Peter Bradshaw 

The top 10 … cities on film

From Michael Mann’s de-romanticised LA in Heat to Nic Roeg’s mysterious Venice in Don’t Look Now, these films tease out cities’ nuances and cast them as characters in their own right
  
  

Manhattan
Woody Allen’s Manhattan fetishises New York, casting the crime-ridden city as a shangri la of sophistication. Photograph: A still from Manhattan.

New York in Manhattan

Released in 1979, directed by Woody Allen

Nothing is more cliched than calling a film a “love letter” to a certain place, but Woody Allen’s comedy comes close. With Gordon Willis’s gorgeous cinematography, Manhattan is rendered in a lustrous, glowing monochrome, fetishing the city, erasing its poverty and crime – then at its notorious zenith – and making of it a shangri la of sophistication. The opening sequence is a famous montage: static exterior shots of Manhattan, daytime and then night-time, to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Those images have almost eclipsed memories of the story itself. Allen’s camera is out and about on the streets of New York, and he is always gloriously at home there.

London in It Always Rains On Sunday

Released in 1947, directed by Robert Hamer

There are plenty of movies that use London’s tourist locations as establishing shots. Aerial images of the House of Commons or, nowadays, the Gherkin are so interchangeable that film-makers might as well use stock footage. Robert Hamer’s excellent 1947 melodrama is quite different. He sometimes uses built sets, but he also uses real locations in a recognisable working city, shooting in places like Stratford and Chalk Farm. Notably, the film stays out of the centre. There are comparisons with Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants Du Paradis, with its teeming market scene. It is a very intelligent use of London.

Belfast in Odd Man Out

Released in 1947, directed by Carol Reed

Carol Reed is a brilliant director of cities in films. In Odd Man Out, the city becomes a character in its own right. Everyone remembers abject, poverty-stricken and war-ravaged Vienna in his The Third Man. This is just as powerful. Set in Belfast, it brings a documentary vividness to the city. Belfast really deserves the title “city” here — a booming place before its troubles, bustling, vital and prosperous. A place where a packed tram can visibly head for the Falls Road without any fear, other than that which is disclosed by the story, which is itself a premonition of the city’s future woe. James Mason is an IRA man holed up in a safe house, who leaves his confinement to lead a bank robbery. A great city film.

Nanjing in Spring Fever

Released in 2010, directed by Lou Ye

In 2009, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye made an intriguing noir about sexual transgression, gay and straight. Noir movies are always set in big cities, of course, but they tend to be places of shadows and darkness. This is different: it is set in Nanjing, one of China’s cities with almost exponential growth, a megacity only outsized by places like Beijing and Shanghai. Lou deploys fascinating images of the big city in daytime: eerily colossal new buildings and gigantic pedestrian piazzas — impressive in some ways but weirdly featureless, without the poetry conferred upon Manhattan by its denizens. Lou works imaginatively with its very impersonality.

Paris in Cléo De Cinq À Sept

Released in 1962, directed by Agnès Varda

The film-makers of the French new wave were brilliant in their passionate connoisseurship and celebration of Paris, a place virtually re-invented by popular culture. In fact, this movement’s relationship with the city has still not been investigated and researched as thoroughly as it might be. Truffaut, Godard and Rivette all made brilliant films with Paris as a virtual character, but Agnès Varda’s delicate, witty, sad, ambulatory movie is of particular interest: in some ways the work of a ciné-flâneur. A woman tours around Paris, waiting for the results of a medical test, and modern-day lovers of the film can recreate her journey. Varda’s Paris is sited with concrete specificity in the film.

Tehran in Fireworks Wednesday

Released in 2006, directed by Asghar Farhadi

Tehran has tended to be a closed and alien place to Western media. For many, it is represented by journalists’ images of the hostage crisis or the Ayatollah funeral. The work of film-maker Asghar Farhadi shows us a Tehran which is much more like a European city than cinema-goers here had suspected, a place with recognisable people whose stressed working lives are not governed just by geopolitical issues that make it onto the news. His Fireworks Wednesday is a fascinating drama, centred around the city’s traditional New Year’s celebrations involving fireworks in the street. The city is a thrumming beehive of middleclass lives, all buzzing with secrets and lies.

Los Angeles in Heat

Released in 1995, directed by Michael Mann

Michael Mann’s Heat, in which Al Pacino’s cop faces off against Robert De Niro’s gangland villain, is a real LA film. A film set in a huge, sprawling, de-romanticised metropolis. It portrays LA as a place where criminals are rootless, almost weightless. They have not put down roots in LA; they have made no emotional investment. When the heat is on, they have to be ready to walk away. Mann’s LA is a city of glass and steel modernity, a city which will provide a suitably glamorous sheen for its sexy shootouts and confrontations. The place is anathema to pedestrian dawdling: very different from the LA historical sites in, say, Alex Holdridge’s In Search Of A Midnight Kiss. The sleek forms of LA inspire a kind of eroticism, but not love.

Venice in Don’t Look Now

Released in 1973, directed by Nicolas Roeg

One of the greatest representations of a city in film. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a couple whose child has died in an accident. They come to Venice and are tormented by visions of what may be the child’s ghost. The Venice of Nic Roeg’s great film is mysterious and exotic — replete with a kind of Western-style orientalism, in fact — but never touristy. Roeg is never content with the visual cliches, and there is none of the usual imagery of Saint Mark’s Square. He evokes the city’s disorientating waterways and passageways: echoing places where one could easily lose one’s bearings at night. There are also the duller, more workaday parts of Venice, in which one is introduced to the disquieting idea that the entire city is an occult conspiracy, leading inexorably to death.

Dakar in Touki Bouki

Released in 1973, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty

This bizarre and challenging movie by the African experimentalist auteur Mambéty in many ways questions how we live in cities, how we experience them and how our identities are formed by them. Conventional, realist films place their characters in the streets, squares and open spaces of a city, or in their houses and apartments, and show them working out their rational social lives. Mambéty invents a couple who live in Dakar in Senegal, but show them yearning to escape to Paris. Their lives are a confusing new wave swirl, their actions and motivations obscure. It is as if it takes place as much in Paris as Dakar, or in a city of the mind.

Rome in The Great Beauty

Released 2013, directed by Paolo Sorrentino

I can’t think of any city so drenched with infatuated love, and yet also a kind of disillusion and disenchantment, as the Rome of Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. Toni Servillo plays a jaded middle-aged man about town who is astonished to hear something about a woman with whom he was once deeply in love back in the distant past:. It inspires a final, ecstatic rapture for his city. The movie is in a sense about his leave-taking, his final passeggiata, which savours of sadness and mortality. Sorrentino’s camera swoops and veers around Rome, concentrating on its historic metropolitan glories in the manner of Fellini in La Dolce Vita. It is a film about Romanità, or Romanness.

 

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