
The Cat People (1942) [ex]
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) [ex]
Rear Window (1954)

 

->Assignment for WEEK 6: Read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 325-364

WEEK 6—THE RETURN OF LOCATION SHOOTING

Topics
The city as "naked" hero
A declaration of independence
Film and photography
Experimental cinema at mid-century

Screenings
The Naked City (1948) [exs]
Little Fugitive (1953)
N.Y., N.Y. (1957)

 

->Assignment for WEEK 7: read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 295-324

WEEK 7—“I LOVE THIS DIRTY TOWN”

Topics
New York and media power
Darwinian life in the Broadway jungle
Urban sleaze

Screening
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

 

PART II: THREE CONTEMPORARY NEW YORK DIRECTORS

 

->Assignment for Week 8: read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 265-294

WEEK 8: NEUROTIC NEW YORK: WOODY ALLEN

Topics
The New York posture
Romantic New York in a hip era
The sado-masochistic pleasures of the past
The return of the Astoria Studios

Screenings
Manhattan (1979) [ex]
Radio Days (1987)

 

->Assignment for Week 9: read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 365-398

WEEK 9—VIOLENT NEW YORK: MARTIN SCORSESE

Topics
The neo-noir film
The rage of urban living
Business and criminality
To die laughing

Screening
GoodFellas (1990)

 

->Assignment for WEEK 10: read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 156-184

WEEK 10—EXPLOSIVE NEW YORK: SPIKE LEE

Topics
Lee and Brechtian cinema
The dialectical film
Film and racial politics
“ The street” once again
Referentiality in film

Screenings
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Night of the Hunter (1955) [ex]

 

PART III: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES IN NEW YORK FILMS

 

->Assignment for Week 11: Read How the Other Half Lives & "Immigration Patterns in New York City before and during the Era of How the Other Half Lives" (handout)

WEEK 11—NEW YORK AND IMMIGRATION: THE 1890s FROM THE 1970s

Topics
The fact of the slums
Immigration and the changing face of New York
Re-presenting the immigrant past

Screenings
Hester Street (1974)
Godfather II (1974) [ex]

 

->Assignment for Week 12: Read Sanders, Celluloid Skyline, pp. 399-442

WEEK 12—THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE; CODA: FILM IN NEW YORK NOW

Topics
The rise of the public television documentary
Essential greed and heroic endeavor
Engineering spirituality
The horror of reality
Film and historical objectivity
The film industry in New York in contemporary times

Screenings
"Brooklyn Bridge" (1982)
New York: A Documentary Film (1999) [episode centering on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire]