Cities and Film, a conversation with Ezra Glenn

Ezra Glenn walks us across the intersection of cities and film, just like he does in his MIT class called The City in Film.

In our conversation, we talk about Berlin: Symphony of a Great City which is a fascinating 1927 film. Ezra points out that the earliest films were is many ways the most experimental — no one had really figured out what a film was supposed to be, so directors were willing to experiment with all sorts of ideas. As filmmaking advanced, many of the wilder innovations were dropped for the sake of efficient storytelling. Nevertheless, the idea of a city as a symphony is apt, and this movie gives a real snapshot of the life of one of the world’s great cities before the Nazi regime and the World War II left it completely in ruins.

We also talk about Jules Dassin’s The Naked City which is considered one of the great and first “city movies” ever. [I remember there are some wonderful street scenes from The House on 92nd Street, a Henry Hathaway classic from 1945.] Ezra corrects us: it’s not film noir, it’s really the first police procedural, which he says is fitting given its 1948 date, at the outset of the decade of the bureaucratic man. I note that New York is itself a character in the movie. When I first saw this film way back in graduate school, I was told it was the first movie to film live street scenes, which they achieved by hiding the camera in the back of a delivery van.

When Craig Kelley saw this interview, he noted with approval Ezra’s comment that he had switched from being a city planner to focusing on urban studies: “Stop rushing to change cities and be a little more reflective and try to spend a some time thinking about what cities are in the first place.”