Above is Paul Signac's Vue de Porte de Marseille from 1905. In the background is the Basilica de Notre Dame del la Garde. The depiction is very similar to William Friedkin's opening shot of The French Connection, which begins by zooming out from a view of the basilica into a port scene. The MOMA acquired this painting in 1955. Was it on view between then and 1970? Could Friedkin have seen it?

This the cover of the 1st ed. of Death Wish. Why does Paul Benjamin shed a blood tear? For his city? For the people he's killed?

From the dust jacket:

Death Wish is the story of a society having a nervous breakdown. It is about something that causes a secret uneasiness far back in the conscious minds of many people. What would happen to a man who is unable to keep to the narrow line that stands between being victim or executioner?

Paramount purchased the rights to both Death Wish and a novel called Relentless. The latter was produced by CBS television in 1977 - a story about an Arizon state trooper--who is also Indian-- that pursues a paramilitary group of robbers (who killed his uncle and have taken a woman hostage) into the mountain and uses his knowledge of the wilderness to track them.

A follow up to my entry on George Tames 1961 photo of JFK entitled "The Loneliest Job in the World" a very very similar picture, also taken in (November) 1961 by Jacques Lowe:

http://www.jacqueslowe.com/gallery.php?id=jfk&num=18

Lowe also has a famous picture (reproduced for popular poster prints in the 1960s and 1970s) of RFK and JFK in silhuoette entitled "Brothers" from 1960.

According to Herbert Packer in an article for New Republic (January 10, 1970, 12-13), "Gideon 1963": "made it essential for the states to afford the effective assistance of ounsel to criminal defendants." It should also be notes that Miranda v. Arizona established the basis of Miranda rights (a frequent cop film/ cop show trope). In essence, what Packer calls the "procedrual revolution" in law occurs in the 1960s, ensuring more and better rights for alleged criminals. This occurs though, in the supreme court. The legislative response, and still the law enforcement institutions themselves are much slower to change in accordance with these decisions.

From Show magazine, July 9, 1970, p. 12 ("Showing Up" section), A short piece about Gordon Willis:

"Cinematographer Gordon Willis has become recognized as one of the great talents working in films today. So far this year he has in release End of the Road, Loving, and The Landlord. With stark simplicity, he has found out how things really look, distilling appearances and discovering a reality that transcends most of what has been seen on the screen up until now. With the most accurate, artistically devised lighting, he has developed a style that is clearly his own, but that is also perfectly right for the style of the film. He starts filming Alan J. Pakula's Klute next month in New York, where he has a knack of fining more poetry in litter than most cinematographers can find in a rose garden."

Recent interview blogradio interview with Owen Roizman and Sonny Grosso. Roizman briefly discusses his dissatisfaction with Friedkin's color "restoration" of French Connection for blu-ray disc: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2009/02/atrocioushorrif.php

Spanish (or italian?) poster in the style of "man over city" a la Fântomas, Captive City, etc.

In her book on the Erotic Thriller, Linda Ruth Williams interviews William Friedkin about the production of Cruising. Among other things, Friedkin claims that the main inspiration for the film was not the book with the same name by Gerald Walker, but a series of columns by Village Voice writer Arthur Bell, who apparently covered homicides taking place at the clubs Friedkin would later shoot in. Bell later joined others in vehemently denouncing the film.

To start, look at "Looking for Mr. Gaybar," Village Voice, 24 January 1977, p19, 20.

From July 25, 1977. With articles on the emergent "underclass." Referred to in the introduction to Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of Slums.

A dreaded moment: Another scholar has succinctly captured what I want to say about 1970s urban cinema.

"In the end, Scorcese's films translate a city in crisis into a geography of desire, a fascinatingly undetermined social space with as yet illegible rules."

That's Sabine Haenni in her article "Geographies of Desire: Post-social urban space in the films of Martin Scorsese."

I'm hoping she doesn't tread too far into my territory and I'm sure that this will complement rather than eclipse my own research. Anyway, I'm glad she says it, it means I'm not wrong. And there's many more films with which this case can be made and complicated.

The Jack Bigel Archive at Baruch College holds a copy of a pamphlet titled "Welcome to Fear City" published by the "Council on Public Safety" in 1975. The CPS was an amalgam of Fire and Police Unions who, facing massive layoffs by the city, joined to publicize to tourists the dangers of New York. The contents and impact of this stunt is documented in Miriam Greenberg's Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World.

Image from Slave-Unit, a series called "Welcome to Fear City." Inredible series of photos updating Atget's style for the urban paranoia set.

(http://www.slave-unit.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=166&g2_page=2)

It's difficult to track how many times an anecdote emerges about real-life law enforcement / crime fighting draws on fictional sources. Below (somewhere) is a story (from Mark Seltzer's book, I believe) about the emergence of FBI profiling and how it drew on classic detective fiction, such as Poe and Doyle. The mind-melding of the Purloined Letter is, of course, FBI profiling avant la lettre, and was later taken up by Michael Mann's Manhunter.

SO - the tag is "fictions of law enforcement," okay? Remember that.

Here's another one, recounted by Christopher Wilson in Cop Knowledge: Lincoln Steffens, author of The Shame of the Cities, a classic muckraking tale of urban corruption in a number of US cities in 1904, tells (in his memoir, and with Jakob Riis as an interloctuor no less!) of being regaled by a Chief Inspector of the true tales of his own heroism, but realizing that this detective was in fact drawing his material from popular detective fictions of the time (which Steffen's knew the detective read and enjoyed -- he surreptiously borrowed them from him from time to time). Writes Steffens "Thus I discovered that instead of detective's posing for and inspiring the writers of detective fiction, it was the authors who inspired the detectives."

(qtd in Wilson, Cop Knowledge, 26)

The best source on the the cultural understandings of cops in America is in the work of Christopher P. Wilson, particularly his book Cop Knowledge and an article on Serpico and Prince of the City called "Undercover: White Ethnicity and Police Expose in the 1970s."

The Brookings Institution has released a new report, based on 2000-2008 census data, indicates that the suburbs are now the most likely location of the poor, and low-income ethno-racial minorities -- what an AP press story concludes is "white flight" in reverse.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvFjjAiva42zBzRC8o2-s7zHD6IwD9FJ37800

http://www.brookings.edu/metro/MetroAmericaChapters/report_overview.aspx

Neil Harris's term "operational aesthetics" covers much, if not all, of my interests in cinema. Harris develops the term in his book Humbug on P.T. Barnum. Noting that audiences flocked to Barnum's productions, even though they were known to be hoaxes and the ways Barnum's advertising invited audiences to "decide for themselves" - Harris elaborates a particularly American attitude, skeptical and information-seeking, that seeks to know how things look and how they work. It refers to the capacity of productions to appeal to the analystic,investigative, and problem-solving faculties. To elucidate his point, Harris even discusses Poe's invention of the detective story and its popularity. Yet operational aesthetics in cinema perhaps stretch beyond American borders. Early documentary forms, especially something like Basil Wright's Night Mail can be seen to be constructed around a desire to show --just as much as poeticize -- Britain's rail mail. Additionally, Eisenstein discusses something very much like the operational aesthetic (in a quote contained in Annette Michelson's essay "Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair") when he talks about the school film, and the ability of cinema to show pupils "how a power station, a newspaper, a book, a glass factory, a colored illustration is produced.."(paraphrase - from Conversations with Eisenstein trans. harry brose, 1970) . Urban cinema -- film which shows "how a city works" is one mode of operational aesthetics (and Eisenstein alludes to the urban nature of the school film earlier in this quote.)

Robert Zecker's book Metropolis covers urban representations in American mass culture. His chapter on the 1960s and 1970s covers various cop programs including The Streets of San Francisco, NYPD, Mannix, and some others.

What happened to Juanita Neilsen? A Sydney journalist who, in the 1970s opposed a real estate development and was then murdered. Two films document these events Heatwave (1982) and The Killing of Angel Street (1981) -- the latter especially is supposed to be worth watching. A genre film about real estate and society a la Over the Edge?

An off the cuff quote from Edward Buscombe's entry on The House on 92nd Street in the BFI Companion to Crime: "Almost any issue that Hollywood wanted to make a film about could be refracted through the generic conventions of the crime film." (175)

Paired with this quote from Will Straw on Leftist involvment in the social documentary genre: "At the heart of the semi-documentary was the tension between its restricted institutional frame and teh rich possibilities offered by narrative worlds outside the studio backlot." (in "Documentary Realism and the Postwar Left," 'Un-American Hollywood," 141.)

Important also to look at is Parker Tyler's relation of narratives of investigation to documentary in American Quarterly 1 (1949), 99-115 [See notes to Straw's essay] AND Kracauer's review of Boomerang! in an article called "Those Movies with a Message" in Harper's 196 no. 1176 (May 1948): 568.

Sabine Haenni has a recent article in the Journal of Film and Video (Spring/Summer 2010), "Geographies of Desire: Postsocial Urban Space and Historical Revision in the Films of Martin Scorsese." Interesting, as far as I have read, relevant to my topic, should be included at some point.

By the 1970s, Richard Sennett points out, anti-urban bias is not only observable in the right-wing, but on the revolutionary left, in the writings of Franz Fanon, and in Mao-Tse Tung and Fidel Castro's celebration of peasantry. Fanon held that "the necessity for bureacracy in a city an dthe anonymous character of human contacts were bound to destroy the feeling of closeness in men... these dense places would frighten men into pursuing safe routines where they knew they would not be overwhelmed. They would thus be pushed into private circles of security and eventually lost as revolutionaries" (Sennett, xv, Uses of Disorder - paraphrasing Fanon)

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

– The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, page 2

Robert Smithson wrote an essay in the early 1970s entitled "Fredrick Law Olmsted's Dialectical Landscape," which considers the design of Central Park, it's naturalistic aesthetic lineage within 18th and 19th C. ideas about the picturesque, and contemporary uses of the park by hoods, homosexuals, graffiti writers and the like. Sounds very promising. Found here:

Smithson, Robert (1996), Flam, Jack D., ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press,