The city in contemporary film

...However relentlessly pernicious innercity life can be, the characters are not innocents, but people who collaborate with what is worst in their world...

...The women of Ray's family, his beatendown wife, Val, her mother, Janet, who is the only character who holds a job, and Val's grandmother, Kath, inhabit a separate, more stable and caring world...

...Like Oldman's work, Loach's inner-city films depict unemployment, domestic violence, and drug addiction as an integral part of his characters' lives...

...Considering the nature of most films dealing with the inner city, Riker, however, has uniquely constructed a portrait of people who enact a sense of responsibility and loyalty, and avoid savaging each other or destroying themselves...

...Hate is about a society collapsing on its urban margins without a touch of hope in the offing...

...104 DISSENT / Spring 2000...

...RECENT EUROPEAN films about the fate of urban immigrants and migrants, like those by the Dardenne brothers of Belgium, situate their action in the drab industrial squalor of bleak neighborhoods squeezed between automobile expressways and metropolitan rail corridors...

...Lee's view of the inner city is greater than the sum of the individuals who reside in it...

...With the arrest of Chino, Lisette (a little too conveniently) finds a work life in the larger world—achieving for the first time a sense of identity and self-esteem that the neighborhood can never offer her...

...Still, the women provide a network of support for each other, and have a capacity for hope and kindness that the men lack...

...Some of the characters commit horrific acts, but they are humanized to a point that they 102 n DISSENT / Spring 2000 can't be seen as mere strutting inner-city stereotypes out of rap music videos or action melodramas...

...The City's cast is made up mostly of non-actors—immigrants who have experienced variations of their characters' painful lives...

...Clockers' dirge-like vision of the inner city inherently has more of a social perspective than the other nineties' American inner-city films...

...Lee's political vision is not a fully developed one...

...American films that broke more sharply from the conventions of inner city action melodrama include Nick Gomez's Laws of Gravity (1992), Darnell Martin's I Like it Like That (1994), and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) and Clockers (1995...

...He simply observes his characters with a clear-eyed view that sticks to what is true, serving no larger moral, political, or social purpose...

...Yes, it's flawed (for example, a few too many film school stylistic tics and an aggressive sexist strain) but the more one views it, the more its political complexity becomes apparent...

...XXII, No...

...It's the institutions and capitalist system that are the real villains for Loach Loach is a Marxist who views English society through the prism of class difference and conflict...

...Their lives are not much different than those of their American counterparts— random brawling, drug taking and dealing, petty criminality, and permanent unemployment...

...Still, it's good to see a film about inner-city life where drugs, guns, and mindless violence are not at its center...

...He exhorts black adolescents to purge their lives of guns, drugs, and violence, and reject the easy money and glamour of becoming a drug dealer...

...He does not explore in depth the variables that go into the shaping of inner city culture— unemployment, racism, the legacy of slavery, the absence of role models, inadequate parenting—or examine the dialectical relationship between social structure and individual behavior...

...These are not political heroes, for they struggle too hard roo . DISSENT / Spring 2000 with the immediacy of economic survival to contemplate confronting the institutions that use and abuse them...

...Oldman has chosen neither to sentimentalize, judge, nor patronize these members of London's marginal working class, whom he knows so intimately...

...It's a seedy milieu—the characters living in squalid, claustrophobic railroad flats—but not quite a slum...

...In contrast, the characters in the Dardennes' films have no connection to historic urban Europe...

...The European inner-city films are darker and, often, more politically conscious than most of their American counterparts...

...A number of the films do take place in public housing projects, and the directors convey the mean sterility and oppressiveness of their cityscapes...

...4, both by Leonard Quart...

...THER EUROPEAN inner-city films like actor Gary Oldman's auspicious film debut Nil by Mouth (1995) are just as pessimistic...

...Strike himself is no abstract symbol of innercity pathology or victimization...

...There are countless other films to be made about inner-city life that get at its contradictions and complexity, and refuse to romanticize, cynically use, or degrade the lives and world they depict...

...Of course, he's probably almost as selective in the characters he focuses on as Hollywood filmmakers who make gangbangers their inner-city representatives...

...They sit apart from the men in the pub, their relations with them dominated by a need either to fend off their violence or pick up the broken pieces after the men, who treat the women like dogs, commit one selfdestructive and destructive act after another...

...Gomez offers no social or economic explanations or rationalizations for the world he evokes—behavior is all...

...There are no shoot-outs, car chases, melodrama—just a taut, tense, awkward, everyday portrait of marginal whites engaging in minor hustles to survive...

...They head for Paris, a city whose sophistication and wealth make them extremely uneasy...

...Rejecting facile stereotypes and conventional box office formulae, the directors captured the ethos of New York's Puerto Rican, African-American, and white working-class worlds...

...They fail to get money that's owed them, are incapable of pulling off a credit card swindle or stealing a car, and impotently try to pick up women at an art opening, where their self-defeating behavior gets them thrown out...

...Their world is unrelieved by even momentary physical escape into those elegant, privileged streets, making their potential success as human beings even more powerful...

...It's a threat posed by the profound sense of rage, self-hatred, social despair, and impotence that envelop elements of African-American society, and make communal and familial life so difficult to sustain...

...Photo by Victor Sira...

...The film's conclusion carries no answer to what it means to "do the right thing"—just more questions...

...One begins to see that it's not intellectual confusion that Lee is projecting, but surprisingly (given the body of Lee's work) a genuine sense of political ambiguity: The film avoids being polemical by asserting that there are many possible political choices, and offers Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as two alternative political visions and strategies...

...Kassovitz ends Hate on a bleaker note than Lee's Clockers...

...He also feels no need to mention the destructiveness of Thatcher and Tory economic policies to provide a social context...

...The project's putative park-like space is turned into a threatening and uncontrolled setting...

...fast-talking Said is North African...

...The films confirmed for suburban filmgoers their images of an inner city permeated with burntout, graffiti-scarred tenements and concreteblock housing projects, and their fears of feral drug dealers and wasted addicts...

...The film takes place in the existential present—we learn nothing about the characters' pasts or what shapes their behavior...

...La Promesse centers around fifteen-year old Igor's ethical crisis (played faultlessly by a teenager of almost disconcerting beauty and with no prior film experience), who helps his father in a shady labor racket that exploits illegal immigrants...

...Igor's crisis is set off when an African worker dies on the job largely through his father's cruel negligence...

...It's a film inspired by both Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese and centers around three central characters...

...He is an ulcer-ridden, solitary dreamer, obsessed with model trains, but caught up in the criminal ethos that ravages life in teeming housing project neighborhoods...

...What Lee wants us to see is that the inner city is so permeated with internecine violence that the greatest immediate danger to blacks comes from other blacks...

...In essence he accepts morally suspect means so that the community can make some social gains...

...For more than a decade, independent and studio directors dramatized the most convulsive, violent, and self-destructive inner-city lives...

...Clockers is essentially a meditation on its protagonist, Strike (Mekhi Phifer)—a young black man who, with his cohorts, spends his life on the project benches dealing crack in retail weights to a variety of customers—urban and white suburban...

...Hate is an angry, stylized, overly revved-up film...

...No film of note has appeared evoking the end of the crack epidemic, the radical decline in the crime rate, or the strengthening of the inner-city economy...

...Her mother's severe alcoholism, Rosetta's almost feral efforts to scrape up the necessities of life, and the wrenching betrayal at the film's dramatic center, make it an extremely unsettling work...

...In Hate, when the action moves through historic Paris, the viewer begins to become more connected to the characters' marginality...

...Portions of this essay appeared in different form in Cinéaste, Vo...

...Nil by Mouth may have the feel of a documentary, but from Eric Clapton's vivid bluesy score to the probing close-ups that get inside its characters, this is a carefully crafted and detailed realist film that is never visually dull...

...In Do the Right Thing (1989), his best film so far, he made an intellectually serious, formally dynamic, and even-handed work about a number of the prime social issues facing the black community—police brutality, white racism, the irresponsibility of black men, and black hostility to Asian and white storeowners...

...Gomez drops the neighborhood's stable Polish immigrant and second-generation population from the film, and by doing this he creates an edgier, more volatile world—devoid of families and populated by a narrow world of marginal young white men and women who hustle, shoplift, loan shark, hijack, sell guns, and hang out in a neighborhood bar...

...The films also refuse to explain away or absolve them of responsibility for their behavior...

...They all live in a banlieu (a working-class suburb on the periphery of Paris) in a self-enclosed, sterile housing project, whose salient characteristics are vast empty spaces, ubiquitous graffiti, and groups of young men aimlessly hanging about...

...The film's action takes place in Seraing, the industrial suburb of Liege where the Dardennes grew up, and where the closing of a number of major factories produced a staggering 30 perNOTEBOOK cent unemployment rate...

...The real slum in their minds is adjoining Puerto Rican Williamsburg, with its abandoned buildings and garbage-filled lots...

...elegantly composed, Rossellini-like La Ciudad (The City, 1999), which deals with Hispanic immigrants in New York who face exploitation, alienation, and poverty...

...They are without options or hope, their only defense black humor...

...I Like it Like That is Darnell Martin's first and only film...

...I Like it Like That's focus is much less on social pain and pathology than on how constricting for the individual, especially in terms of gender identity, the milieu can be...

...and the most articulate and inNOTEBOOK trospective, Hubert, is African—an ethnic mixture whose solidarity reinforces the film's antipolice message...

...What Nil by Mouth grants an audience is an unsparing look into a world so particularized and real that all sociological paradigms and political abstractions about this marginal class's ethos seem beside the point...

...IN ALL THESE films the city is never just a photogenic, elegantly composed background where the characters interact or the narrative action evolves, but another significant character whose weather, space, light, architecture, and social conditions reflect and help shape the behavior of the people who inhabit it...

...Clockers projects a vision of innercity entrapment that strikingly conveys what Cornel West called "the nihilistic threat" that exists in "the self-destructive and inhumane actions of black people...

...THE ABSENCE of fathers (onone level the film deals with the cycle of destruction set by fathers), white racism, and unemployment are a given in the film, but Lee does not allow any of these factors to absolve his characters of responsibility for their actions...

...There are also the night streets—often rain swept—and the strip DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 103 NOTEBOOK clubs, pubs, fast-food restaurants, boxing arenas in which characters meet and take refuge...

...Uncontrolled, sociopathic Vinz is Jewish...

...He then becomes enmeshed in efforts to protect his father while attempting to help the immigrant's widow and child...

...La Promesse never becomes a social tract because the film so brilliantly depicts the subtleties of the father-son relationship, and in its powerful final sequences, the even more nuanced realtionship between the boy and the African widow...

...The few police that are in any way sympathetic are powerless to affect their colleagues' behavior...

...If a film like I Like it Like That lacks a political edge, it carries an implicit critique of sexism in both the inner city and in the world of record companies...

...The film is also so free of cant about race (no anti-white polemics) that its moral message is delivered by Rocco Klein—the emotionally exhausted, cynical white detective...

...However, looking at American "innercity" films and more recent European films, one perceives that, over time, it's class rather than race that ultimately defines the lives of urban poor people throughout the industrial world...

...What basically differentiates their world from the one in Clockers is the racial mixture of people on the estate, and the fetishizing of the gun in a society where guns aren't commmonplace...

...Lee's critique is moral, not political or economic in nature...

...Death rates due to homicides have ranged between six or seven times higher than those of whites during the past fifty years, and most black criminals victimize other blacks...

...On the other hand, as in the films of Loach, Kassovitz, and Oldman, for the brothers Dardenne there is no possible alternate world, no ticket to a bus "out West...

...Oldman grew up in South London, so he knows the look and vernacular (harsh, expletivefilled talk hard for an American audience to decipher) and avoids any hint of artifice or DISSENT / Spring 2000 n IOI NOTEBOOK caricature in depicting the milieu...

...The quality of Spike Lee's work has fluctuated radically...

...He is also the one father figure, who offers—in his relentless pursuit of justice—a glimmer of hope to Strike and his protege, Tyrone...

...In fact, NYPD Blue is set in a nineties East Village that seems never to have gone through gentrification...

...These films form a unique body of work comparable to some of the most socially critical and disquieting films made in Europe, like those made by English directors Ken Loach, Gary Oldman, Mike Leigh, and France's Mathieu Kassovitz...

...However, he must compromise his notion of justice to gain his community's support and serve it more effectively...

...1, "Spike Lee's Clockers: A Lament for the Urban Ghetto," and in a review of Nil by Mouth, Cindaste, Vol...

...It uses restless camera movements, zooms, point-of-view shots, and some documentary footage of young project inhabitants battling the police...

...The newer European and American films dealing with immigrants and marginalized working-class characters move us away from the notion of the "inner city" as a ghetto with invisible walls or an insensate world permeated with tabloid violence...

...It evokes a public world of graffiticovered murals, kids playing salugi on the street, and sidewalks filled with intrusive DISSENT / Spring 2000 In 97 NOTEBOOK people and sound (rap, salsa, boogolo, and rhythm and blues...

...It's Strike's story, but it is also a film about innercity culture in the way the "hood" films, or even Laws of Gravity and I Like it Like That are not...

...Nothing works for the three protagonists...

...The film's lost characters use American innercity neighborhood slang ("chill," "asshole," "fucker"), listen to rap music, and watch Lethal Weapon...

...Riker is a political filmmaker, but not one who subordinates his characters in the effort to make political points...

...The urban industrial environment of those at the bottom of society is represented as increasingly diverse but as physically and socially bleak, no matter how remote from the city's center...

...Strike craves a father, but the only paternal figure that he is linked to is his employer in the drug business, Rodney (Delroy Lindo)—a manipulative, quietly ominous figure who offers nothing but crime and money...

...In a number of interviews following the film's release, the Dardenne brothers spoke passionately about the social dynamite created in many parts of industrial Northern Europe by high unemployment levels combined with rapid immigration from Africa and Southern Europe...

...What should be noted is that in Lee's most recent film, Summer of Sam, his seventies ItalianAmerican working-class characters may not suffer from social despair, but they are as trapped by their claustrophobic sexist and racist ethos as the clockers are by their destructive milieu...

...For Loach the possibility for social change rests with a rank-and-file movement of the working class that he sees as usually being betrayed by the traditional left—be it the Communist Party in Spain during the Civil War or the Labour Party in England...

...Martin's film is shot in a cartoon-like, high decibel style...

...Some of the most talented directors of innercity films have, nonetheless, created enduring, stark, and brutally honest portraits of contemporary slum life in Chicago, Los Angeles, and especially New York...

...Mathieu Kassovitz's Hate won the Best Director's prize at Cannes in 1995 and was a popular and critical hit in France...

...However, for Oldman, "People are politics, it's not the other way around...

...Few recent films have depicted the changed climate of the American inner city in the late nineties...

...The images and characters projected may only be a powerful fragment of a richly textured neighborhood world that no one fictional film can encompass, but they do reverberate in ways that force us to think and feel about marginalized urban people in more intricate and less reflexive ways...

...Other English directors dealing with urban working-class life, like Frears, Leigh, and Loach—despite their political differences— make reference to Thatcher's callous contempt for the working class and treat her as a villain who helped usher in an era exulting in entrepreneurial greed...

...Martin grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Bronx—the progeny of a mixed marriage (black father/white mother)—and worked as an assistant to Spike Lee...

...We are more apt in films and daily life to either personalize a social or political issue or make it utterly peripheral than to explore its historical and structural basis...

...The choice made by Lee's conflicted protagonist, Mookie (Spike Lee), to throw a garbage can through the window of Sal's Pizzeria in the midst of a riot is not seen as a heroic act, but one that leaves him perplexed and saddened...

...American films, be they independent or mainstream, rarely provide an institutional context for socially charged subjects...

...The film successfully fused realism and stylization (primary colors, tight closeups, jump cuts, artificial light, montages, and narration) to provide a critical kaleidoscope of black life on one Brooklyn street...

...The narrative of Clockers hinges on the murder of a black drug dealer and the attempt 98 • DISSENT / Spring 2000 by a driven, white, homicide detective, Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel), to get to the bottom of the case...

...When an old Jewish man tells them a tale that should have meaning for them—about a Gulag deportation train and the price paid by a friend who resists a Soviet guard's orders—they dismiss it as ridiculous...

...The film offers no hymn to the human spirit or political or social explanations for the family's situation, but treats their criminal, unredeemable lives as solely a product of their own behavior...

...The crux of the narrative revolves around Rosetta's wary friendship with a resourcefully good-humored young man her own age who works (off the books) at a nearby waffle stand, and whose job she fiercely covets...

...For example, one central character in City of Hope is an idealistic black councilmember who is committed to social change...

...What we get is a great deal of semiimprovised, naturalistic, inarticulate talk evoking a dead-end, brutal world where nothing apocalyptic occurs...

...He wants his films to move audiences to new ways of looking at their society and to commit themselves to social and political action...

...Lee reinforces this perspective by intercutting mindlessly violent music videos, malt liquor ads, video games, gangsta' rap, slasher movie images, and sounds that are an integral part of the dockers' daily life...

...In addition, the men have spent a great deal of their lives in prison...

...But there are some revealing differences among them...

...At its conclusion, however, without a tinge of sentimentality, the film affirms the power of human connection and love...

...They are what fit best into the uncomplicated conventions of action melodrama...

...Her feminist fable centers around vibrant, feisty Lisette (Lauren Velez), who is trapped with three kids in a marriage to dim, macho, self-centered, loving, sweet Chino (Jon Seda), a bicycle messenger...

...Both Dardenne films, La Promesse and Rosetta, have been highly acclaimed in Europe, with Rosetta winning top prize at the 1999 Cannes Festival...

...Oldman is influenced by Ken Loach films about nineties' inner-city life (Raining Stones, Riff-Raff and Ladybird, Ladybird), but without their political and social agenda...

...But his characters are generally decent, sympathetic people whose personal flaws and limitations are seen as a much less significant determinant of their fates than the character of English institutions and society...

...With Clockers, Lee made the most socially critical and evocative of the nineties' inner-city films...

...Superficially treated and marketed as a "hood" or "ghettocentric" film about violent gangbangers ("dockers" are minor drug dealers), it is actually a powerful lament against the violence and pathology of inner-city life...

...The police in both the banlieu and Paris are brutal, sadistic, and racist, and are seen as the primary enemy (a rap song, "Fuck the Police," blasted by a local DJ echoes their sentiments...

...They spend the day drifting around the project—joking and getting into conflicts with the police...

...However, there are films like David Riker's DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 99 NOTEBOOK Ana (Silvia Goiz) in the "Seamstress" episode of La Ciudad...

...The London project or council estate, melancholy and empty of people, the French and American ones filled with young men dealing drugs or aimlessly hanging out on its roofs, basements, hallways, and benches...

...In the New York films, Manhattan's office towers are a psychologically distant backdrop that still offer the constant fantasy of escape, and situate the action in the familiar geography of success and failure...

...The film at times seems to strain for the poetic and poignant...

...XXIII, No...

...Television police dramas like the racially integrated, psychologically complex Homicide and the longrunning, more formulaic NYPD Blue have, despite the decline of crime, continued (adhering to the genre's demands) to depict the inner city as threatened by continuous mayhem...

...Sayles, however, is a rare figure among American directors—a filmmaker politically committed and sophisticated enough to make social films that eschew sloganeering for an intricate analysis of how racial and ethnic politics function in a small city...

...He conveys the harshness of the immigrants' work lives (sweatshops, casual day labor) and suggests the need for a solidarity that the immigrants can only tenuously affirm...

...Obviously, in these programs the emphasis is less on social texture and change in the inner city than on the character and emotional life of the individual detectives, and their solving of a variety of violent crimes...

...LEONARD QUART is professor of cinema studies at the College of Staten Island and at the City University Graduate Center (CUNY...

...But Riker's montages of immigrant faces in all their dignity, exhaustion, and melancholy remind one of Walker Evans's indelible photographs of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...

...Where Lee grafted a contrived, hopeful note of Strike heading toward gleaming sunlight and the western prairies, Kassovitz gives us a stand-off—Hubert and a cop drawing guns on each other at close range...

...The critique, however, has power not because of its intellectual sophistication, but as a result of Lee's gift for getting at the emotional heart of his characters' destructive behavior without ever sensationalizing or sentimentalizing it...

...It is structured around twenty-four hours in the lives of the three young men, in the aftermath of a riot against the police, who are the film's primary villains...

...It's clearly what the Dardennes aimed to achieve...

...Even as abandoned swaths of the South Bronx and Brooklyn were being filled in with modest private homes and garden apartments, most often through the efforts of community organizations and church groups, film crews continued to scout locations in the most sensationally blighted of inner-city streets...

...However, it never goes outside Lisette's consciousness to provide an overview of the South Bronx...

...Like Loach's film Riff Raff, the Dardennes depict a racially and ethnically heterogeneous working class that is viciously exploited in illegal and semi-legal forms of casual labor...

...The films we have discussed depict lower-class city life with a greater fidelity to what is true than most media representations...

...The film begins in a working-class pub with its garrulous, alcoholic, brutal central figure, Ray, sitting at a table with his loyal stooge, Mark, exchanging stories about orgies and planning a scam...

...Films like Nil By Mouth, Clockers, and Hate don't offer the final word on life in the inner city, but all of them avoid reducing their characters to either social victims or monsters...

...This is Riker's first fictional film, and he brings to it a documentarian's need for authenticity, coupled with a desire to capture through powerful images the immigrants' sense of dislocation and oppression...

...Lee, however, is not interested in carefully shaping the film's narrative or heightening its violence and tension...

...WILLIAM KORNBLUM is an editor of Dissent and professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center...

...Nil by Mouth, in turn, is a semi-autobiographical work about a white, South London dysfunctional family where almost everybody is permanently unemployed and lives on the dole...

...There is nothing intellectually new here (and if there is a political commitment it's to voluntarism, not socialism), but it is done with imagistic power—noir-style night scenes that capture the heart of the spiritual emptiness and oppression of inner-city life, and daylight scenes skillfully evoking the waste NOTEBOOK of intelligence that goes into the clockers' elaborate drug dealing maneuvers...

...0 F COURSE, there are American independent films, such as John Sayles's City of Hope, that construct a dialectical relationship between the decisions and fates of individual characters and the social and political context they inhabit...

...Social change or fragmentation naturally carries more dramatic interest for an audience when centered on the fate of an individual than on the policies or forces that helped shape the world she must confront...

...Nick Gomez's low-budget film Laws of Gravity (filmed in twelve days for $38,000 and borrowing heavily from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets) deals with petty thieves in Brooklyn's Greenpoint...