written and produced by: Ian MacNeill
based on Lewis Mumford's book titled "The City in History"
graphic: Gerald Budner
music: Robert Fleming
sound engineer: Kathlen Shannon
sound recording: Joseph Champagne, George Croll, Ted Haley
sound editing: Karl Du Plessis
audio-visual materials research: Marion Leigh
narrator voice: Budd Knapp
directed and filmed by: Christopher Chapman, Robert Humble c.s.c., Iwanami Films LTD., Derek Knight, Claus Loof, Ian MacNeill, T. McCartney-Filgate, Reginald Morris c.s.c., Erik F. Nielsen, Brian Probyn
contributions: British Museum, Archivio fotografico del Musée du Louvre
executive producer: Guy Glover, A National Film Board Of Canada, 1963
places: Venezia, New York, Parigi, Pamplona, Siena, Hiroshima

A copy is of this film can be: seen in Videoteca IUAV in Venice , (http://iuavbc.iuav.it/sbda/main.php?page=350 , ricerca per titolo, Lewis Mumford on the city); or bought by NFB (National Film Board of Canada), http://www.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?id=11089#ff-gen .

“The motor car shapes and forms… not only our cities, but whole city regions. Indeed it seems to be…The most influential of all our city planners. … For the heart of the city it meant a loss of building sides and open spaces as some of its most valuable areas became waste lands of smoke and steel. … The more the city is scattered, the more they need the automobile. ”
Filmed images lead spectators from the chaotic traffic of the cities to the smoke of the railway, to big motorways used by commuters to drive from suburbia to the city center of American cities. The exposing spaces of a large annual fare, the public is dreaming looking at new cars.
“ … The motor car inflates our private ego, proclaims our social status and provides us with the illusion of freedom and power . … But when the railroad era begun in the Netherlands , the railways supplemented – not supplanted – the waterways. …The best of the old is combined with the best of the new. Filmed images taken from an airplane in the Nederland 's, tell a story of balanced relation between the different transport systems in that country. Elsewhere in Europe , traffic and parking occupy the centre of cities. Every night huge lorries carry new cars to sell in the city. “… But in the hearts of our cities, there's no time left … Clogged city arteries caused by building too densely and relying too much on the private automobile for city transportation is not only a north American disease. … It is spreading rapidly to the all cities in Europe , even less suited to the use of the motorcar . … If we are to save the hearts of our cities, the choice is clear and urgent. …We must boldly control the use of the motorcar in the dense cores of cities ”. (c.l.)

written and produced by: Ian MacNeill
based on Lewis Mumford's book titled "The City in History"
editing: Dennis Sawyer
graphic: Gerald Budner
music: Robert Fleming
suond engineer: Kathlen Shannon
sound recording: Joseph Champagne, George Croll, Ted Haley
sound editing: Karl Du Plessis
audio-visual materials reaearch: Marion Leigh
narrator voice: Budd Knapp
directed and filmed by: Christopher Chapman, George Feynon c.s.c., Mogens Gander, Jacques Giraldeau, Derek Knight, Claus Loof, Ian MacNeill, Reginald Morris c.s.c., Erik F. Nielsen
contributions: British Museum, Archivio fotografico del Musée du Louvre
executive producer: Guy Glover, A National Film Board Of Canada, 1963
places: Stoccolma, Harlow, Haddington, Ottawa
A copy is of this film can be: seen in Videoteca IUAV in Venice , (http://iuavbc.iuav.it/sbda/main.php?page=350 , ricerca per titolo, Lewis Mumford on the city); or bought by NFB (National Film Board of Canada), http://www.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?id=11089#ff-gen .

Video-review
(by Cristina Peraino)

See the video (.mpg file - 2,14 Mb)

“Because the heart of a traditional city like Arles in France is small and compact, it may be found there a more concentrated and many sided reflection of even common place events and dilemmas of life. Not only will the sense of the city be more complete but there will be a closer and more vivid knowledge of the countryside and of the people from it in such a city on even an ordinary errant than on a trip, to say, an antiseptic modern supermarket.”
From France , taken from the streets life of a small town, come the first images of this film. The Baroque transformation of cities, in this case, offers a comparison with history. The images then go to the central theme, showing people that assist silent to the demolition of a historic building in the old centre of Montreal , Canada , to be replaced by skyscrapers of financial assets. The film ends on the positive and reassuring experience of Netherlands where it has been possible to maintain intact its city centres.
“ When the dynamic flood of capitalism asserted through Europe, no city ruled it more successfully than Amsterdam . It was the age of Rembrandt. Amsterdam preserved its balance as it grew and in achieving balance it fastened a richer mode of growth. The culture of cities is in no small part the culture of men .” (c.l.)

Video-review
(by Cristina Peraino)

See the video (.mpg file - 2,17 Mb)

“To built monuments, monuments representing royal power and religious glory, cities have often sacrificed the immediate well be and the comfort of their citizens. But poets like William Blake saw the squalid truth that lied beneath the surface of golden London and her silver Thames, strong with shining spires and corded ships. And never before in history had so many people lived in such ugly and savagely debased surroundings ”.
A sequence of those monuments that best identify the periods in which we traditionally are used to split on the history of the city (from the pyramids of the Egyptian age, to the skyscrapers of the contemporary age) introduces images, equally classic, of the living conditions of the working class in the industrial cities of the nineteenth century. The way toward images of the large public slums of the contemporary industrial city is all too easy. A series of photographs of the late XIX century illustrates the myth of bourgeois life in country side villas, reinterpreted in XX century in form of single house built in the suburbs, however, devoid of any quality of the life of the village. A night spent on the attractions of a country fair, offers the images necessary to the final exhortation in the film: “ So long as their communal spirit persists, there is hope that man's communities will reflect the complex patterns and potentials of his own life .”
“ More than a 100 years of agitation and legislation have not wiped out the slums. Indeed, in most cities they are increasing. These needs can be satisfied only by public effort and imaginative architectural design. Under the tread of metropolitan power, congestion and standardization, people seem almost instinctively to know that their communal survivor depends on holding fast to the vital village element, always present in all cities. A street fair or a saint's day festival in an old city neighborhood is a recurrent reminder of man's age old insistence on their communal and personal identity .” c.l.)

Video-review
(by Cristina Peraino)

See the video (.mpg file - 2,17 Mb)

“The congested metropolis has produced a flight from the city, an actual escape or in an increasingly impersonal environment…The threaten to shadow the historic urban forms and to scatter the contents of the city at random over the landscape. Result is a dispersal of the city's essential or social organs for meeting and mixing. Happily in the midst of our present urban confusion and disintegration a new pattern of life has begun, just begun to emerge. The best of the present regional communities, the Stockholm satellites or the English new towns are attractive and lively.”
This film first shows common images of the rubbish that invades congested cities, where it is not unusual to find in the streets those who have been excluded from those cities. The next sequences illustrate the most successful cases of regional settlements, trough which proves that an alternative is possible. The examples in this case come from Sweden and Great Britain . The object here is the size and organization of the “new centre" for the new settlements. These images particularly insist in focusing the need of reproduction of the conditions of social and cultural centres of the old city, where all professional activities, educational, artistic and social are concentrated.
“ Such magnetic centers could give to the emerging new mosaics of communities the means they need for the steady purposeful development.
The city multiplies man's power to think, to remember, to educate, to communicate and so to make possible associations which bridge or bypass nations, cultures, beliefs and theories.
The curtain rises on a new urban drama and a new urban stage: the city of man. The city where men will at last be at home by themselves on a smaller planet but in a wider world. ” (c.l.)

Video-review
(by Cristina Peraino)

See the video (.mpg file - 2,23 Mb)