DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-380395
title: Spatial truths and temporal fictions: cinematic representations of the American city 1938-1978

description: This dissertation examines two works of cinema—The City (1939), directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, and Killer of Sheep (1977), directed by Charles Burnett. Straddling the midpoint of the twentieth century, they together bracket a critical forty-year period in the development of the American city. It is during this span of time that a paradoxical condition emerged in the United States. The country became on the whole less segregated on a national scale, yet re-segregated to near-equal levels within each metropolitan region. As fluid as regional demographics were during this time, with millions of rural white and black Americans moving to the urban centers across the country seeking opportunity, the gradual relocation of industries from the traditional center city to new urban-edge communities (as discussed in relation to The City) from the late 1930s onward, coupled with slow progress ending racial restrictions in real estate lending, led many African American communities to become devastatingly “out of sync” with the flow of postwar opportunity (as discussed in relation to Killer of Sheep) by the 1970s, leaving many in a state of “hypersegregation.” ❧ Film, as a time-based art form, proved to be a particularly apt medium to represent the relationship between physical mobility and social mobility for all Americans during the first half of the twentieth century (as discussed relative to The City), as well as the consequences of the lack of mobility and opportunity afforded to some Americans based on race in the second half of that century (as discussed relative to Killer of Sheep). Each of these works is a film about time, and also of its time, registering the shift in the public “image” of urban poor across this forty-year period from predominantly white (as depicted in The City) to predominantly black (as depicted in Killer of Sheep). ❧ While the two films are antithetical to one another in terms of their narrative or temporal organization, they share a common commitment towards engaging the medium of film itself as a tool for social persuasion. Both attempt to bring the far and the forgotten near, and to cancel out the distance so often created through strategies of segregation, intentionally blurring the line between fiction and documentary modalities, and forcing us (middle-class Americans) to encounter through direct address (via “the voice” in The City and “the look” in Killer of Sheep) what we had hoped to have hidden through physical distance in the real city. This dissertation argues that hypersegregation in the late 1970s was not only directly linked to many of the racially motivated planning policies put in place during the late 1930s, but that (as an extreme spatial condition) its representation began to challenge the language of cinema as a temporal art form in works such as Killer of Sheep by the late 1970s. ❧ By abandoning the temporal conventions that assist in producing narrative coherency and by focusing instead on the “weight” of empty spaces and discarded waste in the ghetto, Burnett suggests with Killer of Sheep that the main protagonist’s personal crisis of living in poverty is caused as much by geography (space) as it is by historical circumstance (time). Extending the type of temporal-spatial alienation felt by the protagonist to the audience members themselves, as Burnett does in Killer of Sheep, the viewing subject is able to recognize the extent to which our temporal fictions often conceal our society’s uncomfortable spatial truths. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that this emergent spatial awareness as depicted in Killer of Sheep was met with a similar “spatial turn” in the social sciences during this same period of time—a “turn” which recognized, as Burnett did, that critiques of Western society’s grand historical narratives are not enough to dismantle long-standing forms of social hierarchies, and that an informed critique of our relative uneven spatial positions is equally necessary.