Seeing Symphonically

Erica Stein is Assistant Professor of Film at Vassar College.

"There are numerous individual musicians for Stein to conduct in Seeing Symphonically. She succeeds in pulling them all together as any good city symphony would and any good city planner should. The question of what a city would be like if it allowed people to have a right to the city versus capital's claim to the city remains unanswered. However, Stein wakes us up to the noise, mess, and smells of the city and its potential to foster quotidian encounters that are better than utopian; they are symphonic." — Journal of the American Planning Association"Seeing Symphonically is one of those books that needed to be written. It is somewhat surprising that a book on the representation of New York in avant-garde and independent film hasn't already been published. The book is therefore an important and long-awaited contribution to both film studies and urban studies." — Steven Jacobs, coeditor of The City Symphony Phenomenon"The City Symphony film—long a staple in filmmaking and a genre which has produced a large handful of genuine film classics—has always struck me as a wonderful merging of documentary and experimental film. But under the watchful and educated eye of Erica Stein one sees that so many of the New York City Symphony films also and importantly bring a critical and sometimes caustic eye to the utopian aspirations of New York's checkered record of urban planning and redevelopment." — David Desser, author of The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa

• IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Carving Out an Island1. Tomorrow Has No Smell: The City, Regional Planning, and the National Day2. City/Text: Weegee's New York, Urban Renewal, and the Miniature-Gigantic3. Secret Passages: Symphonies of the Margins, Slum Clearance, and Blight4. Spectacle in Progress: Symphonies of the Center and Advocacy Planning5. Image/City/Fracture: The Cool World, the Urban Crisis, and Nostalgia for ModernityCoda: RepairNotesBibliographyIndex