The City (American Institute of Planners, Civic Films, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, August 14) in the early afternoon my husband Charles and I stumbled on an intriguing YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g96j5Hagfuc) from someone named Ade Hanft who’d been inspired to re-edit a 1939 film called The City, co-directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke (a documentarian, not to be confused with Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke, billed as “W. S. Van Dyke” and commonly known as “Woody,” who directed the first four Thin Man series films at MGM along with a lot of their best movies) and featuring music by Aaron Copland. Hanft was inspired by a book by New Yorker classical-music critic Alex Ross, who in a chapter on Copland from his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century wrote of The City, “A sequence depicting the congestion of the city inspires vamping repetitive music that anticipates the minimalism of Philip Glass.” Hanft seized on that quote to re-edit the film, cutting it from 32 minutes to 24, substituting a modern recording of Copland’s score for the original (conducted by Max Goberman, who made a ton of money conducting original-cast recordings for Broadway shows and used it to underwrite a complete Haydn symphony series that, alas, he died before he could finish) and removing all but one section of the original narration (written by urban critic Lewis Mumford and read by actor Morris Carnofsky). Hanft’s intent was to make the film seem even more like the movie Koyaanisqatsi (1982), directed by Godfrey Reggio with a musical score by Philip Glass. He even called the result “Copland-isqatsi.”

Of course that piqued my curiosity to see the film in its original form, which I was able to do on an archive.org download (https://archive.org/details/90594-the-city-ray-vwr) which I ran for Charles and I right when he got home from work last night. The City was produced by the American Institute of Planners, under the banner of “Civic Films,” and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its rather didactic purpose was to promote the construction of “new cities,” free from the congestion and dire living conditions of actually existing cities, that would be carefully planned and constructed in harmony with their environments and kept from getting too large. The film is basically in three sections: a bucolic ode to old-fashioned country life, a lament that its values had been lost in the unplanned growth of modern cities, and a call for a return to a quieter, more human sense of community through carefully planned semi-urban environments. Oddly, the Mumford/Carnofsky narration makes a snide reference to suburbs as not at all what they’re advocating, but the “planned communities” the film is advocating certainly look like suburbs on screen. Charles even picked up on the fact that the family in the “planned community” had an electric refrigerator, not an “icebox” in the literal sense (a box with a block of ice in it). Watching Hanft’s re-edit of the film I was dreading what the narration was going to sound like in the original, but it was refreshingly free of the bombastic style the syndicated newsreel The March of Time made infamous starting in 1935. It helps that Carnovsky’s voice doesn’t have the crack-of-doom intensity of The March of Time’s narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis, and it helps even more that through long stretches of the film directors Steiner and Van Dyke allowed Carnovsky to shut up and let their images and Copland’s music tell the story unaided.

The City is a fascinating curio, and Copland’s score for the film deserves to be better known. It’s also interesting that it carries over the country-good, city-bad contrast from a lot of films of the period (including innumerable movies in which a central character is framed for a murder he didn’t commit, flees to the country and is reformed through “honest” country values), which I’d always assumed was ideologically from the American Right, in a work that is clearly a product of the Left. Much of the first part of The City looks like Walker Evans, the famous still photographer who documented the Depression, made a movie. At the same time The City is hardly as pioneering as Hanft made it seem; in 1927 Walther Ruttmann had made a similar film called Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and it’s pretty clear Steiner and Van Dyke had seen Ruttmann’s film and been influenced by it (and probably by the similar experiments of Soviet director Dziga Vertov). Indeed, there were a number of films that showed similarly abstract visions of big cities, and not all of them documentaries: fiction films like King Vidor’s The Crowd and Paul Fejos’s Lonesome (both 1928) had scenes strikingly similar to ones in The City. The images of secretaries working at desks in a giant hall busily transcribing letters on typewriters were copied almost exactly from The Crowd, and Steiner and Van Dyke used that image to make the same point Vidor had: to emphasize the dehumanizing aspects of that sort of work. In its original form, with the narration, The City is a bit on the didactic side – though even the 1939 cut of the film has long stretches in which Steiner and Van Dyke trusted their images and Copland’s music to make the points without overstressing them with narration. Hanft’s re-edit is fascinating in its own right even though it makes the film over into an abstract “-qatsi”-esque piece that wasn’t at all what the original filmmakers intended!