Posted by Nichole
By fusing urban planning with filmmaking, Civic Eye Collaborative is continuing a long and evolving tradition of urban documentary filmmaking.
The earliest films were documentaries in the sense that they simply recorded events. These short films were called "actuality" films; they were primarily single-shot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking or a city street scene. Early films such as San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (1906) were incorporated into Pathé Gazette newsreels, which originated in France in 1909, and were launched in the United States in 1910. Although some actuality films employed trick effects and re-staged events, such as How It Feels to be Run Over (1900) and A Derby Day Incident (1903); others had more explicit publicity objectives, such as The Manchester Ship Canal (1912).
Many of the earliest productions by Edison Studios, owned by inventor Thomas Edison, were actualities, including New York City Street Cleaning (1912), The City of Washington, the Capital of the United States (1912), The City of San Francisco (1913) and A Winter Visit to Central Park, New York City (1912). Competition from French and British story films quickly changed the market; already by 1904, 85% of Edison's sales were from story films.
In the 1920s, David Kaufman, better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov, began experimenting with documentary filmmaking in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés. In Man with the Movie Camera (1929), an experimental silent documentary film, Vertov aimed to record "life as it is" in Odessa and other Soviet cities. Citizens were filmed at work and play, interacting with the machinery of modern life. Vertov worked within a Marxist ideology, striving to create a futuristic city that would showcase Soviet ideals.
Once the story film became popular, actualities were largely neglected until the emergence of filmmaker Robert Flaherty in the early 1920s. Flaherty was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922), although the term "documentary" was not coined until four years later. He is considered a pioneer of documentary film, being the first filmmaker to combine documentary subjects with a fiction-film-like narrative and poetic treatment.
In 1926, it was English filmmaker John Grierson who coined the term documentary, which he defined as the "creative treatment of actuality," setting it apart from travelogues and newsreels. After the success of The Drifters (1929), he went on to establish the British documentary film movement. Groundbreaking films such Housing Problems (1935) and Night Mail (1936) were produced during this time, which featured interviews and often dramatic re-creations of events, foreshadowing the docudrama.
Grierson's films influenced documentary work in the United States, notably that of filmmaker Pare Lorentz, whose The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) were powerful reflections on the relationship between people and their land. Both films, along with The City (1939), a study of urban planning by Willard Van Dyke, were presented to popular acclaim at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The City is an early example of American social documentary filmmaking, proclaiming that Americans must find a balance between working, living and the land.
In the 1940s, many documentaries had more explicit public education objectives. British Transport Films was established to produce documentary films, including travelogues and "industrial films," which promoted the progress of Britain's railway network. The organization also made films for London Transport, the British Waterways Board and the coach company Thomas Tilling. In the United States, The Office of War Information (OWI) was formed in 1942 to coordinate efforts with the film industry and record the nation's wartime activities, which included documentaries, newsreels and propaganda films. During the war, American filmmakers mixed the photorealism of documentaries with forms of fiction to produce reenactments of true stories, such as The House on 92nd Street (1945) by Henry Hathaway, an anti-Nazi spy film based on FBI records.
Starting in the 1950s, Cinéma vérité and similar documentary traditions, such as Direct Cinema, were reactions against studio-based film production constraints. These films were shot on location with smaller crews and handheld cameras; filmmakers used synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded. Operating within an "observational mode," these films desired to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully. Examples include Bad Boys (1961), an improvisational film depicting life in a boys' reform school, and C'était un Rendezvous (1976), a film showing a high speed drive through Paris.
As early as the 1940s, American documentaries began focusing on issues of city congestion and urban sprawl. Films such as Cities: How They Grow (1952), Birth of a City (Circa 1956) and The Changing City (1963) looked at the phenomenon of urban sprawl and the development of shopping malls. In the 1960s, American Urbanist William H. Whyte began wielding still cameras, movie cameras and notebooks in order to describe urban life in an objective and measurable way. His findings culminated into a book published in 1980, and later a companion film released in 1988, both titled The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
In more recent years, numerous social documentaries have covered urban issues, including land trusts in Homes and Hands (1998), homelessness in Dark Days (2000), community gardens in Beyond Organic (2000), sustainability in Designing a Great Neighborhood (2004) and in No Impact Man (2009), transportation policy in Contested Streets (2006), suburban life in Radiant City (2006), gentrification in The Vanishing City (2009) and urban renewal in Brick City (2009).
With the availability of low-cost, high-quality video cameras, high-speed internet access and social networking tools, documentary filmmaking has flourished online. In 2006, Streetsblog (which later evolved into Streetfilms) was established to produce short films explaining transportation planning policies. The project grew out of a short film titled The Case for a Car-free Central Park (2004), which was produced for the bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives.
Building on this long tradition of urban documentary filmmaking, Civic Eye Collaborative uses film as a medium for community storytelling. When focused on the details of daily life, film has the power to show how fundamental urban planning is to the quality of life of citizens, and how important these issues are to a city's vitality.
In the tradition of William H. Whyte, and with the help of new technology, we are able to do comprehensive observational studies of communities using film, motion graphics and still photography. By employing various documentary techniques, we continue to find new ways to engage and educate communities about the urban planning issues that impact them on a daily basis.
Great archives with vintage urban films:
