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The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jar396

1945-2314

Hilary Radner,

European history and politics

The Apartment Plot by Pamela Robertson Wojcik adds to a growing list of recent volumes on film genre testifying to its revitalization as an area of research within contemporary cinema studies, with series such as New Approaches to Film Genre, edited by Barry Keith Grant for Blackwell Publishing, contributing to this trend. Notwithstanding the volume's initial claim, however, Wojcik does not situate her analysis within the context of this new work on film genre. Her argument follows a line of thought similar to that proposed by Lee Wallace in Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (2009), in which Wallace argues that the apartment in a group of six films made between 1961 and 2000 functions as a chronotope that usefully dissects the oppositions between “sexual privacy and sexual publicity, domesticity and urbanity, innocence and corruption” as crucial to the definition of sexual identity (p. 137). For those unfamiliar with the term, Robert Stam describes the chronotrope, a concept he attributes to Mikhail Bakhtin, as “the constellation of distinctive temporal and spatial features within a genre defined as a ‘relatively stable type of utterance.’” He explains: “The chronotope mediates between two orders of experience and discourse: the historical and the artistic, providing fictional environments where historically specific constellations of power are made visible” (Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 2000, p. 204). For Wojcik, the cinematic representation of the apartment in a collection of films made between 1945 and 1975, in which the apartment itself acts as a “narrative device” (p. 6), provides what she describes as “a philosophy of urbanism” through which “overlapping but not identical ideals of urbanism are produced for different identities, marked by gender, sexuality, class, and race” (p. 267). Drawing on the work of urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991), Wojcik proposes that “the apartment plot can be seen as a correlative of the suburban domestic ideology” (p. 19) of the 1950s explored by media scholars such as Lynn Spigel in Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992). Wojcik explains that “each chapter examines a different ‘tenant’ in the apartment plot”: the “bachelor,” the “single girl,” the married couple, and the African American family (pp. 42–43). This “philosophy of urbanism,” expressed in films such as Rear Window (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961), Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961), Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), and Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971) “might be seen as something of a conspiratorial plot, justifying heterosexual closure, the ‘taming’ of the feminine, and the deracialization of urban space” (p. 43). While film scholars will probably remain unconvinced that the apartment film constitutes a genre in its own right, and historians will be frustrated by a methodology that leads only to partial glimpses of mid-twentieth-century American urban development and its complexities, Wojcik nevertheless succeeds in demonstrating the value of focusing on the apartment, and mise-en-scène more generally, as a heuristic device. Doing so enables her to explore continuities between an otherwise diverse body of films, revealing how cinema both represents and participates in the production of discourses about urban architectures and experiences. As such, the volume makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of the relations among cinematic representations, architecture, and everyday life.