Steiner & Van Dyke: The City (1939)

Exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair as part of “Tomorrow’s City,” The City is a suburban symphony film – a blueprint and manifesto for a new decentred form of urban living. Scored by Aaron Copland, it plays as four more or less discrete films, or movements – a nostalgic vision of small-town American life, a depiction of the industrial slums of Pittsburgh, an evocation of the modern American city and, finally, a proposal for a new kind of Garden City. All four sections are spectacular – the first is a classic slice of bucolic Americana, the second is a study of industrial smoke and steam that draws on Steiner’s textural mastery in H20, while the third is an extraordinarily vivid evocation of the gestural tics and nuances of the urban crowd, surely one of the greatest depictions of the rhythmic metropolis ever committed to film. However, the fourth section is perhaps the most astonishing, just because of how it positions suburbia as the end-point of the American technological sublime – after a montage sequence featuring skyscrapers, military jets and the Hoover Dam, we’re presented with a suburban polis “as moulded to our human wants as planes are shaped for speed.” As the “motor parkways that weave together city and countryside,” the highways play a key role in this vision – they’re portals to a new plane of existence, more or less interchangeable with all the greenbelts and green spaces that they leave in their wake. In fact, at the peak of its highway pastoral, it feels as if the film is a paean to the possibilities and poetry of greenbelts without highways, suburbs without cities – it is actually shot in the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland – or as if the highways were rivers of rejuvenation, rendering all labor in their vicinity agricultural, agrarian, almost feudal. Cosmic in its scope, and breathless with technological speculation, it's a spectacular advertisement for suburbia as a launching-pad to the universe, and a clear forerunner to the sci-fi suburbs of the 1950s.