The city and the crowd

At the turn of the twentieth century the metropolis became a character: it crushes, it intoxicates, it renders anonymous. Döblin turns Berlin around a man leaving prison, Dos Passos chops New York into fragments and newspaper headlines, Joyce fits Dublin into a single day, Bely makes Saint Petersburg ghostly. Cinema found there its natural subject: Vidor loses a clerk in an office of a thousand identical desks, Vertov films a city from waking to night, Scorsese lets a taxi driver hate his own.

works 10

• NovelThe Belly of ParisLe Ventre de ParisÉmile Zola · 1873An escaped convict returns to live in the midst of Les Halles, among well-fed shopkeepers.Literature
• NovelPetersburgПетербургAndrei Bely · 1916A novel of 1916: in St Petersburg, in October 1905, a student receives a bomb meant for his father, a senior official.Literature
• NovelUlyssesJames Joyce · 1922A day in the life of a Dublin advertising canvasser, captured as close as possible to his thoughts.Literature
• NovelManhattan TransferJohn Dos Passos · 1925The narrative follows a dozen New York destinies and links them through headlines, song lyrics and short tableaux of the city.Literature
• NarrativeParis PeasantLe Paysan de ParisLouis Aragon · 1926A Surrealist poet seeks the marvellous in a Parisian arcade doomed to disappear.Literature
• CinemaMetropolisFritz Lang · 1927A future city split in two, the towers of the masters and the underground city of the workers, in the most expensive film in German cinema of its time.Cinema
• CinemaThe CrowdKing Vidor · 1928The film takes as its hero an ordinary clerk, one among the crowd of New York, and gives the part to an almost unknown extra from the studio.Cinema
• NovelBerlin AlexanderplatzAlfred Döblin · 1929Berlin at the end of the twenties, around a working-class square, where a man released from prison tries to stand upright in a city that speaks louder than he does.Literature
• CinemaMan with a Movie CameraЛюдина з кіноапаратомDziga Vertov · 1929A silent film of 1929 produced by the Ukrainian studio, whose credits announce that it has no script, no actors and no intertitles.Cinema
• CinemaTaxi DriverMartin Scorsese · 1976Written by Paul Schrader in less than two weeks, the film follows a lonely taxi driver through the streets of Manhattan.Cinema