Cities as Characters: a narrative possibility? (original) (raw)

Cities have been a common sight in films since the very beginning. However, not all the portrayals of cities are stylistically similar. While in most films the city is simply a neutral backdrop in which the action takes place, having no effect in the narrative and the plot, there is a considerable number of films in which the city has significant influence in the way the story develops. Film critics and filmgoers alike tend to, time and again, declare that the “city is almost like a character” (Wickman and Berman, 2014). However, this classification may not be accurate or helpful: does it suggest that a city and a person may serve the same dramatic purpose, under certain conditions? Is the definition of “character” flexible enough to accommodate both concepts? These are the questions I hope to have an answer for by the end of this essay. However, my interest in these questions lies within a wider interest about the various ways cities can be portrayed in Film, which is, in fact, a knowledge I hope to gather and use in my creative studio practice. This essay is comprised of two chapters. The first chapter is an attempt to pin down the concepts I’ll use on the rest of the essay, as well as to identify the limitations of the common application of both concepts. The second chapter will see the findings gathered in previous chapter applied to three films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), and Kléber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds (2012). The choice of these three films over many others is partly due to personal preference. Nevertheless, I also consider these three examples to include a very wide set of aesthetic characteristics which will illustrate the myriad ways city can be portrayed in Film. My expectation is that, by the end of the chapter, I will be able to know with a greater degree of certainty whether cities are portrayed as characters or not.