Martin Scorsese and the Rhythm of the Metropolis

Abstract

How could we possibly think of the cinema without images of cities springing to mind? Throughout the past century, cities have been caught by the camera in documentaries and in fictions, continuing the tradition of the literary works that represent people, events and feelings in a metropolitan environment. For a whole century urban landscapes have been coming and going on screens in no particular order and with no recognizable development or thematic unity, since cities have been the canvas for a story as often as they have been the main subject, the protagonist of the whole film. Ever since René Clair’s Paris qui dort (1924), which has so much in common with Guillaume Apollinaire’s visions of Paris, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), which has so much in common with an expressionist painting or a constructivist project, films and cities have been an irresistible combination, proving that architecture and film-making have as close a relationship as cinema and theatre or painting or literature — the arts which have most typically been associated with film (one need only think of André Bazin’s essays on these topics).¹

Cities, like people, can be recognized by their walk … So let us not place any particular value on the city’s name. Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collision of people and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble inside a pot made of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities