Friday, October 16, 2009

Cityscapes and Hellscapes.

Cityscape. Hellscape. Two distinctly powerful words that to me have always seemed related . They are interchangeable, both referring to the samething. In my head, in my imagination, these two words create such images. The burnt husks of buildings, blood red skies,night time,neon. My obsession with these two words grew from three other obsessions.
First, my obsession with a particular group of old futuristic films. Blade Runner. The Warriors. Escape from New York. Tron. Westworld. The Element of Crime. Old films from the seventies and eighties, particularly the eighties, have always fascinated me with their visions of the future. The mix of the futuristic with the retro. Showing us futures that never quite came to exist. Futures that literally paint a vision of the city and a vision of hell as the samething. The Element of Crime especially, portrays a particularly bleak vision of the future, a vision of Europe as a dead world full of garbage,delapidated buildings,never ending rain and perpetual darkness. Sparsely populated with damaged people without hope waiting around to die. Lars Von Trier films all this in saturated orange and yellow tones, creating a true nightmare world, a hellscape somewhere between dreams and reality.
Secondly, my obsession with old films about New York City. I'm talking particularly about Blast of Silence, The Naked City, and Strange Paradise, I also have to throw in The Third Man. Although this film is not set in New York City, I was equally fascinated with the environment of the city that is both this films setting and strongest character, that of post world war 2 Vienna. I love the stark black and white world these films illuminate. A mysterious romantic world. A world that has since ceased to exist, or maybe never really existed at all.
The third obsession of mine that has fueled my love of cityscapes and hellscapes is music. Specifically the music of Brian Eno on records such as On Land and Music for Airports, and Kraftwerk on records such as Computer World and Radioactivity. But also particular film soundtracks from the seventies and eighties. The soundtracks for Bladerunner, and Escape from New York especially, capture the feel I imagine these future worlds to have. All synths and space and sinister undertones. Also certain horror film soundtracks from this time. Dawn of the Dead, Suspiria, and especially Zombi. Almost all of the soundtracks Goblin completed for Dario Argento fit the bill. Terrifying, atmospheric prog-rock freakouts.
I also completely forgot to mention the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. A man whose work epitomises the emotions and images I'm talking about. Films like Solaris, Stalker, Ivan's Childhood and The Mirror. All epic cinematic poems that examine loneliness, grief, war, love, and the human condition in general.
I'm not sure if any of this is making sense or not. I'm simply talking about the world the two words create in my imagination. A world where it is always night time. Burnt out cars line the streets, grafitti sprayed on every space, Japanese billboards towering over everything, eternally raining, men with five oclock shadow wearing brown overcoats and worn fedoras mingle with street gangs in matching leather, platinum white hair and wild looks in their eyes, street punk girls in torn fishnet stockings, neon hair, and elegant women with red lipstick and old vintage dresses. Drug addicts slumped in door ways, some shops boarded up, old and decrepit, others sleek silver with big neon 1950's signs over the front window, overcrowded with people, men driving rickshaws transporting people wherever, food stands on street corners, on some streets parked cars still burn, other streets lie empty, hundred year old building half demolished, or reduced to rubble by bombs dropped long ago. Some scenes are in black and white others bathed in garish oranges and yellows. The gutters overflowing with garbage. Fear and excitement fill the hearts of everyone. The air crackles with sinister energy. And over everything the warm weird emotion of synthesizers and subtle driving drum machines.
I believe if you take all the films I've mentioned: Bladerunner, The Warriors, The Element of Crime, The Naked City, Blast of Silence, Tron, Escape from New York, Stalker,etc., and the music of Brian Eno and Kraftwerk and Goblin and all the other film soundtracks I mentioned and mix them all together you will get what I'm talking about, the images and emotions the words cityscape and hellscape create in my imagination. A strange mix of warmth and fear and dreams and nightmares. A world I'd love to visit.