Alan Marcus

Nanook of the North as Primal Drama

The approach Robert Flaherty took to devise and shape his classic film, Nanook of the North [1922], served to codify the emergence of a new film genre, which I have defined in this article as primal drama. The films popular reception and iconic status are assessed in terms of its precursors and the way it engages with themes associated with evolutionary theory, the role of space and place, and the historical context in which it was made. In analysing the film, I seek to interrelate film studies texts and archival research with literature on behavioral psychology, genetics, and cultural geography.

Spatial transfigurations in beautiful Dachau

There is a revealingly sharp contrast between the elegant Renaissance palace, Schloss Dachau, situated with its walled gardens on top of Schlossberg hill, looking out above the town, and to the cit...

Looking up : The child and the City

This article examines the work of four documentary photographers: Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt, Walter Rosenblum and Jerome Liebling. During the late-1930s and 1940s, they photographed, in unique ways, the children and adolescents living in New York City. Their distinctive forms of street photography explore a subterrain of attitudes about child behaviour in an urban environment. The study is based upon interviews conducted by the author and a close examination of the work of the photographers.

A Tale of Two Cities: Dachau and KZ Munich

A stream. A clubhouse. A witness. Theodore Pais never crossed a stream called the Wurm canal to play a round of golf, or enjoy the local Bavarian cuisine available to members and their guests in the dining room of Golfclub Dachau. A temporal demarcation and physical border separated him from what is now the club’s par four, fourth hole. The Wurm canal is a line, a thread that links a paradigmatic site of death and brutality with the boundary of a site of leisure. The quiet waters of the Wurm canal pass birch trees on one side and barbed wire on the other. Crossing it marks the threshold for 800,000 visitors and tourists who traverse the canal to enter the Nazis’ first state concentration camp.

Visualising the city Introduction

The city beckons us, employs us, thrills us and alarms us. Whether contextualised within a film narrative or engaged with in everyday life, for many of us the urban environment is a defining feature of living in the twenty-first century. A few years ago, a student informed me that he wished to write on an aspect of ‘the city in film’, and asked which books he should consult. We explored what turned out to be a rich seam of recent publications on film and the urban experience. Thus was planted the seed of interest that led to developing an international conference, Visualising the City, hosted by the Centre for Screen Studies in June, 2005 at the University of Manchester. Participants included practising architects, architectural and town planning historians, filmmakers, and film and visual culture theorists and historians. Of the 170 papers presented, a selection has been redrafted for publication in this special issue, together with several others that were commissioned. This interdisciplinary area of interest builds on a strong foundation of previous symposia and scholarly work, including the Screenscapes conference in Leeds in 1993, which led to Clarke’s The Cinematic City (1997). In 1994, the Cine City conference was held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The Symposium on Cinema and Architecture followed at Cambridge University in 1995, which resulted in the Penz and Thomas edited book, Cinema and Architecture (1997). In 1999, the Cinema and the City Conference was held in Dublin and gave rise to two edited books by Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the City (2001) and Screening the City (2003). The latest full-length rendering of the topic, Visualizing the City, will be published in 2007. The research this work represents on the relationship between the visual and the architectural has exposed a prodigious interest across a range of discipline areas. As part of a continuum of the latest investigations in the field, this special issue of The Journal of Architecture features a collection of eleven short articles that emerged from the Manchester conference. They serve to illuminate different nuanced uses and methodological approaches for looking at visual representations of architectural forms and the urban environment, and the integrated use of the visual to enhance our understanding of architectural design. The articles form three loose but overlapping groupings. The first theme chronologically links architectural investigations into Germanic cities, raising issues associated with shifting identities. Sabine Hake uses photographs of the architect Erich Mendelsohn’s iconic Mossehaus in Berlin to theorise about its evolving relationship to modernity. The redefinition and transfiguring of place featured in the problematic urban integration of a former concentration camp within the postwar town of Dachau, and the creation of a city within a city, forms the focus of my contribution. Miriam Paeslack draws on abstracted urban images taken by three 521