"The Naked City" (1948)

A city made naked. How does one unclothe a city? At night the citylights are strong enough to obscure its most private parts. At day a rush of people at every conceivable corner of the street-and-building grid induces either nausea or delirium if one focuses too much on the flow of information. The city never seems naked, but it is. It is stark naked and ghastly with odors and faces. It is naked because it has no clothes to speak of. The people and the streets and the cars and the subways and buses and the buildings are the city stripped to its bones. Its physiological collocation: the tunnels and avenues and the angles of drops and rises the source of a rhythm that pulses with indigestion, rigor mortis, tenacity.

The New York of Jules Dassin's "The Naked City" is the mythic New York, the city of cities, the archetype and embodiment of the platonic ideal of the city. Dassin doesn't paint it or translate it or interpret it, but breaks it to pieces and puts it back together in an editing room; he reveals it to be a vast circumference of densities that don't stretch out but fold into each other when he fixes the frame on the multipatterned rings of its exposed treetrunk; after of course having chopped that tree of a town down, 'stripped her glory', 'bared her passion' ... The first aerial shots of New York that begin the film scan the city from an exterior apprehension, as that of a migrant approaching an empire overrun with atoms & skyscrapers from the privileged view of a helicopter, and gives us sight of a movable banquet on which we are about to feast.

(One must ignore the rather obnoxious narration by the then-hot producer Mark Hellinger, an unfortunate dub that strangles the film of its potential high-noir seriousness, but which Dassin's visuals regardless overcome through sheer majesty, the director's eye trumping the producer's infatuation with his own project; Criterion has done us the justice of changing the title from "Mark Hellinger's The Naked City" to "Jules Dassin's The Naked City"; nevertheless, one gets the feeling that Dassin would have humbly corrected us that there would never have been a "Naked City" had it not been for Mr. Hellinger, nor even a Burt Lancaster or a "Brute Force" if one were to take it further, to which one can only assent and nod one's head.)

Much like the ridiculous needlessness of the narration, the actual plot elements of the one story chosen from the "8 million stories" that New York promises amount to a rather banal process. The radio program quality of the film's narrative mechanics (which would be expanded upon later in a tv series) do not completely submerge the film; Dassin guides us through the city with print quality rushes that overlap the everydayness of the plot and characters. When a character exudes the conventions of the day, Dassin makes sure that our eyes are gorged on the lights, shadows, recesses, and projections that lash out from the background. We are saved from the tralatitious traits of an inferior noir narration by the amplitude of the scenery and the velocity of the edits that introduce a numerousness of faces, bodies, and voices in a city continuously alive.

Dassin blows up New York piece by piece, but he does so in order to enliven it, to establish it from within its proper fragmentation, paradoxically, as an inviolate whole that though cratered by pockets of human interest and scattered malignancy, stands up proudly in a beacon of ornamental delimitation. New York is the principal character (as the glib Mr. Hellinger tells us) because it has a world to hide in its perpetual revelation.

In the final climax, pre-designed by the beginning march of quick edits - of the characters who turn out to be the principal actors in the drama - to be a consequence of the systemic networking that commences with the murder of a beautiful model, & ends with the death of a nefarious villain who like King Kong ascends the Brooklyn bridge to escape antagonists, we find that it is the city which changes men and women against their will, which drives them to commit treacherous and occasionally blameless acts against human nature, because they are in thrall to the enchantments of a city run amok with the sounds and sights of differentiated citizens as they make their frantic orbits in the NYC galaxy. We learn from the wide scope that harbors the triteness of the story, that it is not man who founds cities, but cities which find men:

"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?" - Marshall McLuhan, Media as Translators