Nicholas Bullock (University of Cambridge)
Aids to Objectivity? Photography, Film and the new Science of Urbanism
In the Introduction to La Vie de Cité, written in 1927, Poete talks of his desire to establish a new ‘science’ of urbanism that would bring a new objectivity to the study of the city and, in doing so, would put it on a par with the other increasingly scientific social sciences of geography, economics or history. The new science, based on objective ‘observation’, was to draw on sources of all kinds from the archaeological to the visual. For Poete, the advent of photography and film, offered unparalleled opportunities of capturing a record of the life of the city that might be both comprehensive and neutral. As librarian of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Poete supported and extended the programme of photographing Paris initiated by the Commission des Monuments Historiques as early as 1850s. As one of the founding members of the Institut d’Urbanisme de l’Université de Paris, he was also an enthusiastic advocate of the use of film both as a way of explaining the history and the workings of the contemporary city. He was well aware of the use of film for these purposes in Britain and in Germany and himself completed two films on Paris by 1927 with the assistance of Atlantic Films. One was an animated rendering of the history of Paris, using maps, drawings, paintings and architecture to chart the growth of the city, the other was a ‘postcard’ film of the city that showed off the city’s monuments from Notre Dame to the Arc de Triomphe to best advantage. However, his most ambitious film project, ‘Paris au Fil des Heures’, planned for 1935 but never completed, was to use film to record the rhythms of the city over the course of the day and thus to reveal the complementary nature of Paris as the city of both ‘Luxury Consumption’ and ‘Luxury Production’.
In my paper, however, I shall argue that the photographic collections that Poete helped to assemble and the films that he made or proposed were far from neutral. The composition and the subject matter of many of the photographs, for example Atget’s pictures of View Paris, were shaped by artistic conventions such as the Pittoresque that were artfully constructed. Poete’s use of film was equally ‘non-objective’ as I hope to demonstrate by projecting a short excerpt of an interpretation of his original scenario for his proposed film, ‘Paris au Fil des Heures’, made possible by the skills colleagues in the Digital Studio. With its dawn to dusk structure and its use of ‘found-footage’, I shall seek to make the case that it may be more appropriately regarded as an exercise in the ‘City-Symphony’ genre than a neutral documentary investigation of the kind he advocated.
In my paper, however, I shall argue that the photographic collections that Poete helped to assemble and the films that he made or proposed were far from neutral. The composition and the subject matter of many of the photographs, for example Atget’s pictures of View Paris, were shaped by artistic conventions such as the Pittoresque that were artfully constructed. Poete’s use of film was equally ‘non-objective’ as I hope to demonstrate by projecting a short excerpt of an interpretation of his original scenario for his proposed film, ‘Paris au Fil des Heures’, made possible by the skills colleagues in the Digital Studio. With its dawn to dusk structure and its use of ‘found-footage’, I shall seek to make the case that it may be more appropriately regarded as an exercise in the ‘City-Symphony’ genre than a neutral documentary investigation of the kind he advocated.
