From the start, documentaries, themselves scarcely more than a decade old at feature length, figured, too. Paralleling the Museum's paintings and sculptures, they embraced abstraction and experimentation, including social experimentation in the case of the journalistic images chronicling America's tumultuous life. In style and content, The City (1939), co-directed by Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner, was a convergence point for several of the strongest currents pulsing through the art world. Ever since Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), arguments have raged about just what documentaries are. It's debatable how much The City is reportage and how much is polemic. What's unmistakable is that the film was, and is, a milestone, even if time and events have had their little joke with its priorities. Van Dyke was to say it stemmed from his belief that film could change the world. That conviction, backed by still-potent images, keeps the film vibrant to this day.
Sponsored by the American Planning Association with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, it is utopian in its outer sections, first portraying idealized small-town American life of the past, then ending with the sunny rationality of planned communities of the attainable future. Perversely, but perhaps predictably, it's the messy middle two parts that are the most compelling. One depicts the grimness of life in workers' shacks slapped onto the sides of hills and slag heaps in sooty, sunless, permanently dingy, smoke-infested Pittsburgh (source of the Carnegie fortune!), where workers and their families suggest stragglers from a dejected, defeated army. The other hums with the stresses of a modern Manhattan bursting at the seams, mechanizing its dehumanized masses into ever-sped-up units on an assembly line run amok.
The City is about heaven and hell, riding the traditional bias of a rural America that saw cities as sin magnets. The city is the bad guy here. The small town is the good guy. Except that it doesn't quite work out that way as a viewing experience. Small-town America of the past and the neat little greenbelt communities of what the film hopes will be the future seem a bit false and forced, however well-intended. And life in Manhattan hums excitingly, even with the overdrive. This may be the place to mention that for many Americans living in the Pittsburghs or their farm and factory town equivalents, cities were what they longed to escape to, a view rudely but vigorously immortalized in the recently restored Baby Face (1933), to name but one cinematic barometer of the time. Not surprisingly, the city steals The City away from its good intentions. Most films of the period do. The real message they deliver, whether in frothy comedies or earnest documentaries, is that cities are where it's at. There's a reason why they are people magnets, and the more The City presses its indictment by speeding up the camera, the more we're struck by how vital its supposed target seems. One of the blatantly entertaining bits of editing involves quick cuts from traffic signs saying NO PEDESTRANS, NO RIGHT TURNS, NO CROSSING until it seems the city itself is saying NO to all forms of life.
But there's a fresh, urgent urban poetry in the stylized shots (especially from above) of people hurrying along crowded streets in coats, ties, and hats for the men and dresses for the women. Even scarfing down sandwiches in virtual unison at crowded lunch counters, they don't look drained; they look purposeful, not at all unhappy to be where they are. The lesson we take away is not that all cities are bad for one's health, only that being a poor steel worker in Pittsburgh isn't nearly as invigorating as being a working Joe or Jane in Manhattan. One wonders why the filmmakers didn't journey only blocks away from the bristling urban possibility in the rows of office buildings and glut of traffic to find what surely could have been some miserable-looking slum dwellers. They make the case against Pittsburgh, at least the part they show us, but not against Manhattan. Could it have been that they themselves were more infatuated with the big city than they realized? It would be going too far to say that their indictment turned into a valentine. But despite all the camera speedups, the imagery of big city life remains vibrant and in its overheated way, alluring, as all those shod feet scurry across the still-cobblestoned streets. Or, in an unexpectedly ironic echo of a simpler past, Trinity Church looks incongruously out of place in pearly light at the foot of a deserted canyon of Wall Street skyscrapers, perhaps on a Sunday morning.
The play of concrete images of big-city life played against the abstract patterning of it in the aggregate - crowds on the move, traffic at a virtual standstill, are pretty hard to resist. The earnest alternatives to it, on the other hand, are pretty easy to feel lukewarm about. Left out of the rural small-town portrait at the start is the fact that it came with a lot of backbreaking labor. If the rutted dirt roads had been better, there would be no need for its scene with a blacksmith hammering out a new iron wheel rim for a farm wagon. The rural opening is too artificially Arcadian, too unconvincingly Edenic, to be believed. Similarly, one need not resort to the hindsight of observing that the greenbelt ideal (filmed in prototypical Greenbelt, Maryland) bowed to the law of unforeseen consequences, that suburban sprawl has sent people back to cities to reinvent neighborhoods there, that cloverleafed freeways, far from promoting mobility, now often bring it to a halt, or, at best, crawl. In fact, the real value of The City may be that it has rendered itself obsolete, that cities have undergone another life and death cycle or two and now are focused on other facets of the classic urban challenges having to do with housing, transportation, human amenities and economic sustainability. Thinking of suburbs as a shining alternative to cities has not panned out.
And yet the imagery lives, even if the thinking behind it demands reassessment. The film assembled some heavy hitters of the period. Lewis Mumford provides commentary, Aaron Copland wrote the music, Morris Carnovsky provides narration. And its imagistic lineage is impeccable. Steiner (1899-1986), a Clevelander, worked with Flaherty and Paul Strand and influenced Walker Evans. Denver-born Van Dyke (1906-1986) co-founded the West Coast-based Group f/64 with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. Steiner worked with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's photographer, Pare Lorentz, on the latter's Dustbowl documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). Both Steiner and Van Dyke worked with Lorentz on his Tennessee Valley Authority documentary, The River (1938). The City, with its blend of the sharply-focused journalistic and the unexpectedly lyrical abstract, opened at the 1939 New York City World's Fair and ran there for two years. The patterning in The City suggests the patterning of waves in Steiner's celebrated 1929 abstract film, H2O. In his later years, he returned to freelance photography. Van Dyke kept making documentaries, including one, The Photographer (1948), about Weston. Continuing the Iris Barry tradition, he also headed MOMA's film department from 1965 to 1974. Van Dyke didn't have to shepherd The City into the MOMA archive. A compelling case can be made for preserving and showing it at regular intervals. It's a quintessential social documentary.
Director: Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke
Screenplay: Henwar Rodakiewicz (scenario); Lewis Mumford (commentary); Pare Lorentz (outline)
Cinematography: Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke
Music: Aaron Copland
Film Editing: Theodore Lawrence
Cast: Morris Carnovsky (Narrator)
BW-43m.
by Jay Carr
