Malas Calles, a look at the relationship between city and cinema from urban anthropology

Hamaca, resident project in Hangar and the only archive of video art of the state, presents the first online exhibition conceived specifically for La Virreina website visible until April 22, 2018.

Starting from the desire that different cultural and social actors of the neighborhood and the city (social rights, research, immigrant groups, recovery of historical memory ….) appropriated Hamaca’s archive and offered a guided tour as a tour of the drives of the research process itself, offering as a result a curating project with the selection of different pieces of the archive and with some textual references to guide us in this selection.

The relationship between the city and the cinema is as old – or as new – as the cineme itself. Not in vain, what is considered the first cinematographic work, La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine, recorded on March 19, 1895 by the Lumière brothers, showed the departure of a group of workers, mostly women, from a Lyon factory. The importance, in the determination of the forms and characteristics of the cities, of the process of industrialization experienced by some countries of the Western Hemisphere, appears already collected by authors of important contemporary works. Between them they would highlight, for their analytical perspective, Contribution to the housing problem, by Frederick Engels, or the works that geographers like the French Eliseo Reclús were publishing over the years.

Previously, there had already been attempts, in the face of the advances and effects of triumphant industrial capitalism, to propose more human urban designs linked to the rural environment and nature, which, moreover, were normally accompanied by projects for the creation of new societies. They would be the cases of utopian socialists like Étienne Calbet or Robert Owen that would inspire more realistic approaches and, above all, more acceptable to the bourgeois powers, such as the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard. It is, no doubt, from that moment that cities live a new golden age. The need for labor to supply the incessant number of factories attracts and concentrates a large amount of peasant population that sees, suddenly, transformed their daily reality. The role of cinema as a notary of social changes continues in force. Great example of it is the work The City that, with script of Lewis Mumford, was elaborated, in 1939, for the New York World’s Fair.

+info