“In Fiji, they have these iridescent algae that comes out once a year in the water,” says master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in Michael Mann’s L.A. crime epic Heat (1995). “That’s what it looks like out there,” as he gestures out towards a panoramic view of the city lights at night from a Hollywood Hills home. Years later, while shooting another L.A. crime film, Collateral (2004), Mann would describe the L.A. night lights from a different perspective: “When its humid, the sodium vapor from the street lights in this megalopolis of 17 million people bounces up onto the bottom of the cloud layer and it becomes diffused light. You see this wondrous, abandoned landscape with hills and trees and strange lighting patterns.”[i] Decades before both films, a two-page panoramic photograph of the city at night appears to anticipate these presentations of Los Angeles. In the magazine Southern California Through the Camera, produced in 1929 by the All Year Round Club of California,[ii] the viewer is treated to several images promoting a cultured and leisurely Southern California lifestyle – the center piece image being an aerial photograph of downtown Los Angeles provided by photographer Robert Earl Spence (credited as “Spence Airplane”). “The joyous Southland,” the magazine proclaims, “is a good place for the inspiration of artists, writers, and moving picture directors.”[iii]
The history of Los Angeles during the twentieth century – and indeed the history of Hollywood’s place within the larger history of the region – is tied to competing visualizations of the city. In City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), Mike Davis describes several categories of “Los Angeles intellectuals” in an effort to flesh out “a history of culture produced about Los Angeles…that has become a material force in the city’s actual evolution.”[iv] Of the seven that Davis describes, there are three that have played a particularly strong role in providing images that contributed to narratives about the city’s utopian promises, and counter narratives that revealed corrupt power structures, class struggle, and existential crisis. First, there are the Boosters, who according to Davis, “inserted a Mediterraneanized idyll of New England life into the perfumed ruins of an innocent but inferior ‘Spanish’ culture.” They were exemplified strongly by the “Arroyo Set”[v] and their financial and political allies. Second were the Noirs who “reworked the metaphorical figure of the city…to expose how the [middle class Los Angeles] dream had become a nightmare.”[vi]Novelists like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler pierced booster myths with Double Indemnity (1936) and The Big Sleep (1939) respectively – the latter featuring a character, General Sternwood, who bears a striking resemblance to prominent Booster Harrison Gray Otis (a comparison also found in Howard Hawk’s 1946 film of the same name). Lastly, the Debunkers insisted upon “the centrality of class violence in the constitution of the social and cultural landscapes of Los Angeles.”[vii] These were novelists like Upton Sinclair, journalists like Carey McWilliams, and, later, filmmakers that explored an “invisible Los Angeles,” what Thom Andersen describes in his video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself as a “cinema of walking” about a “city of walkers.” Booster city panoramas, like Spence’s Southern California Through the Camera aerial views, project a city with limitless possibilities, whereas Heat, harkens back to a noir tradition, by poetically piercing this glittering image by presenting its “sea of iridescent algae” layered on top of a land of contradictions and broken dreams. In stark contrast to both, The Exiles (1961), Kent MacKenzie’s neorealist film about Native Americans living in the Bunker Hill district, concludes with a scene on top of Chavez Ravine (known as Hill X) overlooking the city. The film’s characters congregate on Hill X to sing and dance to traditional tribal songs, with a sea of city lights providing a vast background. In this Debunker film, this familiar city panorama presents a displaced people as adrift and invisible in an area that was grown, ironically, through creating visibility.
This visualizing of Los Angeles can be traced back to established traditions of Southern California photography during the nineteenth century, developing as a form for art, commerce, civic planning and civil engineering, and providing the region with a mythological narration. Scholarship of pre-cinema photography, according to Charles Wolfe, offers a different set of possibilities when one departs from traditional views of the form as a precursor to cinema: “as an antecedent mechanism of photographic inscription.”[viii] Photographic images produced in California during the latter half of the nineteenth century exhibit the same guiding principles of spatio-temporality found in early Los Angeles cinema, and indeed echoed in subsequent cycles of Los Angeles films in a variety of ways. This chapter will examine nineteenth century California photography, its impact on early Hollywood filmmaking practices, and its distinct presence in films that are set in Los Angeles.
Nineteenth century California photography cemented a variety of representational principles and practices that contributed to the selection of Los Angeles as an ideal location to grow an American dream factory. For one, these images gave rise to a visceral language for representing a natural landscape being overtaken by a growing city. The rise of photography in California was a precursor to the Progressive Era[ix] (approximately 1880 – 1920) – a period that saw a phenomenal population boom fueled largely by visual marketing and an industry of folklore and storytelling. By the end of the Progressive Era, Los Angeles became the largest city on the West Coast – up from 187th place nation-wide in 1880.[x] Images taken of Los Angeles before the start of the Progressive Era document a city growing past a Spanish/Mexican past, a history whose remains were falling into decay. As nineteenth century California moved into the Progressive Era, photography often went hand-in-hand with the promotion of the region and civic projects. Later, Los Angeles photography, and later moving pictures, would counter sharply with the images of other cities nationwide and globally, challenging the public perception of what a city could be and offering a different perspective on the concept of stadtbild:the intangible cultural and geographical sense that one gets from a particular city – the feelings a particular city exudes.
Photography in California during the nineteenth century also pioneered photographic genres, much in the way that photography during the American Civil War established photographic genres linked to moral outrage and scorched earth.[xi] California cityscape photographs directly contributed to, as Dimitrios Latis observes, the silent film genre known as “city symphony,” day-in-the-life films that celebrated the splendor of modernity and city life. [xii] Films such as Berlin: Symphony of a City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) and A propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930), for example, elevated the actuality film form to a more poetic portrait of a city. Here, I argue that we can add “city symphony” to the list of pre-cinema photographic genres that emerged during the nineteenth century when one considers that the photographs taken of Los Angeles (and San Francisco) during the 1870s exhibit similar qualities as silent film city symphonies. The techniques for presenting the city, which I will explore in this chapter, culminated in L.A.’s own silent city symphony from 1920 from First National and, to this day, have a distinct presence in L.A.-set films.[xiii] If films like The Exiles are indebted to the tradition of neorealist cinema exemplified by Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945), then both can be seen to echo the city symphony genre, though in radically different ways and with didactical purposes.
The development of photographic techniques during the nineteenth century were primarily concerned with replicating physicality, creating environments, and, in contrast to the painted image, providing a sense of corporeality. Photographers in late nineteenth century California presented a territory to Midwesterners and East Coasters, familiar to many only through literature, as a real physical space. Later, early motion pictures, in particular the silent slapstick films, set their physical spectacles in places and spaces that were familiar to audiences through two-dimensional images, creating three dimensional spaces within the minds of the spectator that beckoned to be navigated through. This contributed to what has been described by some scholars[xiv] as a “cinematic mapping impulse” in which the manipulation of spatial relations by the moving image taps into desire to mentally map out the diegetic terrain. These cartographic qualities to early California photography are exhibited in early slapstick films, and later would become a feature of Los Angeles cinema and other urban set films in a variety of ways.
Lastly, California photography contributed to early Los Angeles studio practices in a variety of ways. As Brian Jacobson notes, the symbiotic growth of Los Angeles and the movie business during the 1900s and 1910s is linked to the demand of outdoor filming space. [xv] The links between the natural landscape and innovations in photographic forms in the nineteenth century played a key role in the development of the studio backlot as a defining feature of Los Angeles moving picture culture. Mark Shiel also notes that, from 1900 to 1915, Los Angeles was one of “the most important centers for fine art photography,” and that these photographers, alongside booster visual marketing, standardized an iconography of the region that came to be affiliated with the American motion picture industry.[xvi] These perspectives complicate the traditional narrative of why the motion picture industry migrated to Southern California circa 1905, a narrative that generally centers on two factors: ideal shooting conditions in Southern California’s Mediterranean ecosystem and legal maneuvering, an easy escape route to Mexico in the event that Edison patent agents attempted to seize their equipment and film stock. While there is certainly some truth to both explanations, they are largely overstated according to recent studies and are inadequate for contextualizing the rise of the American film industry with the broader discussion on turn-of-the-century visual culture. [xvii] In this chapter, and the chapters that follow, I will argue that the population boom in California during the early twentieth century, along with the rise of Hollywood, was the product of a robust visual culture, of which photography and the practices it established played a significant role.
[i] Collateral, DVD, “Making of” featurette: Michael Mann explains why he shot most of the film on digital.
[ii] Organization founded in 1921 by real estate mogul and general manager of the Los Angeles Times Harry Chandler, aimed at promoting tourism in the region.
[iii] Pg. 29.
[iv] Davis 1990, pg. 20
[v] Novelists, artists, and journalists who contributed to a mythology of Southern California as an American Eden (often tinged with the language of white supremacy). One of the movement’s most charismatic figures was Charles Fletcher Lummis, a figure who I will return to in chapter two.
[vi] Davis 1990, pg. 20
[vii] Pg. 24
[viii] Wolfe 2018, pg. 212.
[ix] Perhaps of one of the seminal works on California’s Progressive Era can be found in Kevin Starr’s Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (1986)
[x] Davis 1990, pg. 25
[xi] For further reading, see Trafton, John. The American Civil War and the Hollywood War Film. NY: Palgrave, 2015.
[xii] Latis 2018, pg. 205
[xiii] Untitled; Available through UCLA Film and Television Archive as “Los Angeles, ca. 1920s).
[xiv] For further reading, see Rositzka, Eileen. Cinematic Corpographies: Re-maping the War Film Through the Body. Berlin: Cinepoetics, 2018.
[xv] Jacobson 2015, pg. 171.
[xvi] Shiel 2012, pg. 23
[xvii] See Jacobson 2015, Shiel 2012, and even earlier works of Tino Balio and Eileen Bowser offer a more complex portrait the than traditional narrative of why Los Angeles was selected as a site for a motion picture industry.