Scientific and Artistic Investigation of Cities Offered in a Cinematographic Manifesto

In a cinematographic manifesto, Jacques Levy, a geographer and urban designer at EPFL, offers a scientific and artistic investigation of cities. With a special focus on China’s urban centers, he draws parallels between Italo Calvino’s book “Invisible Cities” and the real world.

An EFPL professor has decided to communicate findings from his research in a film – an atypical approach carried out by an atypical researcher in a scientific environment that traditionally favors the written word for its publications. In his film, Jacques Lévy constructs a dialogue between the famous Italian writer, Italo Calvino, and his own scientific discoveries. In “Invisible Cities,” Italo Calvino has Marco Polo describe 55 cities that he imagines him to have visited to the great emperor Kublai Khan. In this project, the Levy draws on a range of themes, such as trade or memory, touched on by Italo Calvino. His manifesto builds on a patchwork of sequences filmed in numerous Chinese cities and photographs taken on all four corners of the globe over almost 13 years.

In what light did you view cities in your film?

Cities are the most productive way of bringing people together. They are a concentrate of everything that exists in a society. They always hide something new, something unexpected, because they are at the same time banal and extraordinary. We feel comfortable in cities; we know how they work. Yet merely walking through a city, we sense a tension between a feeling of surprise and one of being at home. What I found interesting in the research that led up to this film was the relationship between the singularity of each individual city and the increasingly standardized concept they are built upon.

What is behind this unifying aspect?

In a way, the same causes lead to the same effects. For instance, every city needs a transportation network, otherwise its various areas do not communicate. Consider the subway line in New Delhi. It’s fascinating to see how the residents force themselves to wait for the passengers exiting the metro to do so before they embark. In a society where the notion of public property is only weakly present, where other people are hardly considered if they are strangers, and where the idea of urban discipline is still rather vague, this subway is somewhat the antithesis of Indian cities. A kind of self-conditioning is taking place, and you can tell that they are in the process of learning. New Delhi’s subway line is unique in that it is New Delhi’s subway line, but at the same time, it is a lot like any other subway on the planet.

What is the connection to literature?

Cities are a genre, in the same way that detective stories are a literary genre. They all follow the same rules. But the beauty of the genre arises from variation within these rules, where creativity is constrained, but present nonetheless.

And why use cinema to carry this message?

I did not aim to make a popular film, but rather to understand specifically how video could contribute in a project that is based on the same principles as the work leading up to any other scientific publication. Here, the premise is to strengthen the viewer’s lucidity, rather than weakening it. A commercial fictional film is formatted for a certain type of reaction. In the spirit of research, the opposite has to be the case. Readers, or the audience, always have to be in a position that lets them criticize or refute the work. That means that we have to keep them awake, not put them to sleep.

Why did you choose to cite Calvino?

Italo Calvino is a close companion of mine and has been accompanying me for a long time now. I’ve read and re-read him over and over again. He has had a strong influence on me and is one of the reasons behind my desire to study cities at a deeper level, not only as a theoretical object. I feel strongly in tune with Calvino’s approach, not only at the interface between science and art, which have to be considered as two distinct entities, but also in assuming the fact that there are hybrid zones, in which the researcher is concerned with aesthetics and the artist with knowledge. For me, “Invisible Cities” by Calvino is a general treatise about cities, broken up into chapters. I tell my students that it is the best treatise on urban geography and that, to this day, I cannot offer them anything better in the scientific domain.

Public spaces are a recurring theme in your film

One thing struck me in China: the way citizens appropriate public spaces. To me, these spaces are the quintessence of urbanity, contributing to what distinguishes one city from many of the other possible spatial configurations. The way I see it, urban designers are not the sole designers of public spaces; the people that frequent them and occupy them play their part as well. In China, citizens take over public spaces that could just as well have remained unused or mediocre. They bring along their instruments, or play music on their stereo systems to dance or do sports to, without any form of conceit. It seems so simple to do, yet this is something that you don’t find everywhere in the world, in particular in Europe, which has a long tradition of public spaces.