ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film The City directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke. The City was a sponsored film produced for the 1939–40 New York World's Fair by Civic Films Inc. in conjunction with the American Institute of Planners and with the financial assistance of the Carnegie Institute, and, as a whole, it isn't technically a city symphony. The City is a project that had strong ties to the artistic and political avant-garde and that emerged out of the art, film, photography, and design nexus that was such an important feature of these overlapping scenes. The team that created The City is a veritable who's who of leading figures in the realms of documentary film, experimental cinema, modernist photography, urban planning, and contemporary music.
