The Cinematic City. - book reviews

Afterimage, March-April, 1998 by Jesse Lerner

The construction team currently restoring the 1922 Egyptian Theater, the American Cinematheque's future home on Hollywood Boulevard, is engaged in a peculiar form of archeological excavation. Bound by federal laws dictating what renovations are permissible within a designated historic landmark and required to create a space suitable for contemporary media arts exhibitions, the workers peel back layers of piaster, paint and drywall. In the process they have revealed fragments of a 1960s-era mural, a hybrid of psychedelic and Egyptian styles, and, several layers beneath this, what remains of the original pastel and art deco '20s decor. The excavation of successive false fronts and simulations suggests an architectural model for urban memory. Each layer reworks not a lost original but rather a prior approximation.

This laying bare of evolving styles in the simulacra of Middle Kingdom movie palaces provides a provocative starting point for explorations of cinema, cinematic architecture and the filmic representation of urban space. How have cities been mapped in film, and how have these filmic representations in turn shaped our perceptions of the city? How might we distinguish between set-designed representations of the city created in the studio and the use of actual city spaces to express urban realities? Numerous filmmakers and architects, including Rene Clair, Sergei Eisenstein and Rein Koolhaus, have spoken of the affinities that link these two disciplines. Film can offer an architectural experience, by linking together a series of views of an environment through editing, or by way of a mobile camera. The possible points of contact are numerous, ranging from the architecture of movie theaters, panoramas, dioramas and other environments of the visual to the tracing of the urban subjectivities for which film is both the paradigmatic expression and influential force.(1)

Norman Klein's The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory and David Clarke's anthology The Cinematic City both wander through this intersection, considering any number of approaches and asides. Klein focuses on Los Angeles, a city where much of the landscape seems to inscribe changing cinematic forms. Movie palaces like the 1927 Grauman's Chinese or the 1925-26 Romanesque/Moorish fantasy of the Tower Theater render the fantastic sets of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) as functional public buildings, as do whimsical structures like the Babylonian caprice of the 1929 Sampson Tire Works (today the Citadel outlet mall) or Monrovia's exquisite 1925 Aztec Hotel. At the Universal Studios theme park, film sets from Hollywood blockbusters like Back to the Future (1985, by Robert Zemeckis) and Jurassic Park (1993, by Steven Spielberg) are reworked as amusement park rides. Similarly, to step from film to the digital, postfilmic audiovisual representation of city space, the endless exurban sprawl - stretching nearly without relief from Santa Barbara to the United States-Mexico border to the Inland Empire - conjures up a game of Simm City run amok.

Klein is the ideal guide to direct us through this postmodern space. On any street corner of downtown L.A., he could tell a hundred anecdotes and oral histories about what had happened on that block. Most of Klein's stories have to do with how neighborhoods and communities are erased, remade or evacuated through greed, inept planning or "white fright." Many of these sites are familiar even to individuals who have never been to Southern California, by way of the dozens of Hollywood films that have utilized these locations, either as the backdrop for some tale of barbarous Los Angeles violence or to stand in for some other decaying city.

On his anti-tour, Klein points out any number of absences, ersatz would-be landmarks and gaps left behind by demolition-happy developers. An interior decorator unsatisfied with his craftsman-style home (itself a nostalgic Victorian evocation of preindustrial construction) decides after a trip to Britain to remake his home as an English cottage, and covers the wooden facade with artificial bricks and ivy. A few years later, after the ivy has grown some, the house looks as authentic as the make-believe missions and Queen Annes that surround it. Alongside the Pasadena Freeway, the Community Redevelopment Agency relocated a few of the nineteenth-century mansions from Bunker Hill, once an elite enclave, later a multi-ethnic working-class neighborhood. Other than the few houses that were moved, the rest of the neighborhood is gone, and in its place are government buildings, corporate skyscrapers, parking lots and the Museum of Contemporary Art. As these scenarios suggest, Klein understands Los Angeles as a palimpsest, a site of razed neighborhoods, commercial districts that no longer exist, communities that have been dispersed or moved elsewhere. Much of these local histories will be hard to follow for readers not familiar with Southern California, but his project is by no means only of interest to Angelenos. In fact, Los Angeles - a decentralized, expansive, divided heteropolis - is taking the place that Chicago once occupied in the organicist models favored during the first part of the century as the paradigm for urban development in the U.S. In this sense, Klein's account, both microhistorical and sweeping in its scope, complements the work of other theoreticians of Southern California urbanism such as Mike Davis, Edward Sola, Michael Dear, Margaret Crawford, Michael Sorkin and others. Los Angeles is no longer understood as the exception, but rather as a new model for understanding the city.