The anthology
Mob Culture: The Hidden Histories of American Gangster Film contains two (so far that I have read) great articles that I will need to refer to.
Grievson
Lee Grievson's "Gangsters and Governance in the Silent Era" reassesses the emergence of the gangster genre in terms of its representation of urban criminality as an aspect of modern experience. His approach is stated thusly: "I am particularly interested in situating the representational strategies an cultural work of these films in relation to other public discourses on crime and the city examining the points of intersection within a body of knowledge and power and the pervasive culture of social discipline in early twentieth-century America... Overall, the essay seeks to reconsider and recast the history of the gangster film beyond the restrictive context of Prohibition and the early 1930s economic depression, tracing out the beginnings of anxieties about criminal ganges in the turn of the century period and the cultural refraction of that anxiety as episodes in the imagination of the governance of tha mass public that predates--and indeed prepares the ground for--Prohibition and other practices of discipline and social control."
Stanfield
The other very important article is by Peter Stanfield about blaxploitation cinema, "Walking the Streets: Black Gangster and the 'Abandoned City' in the 1970s Blaxpoitation Cycle." Stanfield notes that many blaxploitation films employ scenes of protagonists walking and negotiating the streets. Narratively this often functions to establish their urban knowledge, but visually these scenes transmit a sense of realism. Noting the standard criticism of blaxploitation--the idea that the films failed to produce or promote a progressive vision or agenda for the black population and that--Stanfield argues instead that black social can be glimpsed "obliquely" in these films, in their "particular representation of street life" (287). The intriguing element of Stanfield's argument--and something that I think I have been trying to get at all along--is captured when he writes: "The [blaxploitation] films work to construct a specific city experience, one that is grounded in the PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF URBAN CENTERS yet also transformed by the NARRATIVES INSPIRED BY FORMULAIC URBAN CRIME FICTIONS. Blaxploitation film of the 1970s narrates stories in which the representation of street life simultaneously invokes and dramatizes the experience of everyday life." His assertion about MELODRAMA + THE EVERYDAY is drawn from the work of cultural historian Michael Denning's book Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1997 - around p. 200) who writes "a story to be a story had to be set in a contemporary time and knowable landscape, but its plot had to be out of the ordinary; 'everyday happenings' according to this... aesthetic, did not make a story. The story was an interruption in the present, a magical fairy tale transformation of familiar landscapes and characters, a death and rebirth that turned the world upside down." So, though blaxploitation films, as Stanfield notes, presented caricatured versions of urban revolutionaries, they were "linked to the quotidian realities of their contemporary audiences."
Stanfield also makes a point about urban migration patterns (with statistics to back himself up) that despite the fact that "white flight" was taking place, ever increasing numbers of blacks and puerto ricans were moving to urban centers throughout the 1960s and 70s. This is the reason why the term "inner city" and its concomitant connotations were invented, and why "the city" came to be equated with blackness, specifically black poverty (he also notes that middle-class and professional blacks exited the city with the whites).
There are a few problems (opportunities, for me) with Stanfield though. To make a--very interesting--point inner cities becoming the new West he reproduces Paul Virilio's quotation of the mayor of Philadelphia following race riots in the early 1960s: "from here on in, the frontiers of the State pass to the interior of the cities." To me this quote is not so straightforward though. What exactly does the mayor mean here? Stanfield, and I think Virilio too, take this to mean that the mayor is saying that American cities now take on, in American imagination and reality, the wildness of the Wild West. But could not the mayor be making a more pragmatic statement regarding the (fiscal and governmental) responsibility of the State to the city? After all, the frontier of the state of Pennsylvania is what, Ohio? Not exactly the Wild West really. Again, the wording is very confusing to me and I could be wrong, but I also don't necessarily trust the judgments of a British scholar and an italian archictect/"cultural theorist" (and Virilio can be a real crackpot). Also, earlier Stanfield writes in reference to the opening sequence of Shaft, which mostly I believe take place in the Times Square area, that "The streets of Harlem belong to John Shaft."
The last problem I have with Stanfield is that he draws too sharp a distinction between the blaxploitation cycle and films of the "Hollywood Renaissance" by people like Friedkin, which played only to white fear about the city (likely in suburban cinemas). This is a provocative idea -- is it possible to split the urban crime films of the 1970s into those that played to white fear and those that address, as blaxploitation arguably does, the urban social experience (one of escape + confinement according to Stanfield)? On the white hand, 1970s urbanity figures along the lines of Travis Bickle's vision of a "dantesque inferno," on the black hand side the city represents containment with limited promise of escape. Stanfield though doesn't go further in his analysis (for whatever reason). I wonder if this is a useful hermeneutic to look at - or how my own project would fit in. Certainly, I think that the city was presented as hell, but not to everyone. Maybe it's that the promise of the 1970s is also oblique? Is there not a promise offered, whatever its violent resolutions, in the identity-dissolution series: Deathwish, Deathwish II, Cruising, Hardcore, Looking For Mr. Goodbar? Also, is there not a glimpse of a cosmopolitan lifestyle (not yet gentrified, commodified) in films like Serpico and others that is important?
