The City

The City

Rejissyor: American Documentary Films, Inc.. Contents. A plea for community planning, which contrasts the awesome conditions of human living in a modern industrial city with (1) the serenity of life in an eighteenth-century New England village and (2) the architect's and engineer's concept of the model community, as typified by the federal government's resettlement experiment at Greenbelt, Maryland, and the privately developed one at Radburn, New Jersey. Life in the New England village of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is described. There are slowly unfolding views of an old water wheel, a covered bridge, the swimming hole, and other scenes characteristic of the period. A town meeting is shown in session; the speaker at the meeting talks of the village way of life and his remarks are illustrated by views of people at simple handicraft tasks. The transition to the modern industrial city is made by the merging of a shower of sparks from the smithy's forge with those from a Bessemer converter in a modern steel mill. The scenes change to smokestacks against the sky, to molten slag flowing down the dump, and to the miserable company houses. Children walk along the crude wooden sidewalks. One child narrowly escapes death when he and his companions run across a railroad track in front of a train. A woman pumps water a few feet from an outdoor toilet, hangs the washing in a smoke-filled atmosphere, and shovels coal into an outmoded kitchen stove. Such symbols of industrialism as smokestacks, locomotives, and steam shovels are shown as the musical tempo is accelerated and the commentator echoes the phrases "better and better" and "faster and faster." Now attention is turned to the great metropolis, New York. Dwarfed by the skyscrapers, human beings mill through city streets, push out of subways, and squeeze through seemingly endless lines of mid-town traffic. The music works up to a screech symbolic of the nervous tension and speed of life in the metropolitan business center. An office scene of long r

https://archive.org/details/0545_City_The · Public domain (Internet Archive)