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