From the urban symphony to urban noise. City-screen, city-panopticon and city-deterritorialized in El juego de la vida (GAC, 2007)

Abstract

Our research is framed in the context of relations between cinema and city, which aims to analyze a contemporary urban symphony: El juego de la vida (Grupo de Arte Callejo -GAC-, 2007). Now, unlike the urban symphonies of the 20s, which organized the images through montage with classical music; in the case of El juego de la vida, the soundtrack is made up of zapping noises, camera and gun shots, and chaotic and abstract urban voices. Thus, we propose to apply a conceptual creation methodology in order to extract the ideas inherent to the film: the city-screen, the city-panopticon and city-deterritorialized. These concepts are going to plot the rhythms that constitute the regulation of urban existence in various ways: from the interweaving between the alienating rhythms of zapping and the rhythms of television images (city-screen) and between the rhythms of the shots and the rhythms of mosaic images (city-panopticon). However, rhythms can also generate emancipatory movements, symbolized by the nexus between the rhythm of street voices and the rhythm of images-traffic and images-flow (city-deterritorialized).