Nous avons le plaisir de vous faire parvenir le programme de nos journées d’étude intitulées « Après la symphonie urbaine ». Celles-ci auront lieu le lundi 12 et le mardi 13 mai à l’université Toulouse Jean Jaurès – Maison de la recherche.

Argument

In 1932, referring to the scripts submitted to him by young members of the British documentary school, John Grierson wrote: “Berlin [Walter Ruttmann, 1927] still excites the mind of the young, and the symphony form is still their most popular persuasion. In fifty scenarios presented by the tyros, forty-five are symphonies of Edinburgh or of Ecclefechan or of Paris or of Prague” (Grierson 105). While undoubtedly an exaggeration, this statement nevertheless testifies to the importance of the city symphony genre beyond the timeframe that is usually ascribed to it (1920-1930). Far from being anecdotal in the history of cinema, or limited to a handful of famous films – Manhatta (1921), Rien que les heures (1926), Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Rain (1929), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), A propos de Nice (1930) – the city symphony has kept on capturing the imaginations of many filmmakers throughout the world from the early 1930s to the present day.

Besides its usual limitation to a specific time period and subject, the city symphony is characterised by an absence of plot, narrative rhythm and characters, and a structure borrowed from the movements of orchestral symphonies. For Grierson, the structuring in movements and the attention paid to rhythmic variations are even the main characteristics of the genre, thus breaking with the plot-driven classical novel or theatre, or with classical pictorial art. Documentary historian Richard Meran Barsam defines city symphonies as “brief and realistic nonfiction views of city life, united within a larger rhythmic structure [our emphasis] – a symphony – by the recurrence of images, motifs, and themes that provide continuity and progression of ideas” (Barsam 59). Another definition proposed by Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher and Anthony Kinik considers the city symphony to be an “experimental documentary” dealing with “the energy, the patterning, the complexities, and the subtleties of a city” (Jacobs et al. 10). In their book The City Symphony Phenomenon (2018), the authors identify several features common to all city symphonies. These include a focus on icons of modernity (mobile bridges, construction sites, high rises and skyscrapers, factory chimneys and machinery, telecommunications equipment... ), an attention to the contrasts and diversity of modern cities, and an unobtrusive director, favouring the poetic or reflexive documentary modes rather than the expository mode (as per Bill Nichols’s classification). Additionally, they are characterised by photography that often employs fragmentation, canted angles and unusual perspectives, as well as rapid editing and the use of split screens, evoking the frenzy of modern metropolitan life.

While Jacobs, Hielscher and Kinik choose to classify city symphonies in the documentary genre, others list them under avant-garde or experimental cinema. It is important to note, however, that most city symphonies came into being at a time when the notion of “documentary film” did not yet exist (the first mention of “documentary” as a film genre dates from 1933) and when “experimental” or “avant-garde” cinema was still in its infancy. Furthermore, while theorists agree that city symphonies belong to a non-fictional genre, John Grierson, as well as Paul Rotha and Siegfried Kracauer, consider a film like Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) to be a canonical representative of the city symphony, even though it contains numerous fictional passages and has little “documentary value”, to use Grierson’s terms. For Nichols (102-105), the poetic experimentation inherent to the city symphonies and other avant-garde films of the 1920s even gave way to documentary as a film genre in its own right.

It is probably the formal fluidity of the city symphony – a sensory representation of the city that does not have a strict formal framework – that makes it a genre whose resonance extends well beyond the 1920s-1930s. Many films produced after the 1930s bear traces of the city symphony. Examples include The City (1939) by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, Listen to Britain (1942) by Humphrey Jennings, Människor i stad (1947), literally “People in the City”, but distributed under the title Symphony of a City, by Arne Sucksdorff, Daybreak Express (1953/8) by D.A. Pennebaker, N.Y., N.Y. (1957) by Francis Thompson, and Broadway By Light (1958) by William Klein. Other films such as Helen Levitt’s In the Street (1948), Rudy Burckhardt’s Under the Brooklyn Bridge (1953), Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-go-round (1958) and Skyscraper (1959), and Go! Go! Go! (1962-4) by Marie Menken, although they do not paint a portrait of the city as a whole, focus on certain aspects of New York (architecture, traffic, etc.). More recently, Godfrey Reggio’s celebrated experimental film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1983), made up of a succession of static shots with no voiceover dealing with the ills of a modern world “out of balance”, although it does not focus exclusively on a particular city or urban areas, could also be counted as an heir to the city symphony. Since the late 2000s, several contemporary forms of city symphony have emerged, such as Alex Barrett’s London Symphony (2017), Geoffrey Cox and Keith Marley’s A Film about Nice (2010), Finisterre: A Film About London (2003) by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, Signal 8 (2019) by Simon Liu, Of Time and the City (2008) by Terence Davies, I Am Belfast (2015) and Stockholm My Love (2017) by Mark Cousins, and London: The Modern Babylon (2008) by Julien Temple. While the first four films are direct tributes to the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, the following ones follow characters, either fictional (the female personification of Belfast or the character, played by Neneh Cherry, who guides the viewer through Stockholm in Cousins’ film) or real (Terence Davies himself, the London artists on whom Julien Temple focuses), thus moving away from the original form.

Generally speaking, all psychogeographic films (which follow the wanderings of characters, visible or acousmatic, through a space) could also be classified as contemporary city symphonies, even though they retain a certain narrative logic. Films such as Norman Cohen’s The London Nobody Knows (1967), which follows the progress of the narrator played by James Mason, Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977), or Patrick Keiller’s trilogy London (1994), Robinson In Space (1997) and Robinson In Ruins (2010) are representative examples.

Finally, some fiction films too have incorporated stylistic features of the city symphony. The opening of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), and more generally films of the new waves (Italian neo-realism, British free cinema, the French new wave, new Hollywood), depict cities and contemporary urban life. The formal heritage of city symphonies, in particular the symphonic form, the construction in movements and the rhythmic dimension, has however been little exploited in contemporary narrative cinema. For Andréa Franco, Benjamin Léon and Nicolas Tixier (2021), we must question the ability of the cinematic medium to depict contemporary cities in the same way as city symphonies, given the disconnection between different spaces, the proliferation of new centres and the virtualisation of the workforce. In their view, filmic representations of the city are still too often rooted in the twentieth century, and we need to turn to new manifestations of cinema’s place in the post-modern city, as Thom Andersen’s film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) does. Moreover, the symphonic shaping of the city has also given way to new resurgences in the pure visual rhythm of animation or in the hybridization between cartoons and live action (City of Lights, Daan Verbiest et Teun van der Zalm, 2007 ; Une ville, Emmanuel Bellegarde, 2009).

Programme

12 mai 2025

salle E412

13h30 Accueil avec café

Premier panel

• 14h Introduction par Anita Jorge, Zachary Baqué et Vincent Souladié
• 14h15 Anthony Kinik (Brock University) Multi-screen Symphonies?: Montreal and Expanded Cinema at Expo 67
• 15h Steve Hawley (The Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University) Stranger than known; creating a mythical city
• 15h45 Natalia Ardis (compositrice) et Rémi Collin (compositeur et improvisateur de cinéma muet) Improviser ou composer une partition électroacoustique pour accompagner les symphonies urbaines : deux visions d’artistes contemporains

17h45 American Cosmograph. Projection de A Film about Nice (Geoffrey Cox and Keith Marley, 2010) et London Symphony (Alex Barrett, 2017) en présence de Alex Barrett et Geoff Cox.

20h Dîner à La Braisière

13 mai 2025

Amphi F417

9h Accueil avec café

Deuxième panel

• 9h30 Pietsie Feenstra (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Camille Gendrault (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne) et Diane Barbe (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) Une écriture symphonique des métropoles interculturelles d’Europe au tournant du siècle
• 10h15 Camila Gui Rosatti (Centre de Recherches sur le Brésil Colonial et Contemporain– EHESS) et Vincent Jacques (ENSA Versailles) Quand la symphonie devient cacophonie : São Paulo, une mégalopole au prisme de l’histoire du cinéma

Pause

• 11h10 Geoffrey Cox (University of Huddersfield) Listen to Nice
• 11h55 Anne Combarnous (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour) Psychogeographical Drifting in the City of Lonely Angels: Joseph Strick, Ben Maddow and Sidney Meyers’s The Savage Eye (1959) as (Anti-?) City-Symphony

12h40 Déjeuner

Troisième panel

• 14h Mina Radovic (Goldsmiths, University of London)‘And Love Has Vanished’: Aleksandar Petrovic and The Legacy of the City Symphony in Yugoslav Fiction Film
• 14h45 David Lipson (Université de Strasbourg) “The Frederick Wiseman City Symphony Film: Aspen (1992), Belfast, Maine (1999) and Monrovia, Indiana (2018)”