February 26, 2009

- I read Neil Smith's introduction to Lefebvre's Urban Revolution to re-familiarize myself with his basic ideas, and as preamble to reading Production of Space (which I plan to read once this fucking proposal is written). Smith outlines Castell's critiques of Lefebvre's concept of urbanization, noting that the one that still seems to stand is the flawed notion that urbanization comes to determine industrialization -- that is cities in essence run the mode of production in capitialist societies, rather than vice versa. I'm not sure that this will be an especially useful trail to follow, but something else that he does in Production of Space does. Lefebvre, according to Smith, corresponds an evolution of space to the "orthodox" stages of modes of production: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism. These correspond, in Lefebvre's view to: absolute, historical, abstract, and differential spaces (differential being collective, or socialist space). I'm thinking that it will be the character of abstract space that is most interesting to me, but it is something that Dimendberg has looked at closely in relation to film. ISSUE: How do I keep this dissertation from becoming Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity II?

- I would like to write about obscene phone calls and film.
- Also, the history of point-of-view.

- Got Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America - despite the academic title, it's actually an art/coffee table book with an essay by Will Straw and (amazing) cover images from American true crime magazines. Two interesting references: 1) Pierre Mac Orlan - french novelist and critic, who has this idea about crime being part of the "social fantastic." Mac Orlan has a poem/song called La Ville mort, and a fellow traveller of the surrealists in post ww1 Paris, interested in Atget. Also, now-French scholar Dominque Kalifa who has written some what look to be amazing, hardly ever translated articles on the history of crime and the social imaginary. One article "Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth Century Paris" looks to be very interesting. 

February 24, 2009

Reading the essay "The Abandoned City of the Forties," and the way it made connections between Cornell Woolrich's noir and the urban mysteries genre of the mid to late 19th centuries, I began to wonder if this might be a productive way to explore the films the of the 1970s I'm interested in. My problem right now is that I lack a unifying concept in which to link all of the films I'm interested in.

I picked up Richard Maxwell's book on the urban mystery genre The Mysteries of Paris and London. He is particularly interested in Hugo, Dickens and the Sue and Reynold books and the first chapter "Allegory and City Life" explains transformations of the concept of allegory in Goethe and Ruskin, then sketches out the allegorical figures he explores in the city mystery texts (they are: Labyrinths, Crowds, panorama, and the importance of paper and paperwork) -- "Passing from figure to figure, the allegorist works towards the truths of city life." He also identifies three stages by which individual figures are clarified in the novel of urban mysteries - three methods of interpretation within the texts (20-21).

I'm wondering how I could use or incorporate allegory into my project. I suspect by looking to Lowenstein's example in Shocking Representation I could figure out how the concept could
be applied to film "texts" I don't think that as whole I could use allegory, but maybe it could work for a chapter -- perhaps one on Pakula's films. Jameson also discusses allegory extensively, so maybe I could think of how he fits in.

I've been thinking also about the ways I could link Goffman's writings in "Normal Appearances" with Matter and Memory as a way of talking about the visual representations of stalking and pursuit -- the way in which individual impressions of peripheral views are built up in succession resulting in something like paranoia.

I have some ideas about the vigilante being a sort of perversion of the detective figure. Michel Butor (in Passing Time?) talks about how the detective story is constructed on two murders - the first, the illegitimate criminal event, occasions the second, the detective of the murderer. The second "murder" is metaphorical . Butor links this to the Oedipal construction of the detective story -- the detective is the true son of the murderer, who must slay his father. In Death Wish this murdering of the murderer is more literally played out -- but the murder committed (of Kersey's wife) does not need really to be solved, it is not a mystery, he just must find the murderers/rapists and kill them. The criminal changes here too -- they are not artists who produce an aestheticized scene, they do not produce an illusory crime-scene for the detective to interpret and solve. But the criminals of Death Wish are strange in other ways. Their brutality surely "fathers" vigilantism in some way -- i.e. creates Paul Kersey.

Am I making vigilantism out to be more interesting than it is? Or am I looking at it in the wrong ways? The typical way to read these films is as ideologically right-wing. The justice system in cities having failed, viewers identify with the pathos of citizens who mete out their own justice. The problem with this being that these films work out fantasies that justify scenes of violent killing. The narrative provides an alibi-which is indisputable-for the spectacle that ensues. While I agree with this somewhat, I find something more interesting in the fact that between the narrative justification and the violent specatcle, there is a form of pursuit that takes place -- which sustains our interest. Paul Kersey moving through the city is what is most memorable about these films (especially Death Wish 2 where his disguise and pursuit is extended and pronounced). If there is a perversion of the detective story here it is of the transformation of investigation to pure movement/ambulation -- and if we follow Walter Benjamin's argument, that Poe's Man of the Crowd is an "x-ray of the detective story" we might actually see this transformation as a regression (or even a purer form). What if investigation was not a process of building a case from facts divined from the crime scene, inteligently analysed and decoded? What if it was just a naked pursuit that ended in a fatal gunshot?

February 18, 2009

-Watched most of The Detective (Gordon Douglas, 1968) -- Frank Sinatra plays a proto-Serpico liberal cop doing battle with corruption and bigotry in NYPD. There is also shades of Fort Apache, The Bronx, and Assault on Precinct 13 with the police station becoming somewhat like the Alamo within a larger urban fabric of social breakdown, crisis. Sinatra makes a speech to the district commissioner about the ghetto re: doing something to curb the crisis instead of just managing it. An early case deals with a homosexual murder and Sinatra's tolerance is pitted against the other officer's disdain

-Read a little of Mark Seltzer's article in Urban Culture vol 4. on the relationship btw. the urban pathology of the serial killer and the domestic space in which his crimes are committed.

February 17, 2009

- Read review of Will Straw's Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America in Journal of Visual Culture 7(3). Straw's essay for this book may be interesting, though it focuses on tracing style through production/industry histories. Reviewer notes two books that may be interesting: Tom Cohen's Hitchcock's Cryptonomies (about secret agents?) and True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity -- the latter may be specifically about true crime literature though.

-Started  "Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties" in Shades of Noir. Very interesting connections made btw. American variation of the city mystery genre (Lippard's Quaker City is the prime example) and the romans noirs of the forties. Details about the abandonment of cities and good references for making a case about the specificity of urban modernity to America. 

-Leafing through Routledge's four volume Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies -- nothing too interesting so far. 

- Picked up new-ish architecture anthology The Unknown City. May be interesting.