Disappearing City
Director & Producer: Shizheng Liang.
Music: Oneohtrix Point Never – Hospital Escape ／ Access-A-Ride
The metro is a metaphor for the modern urban lifestyle, indicating the disappearance of traditional urban spaces. The metro is probably the best urban space to manifest modernity, as it operates almost as the opposite of walking through traditional streets. Travelers enter a portal under the city’s surface, loaded into a time/space capsule, travel through the city at a supra-biological speed that ignores any obstacles, and return through another passage, where the travelers are ignorant of the urban spatial structure. They do not know which roads they crossed, which buildings they ran into, at which intersections to turn in which direction. They also have no chance to pass by the colorful lives of different urban residents, talk to them, and see the beautiful trees lining the boulevards, which are all critical components of the traditional urban experience. In the metro, the urban experience is compressed into an enclosed cuboid with expressionless people waiting for the destination: thickness-less, boring, and agitating.
Figure 1 shows the various possible scenarios of the underground city, from the marvelous structures of termites, historical human practices, and the dystopian underworld, to fortresses on a sci-fi desert planet. In each image, parallels to the modern metropolis can be identified. And what the metro does, compared to the pedestrian tunnels in these scenarios, is to minimize the perception of space from one cave to another, reducing the city to a de facto sum of isolated places. If a resident lives and works in a building connected to the metro, his entire urban life can occur indoors and underground. In this sense, modern city dwellers begin to evolve into troglodytes, whereas cities become termite nests, i.e., mounds of settlements standing on the barren plains of modernity.
In this research, my main emphasis is to contrast the urban experience when moving through the metro and traditional streets. Figure 3 shows the routes I traveled chronologically (R1-R3). I went to Daguan Station on Hangzhou Metro Line 3 (Phase 1), 34 km from my home, which has only been open for two months. Although in the same city, this area is almost an unknown territory to me. I entered the metro from Daguan station and randomly chose a station to get off, during which time I would wear a blindfold to ensure that I did not interfere with the endpoint. Led by my companion, I arrived at the underground exit and then removed my blindfold to ensure I had no prior knowledge of the starting point. Afterward, I tried to walk across the city to go back to Daguan station without relying on maps or navigation. Taking De Certeau’s insight, I use walking to experience the city and understand it. In this way, I constructed an objective and random experience of the city and documented it as a kind of performance art that examines real urban exploration.
The video begins with an empty subway car, and by multiplying the speed and color manipulation, I wanted to create a sense of dislocation from reality to set the tone for the film. To represent the urban experience in the metro, I tried to convey the feeling of agitation and surrealism by jump-cutting and color change. The idea of the color change came from David Lynch’s representation of distorted psychological conditions, and I used this form to express a psychedelic vision of people in a distance-free hyperspace. The editing style mimics Godard’s Breathless, with extensive use of jump cut and rapid montage, to achieve a dynamic and entertaining image flow and compensate for my weaknesses on the mise-en-scène. I inserted the metro part repeatedly into the urban exploration part to juxtapose the two urban experiences, hoping to create a comparison, but not judging.
In my urban exploration, I made Perecian exhaustive observations of my surroundings. Luckily, the neighborhood I randomly chose was extraordinarily rich and gave me many surprises (and took many wrong turns). As can be seen in the video, my search was divided into three stages: old neighborhoods (part 1), the green area and historical heritage around the Grand Canal (part 2), and the newly developed area with skyscrapers and commercial complexes (part 3). I cannot say which is better or worse, but what is certain is that the urban space became a real entity for me, not just a marker on a map or a name in an announcement.
This experience, I have to say, was surprisingly moving for me, especially at such a difficult time in our urban civilization, when it becomes almost a luxury to live such an urban life freely. But we must not forget why our ancestors chose to live together and why we need cities. At this critical time when public space and street life are constantly challenged, we should not forget Gehl’s famous statement that, “A good city is like a good party.” The greatest thing about cities is not that they give people caves to live in, but that they give opportunities for people to collaborate, interact, and enjoy themselves. I hope this video can not only be a reflection of modern city life, but beyond this, as an invitation to join my exploration of the city in the real distance, and find our urban life back.
Shizheng Liang 3035834785
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in The Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and other writings on media. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.
Castells, Manuel. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. New York: Blackwell, 1989.
de Certeau, Michel. Walking in the City. In The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Fritz, Lang, director. Metropolis. UFA GmbH, 1927. 1 hr., 56 min.
Gehl, Jan. Cities for People. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2013
Godard, Jean-Luc, director. À bout de souffle [Breathless]. Les Films Impéria, 1960. 1 hr., 27 min.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997.
Lynch, David, director. Inland Empire. Absurda, StudioCanal, Fundacja Kultury, Camerimage Festival, 2006. 2 hr., 59min.
Lynch, Kevin. The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964.
Nývlt, Vladimír, Josef Musílek, Jiří Čejka, and Ondrej Stopka. “The Study of Derinkuyu Underground City in Cappadocia Located in Pyroclastic Rock Materials.” Procedia Engineering 161 (2016): 2253-2258.
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, translated by John Sturrock and Agnieszka Daniłowicz-Grudzińska. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Safdie, Josh and Benny Safdie, directors. Good Time. Elara Pictures, Rhea Films, Hercules Film Fund, 2017. 1 hr., 41min.
Tester, Keith. The Life and Times of Post-modernity. London: Routledge, 1993.
Tykwer, Tom, director. Lola rennt [Run Lola Run]. X-Filme Creative Pool, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Arte, 1998. 1 hr., 20min.
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Yomtov, Nel. From Termite Den to Office Building. Ann Arbor: Cherry Lake Publishing, 2014.
Also welcome to comment on my other works through http://course.arch.hku.hk/cchu9034/author/szliangconnect-hku-hk/!
Your project theme is very creative, with the subway as the core to explore the space and distance of the city. At the same time, you have very professional research on urban planning and space. I have deeply thought about the first question, which can bring convenience to people and also lead to the disappearance of traditional urban space (this is the first time I have such thinking). The design and layout of the video are brilliant. The final conclusion also points out the main idea: to find our real city life. Interesting, meaningful and in-depth video essay!
Thanks for your kind comments! Really glad to know this video essay has stimulated some of your thoughts. It really makes me feel like my hard work has paid off.
Your color manipulation with an empty subway car immediately attracted me. It provides me with a feeling of unreality. This unreality feeling in the underground of the city contrast with the parts of the actual city on the ground, which gives me two completely different ways of observing the city. Apart from this visual design, I was impressed by your first research. The idea that each subway station is like a hole in the city and each person is constantly traveling through these “holes” is very creative. This idea gives me a new way of thinking about the role of subway stations in a modern city. It is not merely a convenient way of transportation, but it somehow changes the way people live.
Thanks for your comments! Good to know my visual design really works!
The attempt in this video succeeds in re-expanding the city, flattened and blurred by a voyage-through-wormhole like underground travel, into dimensional streets. The editing and processing of the images tangibly create a curious re-exploration of a city. It is noteworthy that in the process of walking through the city (due to being lost), Shizheng re-entered the residential area where he lived as a child, which he has long forgotten until then. The recapture of missing childhood memories and the recreation of the urban environment in the video formed a marvelous intertext here. Anyway, great video and great observation!
Thank you for helping me complete the story! It was a heartbreaking decision for me to omit this surprising interlude in the text due to the word limit, and I’m really starting to regret that. I believe it would be an incredibly pertinent example of why real urban experience matters and how our modern life undermines this experience. So the thing is when I was finding my way back to the metro station, I searched through the roadside signs and suddenly I found a name that is so familiar. Then my memories started flooding back to me like crazy, and then I vaguely remembered that I had been in this neighborhood that is a few blocks away for all my pre-kindergarten years. It’s really like so-called serendipity as I really thought I never actually enter this region. I was always telling my friends that I have almost no memories before I started middle school. If I didn’t do this research I probably will recollect this fact many years later when my mom reminisces about the past, or maybe I’ll just lose this memory forever. I guess that is why I love exploring cities so much. They never fail to give such a “magic hour”, that at a certain point, the path of our life will miraculously intersect. Any city is a great reservoir with numerous sediments of memories. But only by experiencing it in a “real” way, we can never forget.
Very interesting performance art, very attractive work, very original concept. I have to say the idea of linking the underground lines to termite nests was very innovative but suitable and really made me understand what is disappearing in the city. The editing techniques used in the video are rich and creative, and it is clear that you have studied film editing a lot. The concepts and arguments mentioned in the essay are very thought-provoking, but perhaps a little less so is that the presentation in the video in a little vague, where the stacking of images does not present the theme of disappearance. When interspersing the subway footage with the urban exploration section, the footage inside the subway looks a bit monotonous. In my perspective, it would have been easier to highlight the contrast between the above-ground and below-ground city life if some footage of other people’s behavior and actions on the subway had been chosen to intersperse with the city’s behavior and actions, such as people playing on their phones with headphones in the subway and people chatting on a park bench in the city. This is the best work I’ve seen so far, and my comments above are not meant to be critical, but I think such a novel concept and interesting attempt deserves a perfect short film, and I look forward to work with you if I have the chance to help on the video shoot.
Thanks for your advice! Actually I kind of intentionally made this metro experience part in a monotonous manner, but as you said, I may have to find a better way to make this video more entertaining.
The color changing is very cool, I love those color used in your video.
The idea of understanding your city also very cool.
We should know where we are living, but we always ignore its importance.
Thanks for the comment!
Interesting and sounding method to discuss the disappearance of the city in metro tunnels. It would be great if you could include your map in your video as well so that we can relate your view with the location. Right now, the footage of you navigating the route back seems to appear more as city spaces instead of places with identities like names and locations. Is that the effect you would like to achieve? Overall, you have made a thought-provoking video that is well-explained by your text.