THE CITY AS PROTAGONIST IN MARCH DON'T YOU HAVE DOCS?
by DYHD?
According to the United Nations over 50% of the world's population live in urban environments. In the developed world the figure is over 75%. That's a lot people living in cities. As the primary backdrop for the lives of most of us, the city landscape necessarily houses many of the great stories of cinema. Indeed the city is often cast not just as locale but rather as central protagonist or antagonist in a film's narrative. Many examples in fictional cinema spring to mind – Metropolis, Blade Runner or Lost in Translation – to name a random few.
This tradition is also true of non-fiction cinema. From the City Symphony films of the early 20th century such as Manhatta, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City or Man With a Movie Camera to the hybridised fiction/documentary London to Thom Andersen reconstructing Hollywood archival footage as a tribute to the culture and politics of place in LA Plays Itself, the city offers an ideal prism to interrogate the condition of contemporary humanity.
It is with this in mind that this month Don't You Have Docs? explores the Mubi Garage for short contemporary documentaries that continue this tradition. Building upon the success of last month's inaugural screening program we are presenting a selection of 8 short films curated by William Head around the theme Me The City.
The program for Me the City includes 2 films by Evan Mather, The Image of the City and Scenic Highway. The first is a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Kevin Lynch's famed urban design book of the same name, the later a portrait of Louisiana city Baton Rouge. Mather gleefully mixes archival footage, bold graphics, satirical reenactments and documentary footage to collide in ways that affront and excite the viewer.
This month we also call back the work of UK director Alex Barrett. We programmed one of Alex's micro-docs last month and couldn't help but feature his work again with his 3-minute film Hungerford: Symphony of a London Bridge. As the name suggests the film pays homage to those city symphony films mentioned at the start of this post.
The Image of the City by Evan Mather
We Were Here is another film from the UK in which director Lauren Hatchard skilfully observes the last days of a metropolitan fire station. The film is on one hand a documentation that preserves a building and its people in audio-visual memory, but also goes further and invokes a ghostly motif that seems to suggest that historical reverberations influence a city's future.
In his film Sounds of The Subway: A Documentary Proposal, Peter Woodbridge reconfigures the conventions of the classic essay film by casting his own image and voice as dislocated subjects in a film about another, as yet unmade, documentary. The result being a surprising mixture of personal intimacy and an abstract sense of intellectual divorce.
Death Choreography by Paula Jimenez
Yellow Line Chapter 1 is a fractured, playful vision of Milan as conceived and recorded by the city's homeless residents and facilitated by Logo. Like a book of short stories whose narratives intertwine through, character, circumstance or setting, the film guides us in and out of a city culture that is in essence diverse, but indelibly unified by place.
Death Choreography by Paula Jimenez encompasses all that is aesthetically possible through the serendipity of observation. A one minute, single shot film, it captures a hearse moving through a street in Haarlem, the Netherlands. With a compositional tableaux reminiscent of Dutch master painters, the film captures a moment of civic interaction so structured that it is difficult to imagine the scene has not been carefully orchestrated.
We Were Here by Lauren Hatchard
This program is available now on our Don't You Have Docs? Mubi Garage channel and will also screen at Loop Bar in Melbourne on the 21st of March, 7pm.
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