Film

The City

Name: The City
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1939
Cast: Morris Carnovsky

A 1939 documentary about urban planning that proposes suburbs and nuclear families as salvation from industrial city decay. Shot with striking clarity and narrated with period urgency, it's a time capsule of mid-century American optimism—and its blind spots. Essential viewing for anyone curious about how we got here, or why cities got blamed for problems they didn't create.

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Metropolis1927

Fritz Lang's vision of a stratified future city remains the template for how cinema imagines urban spaces. Visually overwhelming, structurally bold, and genuinely strange in ways that haven't aged.

But The restoration is gorgeous but the pacing is slow, and the plot—a reconciliation fantasy—feels quaint given its own world-building.

Modern Times1936

Chaplin's final silent film captures industrial dehumanization with comedy and rage. Shot just before *The City*, it shows the same era from the factory floor instead of the planner's desk.

But The slapstick can feel dated, and Chaplin's sentimentality about 'the little man' hasn't worn well for everyone.

The Fountainhead1949

Gary Cooper as an architect fighting mediocrity and collective thinking. It's the ideological opposite of *The City*'s paternalism, and fascinatingly unhinged in its conviction.

But Ayn Rand's philosophy is delivered with all the subtlety of a hammer, and the film is genuinely tedious in stretches.

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Come and See1985

*The City* shows how planners imagine controlling human life through design and order. *Come and See* shows what state systems actually do to human bodies and souls when those plans meet reality.

Elem Klimov's Soviet film about a boy conscripted into war is the most visually and spiritually devastating film ever made. It's about systems, innocence, and the machinery of state—all the things *The City* assumes are neutral or benevolent.

But It's an ordeal. The violence is real (or feels real), the despair is total, and there is no redemption or comfort offered anywhere.

Sunset Boulevard1950

A Hollywood classic about decay, illusion, and the machine grinding up those it no longer needs. Shot in L.A., it's a darker reckoning with American modernity than *The City* allows.

But It's cynical to the point of bleakness, and the narrative device can feel mannered on second viewing.

Koyaanisqatsi1983

No dialogue, just images of American landscapes—natural and built—set to Philip Glass. It's an abstract visual essay on progress and systems, making *The City* look like propaganda by comparison.

But The experimental structure and repetitive score will exhaust some viewers. It demands patience and offers no narrative comfort.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth2012

A documentary about the rise and catastrophic fall of a St. Louis housing project. It's the bitter sequel to every film about utopian urban planning, including *The City*.

But The subject matter is heavy, and the film doesn't offer easy answers or redemptive conclusions.

Blade Runner1982

A noir nightmare of a future city—overdense, polluted, stratified. Ridley Scott imagined what happens when the promises of modernist planning collide with corporate greed and human desperation.

But The theatrical cut is compromised by studio interference, though the director's cut is worth seeking out. Even then, the plot is secondary to atmosphere.

Stalker1979

Tarkovsky's philosophical science-fiction about desire, stasis, and the spaces we build around desire. Formally patient, thematically dense, and utterly unlike anything about cities you've seen.

But It's glacially slow, cryptic to the point of opacity, and demands active interpretation rather than narrative clarity.