To Miklós Józsa
In the past few years, Budapest has in several respects become a desirable shooting locale. Low prices, accessibility, the availability of infrastructure and last but not least visual diversity have induced several grand international productions to use the Hungarian capital as a source of images. (Evita, I Spy) As these films are never about Budapest (their plots take place in Buenos Aires, Moscow, Chicago etc.), the city is presented as a loose chain of freely interchangeable and utilizable images entirely detached from the place we would expect them to represent. It seems utterly incongruous with Evita’s plot and visual atmosphere that we recognize the well-known forms of the Opera House behind Eva Peron giving a speech. What is more, we are dislocated from the film’s universe by this discovery and the inner coherence of the plot is weakened by external references appearing in our film-perception.
At the same time, such commingling of reality and film will cause fissures in „reality” itself, in the way we seemingly directly perceive the physical environment that the images are based on. A film that uses a locale as mere scenery places the separated images of a city in a new context and thereby reinforces the city’s collage-character. Different images of the same locale appear on film frames intermingled with images of other locales – essentially disguising their origin, just as in photo albums or guidebooks: they become the components and defining points of reference of a global imaginary geography.
However, the relationship between a city and film, between Budapest and film is not so simple. In the global whirl of images, the demand for emphasis on the local, „the memory-bearing” nature of a city emerges as a counter-reaction. Budapest was rediscovered in the 1990s by Hungarian filmmakers, who make references to the city with renewed enthusiasm. Budapest is not only the locale but also the main character of numerous films made in the last decade (e.g. Ágnes Incze: I love Budapest) and this process is inseparably intertwined with the urge to reconsider the city’s identity and with the possibility to reform it.
In light of the above assessment of films dissecting a locale into images and depriving it of its context, it might seem that the relationship between a locale and fiction with concrete, realistic references used under their real names is much less burdened with contradictions: a city-film builds on existing knowledge, as a starting point it uses places which the audience has direct experience with and it makes use of the locale in creating its own world. However, this relationship is not unilateral either: while the well-known locale legitimizes the image and vests it with the illusion of reality, the image reacts on the locale and transforms it. Integrated into our perception, it transforms our notions about the locale and at the same time the way we use the place.
At first glance, this interaction between fiction and reality seems to be a rather theoretical problem. However, turn-of-the-millennium city marketing provides a vivid example of the contrary by the way it uses images in invoking a city’s attractiveness and creating its inner cohesion. The representation of a locale plays an important role in shaping the attitudes to that locale; therefore it is not surprising that moral considerations are introduced into the evaluation of a representation. Through these, the possibility of a specific novel censorship emerges with respect to representations of a locale: one that investigates whether the actual images are beneficial or detrimental to the given locale.
Exactly this question was raised when the publicity campaign of The District (Hungarian title: Nyócker, directed by Áron Gauder, 2004) was launched. Way before the film was reviewed in terms of aesthetics, worries about its threat to city-image were given voice. Attention was called to the risk that – depending on its content – the film might either strengthen or annihilate the achievements of a decade of city marketing. At the same time, others saw in The District a possibility of grass-root, organic identification, which can enrich the undifferentiated image targeted by city marketing and add meaning to it.
In this text, I will examine the The District in the context of the questions it raised with less attention given to its inherent logic and unity. In order to clarify this context, I need to introduce a couple of general aspects concerning the interaction between a locale and its image.
City and representation
In order to clarify the effects of representations on a locale, first we need to get rid of the idea that the relationship between a locale and its image is clear-cut. Although many authors have undertaken to discuss the relationship between the themes of city image and Derrida’s deconstruction of the opposition between subject and image, it is still customary to treat a city as an essentially physical entity, an architectural arrangement, whose surface is modified and colored by external layers of signs and highlights. However, in opposition to this concept, we have to suppose that the relationship between a thing and its representation is not one-way. What is more, in the chain of reciprocal representations, it is impossible to find the original subject, the starting layer on which the representations are based. In our case, the starting layer is the city, but it is conveyed to us indirectly. As McNeill writes on the dilemma of writing about cities: „Cities are themselves representations and it is through these representations that we vest complex series of social phenomena with unity.” (1) If we accept McNeill’s view, we can define the city with the help of a concept borrowed from the theory of literature: metaleptic space. The metaleptic space of a city is where physical spaces, actions and narratives affect each other and where the physical reality of the city is blended with fancies and images.
The above findings were made possible by a discursive revolution within social sciences in the last third of the 20th century, which put an end to the dream that the discussion of social phenomena could remain transparent. The analysis of soft factors was emphasized in urban research based on the presumption that „space is not only a physical, but also – or perhaps primarily – a symbolic, culture-bearing entity.” (2). Usually, the city perceived this way is discussed in terms of perception of space (subjective city images), symbolic meaning and the language used to describe the city. The first approach is exemplified by researches on mental maps carried out in the 1970s in the wake of Kevin Lynch’s oeuvre. An example to the second is Pierre Nora’s approach focusing on forms of collective memory and placing emphasis on the way social status influences one’s attitude to the city. The third approach can be illustrated by research on the mechanism and the effects of „urban discourse”. (3) This time we will concentrate on the visual representations of the city with primary focus on film and the topos of „dangerous place”.
City images
Should images of a city present the city in a documentary or fictional context, they cannot be considered secondary to the city itself. There exists no purely aesthetic field, in which images could be judged according to their inherent rules exclusively. Representative images cannot be detached from the context of social coherence; they gain meaning within a socially defined web of denotations. To put it in another way: „there’s nothing but text, there’s nothing beyond text.” (4) The role of images in society is constitutive. Norman Bryson writes on the discursive impact of image that ”To conceive image as an ambiguous complementary structure built on a necessarily tangible base is tantamount to the denial of discourse as a cultural form interacting with other – legal, political, economic – forms of the social sphere.” (5)
In this sense, images that make special impact on their social environment and induce significant developments are more important for our argument than ones of outstanding aesthetic value with a chance of becoming classics of their genre.
Representations of a city exert their influence in several dimensions. On the one hand, they acknowledge existing symbols and create new ones for the community by highlighting defined points in the urban space. On the other hand, they define those verbal and visual expressions that are used (or that are usual) in conversations about a place. Moreover, they help to establish the distinctions of „here-there”, „me-someone else” between different places with relevance to everyday use of those places.
Margaret Manale shows us a vivid example of the mechanism of the visual reinforcement of the icon-role of buildings of a city. She writes about the visual symbolism of Berlin’s modernity: „If we want to feel the aura of a city, nothing is more informative than a postcard. This type of photograph carries a myth that any target person can immediately identify. These pictures highlight memorable features, which – by becoming clichés – will become fixed points for collective memory within a transforming universe.” (6)
This analysis can easily be extended to conventional photo albums and films, which have become peers of postcards in their role of representing a city. These well known, „established” representational patterns create a framework within which the city is collectively perceived, experienced, re-identified. Photo albums, cult films, guidebooks offer guidelines, perspectives and categories along which the city is conceived.
Naturally enough, different representations sometimes offer fully conflicting visions of the same city. „Conflicting visions of urban planners, real estate speculators, the authorities and the public embody different urban paradigms, which surface and become dominant in different periods exerting their influence on the locale: on construction and renovation plans, on housing policies and – in a more general sense – they let their influence be felt in the collective discourse.” (7)
Discursive urban planning
The recognition of these facts has led to the spread of the idea of „discursive urban planning”. According to this idea, urban planners are to pay attention not only to physical space and the primary infrastructure of a city but also to the meaning attached to different points in space. These meanings are primarily determined by images, the different representations of the city. „These images and clichés, the imaginary geography made up of places and spaces, have been proven to have a significant social effect that can empirically be concretized and localized – not only on the individual level of procsemics, but also on the level of social discourse about the locale, which serves as a basis for ideological and political rhetoric and upsets the rational discourse of design and regional development” writes Rob Shields. (8) Discursive urban planning makes pretence at a larger degree of control, it extends its manipulative practice to areas unaffected by planning before, for example to subjective and collective attitudes to locales. At the same time, a rein is put upon the despotic rule of the abstract perspective of planning, which has to give up the dream of „modernizing” well-functioning spatial relations. Therefore the primary goal of discursive planning is not to act upon physical space, but rather to accentuate certain features of social space, to make a contribution to local identity and city-image – which is inconceivable by purely architectural means - by the dispersal and flow of images and words.
As a consequence, different urban actors have a strong interest in inducing effective, self-generating symbolic processes in the social space of the city. However, the success of such processes – which have a lot in common with publicity campaigns – is unpredictable, as it depends largely on creative communication and the familiarity with local contexts.
Contemporary urban policies present numerous examples of efforts to mobilize or to monopolize images of a city. In New York, books (Photographing New York) are published for tourists to show them how to take the most beautiful, the most successful pictures of the city. This is evidently motivated by the aspiration to enhance the dominance of a certain type of pictures, which will convey the appropriate, positive image to all parts of the world appearing in photo albums and in visual and verbal narratives. (9) The Rotterdam Film Fund – founded in 1996 – endeavors to lock film productions to Rotterdam by providing subsidies and infrastructure with the intention to make buildings of Rotterdam appear in as many films as possible. This endows the otherwise rather unmemorable urban landscape with symbolic meaning and gives it a chance to gradually carve itself into the spectators’ memory. When the Gent Group „Use-it” launched a competition to compose a new melody for the chimes of the old clock tower of the town, their aim was to reformulate the symbolic meaning of the clock tower within the context of the town through the medium of music and thereby to slacken the fixed connotations of the historic center to make room for contemporary impressions. Similarly, when the town of Szekszárd invites young Hungarian film makers to shoot films about the town in a two-day festival, it strives to mediatize itself: to diversify its images and thereby to find new, refreshed implications and points of orientation and to mobilize the name „Szekszárd”.
The above examples illustrated conscious intentions. However, it is also common that by placing a locale into the center of attention, a novel or a film unintentionally incites symbolic chain reactions that often induce economic processes. It is well known that the British film Whitnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987) contributed to a great extent to the flourishing of Camden Town in London. Similarly, in the wake of the film Nothing Hill (Roger Michell, 1999), real estate prices of the London suburb rose to unseen heights and brought by the appearance of a new lifestyle. Or we can recall the French film, Amelie from Montmartre (Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain), which turned Montmarte of Paris into a pilgrims’ destination and opened way for a new era of prosperousness. Schindlers’ List called attention to the Jewish legacy of Kazimierz, a historic district of Krakow, creating a symbolic basis for the repositioning of the Jewish quarter as a tourist center created with considerable Israeli investments.
We have come quite far from our original target of analyzing The District, but we will soon turn back to it. The main questions that we have to investigate within the context of issues and examples treated so far are how this film interferes with the development of collective images of the 8th district, to what extent it reinforces achievements of local city marketing or works against them and what kind of images and methods it uses to present the locale. But before we turn our attention to the film itself, we have to devote a few sentences to the topos of „dangerous place” and to the way it appears in the urban mind (in the sense of social sciences).
The „dangerous place”
In his article quoted above, Péter Niedermüller describes the notion of „dangerous place” in the following way: „The fact that there are known and unknown places relates less to spatial orientation and more to knowing and understanding cultural connotations attached to spatial forms. It is well known that there are quarters, streets and parks in every city that are considered to be dangerous and therefore the majority of the population of the city refrains from using them. Therefore being dangerous is associated to being unknown. However, it is important to note that there is no real or long-term correspondence between a place regarded dangerous and the actual dangerous situations as Sally Engle Merry’s research has shown it for Detroit. The correspondence is missing on the one hand because „dangerous places” are different locations for different segments of the urban population (not to mention how many different meanings the category of „the dangerous place” might have). However, it is far more important that prejudices, notions, ideas and convictions of the urban population about other segments of the same population are projected and objectivized spatially.” (10)
In the symbolic geography of Budapest, the notion of „dangerous place” is clearly linked with the 8th district. Related stereotypes reinforce this notion and legitimize the increasing ethnic segregation there. A physical and symbolic place created by such processes is best described with the word „elsewhere” in opposition with cozy „here” within the classification of urban places in the minds of the majority of the society. The attitude to „elsewhere” is manifold: „Aversion and admiration are twin poles of the process in which the political will to eliminate the „inferior” is in a conflict with the admiration felt for the „different” (…) Therefore it is not uncommon that social periphery becomes symbolically important.” (11)
At the same time, admiration for the „different” can lead to an exotic distancing, the solidification of the image and peripheral social position of the „different”. Documentary and photography are often criticized for taking this risk: while it fixes and reproduces the positional gap between observer and the subject of observation, it enhances the feeling of superiority and the social paranoia of the spectator. (12)
The mysterious „elsewhere” is often physically close to the well known „here”. „Unlike sheer topographic periphery, cultural marginality is developed in the complex processes of social activity and cultural work.” writes Rob Shields in his study on marginal locations. (13) In this cultural work, the exchange and diffusion of images, notions and opinions play a central role. This work can result in two attitudes to a place: one is a tolerant, identity-focused consensus with an emphasis on multiculturalism, the other is the „security discourse” that leads to increased surveillance and control over a district. (14)
The District
The District is embedded in the context of films and images making reference to and presenting the city. As its title and the subordinate role of the plot show, the main goal of this film is to take a snapshot of the quarter that seems so interesting, exciting and vibrant (and not only from the perspective of the wealthy districts of Buda).
The 8th district of Budapest is one of the most mediatized places of the city – to a great extent due to the transformation of Hungarian pop music and the appearance of hip-hop subculture in the last decade. Dozens of video clips and city films refer to it as the place of urban danger, ethnic conflicts and ruthless street lifestyle and it is not just by chance that the above mentioned subculture finds its virtual affiliation in this quarter. This way, connotations are projected in the space of the 8th district that originate to a far greater extent from an almost arbitrary link between a lifestyle and the vision of an environment than from the actual location. At the same time, this vision offers model lifestyles to the inhabitants of the area, and „the prediction fulfills itself” as residents create physical reference points of the „cultural repositioning” in the urban space.
Through these processes, the 8th district has become a „dangerous place”, „the others’ place” in Budapest and has become a mythical place with this connotation in spite of all the efforts of political leaders of the district to improve the reputation of the area by proving with statistical data that actually it is the least affected by crime in the whole city. Lacking the ability to provide the illusion of direct experience, statistics is evidently helpless in the face of images and the endurance of cognitive maps determined by images. Consequently, in the battle of different representations, identifications and self-determination, in the fight of images, The District is to have major significance, although its effects are yet unknown.
Fundamental questions emerge in connection with the concept of the film. Why would someone make an animation film out of a script that could be shot as a feature film? Why would they use animation technique without making use of the specific possibilities offered by it?
The District tells its story from a „squat perspective” using anecdotic elements of the „indigenous” lifestyle. Although the filmmakers used the language and appearance of living persons to create the illusion of inner perspective, they obviously operate with stereotypes and they selected their characters according to these stereotypes. The half-reality of characters and the distance between animated figures and their living counterparts serve the aims of abstraction and generalization, otherwise the tragedy of personal destinies would show through the parodistic, humorous surface of the film and would have the opposite effect. Similarly, the excessive use of musical inserts, the series of scenes perfectly irrelevant to the narrative of the film and the banality of the plot suggest that the filmmakers were aiming at depicting „the eighth district” from an external perspective as it lives in their own minds along a suitably meaningless plot, which can effectively place the different elements of this image into an order imposed from above, where conflicts are solved easily or are seen as ways of self expression in an anecdotic world.
The District depicts its subject in a peculiar way: the creators draw their own exotic picture with the help of characters supposed to be real. The film gives a report on the situation and makes idealized portraits, but at the same time it places emphasis on tamed, domesticated differences. Taming is achieved through technical distancing and a series of transmissions (film, animated drawing). The use of animation as a form of expression is a technical allure in this case: the aesthetic value added and the excitement of recognition allows the film to avoid talking seriously even in the disguise of ironic jokes. Other films that take place in the 8th district often draw on the tension between the everyday comicality and the pervasive tragedy of life, however in The District only comical elements appear. Here the use of animation technique is associated with a certain tradition of filmmaking that supports a distanced depiction of the world along a linear narrative that makes the homogeneity of the depicted world even more banal and inhibits the spectator to relate to it personally even if the given filmmaker has different goals. The District has more in common with a music video than a narrative, its dialogues are illustrations of slang rather than conversations, its characters are not individuals but stereotypes.
It is exactly the genre of animation film that makes it dubious whether it makes any sense to look for references in this film and to make it accountable for realistic references, even if the filmmakers themselves put an emphasis on the relationship with reality. The technique used in creating the film is to make the spectator forget about this dilemma: the creators used pictures of the real environment, photos of houses, streets and squares as a basis for the brownish-gray world that they created by drawing and re-coloring, computer and cut-paper animation and that serves as a scenery of the film’s story.
Dilapidated, shabby houses with crumbling plaster surround the characters. They do not stand out as individual objects but rather merge into a homogenous background. The urban scenery of 8th district buildings remains image-like and two-dimensional serving as backdrops in a stage-like space of events. Such a concept of places has a lot in common with the way places are used in the 8th district. The precedence of places over streets (that is the use of streets as places), the precedence of loitering and meeting over traffic, gathering on playgrounds, the dominance of external locations are characteristic for a lifestyle whose primary place is the street and in which public spaces take precedence over separated private spaces. Indoor spaces in which the characters appear sporadically are subordinated to external spaces; we often see interiors „photographed” through windows.
The vertical two-dimensionality of the environment is sometimes replaced by horizontal two-dimensionality All of a sudden scales change and the spectator looks down upon the city and recognizes well known points of the morphology of the 8th district from above as on a map. For a moment, the district appears in the context of other parts of the city, in the next it continues to function as a separate entity: the plot of the film never crosses the borders of the quarter.
In many respects, The District plays with the techniques of distancing and approaching that we have already described in connection with the concept of „elsewhere”. The film’s appeal and its social relevance derive from this tension, from the dichotomy of reality and fictional references. Therefore the main question is not how realistically the film depicts the district (this question is rendered meaningless by the distancing effect of animation technique): It is far more important to see which concept of the district is strengthened and which is weakened by this externally constructed interpretation.
On the one hand, The District reinforces the image of „dangerous place”, but at the same time it also dampens it by its playfulness. It brings the characters close to the audience and somewhat banally advocates multiculturalism (a Roma, a Hungarian, a Jew, an Arab and a Chinese forge alliance) and tries to emphasize the cultural potentials of the district. It has a rather ambivalent message in the social context of the city: it takes distance from the place but at the same time brings it close to the audience, stigmatizes it but at the same time admires it, pushes it to the periphery but at the same time brings it into focus. It shows the dilapidation of houses by using brownish-grayish shades and shows the diverse, contradictory relationship of residents to urban space. Thereby it opposes the rhetoric of urban rehabilitation plans, but at the same time it justifies it. It depicts the situation, celebrates it and at the same time declares it to be obsolete.
Seen in a broad social context of images and concepts, by mixing, and using certain techniques and genres while renouncing others, The District confronts and reconciles different notions of the 8th district even when it banally distances them from the everyday fancies about the place. This dichotomy – in which a complex set of ambivalent motives, the intermingling of rejection and attraction and the symbolic focus of social periphery are evident – opens perspectives, which urban planning must take into consideration in spite of its mechanistic way of thinking. While urban planners who consider themselves rational and impartial denounce the desire and nostalgia for „elsewhere”, it is a key element of the symbolic thinking of contemporary society and as such it can be translated into economic factors. Thus, if we put questions of artistic quality aside, we can think of the film as a representation that not only fixes and solidifies well-known stereotypes and social roles, but at the same time mobilizes these by retuning the significance of difference and showing diversity as a local feature and a cultural potential. And even if only a narrow social segment receptive to such ideas accepts this interpretation, The District can help us have conversations about the 8th district in many different ways and place it into the focus of growing society-wide discussions on the role and power of images.
Review on The District:
Marci Csillag: Ethnic clear-sight
Footnotes
(1) McNeill, Donald: Writing the New Barcelona. In: Hull&Hubbard (ed.): The Entrepreneurial City
(2) Niedermüller, Péter: The city: Culture, Myth, Imagination. In: Mozgó Világ, 1994/5.
(3) Mondada, Lorenza: Décrire la ville. Paris, 2000.
(4) Derrida, Jacques: Of Grammatology. Budapest, 1992.
(5) Bryson, Norman: Semiology and Visual Interpretation. (In: Bryson, Holly, Moxey ed. Visual Theory – Painting and Interpretation). Cambridge, 1991.
(6) Manale, Margaret: La modernité fait mythe. Les Temps Modernes 652/2003.
(7) Mondada
(8) Shields, Rob: Places On The Margin. London, 1992.
(9) about dominant and counter images of New York see: Régis Debray: New York New York (In: L’oeil naif. Paris, 1994.)
(10) Niedermüller
(11) Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon: The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, 1985.
(12) Deutsche, Rosalyn: Alternative Space. In: Miles, Hall&Borden: The City Cultures Reader. New York, 2000.
(13) Shields
(14) Mondada
