Seeing Symphonically by Erica Stein

Seeing Symphonically by Erica Stein

Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.

Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.

"There are numerous individual musicians for Stein to conduct in Seeing SymphonicallyShe succeeds in pulling them all together as any good city symphony would and any good city planner should. The question of what a city would be like if it allowed people to have a right to the city versus capital's claim to the city remains unanswered. However, Stein wakes us up to the noise, mess, and smells of the city and its potential to foster quotidian encounters that are better than utopian; they are symphonic." — Journal of the American Planning Association

"Seeing Symphonically is one of those books that needed to be written. It is somewhat surprising that a book on the representation of New York in avant-garde and independent film hasn't already been published. The book is therefore an important and long-awaited contribution to both film studies and urban studies." — Steven Jacobs, coeditor of The City Symphony Phenomenon

"The City Symphony film—long a staple in filmmaking and a genre which has produced a large handful of genuine film classics—has always struck me as a wonderful merging of documentary and experimental film. But under the watchful and educated eye of Erica Stein one sees that so many of the New York City Symphony films also and importantly bring a critical and sometimes caustic eye to the utopian aspirations of New York's checkered record of urban planning and redevelopment." — David Desser, author of The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa

Erica Stein is Assistant Professor of Film at Vassar College.