Celluloid cities

The changing rhythms and shapes of the city chime in many ways with the evolving language of cinema throughout this century. In the 1920s, the developing principles of montage appeared to be reflected in the subjective experience of urban life and the modernist fascination with technology and industry. In Russia, in particular, the ideological exaltation of the proletariat ensured a favourable disposition towards the urban experience. The Constructivist director, Dziga Vertov, exemplified this most clearly, his 1929 film Man With A Movie Camera, charting life on the streets of Moscow from dawn to dusk. Vertov's City Symphony spawned many imitations around the world, but none of them approached the original film's intelligent exploration of the tension at the heart of any attempt to grasp the fleeting ephemerality of city life on film without resort to artifice.

The advent of Stalinism put paid to the experimentation of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, but in other countries, film-makers were finding very different ways of imagining the urban. Fritz Lang's dystopian vision of the city of the future in Metropolis (1927) doesn't stand up to much scrutiny for its plot, but it's one of the most remarkable examples of the recurring desire of film-makers to create imaginary cityscapes (adding force, perhaps, to the argument that filmmaking is closer to architecture than to any other form of expression). Four years later, Lang made the memorable psychological thriller M, which shares with Metropolis one of the abiding concerns of urban cinema, the fear of the submersion of the individual under the irresistible power of the mob. These films foreshadow the contemporary rise of fascism, of course, but their influence can be traced right up to the present day.

In America, as the world lurched into Depression in the early 1930s, the Hollywood studios, looking for new ways to tell stories with sound, reacted with new images of the city. In Busby Berkeley-choreographed musicals such as 42nd Street, it's a place of danger, but also of opportunity for the penniless and ambitious. In the gangster movies of the same period, particularly those produced by Warner Brothers, urban squalor and deprivation is often presented as the root cause of moral collapse and crime.

"The city" in most of these cases meant the metropolises of the East Coast. Although the bulk of the American film industry had been based there for three decades, it was not until the arrival of film noir that Los Angeles became a regular setting for film drama. The noir films of the 1940s anticipate the spread-out urban spaces of the late 20th century, where the car becomes the locus for much of the action. With this change, the mob is replaced by something more nebulous - the city as a net of conspiracy and corruption, its strings pulled by invisible forces.

Of course, not all depictions of urban life were negative. If "the city", in the abstract, was a general subject, then more often than not New York was the particular. Lang was inspired to make Metropolis by his first glimpse of Manhattan after all, and even the Emerald City in The Wizard Of Oz bears more than a passing resemblance to the Big Apple. With the arrival of new, lighter camera equipment in the post-war years, film production moved increasingly out of the studios and onto the street. The city itself became a huge set to be exploited, as in the hyper-energetic 1949 musical On The Town, which set the standard for a slew of comedies and musicals glorifying the city's prosperity, symbolised by its supremely confident modernist architecture.

Location shooting was being put to a very different use in Europe, where the Italian neo-realists were taking their cameras on to the streets, filming with non-actors, and aiming for a new standard of authenticity in their representation of ordinary people's lives. The neo-realist movement proper may have only lasted a few years, but it was a huge influence on cinema verite in France and Direct Cinema in America, raising again the ever-present tension between "reality" and "artifice" in filming the city.

Throughout the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni used sterile urban landscapes to emphasise the futility and barrenness of modern man, while Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) strikingly employs the grandiloquent architecture of Fascist Italy to reinforce the moral inadequacy of his collaborationist antihero. For both film-makers, these man-made environments echo the inner emptiness of their characters.

As the 1960s shaded into the 1970s, the American modernist city, once a symbol of social progress, became a much more ambiguous place. In films such as Alan Pakula's The Parallax View or Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, the monolithic corporate architecture becomes oppressive and constricting, dwarfing the protagonists so that they seem like laboratory animals, running down endless corridors under the unblinking eye of the surveillance camera.

A more baroque urban space is conjured up in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, where the New York streets become a Dante-esque inferno of billowing steam and garish neon. It's possible to look back from Taxi Driver to Lang's M and forward to Mike Leigh's nightmarish Naked in an ever-lengthening line of films depicting the city as hell. In Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, the brutalist architecture of the Parisian banlieues is the backdrop to a simmering cauldron of racial and social tensions; Kassovitz was clearly influenced by the cinema of black American directors like Spike Lee and John Singleton, charting the collapse of the American inner cities into gun rule.

Meanwhile, the city itself becomes increasingly intangible, but also universal, a grey latticework of expressways, flyovers and slip-ways that looks much the same whether you're in Dallas or Dusseldorf. For a director like David Cronenberg, the could-be-anywhere suburbs of Toronto provide a perfect setting for his blood-soaked erotic parables. Cronenberg's version of J.G. Ballard's Crash simultaneously satirises and luxuriates in the fetishistic pleasures of car culture, the thrill of the 16-lane highway and the brutal beauty of pre-formed concrete.

Cronenberg's provocations are a minority taste, but the car crash, the explosion and the overwhelming disaster have always played a large part in commercial urban cinema. As always in film, technological developments have played a large part in all this. After 50 years of location shooting, the city is now increasingly becoming a computer creation. The phenomenon has been seen up to now mostly in fantasy/sci-fi blockbusters like The Fifth Element, or souped-up disaster movies like Independence Day, Godzilla and Armageddon. We're still at the point where technicians are showing off their new circus tricks, but as the technology becomes cheaper, quicker and more familiar, film-makers may choose to construct their urban environments digitally as a matter of course.

In Irish cinema, the representation - or lack of it - of the urban experience has been a bone of contention for many years, linked by some to the desire of foreign producers/investors to exploit a theme-park image of rural, unspoilt landscapes. Attempts to work within urban genres like the thriller have been sporadic and unsuccessful up until recently, although the near-simultaneous production of three films about gangster Martin Cahill will provide the opportunity for some interesting comparative studies. The Irish experience will be one of many questions addressed at next weekend's conference, which will feature contributions from a wide range of speakers from around the world, and promises papers on such fascinating and potentially provocative titles as "Cinema is to City as Television is to Suburbia"; "WarZones/CinemaScapes and the Representation of Sarajevo"; and "Murder on 42nd Street: The Curious Violence of Busby Berkeley's Urban Landscapes".

The Cinema And The City conference runs at the Centre for Film Studies, UCD, from Friday. March 12th to Sunday, March 14th. For further information, telephone Mark Shiel or Tony Fitzmaurice at 01 706 8629 or 708 78327; Fax: 01 706 8605; email: mashiel@ollamh.ucd.ie