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Leonardo Ciacci,
IUAV - History of Architecture Department, Palazzo Badoer, S. Polo 2554, 30125 Venice
Tel: 041 2571421, 719153, Fax: 041 715459
Email: ciacci@iuav.unive.it

Remaking History to Plan the City, in Town Planners' Movies
by Leonardo Ciacci

'Warburg taught 'that it is possible to make articulate human voices heard even from documents of little importance', perhaps catalogued amongst the 'curiosities' capable of interesting only historians of custom'. (Carlo Ginsburg, 1966)

) cf., Carlo Ginsburg, Da Warburg a E. Gombrich, Note su un problema di metodo, in “Studi medievali” series III, VII (1966), pp. 1015-65, now in Carlo Ginsburg, Miti Emblemi Spie, Einaudi, Turin 1992 (1986), p. 29-106.

The films being screened:

) Technical notes on the three films are appendixed to the text. For further information cf. L. Ciacci, Il Cinema degli urbanisti, INU-Modena City Council, Modena 1977.

Pour mieux comprendre Paris, directed by H. de Lallier, screenplay by Marcel Poëte, France 1935 (5')
The City, directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, screenplay by Lewis Mumford, USA 1939 (44')
Una lezione di urbanistica, directed by Gerardo Guerrieri, screenplay by Giancarlo De Carlo, Gerardo Guerrieri, Jaques Lecoq, Billa Pedroni, Italy 1954 (10')

Undertaking a new study using cinema archives as the main source of information is fraught with difficulty. This is not only due to the lack of academic recognition given to such a choice if the researcher is not a film historian or critic. It is more substantially related to two types of not easily resolved problems which continually cropped up in the course of these studies. The first lies in the conviction common to all spectators (therefore also my colleagues, the first to see the results of the work), that cinema is a public property, available to anyone with the time to seat themselves in the dark and watch a film. Making it natural to think that re-screening a film does not amount to research work. The second relates to the mixture of languages, to the necessity of using a large number of specific parameters to interpret the moving images, a research condition that produces a sensation of unremitting amateurism and improvisation.

Nevertheless, if one decides to embark on a study of this type, it is important to recognise from the outset that both of these irritating problems actually correspond to the two principle qualities of the material selected for interpretation.

In spite of what is commonly thought possible, cinema does not lend itself well to an immediate, superficial reading. The production of any type of film, from the most openly fanciful fiction to the most rigidly scientific documentary, requires the construction of a set in which the conditions of 'reality' may be obtained only through 'make-believe'. The coloured tropical fish of the coral reef that feature in nature documentaries, for example, could never be shot if they were not made to swim in the few centimetres of water of a specially constructed aquarium. The same is true of that which every film reproduces, of 'the history' it recounts. In cinema there is no space for description: every detail is the fruit of a combination of representations technically corresponding to single fragments (sequences, shots, close-ups, etc.) destined for editing according to a programme (a screenplay) which gives all the material used a conscious, controlled interpretation.

) On the possibilities of using cinema as a source of history, see M. Ferro, Cinema e Storia, Milan 1980 (Paris 1977); Anthony Aldgate, Film and History, London 1979; G. Ferrara, Cineocchio e cinemenzogna, in M. Cardillo, Il duce in moviola, Edizioni Dedalo, Bari 1983; G. Tinazzi, Il secolo che si vede, Marsilio, Venice 1966.

This is nothing new to the historian. Interpretation of a cinematographic film, like any other document, must begin with a reconstruction of the conditions under which it was made, of the identity of its 'writers', and of the reasons for its production, according to a necessary and inevitable analysis. Nevertheless, once this has been done, an answer to the central question will still not have been found. Why carry out all this work to obtain already known data, given that these are what the director and scriptwriter of the film have inevitably consulted and re-employed, taking them from an already written text, from an already noted event and, in this case, from already completed projects?

All three films in this screening duplicate these conditions. The subject of The City, with commentary written by Lewis Mumford, is the new industrial and residential town built at the end of the nineteen-thirties by the Tennessee Valley Authority to take advantage of electricity from the hydroelectric dam on the river at Norris, Tennessee. The film was made when this town was still being completed, so some of the aerial and ground scenes of the new residential areas are actually of a place called Radburn, a satellite suburb built in New Jersey from 1928 by the architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright (friends and co-founders, with Mumford, of the RPAA, the Regional Planners Association of America).

) cf. Clarence Stein, Verso nuove città per l'America, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1969 (1957).

This could also be said of the first part of the film, which follows the same pattern as The Culture of Cities, published by Mumford in the same year the film was produced, 1938. In the film, as in the book, an idyllic image of pre-industrial civilisation is compared with the smoky, dismal, neurotic life of the megalopolis. The voice accompanying the film's images of unthinkable industrial suburbs lazily recites that 'smoke makes prosperity', casting serious doubts. If it had not been necessary to alter dates and places for a mainly American audience, the American colonial village would have been substituted with one of the Medieval European villages Mumford regarded as the ideal expression of the balance between urban space and organisation of community life. So what is to be sought in the cinema that can not be known from other more dependable sources? Why risk looking amongst 'unreliable' images for documentation that other archives offer with quite different precision and reliability?

The answer is this: in cinema there is the audience. The identity of the audience to whom the images were directed for the first time is recorded between the frames of every cinematographic film. And, in no small sense, so is the identity of each one of the audiences that have seen and will see the images at every subsequent screening. Our own identity as the latest in a series of spectators is also inevitably already written into every film. Each time light passes through the celluloid and is projected onto the screen, the same condition is repeated. The audience is struck by it and a process of identification-projection is set in motion, which involves and transforms, according to the language of image and emotions. When, on the contrary, the conditions necessary for this to take place are not present, it is of no use whatsoever accompanying the images with words and, furthermore, no effort is made to produce this type of film, nor to bring existing ones out of the storeroom, where they will remain forgotten for more years to come. Essentially, a film document is in every case a non-random event, to be read mainly for that which it indirectly conceals between one image and another.

Before going on, then, it is necessary to clarify some points. Why did town planners and authorities on urban questions decide to get involved in something so far outside their own fields: making films? What significance is there in pointing out a tangible connection between the production dates of these films - the end of the thirties in one case, and the fifties in the other? What exactly can be seen in these films apparently made to illustrate urban transformation projects? What research results are obtained from this source that are not obtainable from other sources offering informations that are apparently the same, on the same topics?

The third of the three films you are going to see is certainly the best place to begin such an inquiry, being part of a programme in which the event, constructed for the involvement of a largely predictable audience seems to have been knowingly controlled. De Carlo, Doglio and Quaroni were in those years all consciously, though in different ways, directed towards research into the collective participation of the public in achieving the transformation of the city. Una lezione di urbanistica, one of the three films in the Trilogia, ends with this call: 'Go into your city, man, and work with those who want to make it more human, more similar to yourself.' In order for this exhortation to be continually heard by visitors to the exhibition, the entire staging was set up as a silent film with alternate images and black 'posters' with captions. The route necessary to view the material on display was organised so as to be physically perceived as a pathway, in the course of which the three films halted the visitor in a central space, in darkness, with their cinematic images. According to the curators themselves, it was an initiative full of ingenuity, but one that was consciously intended as a substantial example of town planning in action. So here, then, is the need for the controversy contained in Una lezione di urbanistica, sustaining the hypothesis of participatory town planning as an alternative to and improvement on designed town planning, technical town planning or town planning authoritatively calculated on the basis of statistics.

) The three films produced in occasion of the X Triennale di Milano, nel 1954, were also intended for screening in normal cinemas, something which did not then come about.

) While De Carlo (according to Carlo Doglio, 'the only one with an international standing at that time (1954), cf. G. De Carlo, C. Doglio, R. Mariani, A. Samonà, Le radici malate dell'urbanistica italiana, Moizzi Editore, Milan 1976, p. 63) is certainly the most decisive supporter of 'participation' as active practice within the processes of town planning, and was to demonstrate it in real terms in a particularly important way with the Rimini Plan of the early 1970s, both Doglio and Quaroni were in those years at work on the drafting of the 'Ivrea Plan'. This was supported by Adriano Olivetti, then President of the INU (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica) and founder of the Community Movement, who, while giving it a more political bias, based its activity on the concepts and forms of participation in physical and social transformation.

) It is again Doglio who expresses this opinion, cf. G. De Carlo, C. Doglio, R. Mariani, A. Samonà, Le radici malate dell'urbanistica italiana cit.

In all films of the kind discussed here, the disciplinary controversy, the alternate comparison with theories different from that sustained in the individual film, is an essential compositional component of this type of filmed message, and of the significance therefore attributed to the images. In this context, though, a curious circumstance must be pointed out with regard to the grouping of the three films of the Trilogia at the 1954 Triennial. The sequence in which they are normally presented does not seem to be the original one. The recent unearthing of the original reel used for the exhibition screening, in the archives of the Triennial, has also brought the original order to light. It appears that the films were originally edited in this order: Una lezione di urbanistica (the clash between different disciplinary theories), La citta degli uomini (a re-reading of the history of the city, allowing the spectator to be conducted towards an interpretation of the present situation, the urban problems of the reconstruction period) and Cronache dell'urbanistica italiana (another re-reading of recent history in light of the proposed plan formulated on a radically innovative basis). When a new public screening of the Trilogia was organised in Rimini by Carlo Doglio in 1975 as part of a debate supporting De Carlo's plan for that city, the order of the three films was inverted and the sequence still accepted as correct was definitively fixed.

) After the years of its first screening, the film was once again taken out of its can for a recent screening at the exhibition Il cinema degli urbanisti, which took place in Modena on 16 and 17 May 1997, organised by the writer on the initiative of the INU Emilia Romagna in association with the Modena City Council.

) cf. G. De Carlo, C. Doglio, R. Mariani, A. Samona, Le radici malate dell'urbanistica italiana cit.

This change in the entire sequence of the films may appear to be of little importance, were it not for the mention of a similar fate befalling four other films in a similar case.

In 1928, Ernst May, who in those years (1925-30) was co-ordinator of the Frankfurt building office, made four short films now under the general title of Neues Bauen in Frankfurt am Main. The four films show how much his office was doing in the study and experimentation of new prefabricated building methods for use in the construction of satellite residential suburbs in Germany. They are dedicated, in order, to the design of the 'existenzminimum' and its variants, to the functional kitchen, the 'Frankfurt Kitchen' and to new building prefabrication systems. Curiously, Neues Bauen in Frankfurt am Main, as well as being the title of the whole series, is also that of the third film of the four in their currently accepted order. It shows the system of prefabricating individual modular elements (a kind of Lego in reinforced concrete), made up of hooked and overlaid panels using the 'Frankfurter Montagenverfahren o May'sche Plattenbauweise' patent, and employed by 'Philipp Holzmann A.G. of Frankfurt'. Many of the scenes used in this film are repeated in the subsequent and fourth film: Die Häurerfabrik der Stadt Frakfurt am Main (Building houses in the city of Frankfurt). In this last film, the system of prefabricating individual elements in the workshop is joined by the procedure of on-site prefabrication. With this method, entire walls are prefabricated with fitted windows and doors inserted into the formwork right from the casting stage, 'according to the 'Bron' patents used by the 'Società edile tedesca Occident s.r.l.' di Berlino'. It seems possible to advance the hypothesis that the last two films were made before the two preceding them in the current screening order.

) It is unlikely that the film in which all this is effectively represented was not intended to have a favoured place at the second CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) congress held in Frankfurt in 1929, and entirely dedicated to the study of the lodging: 'Die Wohnung fur das Exsistenzminimum'. It is known that a screening took place at that time, but there is no indication of the type of circulation intended for these films in a non-specialist arena.

) The titles of the individual films of the Neues Bauen in Frankfurt am Main series (A new way of building in Frankfurt) are: Die Frankfurter Kleinstwohnung (the existenzminimum in Frankfurt) length 6', Die Frankfurter Kuche (the Frankfurt Kitchen), length 8', Neues Bauen in Frankfurt am Main  (A new way of building in Frankfurt) length 10 ', and Die Häurerfabrik der Stadt Frakfurt am Main (Building houses in the city of Frankfurt) length 11'. The films were directed by Paul Wolff, from subjects by Ernst May and produced by Wolff Film of Frankfurt, in 16 mm., black and white, silent with sub-titles. The event that led to the making of this series of shorts is still not entirely known in detail, due to the dispersion of the archives from which the necessary information would have been gained. What is known is now in Marco Magagnin, Neues Bauen in Frankfurt am Main. La nuova Francoforte di Ernst May in quattro film del 1928, Degree thesis IUAV, 1997, supervisor L. Ciacci.

) From the film's captions.

A few apparently marginal clues can be found to this. In first place is the already mentioned correspondence between the main title and that of the third film. Secondly, the typeface used for the titles and subtitles of the last two films, a 'classical' italic style, is clearly different from, and 'older' than, the more rational 'Bastoni' face used in the first two. Finally, consideration must inevitably be made to the greater possibility of financing films promoting a construction system that is 'on sale' (one explicit shot of a working crane shows the name of the construction company at work on the site) compared to that available for films showing experimental, avant garde architectural projects. Due to the lack of data, it is difficult to say whether the current sequence is that of the screening made at the Frankfurt CIAM in 1929, or one resulting from the recent transfer of the original films onto VHS video cassette by one of the curators of the archives where they are kept. What can, however, be conjectured, is an evident reversal of the original sequence into a new, more markedly town planning order: from the project to its implementation.

The considerations that may be made on the basis of these facts lead to this hypothesis: the screening of films of a specialist nature, aimed at the general public, require the composition of the message - a priority in proposing the individual arguments, the different chapters of the narrative - in a quite different, even inverted, order to that required for the screening of the same material to an audience of specialists within the same discipline.

More explicitly, when the three films of the Trilogia were screened for visitors to the Triennal in Milan in 1954, the message was composed according to a sequence that could be summarised as: '1) not all exponents of a discipline make the same interpretation of the matters they deal with, we are presenting you with our interpretation; 2) the reasons for this lie in the different possible conceptions of history and of aspects leading up to the present period, we are showing you our history of the city; 3) these are the reasons why schemes dedicated to the solution of similar problems are so different; we are showing you our scheme'. The procedure is deductive and tends to present the final choices as the inevitable, logical consequences of a proper reading of reality.

When the same material is presented to specialists and a smaller circle of other people directly involved in a specific debate, however, the order is reversed: '1) this is our new project; 2) it is a natural consequence of our proper reading of history; 3) inevitably, its (our) theoretical base implies rejection of the errors contained in theoretical positions sustained by others'. This time the procedure is inductive: that which could have seemed discretionary and unjustified to a generic audience, is presented to a restricted circle as an assertion, before being justified. The same reasoning would seem to apply to the Frankfurt films, even if in that case the circumstances are different.

The tone of this interpretation is possibly rather forced. The circumstances and the actions to which it is applied are certainly to be taken as the spontaneous and 'unconscious' results, in a certain sense, of practices stemming from the unwritten rules of a 'specialist language', quite prior to anyone's specific artfulness. What is important to deduce from this reading is a possible proof of what was previously asserted: the audience is the real quality of these materials. The audience enters into the film and actively conditions its content, even if in an indirect way. So that which can usefully and correctly be drawn from this historical source is not in the images of something already known, but rather in the reconstruction-interpretation it allows, of the ways in which contacts have existed in particular historical circumstances between specialised technical sectors and users, between 'cultivated' culture and 'common sense' culture, between technical-political operators and suppliers of consensus on the subjects of the city and its transformation. The cinema, in essence, helps rediscover images of the change, and through this the collective reasons that have produced the big transformations of space and meaning in the history of the city.

As inevitably happens when launching into intuitive research work, one finishes up by restricting references taken from the literature - perhaps excessively - thereby running the risk of over-exposing one contribution to the detriment of others which could be considered equally, and possibly more, important. Some years ago I spent considerable time dwelling on the sentence Luigi Piccinato used to end the last of his presentations at the International Planning History Conference in Lucca in 1975, when he said that 'it is necessary to have historic awareness'. This was undoubtedly a declaration packed with possible meanings. To which of these should we give preference? It is necessary to have awareness of the historical nature of the city, the object to which a town planner mainly directs his work?. Or, more ideally, it is necessary to have awareness of the historic importance of one's own work on the city? Piccinato certainly did not intend limiting himself to the paternal homily of a master nearing the end of his career. In an old article of his from 1949, Invito alla storia dell'urbanistica, the same insistence on the term 'awareness' can be found. Indeed, in that case, thirty years earlier, it appears to have been the central thread of his reflection.

) I am thinking mainly of Gedes and Mumford.

) cf. R. Martinelli and L. Nuti, La storiografia urbanistica, Lucca 1976.

) Having in mind the contrast between a theory of city conceived 'in its externalised, aesthetic, formal aspect' and one considered 'in its complete and logical exception, that sees the city as a living organism in which all those elements that act en masse (technical, demographic, historic, architectonic...) indissolubly balance and complete one another.' cf. Luigi Piccinato, Invito alla storia dell'urbanistica, in, “Metron” 33-4 1949, p. 7-12.

What concerned Piccinato in that article was what to oppose to the sterile idea that makes the 'project', 'or rather, the plan' coincide with the regularity of form - an idea established when 'one proceeds [...] to the identification of 'town planning styles' (such as was done with architectonic styles) - since this is evidently '...a completely antihistorical thought [in which] the city is seen not as a social product, but solely an aesthetic fact...' And, to Piccinato, 'pseudohistoric' was also the position of 'looking at the technical aspect, exalting its strength as a single positive fact... still very much in vogue...'.

) Ibid. p. 7.

The word 'awareness' appears in the article a first time when Piccinato describes the work of those building technicians who resolved 'problems separately, one by one... (only rarely reaching the synthesis represented by architecture, and almost always without being aware of it)...'. It appears a second time when, on the subject of the history of this century, Piccinato writes that ''awareness' amongst town planning technicians that the city is, also materially, a collective fact with its own social content that alone can justify it' arrived rather late. And, again, when he recognises that 'such awareness, appeared in the spirit of economists and philologists before that of technicians', '...until finally, Gantner (a philologist, mind, not a technician) was able to pose the concept of scheme as work of art, or rather, as expression of a culture, a life, a civilisation, and therefore closely related to the organism of the city...'. Then, finally, 'awareness' of the city assumes its full meaning when Piccinato concludes that: '...the crisis in which town planning is now floundering (and from which it is perhaps emerging) has its roots in something deeper, more grandiose and more serious than the technical-functional, or the aesthetic-formal, but is rather at the very roots of our civilisation and our society. [...] if we want to intervene, acting in the present chaos of our urban life (and if we want it quite resolutely), in order to propose solutions and alleviate the problem, it is primarily necessary to acquire awareness of the city. And only the history of town planning can give us this'.

) Ibid. p. 9.

) Ibid. p. 11.

) Ibid. p. 12. Italics mine.

Piccinato seems to want to establish a substantial connection between town planning history and the history of the city, eliminating any possibility of space for a history of town planning as a simple history of the discipline. 'Only now, then, that the meaning of 'city' is clear, is a history of town planning possible'. Not only, but in this interpretation, history of the city and awareness of the city end up coinciding, with the recognition that 'the city should be seen and studied as collective work of art'.

) 'There is, in fact, an important, fundamental law: that of adherence of the plan [.] to the structure of the city... adherence of the 'urbs' to the 'civitas'. 'Adherence is the 'condizio sine qua non' for proving the worth of the plan... [a condition without which] there is no historical or critical basis. In such a case, the plan is no longer an object of town planning history, but may be of interest, if any, only to the history of design'. Ibid. p. 11.

) Ibid. p. 10-11.

) 'The city, in reality, is the expressive description of culture and civilisation. All the great historic events and great monuments have not only had the city as their theatre, but are, in a certain manner, 'events of the city'. '...a city which 'expresses' the moment of a culture, is in itself a work of art'. 'A work of art to which all citizens make contributions, which are, in a certain sense, collective even when they seem individual, because it is lived by an organised community, or rather, a society: the city should be seen and studied as a collective work of art'.' The city is an organism, where 'Organic has its richest, deepest meaning... that of being created, of living the same life as the citizens...' Ibid. p. 11.

The collective nature of the action producing the work of art referred to by Piccinato is, of course, in the experience of all. Only in small part is it a collectiveness recognisable in the overall actions that daily, episode by episode, constantly transform the nature, the form and the meaning of the inhabited space. In order for the city to be able to produce that type of slow modification, it must necessarily pass through short but highly intensive moments of episodic transformation. These are self-contained, but are so symbolically potent that they are able to guide the totality of similar, repeated actions that invariably follow them over the medium-long term. The collective nature of the construction is, in other words, perceptible only in episodic moments, lived collectively by the spontaneous and freely sought participation of all. These are historic moments in which not to be present and participate produces an individually unsustainable anxiety. In those moments, the attention of everyone is alive and vigilant; everyone wants to be informed on what is changing in their spatial references and in the rules establishing the new physical confines of that which is individual, private, within that which is collective, public.

It is in those moments that a town planner may think - and such was the case in the circumstances to which this reflection makes reference - that a highly emotive means of mass communication (even in the case of a documentary, the language of images does not refrain from exploiting the emotional) can provide him with the right tool for giving his own particular stimulus to a situation in transformation, and for 'achieving awareness of the city'. And cinema allowed a collective contact, even if limited, for acting on the city as 'collective work of art'. In these films, then, it is a waste of time searching amongst the images that illustrate one specific urban or town planning project. What these films conserve are the images with which their authors wanted to propose a precise version of the history of the city and of its role in the culture of a civilisation at a time when this was undergoing transformation.

The first film in the programme, Pour mieux comprendre Paris, by Marcel Poëte, lends itself well to a reading of this kind. What did Poëte think would remain of his interpretation of the genesis and development of the city of Paris in the memory of any Parisian spectator?. His interpretation was a cultivated, difficult one that was, above all, projected at high speed in a couple of minutes to spectators seated in the cinema. Certainly not much that could reasonably be remembered. Perhaps a few images, or perhaps some combination of images. Or perhaps only the idea that Paris - in 1935 a big, modern capital, thanks also to the presence of that movie theatre itself - was the result of a long history, of millennia; and, above all, a result that was so different from those that had produced London, Berlin, New York, Chicago etc.

Would the average Parisian have been able to imagine that so much unrepeatable individuality could be demolished? Was it possible to conceive of violently interrupting the evolution of that living, vital organism, and substituting it with an entirely new city, specially constructed to remodel the space of modern life - that of the new era of motor cars and industry - as was being preached with extraordinary power of suggestion by the hated Le Corbusier?

It would be no surprise if this was, in fact, what had spurred a careful, prolix scholar, mindful of the smallest detail, as Poëte proved to be, to accept 'three minutes' as the maximum time within which to contain four volumes of thousands of pages, and other reflections with quite complicated theoretical implications. And here is an interesting point. One does not oppose a project regarded as highly dangerous and unacceptable, such as Le Corbusier's must have seemed to Poëte, by attacking the proposals, but by indirectly demolishing its historical authenticity.

) The reference is obviously to the 'city for three million inhabitants' published by Le Corbusier in Urbanism, in 1925, together with his proposal for the application of those same theoretical principles to the city of Paris with 'Plan Voisin'. cf. Le Corbusier, Urbanistica, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1967 (Paris 1925).

'The city is an organism [about which] we can come to know the characteristics, the nature of its structure' Le Corbusier had written ten years previously, concluding that, 'the study of a city falls within scientific research, given that it is a sufficiently coherent complex for its laws to be determined'. So the history of the city cannot but be tackled in its most general terms, focusing on a recomposition of the conditions governing the relationship between man and nature in the various periods according to which construction of the physical forms in the inhabited space was begun.

) cf. ibid. p. 79.

For Poëte, on the contrary, 'the city is a living organism' and as such destined to transform itself cyclically, evolving according to its conditions of life, quite concrete and unique in each case, through to such a time when something intervenes and interrupts that life, transforming the living city into a ruin, an archaeological relic.

) cf. M. Poëte, La città antica. Introduzione all'urbanistica, Einaudi, Turin 1958, (Paris, 1929).

To continue down this road, it must be admitted that the clash between different positions in town planning, before being a clash between alternative schemes, is a clash between alternative histories of the city. All the classics of theoretical town planning literature proceed in the same manner. A finished scheme, already defined in its general structure, is only then followed by a history of the city. In the light of the new, intentionally formulated premise, the choices of the proposed scheme cannot but appear the logical and 'natural' consequence. This is true of Le Corbusier, as it is also true of Cerdà, Sitte and everyone else who has posed these same problems. On the other hand, it must be the fate of every 'utopia', of every all-encompassing scheme for the transformation of a city-society, if even Thomas More, only after having defined his Utopia and 'designed' his ideal social organisation, wrote the premise detailing the philosophical motivations and ideals. That this then became the first of the two sections of his treatise should not create any confusion over the order of precedence.

When town planners have translated their schemes and theoretical reflections into cinematographic images, they have amplified these aspects of their method of proceeding, to the point of divulging the substantial connection between theory and history of the city in simplified language. In all the Italian 'theoretical' town planning literature of this century, the first chapter is always dedicated to the city in its historical context according to a recurring division into periods (the Greek, Roman, Medieval city, etc.) which, even if contested, does not fail to be considered an inevitable stage. In reality it is a stage that allows the writer to define his personal leanings within one of the two big traditions which for more than a century have marked out the different town planning camps. The body of films some town planners made between the nineteen twenties and sixties makes it particularly easy to identify how the two main attitudes, the two town planning traditions, are opposed: the scientific-rational and the social-reformatory. These are implicit declarations that can be read in the presentation of the historical 'premise', in the definition of the planner's identity and the position he takes before his institutional (in particular) 'audience', and in the form of the message: didactic educator in one case, militant and ready for involvement in the other.

All this can be found in the documents of cinema archives which, read and interpreted in this way, are capable of adding an interesting chapter to the history of the city, and of what has been done in this century to direct its transformation.

The Films.
The three films being screened are different in terms of format, aim and nature, and are part of a group of films associated by one repeated feature: they spring from the initiative of scholars directly involved in the subjects of the history of the city and the planning of urban transformations.

The first film, Pour mieux comprendre Paris (To better understand Paris) with screenplay by Marcel Poëte, was produced by a private French film production company, ATLANTIC FILM. It was shot in black and white on 35 mm film with an off-screen spoken commentary and is 5 minutes 18 seconds in length. It is actually a short film in two parts (the second has not yet been found). After the first occasion, an exposition of planning, it was probably intended for screening in cinemas during the interval between two features, and therefore aimed at an indifferent, casually reached audience.

In order to appreciate its impact on the audience, it is worth noting that there was considerable interest in this type of film in the nineteen thirties. Indeed, this was sufficient to justify the existence of theatres showing only short, informative, current affairs films. These were mainly located near the main railway stations in the big cities: in London in 1933 there were nine theatres of this kind around the stations of Victoria and Waterloo. In 1936 one train on the London-Leeds line was even equipped for screening the Patè Gazzette

) cf. Antony Aldgate, Film and History, cit.

The ATLANTIC FILM series which includes Pour mieux comprendre Paris begins with the words '3 minute pour...', which suggests a repeated method of condensing an originally vast and complex subject into a few minutes, as was the case with the 'description' of the city of Paris. In 1935 Marcel Poëte (1866-1950) was, from 1903, curator of the Bibliothèque des Travaux Historiques de la Ville de Paris and town planning lecturer at the Ecole des hautes études urbains. His main work, the four volume Un vie de cité. Paris de sa naissance à nous jours (1924-1931), had already been published, as had the Introduction à l'Urbanisme. L'évolution des villes, of 1929. The cinema evidently added a new and potentially highly effective tool to those previously employed by Poëte in his pedagogic experimentation and dissemination, and to his plan for institutionalising 'a service destined for a vast audience...'. In this extremely short film, Poëte condenses his entire theory on the interpretation of the 'life of the urban organism' in the continuity of its history, quite comparable to that of all living organisms: renew one's life or die.

) 'To permit everyone to study the heritage it conserves is an obligation innately linked to the role it occupies, almost a mission', and links the efforts of Po‘te in town planning to that of another grand champion of the people's participation in active transformation of the city, the Scot, Patrick Geddes. cfr. Donatella Calabi, Marcel Poëte, un militante della storia urbana, in, “Urbanistica” no. 104, 1995. Also see, D. Calabi, Parigi anni venti. Marcel Poëte e le origini della storia urbana, Marsilio, Venezia 1997. The discovery of the film is owed to Calabi's archive research.

The second film, The City, which will occupy the central part of the screening is, unlike the first, the result of a precise programme of public financing. It was made with money set aside for cinema productions supporting the propaganda of the Roosevelt administration, the policies of the New Deal. A central role in the initiative was played by the American Institute of Planners, through which Lewis Mumford was invited to write the commentary, in this case, too, recited by an off-screen voice. The film was shot in black and white on 35 mm. film and is 44 minutes in length. Its first screening would have coincided with the opening of the New York World's Fair of 1939.

The film was made when the town planning scheme for the new town built by the Tennessee Valley Authority - which the film shows in detail - was still being completed. Lewis Mumford, whose involvement in the film evidently came after publication of his The Culture of Cities of 1938, had this to say on the scheme shown: 'Strangely, [it is] the most durable of the early building efforts in [President Roosevelt's] programme [and] even if it took years to complete this project and experimentally plan the details of distributing both electricity and social benefits, it long remained the most creative image of social democratic reconstruction'. This film's audience, unlike the first case, was from time to time a specific one: at schools, institutional occasions and town planning conferences. An audience, therefore, sought out by the film with its message of political propaganda.

) cf. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from life. The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. The Early Years, New York, 1982).

The comparisons engaged by this, and by the other films of the same series, with the political propaganda disseminated in Europe by totalitarian regimes through cinema are quite evident. Mumford himself, in The Culture of Cities, had defined the new 'regional city' shown in the film, as an example '...not merely aimed at a more efficient industrial order, but a new social order and a new kind of urban environment'. Some years later, in the Italian edition of this same text, after the war, he was able to be even more explicit: 'Even before the second world war, the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) showed that imagination and audacity are not the exclusive prerogative of a dictatorship. They are just as possible in a democracy with its eyes open'.

) cf. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of The City, Seker and Warburg, London 1938 (New York, 1938), p. 324.

)cf. Lewis Mumford, La cultura delle città, Einaudi, Turin 1954, p. 329.

What is most worth emphasising here is how the film's screenplay faithfully follows the same narrative order as Mumford's book, despite some adaptations made necessary by the completely American setting of the political message. It is a story of the city, beginning with (American) eighteenth century villages, organisms on a human scale, and going through to industrial megalopoli, dramatically directed towards their final stage of 'necropoli' unless alternative choices, such as those shown in the Tennessee Valley Authority's settlement scheme, are adopted in the meantime. It must be remembered that the film, apart from its cinematographic references to other films, such as The Crowd, a film by King Vidor of 1928, and Chaplin's Modern Times made in 1936, reproduces a model already used in a similar German film from 1930, Die Stadt von Morghen. Ein Film vom Städtebau (The City of Tomorrow. A town planning film), dedicated to exemplifying the planning procedure for a project to expand an industrial city, based on application of the principle of development by satellite residential units.

) cf. Die Stadt von Morghen. Ein Film vom Städtebau (The City of Tomorrow. A film on town planning) directed by Erich Kotzer, subject and screenplay by Maximillian.v. Golbeck (town planner for Nurimberg city council), collaboration from: Hans Stephan (director), Hans Hasse (jurist), Osvald Liede, Werner v. Walthausen (architects), Max Saüme (engineer). Produced by ATELIER SVEND NOLAN, Berlin; financed by Wolfahtsministerium (Ministry of Social Security), Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft (Rail and road company), Associations for the planning of Central Germany and Assia and the cities of Nurimberg and Hagen. 16 mm. format, black and white, silent with subtitles, length 30', Berlin 1930.

The third film, Una lezione di urbanistica, is one of three short films conceived and made by Giancarlo De Carlo, Carlo Doglio and Ludovico Quaroni, to be the focal point of the 'Town Planning Exhibition' staged at the X Triennial of Milan in 1954. Put together as the three chapters of a single book on town planning theory, they are, in fact, dedicated to three distinct but consequent arguments. Cronache dell'urbanistica italiana expresses an opinion on the town planning situation in Italy after two decades of fascism, and ends by showing a planning proposal, the rural village of 'La Martella', designed and built by Ludovico Quaroni at Matera in 1951. La città degli uomini, the second of the three films, offers an interpretation of the contemporary city in which explicit references can be found to Simmel (Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben, 1903), to the Urban School of Sociology, Chicago (The City, 1925) and to Mumford (The Culture of Cities, 1938). The similarity of this film to The City, directly cited several times in various sequences, is evident throughout the film. Una lezione di urbanistica, the third and final film, is presented as a radical attack on prevailing town planning orientations, mediated by a captivating mimed performance of the current disciplinary ideas: town planning as architecture of constructed space, town planning as engineering of traffic networks and the urban scheme, town planning as statistical control of the city's development.

) Cronache dell'Urbanistica italiana, directed by Nicolò Ferrari, screenplay by Carlo Doglio and Nicolò Ferrari, photography by Vittorio Del Monte, length 10'; La città degli uomini, directed by Michele Gandin, screenplay by Giancarlo De Carlo, Michele Gandin, Elio Vittorini, photography by Mario Dimicelli, length 10'; Una lezione di urbanistica, directed by Gerardo Guerrieri, screenplay by Giancarlo De Carlo, Gerardo Guerrieri, Jaques Lecoq, Billa Pedroni, photography by Mario Dimicelli, length 10'; all subjects by Giancarlo De Carlo, Carlo Doglio, Michele Gandin, Billa Pedroni, Ludovico Quaroni, Elio Vittorini. Music by Guido Nascimbene, 35 mm, black and white, sound, produced by La Meridiana Film, Italia 1954. According to Carlo Doglio, the 'three films […] constitute, in my opinion, a particular sign of a certain period'. cf. G. De Carlo, C. Doglio, R. Mariani, A. Samonà, Le radici malate dell'urbanistica italiana, cit., p. 59.

) 'The first film is, above all, mine' ..., in those years 'it seemed to us that the solution of the 'La Martella' village, the work of Quaroni, Gorio and Valori, was a brilliant solution in which efforts were made to take account of those values of neighbourhood unity that the sociologist Fridman, USA, had studied in those years at Matera; in which efforts are made, in short, to draw that same type of society and social environment contained in Sassi into the present'. Ibid., p. 72.

) Mainly due to the initiative of De Carlo, cf., ibid., p. 70.

) It is again Doglio who comments: 'I remember that De Carlo and myself, who at the time were living together, translated, often line by line, or had translated, much of La Cultura delle città; and the enormous impression made on us by that Mumford, and how we are still, or at least I am, imbued. I have a master who is Mumford, in this sphere, and I have posited him as master in an overall sense (attention: the Mumford of La Cultura delle città and Le trasformazioni dell'uomo, not the one of other works which seem to me to be repetitive or have aesthetic tendencies)'. cf. ibid. p. 62.

) Doglio attributes responsibility for the film to the 'mimes and [the] director, who ended up making their own text', ibid. p. 71.

) The role played by Quaroni in the making of the three films seems to find space mainly, even if indirectly, in this comparison between different disciplinary orientations. Again according to Doglio, '...the Quaroni study is a fundamental study for Italian organicism, that is, for the Wright school opposed to that of Le Corbusier'. Ibid. p. 63. Rationalism against organicism, then, but also isolation of the discipline from 'participation'; an 'appeal' which in the films of 1954 ''is guilty at the same time of optimism and ingenuousness', but which Doglio renews '21 years later', 'still in the need to ask everyone to be involved' in 'tolerant participation'.

In the film being screened, the active participation of individuals in the transformation of inhabited space, to which 'the city dweller' is called to participate in a direct relationship with the technicians who are geared up for this work, is the declared theme of all three films, and is to be considered the dominant theme. The call for participation, according to the authors, ought to have had a double meaning: theoretical in the medium term, practical in the immediate circumstances of the visit to the Town Planning Exhibition, for which the three films were the central event, destined to emotively involve the visitor. 'It will be a good result if the memory of this show can be associated to the memory of town planning; if every visitor, on even idle reflection, can retain the suspicion that town planning is not a proposal for building traffic systems or an array of monumental buildings, but a complex, dramatic problem of our time in which we are all now involved, including himself'.

) cf., G. De Carlo, Intenzioni e risultati della mostra di urbanistica, in, '“Casabella”, No. 203, 1954.

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Leonardo Ciacci, DSA-IUAV, Venezia, August 1998