ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 describes the city films that emerged out of the Weimar Republic in Germany as the embodiment of modernity. In Berlin during this period, the theorization of modernity accompanied its representation in films. The chapter outlines the emergence of the city film with particular emphasis on the genre of the street film. It provides an overview of theories of modernity by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Max Weber. The discussion highlights Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur and Simmel’s understanding of the metropolitan nervous type. The cinematic depiction of the metropolis criticized alienation in the urban environment but fetishized the technological vision of machinery, urban planning, and modernist architecture. City films gave rise to the figure of the vamp and the trope of the prostitute who encapsulated the desire and danger of the street. These gendered configurations served to discredit women’s emancipation.
