Review of City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913-1931
Even before one has opened Daniel P. Schwartz’s new cultural history City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931, a couple of things stand out which set this particular study apart from others in the field. First of all, there is the claim on the book’s back cover that r...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University College Cork
2025-02-01
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| Series: | Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue28/HTML/ReviewKinik.html |
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| Summary: | Even before one has opened Daniel P. Schwartz’s new cultural history City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931, a couple of things stand out which set this particular study apart from others in the field. First of all, there is the claim on the book’s back cover that reads, “[c]inema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film”, when in fact many film historians recognise that the genre’s heyday lasted quite a bit longer than the early 1930s, and that these films played a minor but notable part in the transition from silent to sound film. The most famous of these films were silent films—such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, 1927), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek S Kino-Apparatom, 1929), and Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930)—but a significant number of these modernist treatments of urban modernity were sound films, especially after 1931. |
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| ISSN: | 2009-4078 |