March 16, 2009

Still looking for ways to frame this project, I've hit upon the idea of situating it within the genre of urban mysteries. City mysteries are serial and novelistic genre that was popularized in the mid-nineteenth century and are typified by Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and G.W.M Reynold's Mysteries of London, though they spawned many imitators and offshoots, particularly in the U.S. Apparently the best U.S. iteration is George Lippard's Quaker City, (about Philadelphia) though there are of course many city mysteries of New York (most notably, New York by Gaslight and New York in Sunshine and Shadow). I briefly took a look at David Reynolds introduction to Quaker City and it notes that Lippard, apparently, was a sort of proto-Marxist, though he probably never read Marx, he shared many of his views about the power of labour etc. 

A better resource though, are books by David L. Pike, a contemporary scholar who has written three books on the imagination of underground and subterranean cities. I think this will be a better guide than Rosalind Williams more well known Notes From the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination . 

Chapter 3 of Pike's book Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 is great. It addresses the city mysteries genre extensively, and ends by talking about film noir and Blade Runner.  Pike also writes about cinema and has a somewhat interesting article in Wide Angle from 1998 about post-war literature and film about living underneath cities, though he doesn't cover extensively enough the visual representations of these undergrounds, focusing primarily on narrative elements without reference to visual construction. 

On p. 164-165 in Metropolis on the Styx though, Pike mentions the ways in which the city mysteries genre was constructed upon an idea about verisimilitude in its reference to real locations and social and economic realities -- in contradistinction to the genre that it ultimately was born out of, the gothic (of which Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho was the first to use the word "mystery" in the title) which was concerned with metaphysical incarnations of evil. I could eventually tie this in with a chapter I am considering that deals with location photography and the construction of verisimilitude (I think this is a somewhat fraught topic. Realistic settings and appeals to verisimilitude require just as much construction and labour -- as French Connection DP Owen Roizman notes -- as studio settings. There is a "reality effect" going on here. Will have to read Barthes on this.) 

Focusing on the idea of city-mysteries in my own project, instead of merely detection, frees me to engage a number of topics related though not directly under the rubric of detection/investigation. I even toyed with the idea of separating out my project into conceptual vertical and horizontal spaces: above ground, underground, up high, inside, outside, urban, suburban, exurban, etc. But I'm not sure this would really work that well. 

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 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.