Reconfiguration of Flaneur of the Modern Metropolis in the Body of a Film Spectator

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Associate Professor, School of Performing Arts and Music, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Art, Art University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.

3 Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

4 Ph.D. Student of Art Studies, Faculty of Art, Art University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

Examining the relationship among cinema, architecture and city has become one of the substantial issues in modernity-based film theories in recent years. Debate about the reconfiguration of modern city’s landscapes in the nineteenth century and concentration on the concept of “flanerie” forms the main part of what David Bordwell calls the “modernity thesis”. Flanerie is an aimless excursion in a kind of distracted perception and absent-mindness through the labyrinths of modern metropolis. Strolling, watching and being absorbed into the visual and spatial attractions of metropolis, is the main motivation of a flaneur.  Baudelaire introduced the flaneur as the modern world's hero, someone who seeks to immerse himself in the collective sensuality of urban spaces, looking to be melted down in fluidity of urban chaos, in search for fusion with collective mass to become "one flesh with the crowd". Like Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin also considered the flaneur as the archetype of modern subject, who in an ecstatic state strolls through the urban spaces and his emphatic look to moving bodies and faces reach to a level in which he is transformed to a united body with the crowd. At the same time, he can be either self or the other.  Pointing to intimate and interactive relationship between flanerie and the artistic imagination, Benjamin believed that due to the flaneur's creativity in dreaming, in front of his eye, the urban environment is converted to a surreal landscape. It might be stated that flaneur is projecting his imaginative inner world over the physical reality of the city and reciprocally by employing physical and psychical essence of the city forms to his own dream. Hence, for a flaneur, an intertwined relation emerges between the real and imaginary maps of the city, to the extent that he cannot distinguish between these two maps. During this dissolving process between the illusional and real maps of the city, the flaneur practically appears as a dreamer architect who reconstructs the architectural identity of the city by projecting his own inner emotional space into the physical territory of the urban landscape. Benjamin, who had acknowledged the cinematic qualities of modern city, also connects cinema and flanerie, and emphasizes that the act of flaneur is so much similar to the experiences of making and watching a film. In this way, the film spectator could be considered as an imaginary flaneur, walking through cinematic time and space. With the changes in the contemporary urban planning, the context of flanerie has also been transformed, and in contemporary automobile-based cities, car driving can be considered as a new version of flanerie. The viewpoint of the observer from the car and the perception of changing landscapes through the car window, have an undeniable similarity to watching a film, And by looking through the windshield, the city unfolds itself sequentially as a cinematic screen. The car's "autopia", provides an audiovisual space in which, the montage of the images as well as the sonic soundtrack are completely reminiscent of the space of the cinema.
 

Keywords

References

استم، رابرت(1389)، مقدمه ای بر نظریه فیلم، ترجمه: گروه مترجمان به کوشش احسان نوروزی، شرکت انتشارات سوره مهر، تهران.
بارت، رولات(1387)، بارت و سینما: گزیده مقالات و گفتگوهای رولان بارت درباره سینما، ترجمه مازیار اسلامی، نشر گام نو، تهران.
برمن، مارشال(1392)، تجربه مدرنیته (هر آنچه سخت و استوار است دود می شود و به هوا می رود)، ترجمه مراد فرهادپور، طرح نو، تهران.
بنیامین، والتر(1390)، خیابان یک طرفه، ترجمه حمید فرازنده، نشر مرکز، تهران.
تانکیس، فرن(1390)، فضا، شهر و نظریه اجتماعی، ترجمه حمیدرضا پارسی و آرزو افلاطونی، موسسه انتشارات دانشگاه تهران، تهران.
دلوز، ژیل(1391)، نیچه و فلسفه، ترجمه عادل مشایخی، نشر نی، تهران.
 دلوز، ژیل، و فلیکس گتاری (1393)، فلسفه چیست؟ ترجمه زهره اکسیری و پیمان غلامی، رخ داد نو، تهران.
سانتاگ، سوزان(1390)، سیمای والتر بنیامین، در خیابان یک طرفه، ترجمه حمید فرازنده، نشر مرکز، تهران.
سانتاگ، سوزان(1392)، درباره عکاسی، ترجمه نگین شیدوش و فرشید آذرنگ، نشر حرفه نویسنده، تهران.
گیدئون، زیگفرید(1389)، فضا، زمان، و معماری: رشد یک سنت جدید، ترجمه: منوچهر مزینی، شرکت انتشارات علمی فرهنگی، تهران.
فروید، زیگموند(1383)، تمدن و ملالت‌های آن، ترجمه محمد مبشری، نشر ماهی، تهران.
لامپونیانی، ویتوریو مانیاگو(1390)، معماری و شهرسازی در قرن بیستم، ترجمه لادن اعتضادی، مرکز چاپ و انتشارات دانشگاه شهید بهشتی، تهران.
Appleyard, Donald, Lynch, Kevin, & Myer, John Randolph (1964), the View from the Road, The MIT Press, Cambridge.
Baudelaire, Charles (1986), The painter of modern life and other essays, Translated by Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press, London.
Benham, Reyner (2009), Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Benjamin, Walter (1986), Reflections: essays, aohorism, autobiographical writing, Edited by Peter Demetz, Schocken Books, New York.
Benjamin, Walter (1999), The Arcades Project,  Edited by  Rolf Tiedemann, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Benjamin, Walter (2005), Walter Benjamin - Selected Writings, 1927-1930, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Benjamin, Walter (2006), the Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Edited by Michael William Jennings, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Borden, Iain (2010), Driving, in Restless cities, Edited by Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, Verso, London & New York, pp: 99-121.
Bordwell, David. (1997), On the History of Film Style: Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Brun‌o, Giuliana (1993), Streetwalking on a ruined map: cultural theory and the city films of Elvira Notari, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine (1994), Baroque Reason: the Aesthetics of Modernity, Sage, London.
Caillois, Roger, & Shepley, John (1984), Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia, October, 31, pp:17-32.
Casetti, Francesco (2008), Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, Columbia University Press, New York.
Charney, Leo, & Schwartz, Vanessa R. (1995), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Friedberg, Anne (1991), Les flaneur du mal(l): cinema and the postmodern condition, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 106, NO. 3, pp: 419-431.
Friedberg, Anne (1993), Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Friedberg, Anne (2002), Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of Los Angeles – endless cinema or private telematics, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No.2, pp: 183-204.
Giedion, Siegfried (1956), Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a new Tradition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994), Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, Cambridge.
Frisby, David (2005), the metropolis as text: Otto Wagner and Vienna's 'second renaissance, in the hieroglyphics of space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, Edited by Neil Leach, Taylor & Francis, London and New York,  pp: 15-30.
Gelber, Anke (1999), The art of taking a walk: flanerie, litretature, and film in weimar culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Hake, Sabine. (2008). Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu (1994), America, paris, the alps: kracaurer (and benjamin) on cinema and modernity, University of  Chicago, Chicago.
Hansen, Miriam (2012), Cinema and experience : Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Koch, Gertrud (2000), Siegfried Kracauer: an Introduction, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Kracauer, Siegfried (1997), Theory of film : the redemption of physical reality, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24x a second: stillness and the moving image, Reaktion book, London.
Parcell, Stephen (1994), The momentary modern magic of the panorama, in Chora 1, Edited by Alberto perez-gomez and Stephen Parcell, McGill University Press, Montreal, pp: 167-188.
Scott Brown, Denis (1969), on pop art, permissiveness, and planning, Journal of American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp: 184-186.
Shiel, Mark, & Fitzmaurice, Tony (2003), Screening the city, Verso, London & New York.
Singer, Ben (2013), Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, Columbia University Press, New York.
Venturi, Robert & Scott Brown, Denis (1988), learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Weigel, Sigrid (2005), Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, Routledge, London & New York.
 
 
 
Journal of Fine Arts: Architecture & Urban Planning
Volume 21, Issue 1
March 2016
Pages 17-28

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics