Special: Berlinale Talent Campus — Day 10

Metrobranding – The Creation and Production of City Images Metrobranding is a term that describes an action taken by a city to define itself from the rest of the world. This dis­cus­sion revolves around this issue and con­sists of 3 film­mak­ers – Tata Amaral, Wim Wenders and Ning Ying – as well as renowned urban­ist, Deyan Sudjic. All 3 film­mak­ers have made films which have both defined the cities they have set them in as well as doc­u­mented their urban devel­op­ments. Moderator Vincenz Hediger sets up the topic of the dis­cus­sion by bring­ing up three moments in film his­tory. The 1^st moment is the 1954 Elia Kazan film, “On the Waterfront”, which was dis­tinc­tive for its real­is­tic on-location shoot­ing of the New York har­bor, which has since ceased to exist due to com­mer­cial­ism and mod­ern devel­op­ments. The 2^nd moment is the 1977 Woody Allen film, “Manhattan”, of which its open­ing mon­tage depict­ing New York City views, with Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and a voice-over track of Allen strug­gling to define what New York is, is a dec­la­ra­tion of love to the city. The final moment is the 1999 Bond film, “The World is Not Enough”, with an open­ing chase sequence set near the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The rea­son Hediger brought up these films is because of their effect on the cities they have been set in. With the demol­ish­ment of the New York Harbor, the Kazan film has pre­served this lost seg­ment of the city along with its social his­tory (film is about dock work­ers deal­ing with labor strife not uncom­mon in 1950s). “Manhattan” was a suc­cess­ful attempt of immor­tal­iz­ing a city through the power of cin­ema. The Bond film is an exam­ple of the cur­rent form of metro­brand­ing, a clear attempt by financiers to adver­tise the city of Bilbao as a tourist attrac­tion. Tata Amaral’s works have, since the begin­ning of her career, worked to rep­re­sent the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil on film. Her lat­est film, “Antonia”, is shot in the SoHo dis­trict, which is not as devel­oped com­pared to the rest of the city. Her moti­va­tion to do “Antonia” was fueled by the youths from the out­skirts who were capa­ble of find­ing hope within their cor­rupted com­mu­nity. This moti­vated her ambi­tion to cap­ture this urban real­ity. The films of Wim Wenders have defined many cities with their dis­tinct images and titles such as “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire”, of which its German title actu­ally trans­lates to “The Sky Above Berlin”. Wenders’ deci­sions on where he shoots his films are either based on whether or not he feels a con­nec­tion with the city or if he aims to cap­ture an envi­ron­ment which he knew was no longer going to exist or as cre­ative deci­sions rather than pre­con­ceived city brand­ing. For exam­ple, his deci­sion to shoot “Wings of Desire” in Berlin was through a need for a city that pos­sessed qual­i­ties he required as the city was to be its main pro­tag­o­nist. Regarding preser­va­tion, Wenders feels that it is the respon­si­bil­ity of a film­maker to do this. Once can­not help but agree as Ning Ying nar­rates to the audi­ence the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in Beijing where “entire neigh­bor­hoods are demol­ished within a night, while our mem­o­ries asso­ci­ated with these build­ings were also stolen from us.” Ning prefers to make films that doc­u­ment present social changes. Her “Beijing Trilogy”, which was com­pleted in the 90s, doc­u­mented the “eco­nomic reform that was (at the time) becom­ing more and more vis­i­ble.” However, the brand­ing of a city within a film, be it inten­tional or not, usu­ally cre­ates the same out­come. Recently, more pro­duc­ers and insti­tu­tions have rec­og­nized the eco­nom­i­cal ben­e­fits of city brand­ing of which many film­mak­ers give into because it is eco­nom­i­cally sen­si­ble, show­ing that an eco­nomic logic exists when it comes to film pro­duc­tions. Besides being an eco­nomic resource, a city can also act as an aes­thetic resource to film­mak­ers. In Europe, an insti­tu­tion chooses one coun­try yearly to be the European “Capital of Culture”. Wenders was selected as part of a group of film­mak­ers hired to rep­re­sent Lisbon, the 1995 “Capital of Culture”, in a series of films. Wenders expressed his cre­ativ­ity in his film, “Lisbon Story”, with a fas­ci­na­tion towards the unique sound­scape of the city, telling the story of a sound engineer’s trav­els through the city as he records sounds from var­i­ous loca­tions in Lisbon. Deyan Sudjic sug­gests that per­haps the uti­liza­tion of the his­tory of a city could “point the way to how some movies can go beyond evo­ca­tion or catch­ing a moment in time to try to explain in a sense what it is that makes a city func­tion and where it comes from.” Sudjic believes that “Breaking and Entering” by Anthony Minghella tries to accom­plish this in its depic­tion of the trans­for­ma­tion of the King’s Cross area in London where as the yup­pie archi­tect char­ac­ter works in his office in the day, at night, that same area reverts into a law­less envi­ron­ment. It shows how time and place over­lap, an indi­ca­tion of how cities func­tion and what it can be. This is how cin­ema can help us under­stand cities as well as doc­u­ment the occur­rences of events and repli­cat­ing images and ideas. Hediger believes that that this is the begin­ning of a new genre of film – the “cura­tor city film” whereby film artists are invited to pro­mote the image of a city. This birth of the “cura­tor city film” is, of course, not entirely bred from com­mer­cial logic. Artistic free­dom is pro­vided and film­mak­ers are not always be told where \to shoot their films and what kind of impres­sions to cre­ate about them. But nonethe­less it fol­lows the logic of metrobranding.