The Flaneuse and the City

Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 THE FLANEUSE AND THE CITY HARMANPREET KAUR “In order to engage in flanerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” - (Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin)1 The figure of the flaneur in nineteenth century emerged as a result of the then existing avantgarde surrealist literature while also being associated with the dream worlds of the surrealist perspective on the city. 2 For Walter Benjamin, the origins of the flaneur lay in Paris. “Paris created the flaneur type...It opened itself to him as a landscape, it enclosed him as parlour.” 3 He further speaks of the flaneur standing on the threshold of the metropolis and the middle class: “Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd.” (Benjamin, 10) It is this crowd of the city that for Benjamin, beckons the flaneur as “phantasmagoria – now a landscape, now a room.” (Benjamin, 10) Flanerie in David Frisby’s words is a “form of looking, observing (of people, social types, social contexts and constellations), a form of reading the city and its population (its spatial images, its architecture, its human configurations)...” (Frisby, 82) This male dandy, a figure of modernity strolled the streets of Paris and its arcades in the nineteenth century. But as the department store replaced the arcades, the mobilized gaze of the flaneur entered the world of consumption, and space opened up for the female flaneur - a flaneuse who brought along a gendered gaze. 4 But if women roamed the street, they became streetwalkers and objects of consumption for the flaneur itself and the concept of female flanerie was not given importance till much later. “The female flaneur has remained absent from debates over the status of the image and the perception of modernity.” (Gleber, 69) The 1 Cited in (Frisby, 81) (Frisby, 85) 3 Cited in (Frisby, 85) 4 (Friedberg, 420) 2 1 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 phenomenon of flanerie that was theorised by Benjamin and celebrated by Baudelaire however remained the privilege of the educated, white, affluent middle class bourgeois male society. Women could only enter this male dominated space if chaperoned by companions or disguised in men’s clothes. This constriction and control over ‘femininity’ would continue to remain in the twentieth century for in texts and films from Weimar Germany idle women are depicted and regarded as prostitutes. Even some feminists in the 1970s hesitated to enter nocturnal streets and restaurants on their own.5 Gleber quotes Feminist scholar Griselda Pollock: “They did not have the right to look, to stare, scrutinize or watch.” (Gleber, 72) From being a male oriented view of the city and its life, flanerie or the art of taking a walk took several shapes from the nineteenth century onwards in symbolist and impressionist forms to surrealistic explorations, journalism and the figure of the detective to later providing space for “female nomadic subjectivity”. (Bruno, 99) Through the films of three female directors, Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) set in Paris by Agnes Varda, Lost in Translation (2003) set in Tokyo by Sofia Coppola and Fish Tank (2009) set in Essex outside East London by Andrea Arnold, this paper argues that city space is reclaimed by wandering women for their psychic and physical emancipation from the cloistered interior space inhabited by them. Further, the city becomes the “geography of passage” (Bruno, 99) as these flaneuses transform and empower their lives through acts of flanerie. These films in many ways represent how women see and are seen by the world. 5 (Gleber, 69,71) 2 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 PARIS IN CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 Agnes Varda’s first feature, the 1962 film Cleo From 5 to 7 was part of one of the most creative periods of filmmaking in the early 60s - the French New Wave and would go on to make her one of the foremost women filmmakers of her generation. 6 Varda’s filmmaking style emerges from her background in photojournalism and documentary (unlike the Cahiers du Cinema writers Godard and Truffaut) which reflects in the striking verité images of Paris, turning it into a character with a continuous presence throughout the film. 7 The film follows Cleo (Corinne Marchand), a spoilt pop singer for two hours from 5 to 7 in the evening, beginning with a session with a tarot reader. The fortune teller gives her grim news foretelling death or a transformation in her future. Cleo is left aghast, as she finds her worst fears about aging and disease come true through the tarot reading. She is awaiting the result of a test, which she fears could diagnose her with cancer and has a doctor’s appointment two hours later that weighs on her mind throughout the film. She leaves the tarot session in a state of flurry, paranoia and desperation and steps outside on the streets of Paris. There is a sense of disorientation as she steps down from the tarot reader’s room, with quick jump cuts of her face as she descends. The disorientation continues as she walks on the streets, with the camera following her in a verité style as passer byes stare at her. She crosses shops and salesman try to sell her goods, but she walks past without engagement and meets her superstitious female companion, Angelé in a cafe, where she looks into the mirror and cries. Later, they enter a department store selling hats, where Cleo tries on various fashionable styles before several mirrors in the shop helped by a female saleswoman. There she says, “Trying things on intoxicates me.” The fil was released a year after Fra ois Truffaut s Jules and Jim a d Alai ‘es ais Last Year at Marienbad, and two years after Jean-Lu Godard s Breathless. Godard makes an appearance in the short film within Cleo From 5 to 7 as well along with Anna Karina. 7 (Haskell 2000) 6 3 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 Benjamin traced the flaneur from the arcades to the department store. He said: “The construction of the department store . . . made use of flanerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flaneur’s final coup.”8 The female flaneur was not possible till her freedom was linked to the privilege of shopping, which became a socially acceptable leisure activity by the late nineteenth century for bourgeois women and they were encouraged to indulge in it without escorts. Department stores or grand magasins became central to capitalist cities which also employed women, making them both buyers and sellers. 9 As Anne Friedberg says: “The great stores may have been the flaneur’s last coup, but they were the flaneuse’s first.” (Friedberg, 421) Cleo, as a flaneuse shops in the hat store, fascinated by the styles and her reflection in the mirrors. The shop windows on the street offer her visual intoxication, a site for consumer desire where can cease to think of her misery and see herself as a fetishized object. What is worse for her is not death, but ugliness and possible disfigurement from her illness. She is shown to be self-obsessed, vain, preoccupied with her image and oblivious to her city surroundings. Varda’s photojournalism turns Paris into a “hall of mirrors – windows and faces that reflect the heroine back to herself.” (Haskell 2000) Paris is scenic as we watch her walk through it, across its mix of people, cars and buses, shops and cafes, bookstalls, boulevards and Haussmann’s “long perspectives down broad straight thoroughfares” 8 9 Cited in (Friedberg, 420) (Friedberg, 421) 4 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 (Benjamin, 11), and our attention is fixed as much on Paris as on Cleo. “It is an odyssey that, like so many French films, is about the double delight of watching a beautiful woman against the backdrop of the most beautiful of cities...” (Haskell 2000) But Cleo gradually learns to look again, at the city and herself with a new awareness and allows it to transform her. Her house cum studio space is big, white and minimal. Inside it, she is the fetishized women bedecked in jewels, fur and wigs and her room is presented as her own mirror image. Her bed, and the room itself becomes a performance space for her invented persona. Here she meets her lover, José (who is married to someone else and only spends a few minutes with her), her musician and lyrics writer, her companion Angelé and herself – who is her own best audience. 10 The moment of change occurs when she throws away her wig, changes into a plain black dress and re-emerges on the street, this time without her female companion. This time her walk is not a masquerade as she becomes an observer of the city, watching people and street performers. Unlike Georg Sand who used to don a male attire to become a flaneuse, Cleo removes her disguise of a spectacle female with the purpose to not buy but to look without being looked at. According to Janice Mouton, the woman shopper cannot be associated with the authentic flaneuse. She argues that unlike Friedberg who elevated the shopping mall to philosophical contemplation for the woman and failed to recognise the perversions of commodity fetishism, Varda on the other hand creates in Cleo a fetish woman who goes shopping but a flaneuse who haunts the streets.11 For Mouton, the life on the street with its risks, surprises and variety carry with it a transformative force. As Cleo rambles through the busy shopping street, Rue de Rivoli, Cafe le Dome and the natural space of Pare Montsouris, she ceases to become an object but joins in and becomes a part of that world and experiences a city in fragments. “Her process of transformation is 10 11 (Mouton, 6) (Mouton, 8) 5 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 echoed by the city’s relentless variety. There is no wholeness or permanence to be sought, no expectation for the woman or for the city of arriving at a fixed identity.” (Mouton, 9) A crucial sequence is when Cleo enters the crowded Cafe le Dome where she overhears conversation (concerning Algiers), men and women look at her as she looks back at them and notices every detail like posters on the bulletin board, paintings on the walls, tables and chairs, a jukebox and a newspaper rack and seats herself next to mirror mosaic surface but does not look into it, for the first time. She meets a female friend, Dorothe who drives a car and this time we view Paris from their window pane. The two friends also take a short taxi ride driven by a female driver and Cleo is amazed of her profession. She wonders whether she is not scared at night. The figures of female automobile drivers provide opposite flaneur figures to Cleo’s who express independence in their movement within the city. Later as 7pm draws nearer, Cleo walks through lush gardens and muses over a waterfall where she meets a stranger, Antoine who is a French soldier in the Algerian War on leave and due to leave by train the same day. She shares a moment of confession with him, when she admits to her fear of dying to Antoine 6 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 who must also contend with the idea of death in combat. He does not know who she is and in his engaging company on a bus ride to the hospital, she discovers real human exchange and a possibility of love. She says to him on the bus, “People’s faces next to mine amaze me.” At the end, Cleo is relieved when her doctor tells her she requires only two months of treatment, and as spectators we are left with the hope that Cleo and Antoine stay in touch. Thus the film stresses on the necessity of flanerie for female subjectivity. “In the end, Cleo and the city claim each other.” (Mouton, 14) Mark Betz reads the various references to the Algerian War in the film as colonial reminders from which there is no escape. From radio news broadcasts in the cab to African masks in shop windows, Cleo’s personal and visual liberation in the film “are linked to a certain flight or regress from the (de)colonised and racialized Other, an Other she is figured variously as and as not.” (Betz, 137) Betz finds the film a colonial allegory, though not fixed in which through Cleo there is an alternation between nationhood and the self and potentialities of a modern woman in a modernizing nation. The eventual meeting of Cleo and Antoine can be seen as a conventional gender 7 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 pairing up or an unconventional coupling of France and Algeria. 12 The city of Paris however becomes the centrepiece of the film which aids and reflects the woman’s inner journey. As Cleo looks into shop windows, we wonder what she sees, and as the camera focuses on her beautiful face and geography of Paris, we wonder what fascinates us. COPPOLA’S TOKYO STORY Sofia Coppola’s third feature film, the minimalist romantic comedy Lost in Translation (2003) starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanasson won her the Best Screenplay Award at the Oscars that year. Other awards included one for Coppola and Johanasson each at the Venice Film Festival. Faintly familiar to sixties European cinema and classical Japanese film13, Lost in Translation is about the meeting of two strangers in Tokyo, who fight their boredom and confusion in each other’s company, and at the end depart with the hope of probably meeting again. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a B-level Hollywood actor who is in Tokyo is shoot a Japanese whiskey commercial. He has a wife and two children back in Los Angeles, but is clearly suffering from a mid-life crisis and a heavy jetlag. His only conversation with his wife revolves around the interior design of their new house, for which he receives faxes from her occasionally in his hotel room. Charlotte, played by Johanasson is staying in the same hotel as Bob, has just graduated from Yale University in Philosophy and is married to a photographer, who she has accompanied on work to Tokyo. While he stays busy in his photography shoots barely taking out time for her, Charlotte spends time by herself in the hotel room, or the hotel premises or sometimes wandering in the city. 12 (Betz, 139,140) (French 2004) Philip French in his review in The Guardian says: Charlotte and Bob, in fact, could pass with flying colours the Michelangelo Antonioni accidie test for the burnt-out Wester ourgeoisie. While the like ess to Japa ese fil ste s fro Coppola s style of fra i g a d pa e. 13 8 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 Both Bob and Charlotte are unable to sleep at night. Charlotte often sits on the window ledge of her room, gazing at a panoramic view of the city in front of her during the night and sometimes during day. Coppola’s camera quietly captures vignettes of her movements – at a metro station trying to figure out maps and routes, walking through crowds and merging with them, walking through Buddhist temples and crossing large thoroughfares and looking at neon signs and advertisements flashing on buildings. Even as she sits in her bathtub, she looks out at the city skyline. The disorientation that the two characters feel in their respective marital lives is reflected in the disorienting urban life of Tokyo where language becomes a barrier for both. Bob watches his own films dubbed in Japanese on television, and both flit through television channels replete with indiscernible, comical and absurd Japanese programmes in their respective rooms. The city leaves them further disorientated and fascinated at the same time with neon signs to video game arcades, stripclubs and karaoke bars. She finds an empty and serene space in Buddhist shrines, while he finds it playing golf in the shadow of Mt Fujiyama in Tokyo. Bob and Charlotte spot each other for the first time in a crowded hotel lift and later at the hotel bar. There they meet more often while also 9 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 spending time together with Charlotte’s friends in Tokyo. As they travel in taxis or on foot, their faces are reflected on the surfaces of car windows with the city lights. The film is shot by Lance Acord in “lustrous nocturnal tones” and presents Tokyo “as an outsider might see it, without apology.” (Rainer 2003) Philip French in his review of the film says, “Japan is just walls of neon signs in the streets, crowds of over-polite servants and karaoke bars.” Indeed, Lost in Translation does feel littered with familiar signifiers of a cliché oriental vision of Japan from a western perspective. There are “bowing concierges bustling after guests in a high-tech hotel, pop-star hipsters with multi-colored hair sporting synthetic fashions” (King, 45) and the film marketed as a comedy to prompt amusement from a western audience was not appreciated by the Japanese audiences.14 Local reviews were not kind either. Yoshio Tsuchiya called the film “stereotypical and discriminatory” and another writer Kotaro Sawaki noted that the Japanese characters “are consistently portrayed as foolish.”15 But even though Coppola does not claim to represent Tokyo objectively or authentically, King suggests that every image has a quality of a first impression. Further it is not clarified whether the subject of the film is Tokyo or western perceptions of Tokyo – “the fantasies that two lonely American project onto the city and its residents.” (King, 45) Tokyo is thus presented as a city of disconnectedness, where two strangers meet and project their own individual alienation onto the city as they both develop a connection between themselves. Both are literally sleepwalking through the city and Coppola’s film is a foreign portrait of Japan because of this. Hers is a stylised approach to cityscape through the use of 14 (King, 45) The Japanese distributor - Tohokushinsha Co. opted for a delayed opening at a single Tokyo theatre and a website trailer as its sole advertisement. L.A based non-profit organization Asian Media Watch also launched a a paig agai st the fil s four Academy Award nominations. 15 (King, 45) 10 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 heightened pastel colours and languorous panning shots. Like her protagonists dreamlike viewpoints, Coppola is also lost in the environment of Tokyo. 16 Charlotte, as the flaneuse in Lost in Translation is shown isolated in her surroundings. Even when she is surrounded by people, usually friends of her husband, she does not engage with them. Perhaps her background in philosophy lends her to deal in metaphysical concepts than direct or physical engagement. She is cool and aloof and Coppola presents her almost sitting above things, especially when she looks down at the cityscape from her hotel room. 17 Like the female protagonists of Antonioni’s films Red Desert and The Eclipse, Charlotte is looking and craving for a real role for herself in life and a sensory experience that can lead her to it. As she lies in bed with Bob one night, she asks him: “Does it get easier?” They talk to each other about their lives – Bob about the happiness he gets from his children and distance from his spouse, while Charlotte of her inability but desire to write, and a lack of aim in life. They barely touch each other but fall asleep talking. One is left wondering about their relationship with one another and several delicate moments like this in the film establish their closeness. 16 17 (Rogers 2007) (Rogers 2007) 11 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 “Sensual experience is one of the ways that Deleuze suggests the modern protagonist may use to re-connect with the world.” (Rogers 2007) The protagonists, who are separated by several years from each other in age, find between themselves a connection that they establish slowly with the aid of disorienting but sensuous Tokyo. At one point Charlotte tells Bob that they should not come back to Tokyo city by themselves, because it would not be a better experience without each other’s company. However, it is the loneliness that the two felt individually in the city that brings them together in the end. In the final sequence, Bob leaves the hotel to catch his flight back to the U.S. There is an abrupt goodbye between him and Charlotte. As he leaves in his car, he looks out at a crowded street from his window. There he spots the back of a woman he recognises to be Charlotte. He quickly hastens out, and runs towards her. Charlotte, from being earlier depicted as alone in the crowd, this time has successfully immersed herself in the street life. He turns her around, gives her a kiss and whispers something in her ear that is left inaudible to the spectator. They both then depart after being quietly comforted in each other’s arms. As Bob leaves in his car, Charlotte disappears into the street crowd. She is “no longer set apart from life, but experiencing it imminently and immediately.” (Rogers 2007) The last sequence, indeed the street in the sequence, is a passageway that transforms her from being conceptual and aloof to being open to the world. 12 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 SUBCULTURAL BRITAIN Andrea Arnold’s second feature film Fish Tank (2009) won her the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival as well as a BAFTA, and like her previous feature film Red Road (2006) centres on a young woman living in a housing project facing sexually fraught situations. Arnold has also been hailed as leading the resurgence of the current crop of British auteurs since her first feature film in 2006 which also did well at Cannes. 18 The protagonist of the film is a 15 year old girl Mia (Katie Jarvis), who lives with her mother and younger sister in a rundown council estate ghetto in Essex, on the outskirts of East London. Mia is a volatile teenager who is always getting into trouble, is excluded from school and ostracised by her friends. Like the juvenile delinquent of Antoine from The 400 Blows, Mia looks for freedom from the pressures of living in their cramped flat at the estate by roaming in the streets and fields outside. She also aspires to dance in the hip-hop style, although we can see that she is not too good at it, but it is in her own private world that she creates an image of being a great dancer. 18 (Pulver 2009) 13 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 What is of importance is the location of the film which portrays semi-urban desolation that rings London. Andrea Arnold herself grew up in a council house in Dartford, Kent on the other side of the Thames Estuary from where Fish Tank is set. The location comes across as in the middle of nowhere away from the hustle of the city. Arnold says of the Mardyke Estate where the film was shot: “I drove out from east London along the A13 and loved it straight away. The madness of the A13, the steaming factories and the open spaces, the wilderness, the empty car parks where Ford used to be. I love too this part of the Thames, where it widens out to meet the sea. I was looking for an estate in the middle of all that that felt like an island...I also loved the wasteland behind the estate.” (Artificial Eye Film Company 2009) Back when the slums of London’s East End and Docklands began to be cleared up after WWII, their inhabitants headed to both Essex and Kent. The Mardyke Estate is typical of such projects. Built in the 1960s to house workers at Ford’s auto plant, it offered former Londoners new flats arranged in tower blocks. They were also vaguely inspired by the utopian schemes of modernist architects and planners but soon proved to be disastrous. The new tenants who were uprooted from their former traditional communities were disoriented and isolated. Drug dealers also began to invade the estates which acerbated a culture that was already riddling with alcohol abuse and petty crime.19 19 (Christie 2011) 14 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 Set against this decaying landscape is Mia who is on the cusp of womanhood. Played by Katie Jarvis who is a non-actor, she was discovered by the casting crew of the film on a station in Essex itself. 20 Arnold’s hand held roving camera follows Mia closely through the claustrophobia of the estate flats and the exterior barrenness she traverses. In the opening sequence of the film, Mia is seen in an empty apartment, head down, dressed in track pants looking out and surveying the life on the estate from the window in the room. This empty apartment is also her personal dance studio where she practices her dance moves and drinks cider. Wearing a hooded sweatshirt she walks towards a group of white girls practising hiphop dance on the street. She is disgusted with their sexualised moves and gets into an altercation and head butts a girl till her nose bleeds. Mia walks away from the scene in a fit of frustration, towards a vacant lot of trailers. A white sofa lies abandoned on a patch, and she sees a white horse tethered on the side. It is a moment of beauty for her to watch an animal standing silently. She decides to steal the horse but is caught by the owners, a pair of rowdy boys living in the trailer, till she begs to let go. The scene establishes her need to be left alone but at the same time, yearning for a connection. Arnold adopts a harsh realist style to convey the emotions of constriction and desire to escape in Mia through details of the setting, from the graffiti in corridors, to litter on the sidewalks and the trash on television. “We find ourselves, in “Fish Tank,” in a world made familiar by the films of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and other socially conscious anatomists of British misery.” (Scott 2012) Mia’s world goes into a flux when her mother, who is also fond of hiphop dance, gets a new boyfriend Connor played by Michael Fassbender. There is a tenderness shared between the two, especially in the sequence when he takes the family fishing in the countryside, which later takes on a sexual turn between them. Meanwhile, Mia becomes friendly with one of the boys her own age from the trailer who she hasn’t met before. She 20 (Artificial Eye Film Company 2009) 15 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 also wants to take part in a dance competition that would give her a job in London. For her the competition is the only route of escape from the drudgery of living on the estate where gradually, her mother jealous of her daughter’s emerging sexuality wants to enrol her into a ‘correction’ school. Connor provides her with a video camera to record her audition tape while also proving her a song – ‘California Dreamin’ to dance to reminiscent of another film, Chungking Express. Mia as a flaneuse, not only walks through the streets of this urban ghetto, through automobile junkyards and wastelands but also dances in her private space looking out at the estate in front of her. She watches black hip-hop music on her television at home, imitating their moves and dreaming of a new future. She takes on the style of a subculture as a form of refusal, a revolt and the elevation of crime into art.21 Just like graffiti, it is with the adoption of a subcultural style that she also draws attention to herself. Although, originating from black working class in America, the hip-hop style has gained global recognition and it is this style that Mia and her white family identify with living on their ghettoised council estate. “The new kind of American rebel with, or without, a cause - the gangsta rapper is promulgated by high-paid Madison Avenue advertising executives and MTV programmers to young hip hoppers globally.” (Osumare, 38) Towards the end, she is left disappointed when (Hebdige, 2) It is also interesting to note that originally hip-hop was perfor ed etwee ga gs i breakdance battles in New York subways or highway underpasses to settle disputes. (Osumare, 33) 21 16 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 she finds that Connor is married with a daughter of his own, and the dance competition was only interested in sexy women. Although her dream shatters, the film ends with a hint of hope when Mia decides to leave the estate with the boy from the trailer and start a life of her own. GEOGRAPHIES OF PASSAGE Giuliana Bruno in her book Atlas of Emotion describes the city spaces and interiors in French filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Meetings with Anna (1978) as “geography of passage”. (Bruno, 99) She likens cinema to flanerie and says, “A practice of imaging that participates in the modern philosophical project of mobilizing space, cinema has been home to various forms of nomadism, including some gendered female.” (Bruno, 95) This nomadism and what she calls “female nomadic subjectivity” was also felt in the films of Micheangelo Antonioni, where through female wanderings, he established an aesthetic of filmic anatomy of space. 22 Using architecture, Akerman like Antonioni creates a “geometry” of passage in which she allows the woman to be in her own space and in the space of her voyage.23 I argue that in the films discussed above, the three female protagonists display their nomadic subjectivity through the architecture of the city which each of their female directors create on film. There is a geography of passage in the city that each cross to get over their fears and confusion as they transform into grown women. In Cleo From 5 to 7, Cleo walks by herself into cafes, crowded thoroughfares and gardens to undergo a transformation from her self-obsession by interacting with the city, through an afternoon of flanerie. Charlotte in Lost in Translation finds herself lost in the crowds of Tokyo and is only at the end of the film in harmony with the abuzz city streets. Mia in Fish 22 23 (Bruno, 95) (Bruno, 101) 17 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 Tank walks through the council estate and its neighbouring underbelly and dances in an empty flat overlooking the estate to escape her surroundings and change her life by leaving the estate at the end. The cities they traverse provide them with the physical and psychic spaces to reshape themselves. Lewis Mumford speaks of the several structures of a city like the wall, or a temple or palace and marketplace enabling the individual inhabitant to identify himself with the personality of the city. For him a principal function of the city is “the making and remaking of selves.”24 The window also plays a role in all three films for the protagonists. For Cleo it is the shop window, for Charlotte it is the window screen overlooking Tokyo in her hotel room and for Mia, the window overlooking the council estate from her make shift dance studio. The window is also an analogy for cinema where it frames a scene, places it behind glass making it inaccessible and arousing desire. 25 Here the desire is for the flaneuse to enter the city. Janice Mouton also talks about Virginia Woolf having written about the similarity between browsing in a bookstore and street walking. The books on the shelves are like the crowds on the sidewalk and while browsing, “one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.”26 It is this flash of understanding that brings life to the encounter in the city, be it on the street for Cleo and Mia or a crowded hotel bar in the case of Charlotte. It is in the bar of the Tokyo hotel that Charlotte and Bob spot each other for the first time and talk to each other, much like Kracauer’s early interest in the texture of passageways that were expressed in his reflections on the ‘Hotel Lobby’ and ‘City Map’ conceived as decors of the Mass Ornament.27 As wandering was incorporated into the 24 Cited in (Mouton, 10) (Friedberg, 422) The shop window succeeds the mirror as a site for identity construction to be replaced by the cinema screen. 26 Cited in (Mouton, 11) 27 Referred in (Bruno, 42) 25 18 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 cinema, early film viewing also became an imaginary form of flanerie. This was also important to Kracauer. “For Kracauer, the affinity between cinema and the pavement pertains to the transient, for the street, like the cinema, is the site where transient impressions occur.” (Bruno, 43) In the three films, transient encounters take place between women and men as each negotiate the city. It is not revealed whether these relationships are maintained, but their presence reflects hope and freedom for the female characters as each are able to talk and express themselves to their companion. What begins as an act flanerie for the woman ends in a meeting with a stranger that is further liberating. As Simmel says, “If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the “stranger” presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics.” (Simmel, 143) The flaneuses in Cleo From 5 to 7, Lost in Translation and Fish Tank as wanderers and strangers cross passageways in the city to make and remake themselves. BIBLIOGRPAHY Artificial Eye Film Company. "Press Book, Fish Tank." Artificial Eye. 2009. http://www.artificialeye.com/database/cinema/fishtank//pdf/pressbook.pdf (accessed December 4, 2012). Benjamin, Walter. "Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century." Expose of 1935. Betz, Mark. "Wandering Women." In Beyond The Subtitle, by Mark Betz, 93-178. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion, Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. London, New York: Verso Books, 2002. Christie, Ian. Fish Tank: An England Story, The Criterion Collection. February 23, 2011. http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1764-fish-tank-an-england-story (accessed December 4, 2012). 19 Cinema And The City, M.Phil Seminar, SAA, JNU, 2012 French, Philip. The Odd Coppola. January 11, 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/jan/11/philipfrench (accessed December 1, 2012). Friedberg, Anne. "Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition." PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 3, 1991: 419-431. Frisby, David. "The Flaneur in Social Theory." In The Flaneur, by Kieth Tester (ed.), 81-110. London, New York: Routledge , 1994. Gleber, Anke. "Female Flanerie & the Symphony of the City." 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September 15, 2003. http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/n_9178/ (accessed December 1, 2012). Rogers, Anna. Sofia Coppola, Great Directors: Issue 45, Senses of Cinema . November 27, 2007. http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/sofia-coppola/ (accessed December 2, 2012). Scott, A.O. A Reckless Teenager, Seeking Solitude Yet Craving Connection. January 14, 2012. http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/movies/15fish.html?_r=0 (accessed December 3, 2012). Simmel, Georg. "The Stranger." In Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, by Georg Simmel, 143-149. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1971. 20