Cities & Film

Cities and Film

Upon comparing both articles of Stout and Donald, it can be said that both sources consider the city as a place of constant distortion and social change.

Both articles look at the development of the city and the urban environment through two separate forms of media.

Fredrick Stout analyses the city in a somewhat artistic form, looking at how illustrated journalism shaped how the public viewed cities as well as soon after reshaping this view through the act of photography and the pictures of cityscapes and glimpses into the lives of the city dwellers. The photographs showed the city and its inhabitants for what they truly were, which the majority were poor and living in poverty stricken environments. Some may argue that this was to be used as a shock tactic or perhaps an eye opener into the lives of the downtrodden and poor lower classes, representing the people as nothing more than mechanical anonymous masses.

Stout appears to have identified that through the development and transition of illustrative journalism to photography the feelings that the pictures convey have changed somewhat compared to that of the illustrated journalism drawings. It could be argued that the illustrationed journalism pictures provided a more comical and rosey cheeked portrayal of the city and its people, whereas the actual photographs that were later used conveyed much more raw feeling from both an emotional and artistic perspective.

Donald also considers the city and its archetechture to be a haunting and distorting place. When considering cities represented in film they are more often than not, portrayed as ominous, looming entities that envelop the people that live benith their shadows. Donald attempts to explain how cinema was used and “helped to extend its appeal beyond a working class audience to one that incorporated the middle classes.”

It can be argued that the argument that Donald is trying to uphold is that the city takes away the identity of the people as well as their perceptions of reality and that it dehumanises the city dwellers.

Although both theorists relate to one another in the sence that they both appear to believe that cities and archetecture have a generally negative and dehumanising impact on the people that live there it could be argued that unlike Donald, Stout sees urban life through more artistic eyes, using the medium of photography in order to convey the feelings and true colours of city life and the ways in which people live.