Last Sunday we celebrated the World Audiovisual Heritage Day. Perfect opportunity to reclaim, in this Open City, cinema as one of the most powerful tools in the creation and recreation of contemporary urban imaginaries. Cinema and the city are intimately connected. Their close connection goes back to the very origins of the seventh art. Since its inception, cinema has understood the city, it has figured and configured it, represented, reflected on, perceived, fantasized, devised. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great references of the seventh art and representative of the best of the nouvelle vague expressed it in a revealing way: cinema is a form that thinks and a thought that forms. And so is the city, too. Thinks and makes you think, generates collective imaginaries, invents symbols and icons, It builds identity and bond, it gives shape and life to its streets and corporeality to the senses, even the feelings, of the citizen who lives it. Cinema collects, combines and magnifies its virtues and contextualizes and highlights its defects.
Cinema is born celebrating the city. His first act shown to the public, the first representation of his art is an urban scene in which you can see the workers leaving a factory in Lyon. The city is shown as it is, cinema captures it and directs it to what will be its audience from then on, the citizens, who become, with the city, its object and objective. Based on that scene and its overwhelming success, the Lumière brothers sent operators to the big cities of the world, filming their daily lives and presenting their cinematography.
Thus, cinema becomes entertainment and a form of knowledge and is transformed, following Godard again, not only in a mirror, also in a hammer, that may not be able to change the city in its genesis as art, but it definitely can change the way we see it. The film image ensures that the citizen has not only the view, but also the visit of his city. The urban landscape becomes a tour of its streets, its squares, its citizens. The viewer becomes an explorer. The sublimation of Baudelaire flaneurturning the citizen into a walker in their city, seeing and discovering its corners and meeting the characters that inhabit it. This initial relationship becomes more complex and the distinction between the representation of the city and its manipulation emerges. Filmmakers, sociologists, philosophers, writers, poets, architects, urban planners, engineers, will study cinema and the city as a privileged object of reflection on the city and its multiple facets. Cinema will be the art that imposes, in a clearer and more evident way, from its beginning, the essential transversality in the understanding and ultimate formation of the city. And this is because the seventh art, a pillar of entertainment, but also of knowledge, of our society for more than a hundred years, acts as a crucible where it is possible to fuse painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance and literature, the six disciplines that ordinarily define it. precede.
During In the 19th century, cinema intervened as a prominent protagonist and as a witness to urban transformations.exploring the geography of the city, creating and recreating its spaces and times, using its specific way of studying the city as a tool for professionals from all fields to advance in the analysis of its configuration. Techniques evolve during the 20th century. The brilliant Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini then describes the filmed city as a space in permanent evolution, in which the sum of the different superimposed layers configures the current city, unraveling from his film story the shaping essence of the city. Already in our century, new concepts continue to emerge, such as the one introduced by the architect François Penz, who shows “creative geography” as a new instrument that cinema offers to transcend the spatial limits of the city, through the manipulation of spaces. urban areas that the assembly technique allows. Digital technology and artificial intelligence emerge with extraordinary transformative power, making it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction, understood here as a lie and a proposal. Computer generated imagery (CGI) makes it possible to film the Rome of the gladiators and the Rome of the 22nd century without the viewer being able to barely identify that lie. Baudelaire would surely delight walking the streets of Pompeii before the cataclysm. Combining all of this, architects and urban planners can use all the enormous potential of the new film technology to base their analyses, feed their surveys, and recreate their proposals and inventions. The cinema has already made the journey. From that modern city of the Lumières, as a witness to the industrialization that revolutionized the world, to the post-metropolis, imagining impossible cities like that of Blade Runner, but also the cities of the future that are possible, with the introduction of artificial intelligence.
I return here to take the reader to our starting point, to our audiovisual heritage, which we celebrate these days. I strongly suggest a visit to the Spanish radio television archive, which contains a magnificent repertoire of images about our cities. Of course, any urban planner must explore it without excuse, as an essential instrument in the consolidation of their area of knowledge. And I return to the cinema and my city, Madrid, as a reference in the analysis and explanation of the evolution of Spanish cities from the filmic and, consequently, social, geographical, economic and political point of view.
Madrid, as a historic city, has always been the scene of great films that have enriched our audiovisual heritage, dispersing its image throughout the world. Beyond the large stages built during the 20th century by the most important international production companies, especially, of course, North American and beyond the film image that the new technologies that I pointed out can offer, Madrid has always been a stage for cinema. itself. The city has been the direct protagonist of a good number of films, without the need to resort to expensive Hollywood recreations, even when they resorted to generating an artificial Madrid in some of their productions, placing, for example, Marlene Dietrich or Gary Cooper on the streets of Madrid, even without knowing her. Later Gary Cooper would fall in love with our city, when he visited it to play one of the most recognized characters in universal literature, Don Quixote.
But Madrid was also an essential setting for the film industry, when Samuel Bronston He settled in the capital after purchasing Chamartín Studios and created an entire American-style industry. Productions come out of its facilities that flood theaters around the world. El Cid or The Fall of the Roman Empire, by Anthony Mann; King of Kings or Fifty-Five Days in Peking, by Nicholas Ray; or The Fabulous World of the Circus, by Henry Hathaway, among others. Actors like Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Sofia Loren, They become ambassadors of the city of Madrid in the world. Bronston proclaims again and again that Spanish workers and specialists are good, if not better, than the best and most expert in Hollywood. After Bronston, there were many who used the facilities and streets of Madrid as a stage. There’s Doctor Zhivago, by Basil Dean, made entirely in Spain, using the streets of the Madrid neighborhood of Canillejas for many of its sequences. We would do well to review our closest past and use what we have learned to recover Madrid as a scene and industry of the seventh art. Those words from Bronston were not only true then, they would also be true today. And the settings, our streets, better arranged, our parks and gardens, increasingly better and better. Surely the reader has no doubt that any film production would like to have our Landscape of Light as its setting.
Cinema, in short, as an essential instrument for the significance and resignification of the city. As a tool and artifact for the projection of urban meaning, of urban strategy. As an element and foundation for the generation of a new city, using its techniques to enhance that “creative geography” that Penz speaks of. As a configurator until today and in the future of our enormous audiovisual heritage that becomes city heritage and creator, co-creator and recreator of our urban imaginary. Enjoy it.
#Cinema #city
