De-imaging New York: cognitive mapping and the city symphony

Abstract

Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City is central to film studies, where cognitive mapping is often used to position screen depictions of cities in terms of genre affiliation, urban development, and subject formation. However, Lynch’s model affirms that to image the city is to possess it, and that representation is an activity undertaken by human observers of a place rather than integral to places themselves. It is, in the end, a model fully aligned with—and one that naturalizes—the capitalist (re)development of the city and the role that commercial cinema plays in this process. The city symphony is closely associated with Lynchian mapping, but I argue such films articulate an alternative to it, one in keeping with Jameson’s model of the location and coming to consciousness of the subject within ideology. City symphonies depict a day in the life of an urban environment, combining unities of time, space, and theme with rapid and complex montage. I show how Seeing the World pt 1: A Trip to New York (Burckhardt, 1937) uses a doubled structure to insist on New York as a place constructed (rather than perceived) by the images and representational strategies of its planners, inhabitants, visitors, and visual cultures, including cinema. By invoking and then mocking established itineraries through the city while pointing to the constructed nature of these itineraries as well as the city itself, Burckhardt’s film performs a new kind of cognitive mapping, one that dispenses with the image of the city.