Darkest Victorian London

Just a reminder about the guided walk on monday morning- it's 11.30am at Monument tube (Circle and District). We meet just outside the Fish Street Hill exit. It cost £7 and you pay in cash to the guide. It's a fantastic experience and you will learn loads and loads. I'll be there and looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible...

The webpage for 'London Walks' who organise the guided tour is here:

http://www.walks.com/Homepage/default.aspx

The Rules of Film Noir

Below is a link to a really good documentary on film noir that was broadcast last year on BBC4. It is available for you to download and watch on campus through B0B. Just click on the link and search for 'Rules of Film Noir'. The programme also features author George Pelecanos (see module booklet) as one of the noir experts:
https://bob.roehampton.ac.uk/index.php

Also, check out this interesting interview with the maker of documentary, Matthew Sweet:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/6056395/Why-the-recession-will-lead-to-a-renaissance-in-film-noir.html

For those who are going to write their essay on film noir or for those who are simply interested there is the film noir series on monday mornings starting in a couple of weeks time (I gave out a leaflet about this yesterday). Lastly, I've also been in informed that one of the films I will be showing in the series- The Third Man- which depects post-war Vienna is also available on BoB.

Multi-media project work begins today...

Today's session is really important as you'll be getting into your groups for the first time and deciding on topics for the multi-media project assessment.

Force of Evil

“You're wide open, Joe. I can see into you without looking.”

I hope you enjoyed or at the very least found interesting the film noir that we watched on Monday. Force of Evil is a well-respected example of the genre from 1948, set in New York City and directed by Abraham Polonsky. It is worth noting that both Polonsky and the lead John Garfield (Joe Morse) were investigated by HUAC during the communist scare of the late 1940s/ early 1950s and were eventually blacklisted, or prevented from working on Hollywood movies.

I should say however that it is not necessarily easy to watch films noirs- the acting may seem wooden, the plots too complicated, the atmosphere too oppressive or the soundtrack too jarring. However, it is a rewarding process if you persevere and you soon realise just how much of modern cinema owes to the film noir. You’ll get another chance to watch some noir on Monday when we look at some classic scenes from Jules Dassin’s (1948) Naked City.

Many of themes that I spoke about in the lecture are apparent in Force of Evil. I will pick out just a few here. First, the film was undoubtedly concerned with psychological states. Joe Morse, the key protagonist, was portrayed as a highly confident man with a conflicted conscience- torn between making ‘his first million’ and looking after his brother Leo who ran a small numbers bank in the slums (most probably the Lower East Side of Manhattan) where they grew up. Joe was principled in the sense that he didn’t want his brother to go under when the numbers came in, yet he would not let this stop him from pursuing his own greed. As the plot unwound, we also saw Joe become more paranoid- the scene where the wiretap on his phone is revealed by the clicking as he lifts the receiver is a good example of this. Joe spirals into despair at the end of the film when he realises that his actions and caused the death of his brother. He walks down the stairs to the river bank, where he feels like he has reached ‘the bottom of the world’.

Second, the film fits neatly into the left-wing style of film noir that I mentioned in the lecture. Force of Evil offers a critique of capitalism and the greed and selfishness that this economic system engenders. Indeed it is possible to suggest that Joe, his brother Leo or Doris are not ‘guilty’ or morally reprehensible for working in the illegal numbers racket, they are simply doing what they have to do in order to get by in an unfair system. This is an amoral city, in an immoral system. Leo attempts to be principled by refusing Joe’s offer to work in one of the soon to be legalised betting offices. However, the film shows that principles have no place in capitalism when the humble and honourable Leo eventually ends up dead, having been drawn into the gang dispute. There is also a revealing line earlier in the film where Joe explains that ‘money has no smell’, implying that there is no such thing as ‘dirty money’, or that all money is dirty in some respect. In terms of crime, Force of Evil is fairly typical of films noirs in the sense that it focuses on organised crime. In this film, the underworld of organised crime is shown to be woven intricately into the legal, or respectable world. Indeed, Joe Morse is himself a successful lawyer, albeit a crooked one working for a gangster who runs a numbers game. The message is that organised crime is part of the fabric of ‘ordinary’ capitalism, and that the system could not function without illegal trades and rackets- again, money has no smell.


Third, the city in Force of Evil is shown to be a trap, or a labyrinth. The main spaces of the city are the downtown offices, nightclubs and bars and the slum district where Leo runs his numbers bank and where he and Joe grew up. It is implied to us that Joe has left the ‘old’ neighbourhood- moving up in world, no doubt, - and rarely returns. Yet, during the film, Joe is drawn back to the tenements a number of times, trying to persuade his brother to accept his offer of ‘legitimate’ employment in a big office. Even if Joe feels as if he has left his roots in the poorer part of the city behind he cannot escape them. In fact, it is his self-interested ‘concern’ for his brother that eventually ruins him. A revealing scene, I feel, come close to the end when Joe is seen drowning his sorrows in a jazz bar accompanied by Doris. Doris, who cannot decide whether to fall for the cocky yet vulnerable Joe, is imploring Joe to ‘find an escape’ and to get out of the trap set by the city (which itself is a reflection of the psychic conflict that he is experiencing). Escape from his self therefore also entails an escape from the city, with its traps, cons, entanglements and sentimental lures. Doris appears finally willing to help Joe, yet the news of his brother’s death sends Joe down a final dead end. At the end of the film, Joe is pictured looking up from beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge perhaps symbolising, at last, a way out of the corrupt city- a force of evil indeed.

The Paris Commune 1871 (part 3)

Yet after only a week, the commune came under attack by some elements of the French army, which was being reorganised and reinforced rapidly by the government at Versailles. At the start of April the National Guard began fighting regularly with the regular French army. Throughout April and May the guard were pushed back and on May 21 the Versaillese troops began the reconquest of the city, from the wealth districts of the West. There was no big defence plan. Rather each local district, or quartier, fought desperately for survival. This was made easier of course by Haussmann’s destruction of the tangle of narrow streets and widening of the boulevards. They also had greater numbers and a centralised command from Versailles. Government troops slaughtered the National Guard. There was a ‘bloody week’ of fighting at barricades and the toughest resistance came from the east of the city. According to legend the last barricade was at Rue Ramponeau in Belleville (ironically now a gentrified district).

The number of communards slaughtered during the bloody week of fighting is hard to ascertain although some estimate the number may be close to 50,000. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned at Versailles for supporting the commune. The living dialectic of control and resistance can be extremely violent.

Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris. The crimes of the insurgents have surpassed the most gloomy forebdings of what would be accomplished under the Red Flag. The burning of paris was diabolical; the shooting of the hostages ‘a deed without a name’. But it seems as if we were destined to forget the work of these maddened savages in the spectacle of the vengeance wreaked upon them. The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘party of Order’, sicken the soul. (The Times, 1 June 1871)

Socialists and communists continue to revere the Paris Commune. Lenin and Marx described it as a living example of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. At Lenin’s funeral his body was even wrapped in the remains of a red and white flag preserved from the commune. Urbanists tend to view the commune as an example of how cities can perform an emancipatory function, they can be forces of dynamic processes, the site where the possible can be realised. Government’s, the police and business community are more to think about how such events can be prevented in the future.

The Paris Commune 1871 (part 2)

Part 2 of the lecture on the Paris Commune is below. This part deals with the National Guard and the establishment of the commune. Part 3 follows monday...

Many ordinary Parisians objected to the Prussian presence in the city and joined an armed militia known as the ‘National Guard’ who saw it as their duty, in light of government’s capitulation, to defend their city. Units of the guard, usually situated in the poorest districts of the city, elected their own leaders who included many radical and socialist leaders. Thus, the increasingly organised working class population of Paris was defiant in the face of France’s defeat and were prepared to fight if the German army provoked them. A further factor was the vacuum in power in the city caused by the move of France’s national assembly from Bordeaux to Versailles, just outside Paris. The government, in its chaotic state, was concerned that the National Guard had so many weapons at their dispersal and also a growing authority within the city itself. They ordered French soldiers to seize weapons and according to soem commentators they were also ordered to fire at a crowd of the National Guard and civilians. Yet the soldiers were too demoralised to carry out these orders and one by one many army units joined the popular rebellion. In a state of panic, the government then ordered an evacuation of the city by all remaining forces, by Police and by administrators of every kind. Effectively the central committee of the National Guard was now the new government in Paris. It hastily arranged elections and formally established a government on 26 March 1871. During the uprising Haussmann ruefully regretted that he had not been able to complete all his renovations, especially those in the East of the city, in time to prevent the revolt.

The new commune, as it became known, discarded the tricolore flag replacing it with a socialist red flag. It also introduced a number of policies such as the separation of church and state (forbidding the teaching of religion in schools), the abolition of night work in bakeries and the right of employees to take over and run and enterprise if had been deserted by its owner. Many districts also implemented their own projects such as the IIIe, which provided school materials for free and established an orphanage. There were also feminist inspired policies to disregard the distinction between married women and concubines and between legitimate and illegitimate children. They also advocated the abolition of prostitution and the closure of official brothels.

Two and half hours of 'Crime, Culture and the City' music now on Spotify

Just to remind you that there is some music that fits the themes, cities and time periods covered in the module available for you on 'spotify'. You can click on the link below:

http://open.spotify.com/user/nzamba/playlist/0WwE4l4GinTfbfPTtFIeMm

The Paris Commune 1871 (part 1)

As promised, here is something on the Paris Commune, a topic that I talked about only very briefly in the lecture. I'm posting this in sections so that it is easier to digest...

Part One deals with the background and context, including Baron Haussmann.

There is an awful lot we could say about the Paris commune, we could run a whole module on this in fact. However we will deal with it briefly here, whilst also placing it suitably in context. In short, the Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 28 to May 28, 1871. Principally, it was a government comprised of workers and their representatives, who demanded that Paris should be self-governing with its own elected council. This famous episode in history which lasted two months was bitter and eventually bloody, highlights once more and in a more graphic manner the ongoing dialectic of control and resistance that has characterised the modern metropolis.

The popular uprising in working class arrondisements that led to the commune was not supposed to happen. This was because between 1852 and 1870 Baron Haussmann had reconstructed Paris under the instruction of Napoleon III. Haussmann’s planning was influenced by many factors, not least was Paris’ history of street revolutions. There was also a concern, as was the case in London, with overcrowding, filth and disease in poor areas of city. Much of the concern was brought on by the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed the lives of 20,000 Parisians. It was believed that to prevent disease, ‘men and air should circulate’. As such the renovations were based upon the expropriation and clearance of the very worst districts which wide sweeping boulevards built in the place. These new roads were also claimed to enable public authority and to control a capital that had overthrown several regimes since 1789. The new large straight avenues helped to manoeuvre troops. Haussmann never hesitated to explain that his street plan would ease the maintenance of public order. Haussmann’s projects were funded by the French banks but controlled and managed by the state.

Critics pointed to the social rupture caused by the renovation of many working class districts. The city centre improvements prompted a rise in rents and forced poorer families towards the cities outer arrondissements. Thus the population decreased in the centre and grew in the more peripheral districts. There was also an imbalance, in line perhaps with London, between a new and wealthy West and a poorer, underprivileged and relatively untouched East. Alistair Horne (2007) writes that far from piercing the main trouble centres of the city, by neglecting some areas he produced a resentful apartheid, with infinitely more dangerous proletarian ‘red’ spaces such as the arrondissements of Belleville and Menilmontant. Greater concentration of the poor made self-organisation and self-determination easier- as the commune demonstrated.

This forms part of the context for the Paris commune. The other key aspect was the Franco-Prussian war. Prussia was a German Empire that eventually defeated France in a 10-month war leading up to the commune. Paris itself was under siege by 1870 and the gap between the rich and poor in the city had widened. In addition, the demoralization caused by the occupation of the city and subsequent armistice as well as food shortages caused widespread discontent amongst the impoverished working class in Paris.

Part 2 tomorrow follows the role of the National Guard.