The City and the Street
I am a frequent Letterboxd user. Here's a list I've been sitting on for a while on Letterboxd: some of my favorite movies about urban environments, city life, and what makes cities such exciting, challenging places to live.
I keep telling myself to not post this list until it is longer and contains more definitive works on the topic... but I think it's a pretty good snapshot of the movies I've seen about cities in the last year or so.
I leaned heavily on my Letterboxed reviews to write this up. I have gone there to review every single movie I've seen since August 2018, and it's proven an incredible memory aid. Of all the sites out there calling themselves "social media," I often feel that Letterboxd is really the only one that's been an unqualified good for my brain and my emotional health, haha. It's great to have access to a toolset which allows me to pursue a creative thread like urbanism or city life across many different genres and decades. It's allowed me to watch movies in a much more structured, rewarding way - which has been helpful for my creative work in games as well.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Starting with the first - and honestly one of the better - documentary experiments on the topic of urban life. Imagine sleeping on the street almost a hundred years ago and waking up to find yourself one of the first people on earth to get experimentally filmed by some artist-ass dudes!
Incredibly exuberant and hopeful, full of warmth for cities and the people who live there. It exists online in several different forms with different soundtracks... I listened to the one with the Cinematic Orchestra jazz/electronic soundtrack and it felt so alive and contemporary. Loved it. It's absolutely wild to see something this kinetic and free and creative and then read the reasons people rejected it when it came out. It was cut too rapidly, too experimental... but today it just feels cool and fresh.
Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017)
An film about how exciting and nice it is to have friendship, and a life, and a real community role in a city where things are always happening. Truly understands how wonderful it is going out and doing things and having little projects with your friends!
Several bizarre magical-realist plots intertwine and disrupt one another as our protagonist, an unnamed university student, stumbles between her various friends' and acquaintances' personal crises. In what might be one long, endless night, she is forced to provide and seek the support and companionship you get when you are building deep roots and a sense of identity in a place like a city or a university. Utterly heartwarming stuff.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980)
A documentary born from a sociological study about how people use public spaces like plazas and courtyards in New York City. Narrated by the sociologist who led the study, it uses long video recordings of these plazas to demonstrate how people move through space, find friends, seek company or solitude, find food, etc. in a public place where they choose to spend time. It breaks down the qualities of a good public space with scientific precision--but also with kind humor.
It's so full of hope and idealism that it makes you genuinely grieve for the things that car-dependent infrastructure has taken from us. When I think about the places I go in Los Angeles--well-enclosed, streetside, busy, with loads of choice and places to sit, trees and water and affordable, tasty food... this doc is exactly on the money.
Playtime (1967)
A classic. Every shot is so perfectly composed and so crawling with little visual details - it's a movie shot like bubble wrap, with something popping and clicking everywhere at once. It really replicates what it feels like to be in a crowded urban space.
The story follows a character who feels oppressed and confused by the pristine, modernist strictures of 1960s Paris - and tracks how his good-natured brand of chaos infects and shatters that perfection. The crescendo of this movie, when everyone starts to let their hair down, is absolutely the craziest choreographed clown shit performance anyone has ever caught on film.
Infamy (2005)
A documentary about graffiti artists in the US in the early 2000s. Some of its subjects seemed to be at the moment in their careers where they could transform from thrillseekers and lawbreakers to socially-valued artists. These people are frustrated and troubled by what that might mean, for both themselves and for graffiti as an art form. What does it mean to be legit? Does art have room for people who think of themselves, fundamentally, as vandals, breaking the law because it deserves to be broken? The doc however also covers some graffiti artists who had no chance of crossing over into an art career, limited by poverty, racism, and a basic lack of access to the world of art. It's a fascinating survey of many different graffiti cultures and many different ways of relating to cities and to the art form's role in an urban space.
One of the documentary's most interesting extended sections focuses on Earsnot, a Black gay artist from NYC who founded the collective IRAK. There's a long article about him here which is also worth checking out.
Pedal (2001)
This bike messenger documentary is difficult to find... but I believe in you! It's about the lives and struggles of messengers in the early 2000s, in the moments when their clothing, culture, and bicycles were about to make a big style impact on fashion, bags, fixie cycling, etc. in the United States.
The documentary is very fucking raw. It's hard to compare this to the slick YouTube content coming out of popular modern fixed gear/urban cycling creators like Terry B... it's about homeless messengers living in subway closets, guys getting dismembered in accidents, people grinding to survive, a guy who experiences religious terror and dread when delivering to a building with the number 666...
It's the kind of documentary that makes you pray that everyone in it is still hanging on somewhere. (After watching it, I was crushed to learn that at least one--the documentary's main subject, Eric - is not.) I am currently slowly working on a project to create subtitles for this movie, so that I can show it to some of my friends and family who will need them.
The Story of Yanagawa's Canals (1987)
This movie isn't about a major, dense metropolis, but it's about a community bound very closely and complexly together by an ancient water management system. I appreciated that it wasn't a purely boastful take on the canals - it's also about how difficult and painful it is to get along with other people, and about how the history of the canals is full of political and military conflict.
It's full of brilliant interstitial animations from Studio Ghibli, which give it the feel of an adult Sesame Street cartoon. It makes a powerful argument that ordinary people can share anything worth having - and that they can do and understand everything that's worth doing in the world. It's fundamentally worth living near and with other people, even when it's hard. If you didn't, you could never have fucking canals like these!!
Undercity (2011)
The prototypical urban exploration web doc. Find it here. Clearly inspirational (laudatory, derogatory) to many teens and video content creators who followed after. The video introduces us to Steve Duncan, an urban historian and pathological thrillseeker, who leads his camera crew deeper and deeper into the underbelly of New York City - and into the skies above it.
The perspectives this video finds were so exciting to me when it came out. I was about to go from living in semirural villages and suburbs in New England to living deep, deep inside some of the US's largest metropolitan areas. This video depicts a kind of marginalization which literally pushes people into the margin areas of the city. Truly "liminal" spaces, spaces forgotten around the city's many gateway spaces - bridges, rail stations, and tunnels.
Over the course of the video, you also see the documentary's subject in practically every human emotional state. He goes from a totally vulnerable knife-edge fear at the start to joy, frustration, awe, guarded humility in the tunnel homes of others... and finally, at the end, to a dangerous confidence that makes you think: damn, something might really be wrong with him. There is something very compelling about a guy who looks like he's probably gonna die doing what he loves.