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Manhattan from the air opening The Naked City. |
Landscape in this article is employed in its meaning of a point of view from which a subject
is
able to “command a view of the country stretching out beneath him
and thereby exert control over” [Fabricant, C., cit. in Wallach, A.
(2008) Between Subject and Object. In DeLue, R. Z., and Elkins, J.,
Landscape
Theory. London:
Routledge. pp. 317-8]. But, this precise understanding of landscape
gravitates towards the cityscape, as the centre of power, and, in
noir, landscape starts from it. Cityscape present itself on different
scales, framing only a single building or a street intersection, up
to the entire city horizon seen from a hill or surveyed from an
airplane. The aerial views were introduced to a wider public during
the war, through the newsreels which used shots of destroyed cities
seen from above. On
the other hand, during the postwar period, aerial photography becomes
one of the key instruments in the city planning. A couple of decades
later, aerial surveillance via helicopters becomes a key instrument
of the Los Angeles Police Department as well [Davis, M. (1990) City
of Quartz. London,
New York: Verso. pp. 265-322], and correspondingly, an important
formal element in a number of police films from the 1970s on. In film
noir, instead, the aerial vision of the city is never perfectly
correlated with the total command of the space below. The view is
never entirely perpendicular to the soil, satellite-like, instead the
viewing angle allows for perception of volumes to some extent, thus,
people are not just moving dots, and cars are not abstract
rectangles. This kind of image is apt for the intricate play of
shadows which are used to convey the drama of modern city life, and,
more importantly to our context, the angle of view and the shadows do
not allow for everything to be scanned, thus, mapped. But this is not
a given, as vectors of mapping are operating, too, and they put in
question this romanticised vision of the city and attempt to reduce
it to the grid. This relationship is the leitmotif of what follows.
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