From the margins to the New Hollywood: a spirit apart
For a long time, filming took place exclusively in the studio, except for a few shots intended to anchor the film in a reality that was otherwise entirely reconstituted - the Western was obviously an exception. In the cinema, New York is first and foremost a state of mind, quick to use good words and scathing dialogue, like The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934), adapted from Dashiell Hammett, or the masterpiece of screwball comedy, His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), a pleasant satire of the world of the press and male-female relations, with dialogue delivered at a hundred miles an hour. In 1948, Jules Dassin chose to shoot The City Without Veils - the French title says it all - in New York itself, with the ambition of offering an almost documentary portrait of the city as a background to the plot. A lock was broken: the following year, the musical took over the city and its famous places - the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan, Central Park, etc. - with A Day in New York in the evening. - with A Day in New York in Stanley Donen's own fast-paced style. But these are only timid omens, most of the classics of the time still favor the studio. This is the case of Mark Dixon, Detective (Otto Preminger, 1950) or The Fifth Victim (Fritz Lang, 1956), a scalpel-like exploration in the form of film noir of the New York press milieu. The Bachelorette (Billy Wilder, 1960), a romantic comedy with a bittersweet tone, closes a decade rich in masterpieces in a sublime way while foreshadowing modern writing and anxieties. Diamonds on the Couch (Blake Edwards, 1961) and Holly Golightly, in which Audrey Hepburn gives a delightful performance, conceals a similar melancholy under the airs of a party. At the same time, the documentary film gained importance, preparing the ground for future changes: On The Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1956), a picture of the street of the same name and its cohort of marginalized people and alcoholics, is one of the founding acts. By directing Shadows (1959), whose soundtrack is signed Charles Mingus, John Cassavetes shows that it is possible to make cinema outside the big studios. His work, which is characterized by long sequences stretched almost to infinity and the place reserved for characters played by his wife, Gena Rowlands, is inseparable from the city of New York and will serve as an inspiration to many directors.
The filmmakers of the New Hollywood are rushing into this breach, renewing at the same time the canonical genres of American cinema. Hal Ashby's The Landlord (1970) is a classic that deserves to be rediscovered, tackling an unusual subject for the time: that of relations between whites and blacks against a backdrop of gentrification. Martin Scorsese, who will never stop filming his hometown from every angle and through the ages, made a smashing entrance with Mean Streets (1973), to the sound of the Ronettes and the Rolling Stones, revealing Robert De Niro at the same time. Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker at the time, passionately defended this new generation of filmmakers who expressed a marked preference for New York, as if to escape the overly restrictive influence of the studios.
Between disillusionment and creative freedom
The city then appears as a world-city, separated into distinct territories, often hermetically sealed. The hippie movement has disappeared to make way for a desolate, not to say apocalyptic, picture, in which a certain irony nonetheless shines through, as in Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), an allegory on the American wounds left by Vietnam, which takes us on a tour of the underbelly of this modern Babylon. New York nourishes a kind of security psychosis, which makes the wealthier classes desert it for a while, and which is reflected in the cinema through A Vigilante in the City (Michael Winner, 1974). The Night Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979), a phantasmagorical vision of a ghostly city given over to gang fights, or New York 1997 (John Carpenter, 1981), in which Manhattan has become a huge open-air prison, play not without irony on the fantasies generated by a city plagued by crime.
A nostalgic and realistic vein also flourishes in The Lords (Philip Kaufman, 1979), about a gang of teenagers of Italian origin in the Bronx of the 1960s, or Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976), which testifies to this era when the bohemian community took up residence in Greenwich Village, before the Coen brothers returned to it in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).
Woody Allen, with Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), his avowed ode to the city, humorously captures on film the nerdy New York, fed by European culture and riddled with neuroses. The cinema of the 1980s reflected the changes in the city and in society: the questioning of values was reflected in comedies that were willingly regressive, such as Ghostbusters (Harold Ramis, 1984), which surfed on a new fashion for fantasy films. A new archetype appears, the yuppie, who is seen in After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985), confronted by irrational forces during a nightmare night through SoHo, the artists' district, symbol of a city that is not yet domesticated; in Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987), which is a denunciation of the carnivorous greed that is rampant in the world of finance, but will undoubtedly trigger a good number of trader vocations; or Liaison fatale (Adrian Lyne, 1987), which launches the fashion for erotic thrillers. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) is not just another gangster film, but a vast fresco that resurrects the New York of Prohibition. Abel Ferrara, whose sensitive and painfully catholic style is in line with Scorsese's, or Jim Jarmusch, were mavericks before the emergence, at the end of the decade, of a new independent cinema, represented by brilliant young directors such as Hal Hartley, Whit Stillman, Todd Solondz, or Spike Lee, who, with Do The Right Thing (1989), drew up a stylized and burning inventory of the racial tensions that were then resurfacing.
Whit Stillman'sThe Last Days of Disco (1998), which could be described as "Jane Austen disco", revives the chic New York of the early 1980s and its disco balls, far from the popular Brooklyn of Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). Popular cinema also put the city in the spotlight, as in When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), which heralded the coming fashion of romantic comedies, and made an iconic autumnal New York sown with red and yellow leaves.
The turn of the century
The music - the hip-hop of RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, who provides the soundtrack - also plays a key role in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), in which Jarmusch crosses the group's obsession with martial arts cinema with his own taste for Melville. American Psycho (Mary Hannon, 2000), an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's bestseller , makes obvious, for those who missed it in Oliver Stone's film, the satirical charge against the greed that characterized the Reagan years, which Scorsese will do in turn in The Wolf of Wall-Street (2013), the financial counterpart to his Mafia frescos. Even bloodier, Gangs of New York (2002), a project Scorsese has been working on for a long time, evokes the painful birth of the city, ravaged by wars between Irish and English immigrant gangs. This is not a time for rejoicing, as New York is traumatized by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which the cinema will gradually revisit in films that are not without a certain pomp and circumstance that one would be ill-advised to reproach them for: we must mention The 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002), or World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006), a tribute to the city and to the courage of the firemen who worked among its ruins. Disaster or science fiction films show a certain pessimism: in The Day After Tom orrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), the city is drowned under water after a climatic catastrophe, while I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) offers a striking picture of a desolate city ravaged by a virus.
Little by little, the wounds are healed and the city seems to recover its rights, between dreams and realities. The quest for perfection - artistic perfection - and the insane sacrifices it sometimes seems to require are at the heart of Black Swan (Darren Arofnosky, 2010), a horrific dive into the world of prima ballerinas, and Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014), about the relationship between a student and his teacher in a prestigious jazz school. On a gentler note, Ira Sachs in Brooklyn Village (2016) examines the phenomenon of gentrification that has been steadily growing since the late 1980s. Good Time (2017) by brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, who are used to exploring the less shiny corners of the city, captures with the energy of despair through the run of Robert Pattinson a New York that we are not used to seeing in the movies anymore, the one of the marginalized, the dive bars and the seedy gambling dens.
The city that never sleeps: the explosion of series
The explosion of certain series in the 1990s, now part of popular culture, seems to be a new phenomenon. Friends, although filmed in Los Angeles, proposed to distill for ten years a quintessential New York spirit, in sitcom style, just like Seinfeld (1989-1998). Sex and the City (1998-2004), a true social phenomenon whose influence is very difficult to measure, was added to this list. The successor will be taken in the twenty-first century with the series Louie (2010-2015) by Louis CK, whose fantasy, freedom of tone and narration knows few equivalents, or Girls (2012-2017) by Lena Dunham. Neuroses, humor, and a certain tendency to shamelessness are the invariable ingredients. Broad City (2014-2019), which relies on the crudity of dialogues and situations, and Two Broke Girls (2011-2017) dig into this comic and sarcastic vein through colorful female characters. Master of None (2015-2017), Bored To Death (2009-2011), about a young idle writer who improvises himself as a private detective, or Mozart In The Jungle (2014-2018), which plunges us into the world of classical music with a comicality inherited from Wes Anderson, give an idea of the trendy youth that has taken up residence in New York and Brooklyn in particular. Only Murders in the Building, whose first episode will be released in the United States in 2021, is a humorous thriller whose plot takes place mainly in an emblematic building on the Upper West Side.
Police and drama series have not been left behind in this unprecedented explosion, as the format threatened to fall into a routine and lack of dramatic progression along the lines of CSI Manhattan, NYPD Blues, New York, or Special Unit.
Mad Men (2005-2015) is perhaps the series that most contributed to renewing the format from top to bottom: it resurrects for seven seasons, in a mode that is half-fantasy, half concern for historical truth, the New York of the 1960s, brilliantly reviewing the changes in society that the city has been the scene through the eyes of Don Draper, a Madison Avenue publicist. Among the mainstream series, Gossip Girl (2007-2012), the adaptation of a young adult novel, which gives a glimpse of the daily life of the golden youth of the Upper East side, seems calibrated to be the ultimate guilty pleasure, revealing in the meantime a plethora of young stars. Among them is a certain Penn Badgley, who played a flirtatious bookseller in You, produced by Netflix, hiding in fact a dangerous psychopath.
