Writing the City

(This is coming a bit late, but I'm happy to have the extra time... I didn't even get the film until late in July, and am glad to have a chance to work something up about it...)



One of the things that struck me about Hands Over the City was the number of representations of the city that appear. So much of the film is structured around ways of describing the city. We see Nottola's model (above) - we see several maps - we see his office, with a map painting on one wall, huge photos of the city on other walls, as well as windows looking at the city, and the model itself. But the city is represented by more than just images - there are words and numbers about the city, reports, statistics. The archive room is as much a representation of the city as the maps are.



But none of these representations are adequate - they are often quite flawed. The episode discussing the common wall of the house that collapsed is a case in point: the officials explain that they had no way of knowing - the scale of the map would make a meter thick wall 1/2mm wide line - their pens have 1 mm nibs - they can't represent the real width with their tools. It's a common theme - the reports are all accurate, in their way - but all miss things. You see the various officials making excuses and avoiding responsibilities - but their information, their maps, records, etc., are all equally ambiguous. The representations of the city tend to hide it as much as reveal it. Da Vita gets at this, with his all too apt metaphor - everything was by the book, but the book needs to be rewritten...



While most of this misreading and ambiguity is unintentional, Nottola emerges as a character who can exert willing control over things. He is determined and focused, he knows what he wants. And he sees - and he promises a view of the bay to everyone.. He can imagine it, and represent it - hreates the big model - his office is lined with maps and pictures. He is a visionary - he imagines the city as it will become, he sees it when it is not there. He will build it - but before he builds it, he imagines it, he is, rather literally, a writer of the city:



Now it is true, he is as apt to see the profits he can get as the biuldings he can build - he still falls into that class of ambiguous villains, the 20th century developer. There was a nice piece in the New York Times about a new book about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, her campaign to stop him from bulldozing Greenwich Village for a superhighway, or driving an interstate through Washington Square Park. Nottola is in the same vein as Moses - more of a crook, maybe, but still, someone trying to realize a vision of a city - though a vision that usually forgets about the people living there. Or reduce them to lists of names...



Anyway - it's a good film about a pretty substantial part of 20th century social history - the reinvention of cities. A process still going on - there are echoes of this film in recent films about urban renewal - Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, or Jose Luis Guerin's Under Construction - complete with the tour of the new buildings - handsome, safe, boring, and priced out of reach of the people who are being displaced...

Crashing Walls and Broken Politics in Rosi's Hands Over the City

"You know what the true sin is? Losing."

Francisco Rosi's Hands Over the City compels the viewer to witness multiple layers of political compromise by creating a mosaic of inevitability. From the very first long shot of the converging city, we get the sense Naples is constructed of surface-level promises, hollow walls, and slick facades. Rosi wants to reveal what's hidden underneath, behind, or beyond the surface, the bottom line of possibility and progress. It's a film of great focus, almost too much so that we sometimes forget about the everyday man and woman hurt the most by the corruption. But Rosi constantly reminds how our surroundings can represent true intentions, both the morally corrupt and the honest, specifically the manmade and natural walls engulfing each dynamic moment in the film.

As Chris stated in his introduction, Rosi's "characters are important only to the extent they represent political positions and power", however each contains a professional/emotional duty complicating their role as a politician. Nottola and his scheming speculations show a self-righteous, arrogant businessman manipulating the political machine to make money. But his posturing about power and role as a councilman mask an infantile desire to build, to construct something large for the entire city to see and admire. De Vita is an engineer first and a leftist second, so his primary concerns are with the buildings themselves - the intricacies and fallacies of these structures and how they will affect they everyday working man. Finally, the Doctor, who not ironically is a centrist, gets torn, abused, and pushed from one side to the next, ultimately siding with his moral authority as a physician to fight Nottola. But each of these characters becomes defined not by their actions or reactions, but by the spaces Rosi creates for them.

Hands Over the City uses walls and textures unlike any film I've seen, paralleling character to mise-en-scene to provide a window into how and why the film is so political. Rosi begins this motif during the opening sequence as he tracks the morning transgressions of a local neighborhood, highlighting a construction site and the pummeling sound of a pile-driver. As two men attempt to get breakfast, a gigantic piece of concrete falls into frame, leading to a series of collapses bringing down an entire building. For the everyday person, identity and hope become crushed by the fabricated walls built by their politicians. Nottola's office on the other hand is crisply wallpapered with an intricate map of the city, covering his walls with a sense of detail and preciseness high atop the city. Later, we see his likeness plastered on the walls outside, like an infection spreading undeterred. Also, every politician's house contains wall to wall paintings, a suffocating indication of wealth, as if these are the only witnesses to the shady dealings occurring before them. In the city council chamber, the walls are cold stone, simple, undeterred. Rosi still sees temporary hope in this space, where Democracy can blossom into something more than a springboard for greed. Later, Rosi uses archival footage during the election rally to show walls of people, angry, passionate, motivated, but hood-winked, a documentary element ripe for consideration. Finally, the outside space of the development project provides a disturbing finale to the film, where so much possibility should grow strong, but in truth more of the same politicking will fester, turning the ground into swiss cheese.

Of course, there are countless more spots in the film where space defines the message and mood of the film, and I'm eager to see if anyone has any thoughts on this motif. Also, Rosi's use of pans, tilts, and zooms could inspire an entirely different thought-process on the film, but one still linked to the issue of space.

July's Film: Hands Over the City

For this month's film, I wanted to select one I had not seen before but from a director whose work fascinates me. Hands Over the City (1963) is Francesco Rosi's follow-up feature to his debut Salvatore Giuliano, about the Sicilian independence movement. Hands Over the City keeps the focus on the politics of Southern Italy; in this case the narrative revolves around real-estate speculation in Naples and the problem of political corruption.

To call it a narrative, though needs qualification. For starters, Rosi mixes fiction and documentary, less so here than in Salvatore Giuliano, but the project of the film seems at times closer to what we are used to documentary films doing than fiction films. There are at least two ongoing complaints about Hollywood's politics: 1) it reduces all political problems to personal problems; and 2) it uses politics as McGuffin, a narrative hook that is quickly discarded. Hands Over the City is the polar opposite. Characters are important only to the extent they represent political positions or power. Political deliberation is shown unfolding without the normal emotional catharsis we might expect. It's not a difficult film like Straub/Huillet or even a latter Godard film, but it's a different kind of difficult: the detailed and detached approach can overwhelm a novice or casual viewer. Conversely, multiple viewings can be rewarding.

Some questions I have for Film Clubbers:

Hands Over the City is pretty clearly a political film, but I'm wondering how? With whom do with sympathize and how? My gut feeling is that we sympathize differently than in other political films, but I'm still not sure how this works.

What of Rosi's style? It's often considered as part of a realist vein in 60s Italian cinema. What does it share with other art films from the period? What's distinctive?

The Oxford Guide to World Cinema characterizes Rosi's work as "rationalist." Is that a fair assessment, and if so, how does this play out? What is the relationship between Rosi's work and other intellectual, politicized cinema?

These are hardly exhaustive questions, but they speak to my interests in selecting the film. I'm looking forward to see what discoveries others have in the film.