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Christopher Balla · 9 March 2007

An Internet Movie Database review of Lewis Mumford’s 1939 documentary The City, by ‘fliphop’ from Oklahoma.

This film starts out showing an idyllic old style town, complete with ‘town meetings’ where everyone gets a chance to speak their mind, kids play in the yards, there’s a blacksmith helping out a neighbor, blah blah blah. Then it shows the horrible city where everything is dirty and the air and water are poison. This goes on for a bit. Shows some very cool shots of an industrial town which being from a rural state I’ve never seen. Anyways all this bombast ends up focusing on something called ‘the new city’ which is sort of a cross between a suburb and I’m not sure what. The modern highway is presented as the ultimate solution to the overcrowded industrial city. People go to these ‘new cities’ where the ‘play is not so much different from the work’ and people supposedly don’t mind going to work. Washing machines would free women from boring chores and they could sit around gossiping with their pals. You could walk to work (but I thought everyone would drive on the motor parkway?). Nearby farms would supply all produce so it would be fresh. I have no idea what these guys were smoking. This movie proves that you dont have to be on LSD (not invented till the 40s) to be trippin’.

A pang to my heart that Mumford isn’t quite understood anymore. It’s true, however, that his studies of urban structures have dated significantly, in the same degree as Le Corbusier before or McLuhan after. Utopia is notably far from our grasp today — our contemporary reality is far too entrenched (as seen above) — but there are certain passages¹ that read quite well, and darkly:

My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered thirteen relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.

It is, of course, reasonable that it comes off as relevant. Mumford excelled in his observations — shockingly well in those of goverments and societies — but less so in his calls for action. Not that his sentiments would help in our Global War on Terror: he remains as sort of a Metropolitan Nostradomus, unrelatable but softly entertaining. During a month I spent in New York City at the end of last year, his 1947 From the Ground Up was a frequent subway companion; a rich, earnest, historical photograph built by clean criticism. At its worse it smacks of blighted optimism, much like Le Corb’s spongey Fourierist ‘garden city’ postulations, but despite his ineffectual frustrations with Stuyvesant Town or dreamy joy for Fresh Meadows, Mumford casts the city with an odd sort of stoic sentimentality: one drawn not from humanity (as he viewed them always as a mass, a collective), but from infrastructure.

He was as much of a critic as I’d ever like to be, one with an incredible track record for balancing personal sensitivity and critical artifice. He barely judged, or dismissed — he simply breathed sighs.

¹ Here from ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1964), page 2.

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