The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Double Erasure of Times Square
The semidocumentary film The Naked City (1947), directed by
Jules Dassein, provides an excellent example of such an instrument to cognitively
map the city. Not only is this the first crime film to use location
shooting but it created remarkable verisimilitude by presenting the 107
streets, places, and landmarks of Manhattan as its feature attraction. Evidently
the cameraman, Bebe Daniels, learned from Erich von Stroheim that
“reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination
of the commissioner of police.” 27 And so this narrated story attempts
to represent the city in the raw, with naked and objective images and facts:
a city of steel and stone, of buildings and pavements, of thousands of stories
and everyday events. Through enumeration of such places and incidents, the
film tried to save at least the memory of the city from disappearing. 28
In addition, the film’s use of voice-over is unusual. By borrowing
the authority that documentaries try to assume, the voice-over both enhances
the story’s factual base and elevates its realistic narration of the
methodology of crime detection. 29 The voice-over annotates the development
of the police case and ties together the 107 different locations filmed
in the streets and buildings of New York City. 30 It maps out a city that once
might have been well known by the audience—or that used to mean something
to the everyday life of the viewer—but now required a guide to link
together its landmarks and places. 31 The American Cinematographer noted
that “several buildings of the city were photographed for the last time, having
since been demolished to make room for the United Nations Buildings.”
32 Interiors were shot in the Roxy Theater, offices of the Mirror
newspapers, Stillman’s Gym—none of which survived beyond 1947. In addition,
the Third Avenue El at 59th Street was gone, as was Livingston’s
Dress Shop on 57th Street. 33 From the movie’s beginning, viewers are presented
with a bird’s-eye view of the city, stretched out below in the hazy distance,
waiting for inspection—not unlike “a patient etherised on a table.” 34
This is a truthful story, the Naked City whose facts will be exposed, whose
crimes will be revealed. And it is voice-over narration, a streetwise voice,
that takes this information—raw data, overheard conversations, telephone
messages—and composes it into an invisible labyrinth that must be penetrated
by the detective. “[Voice-over] is the oral map-making of [the detective’s]
journey through the labyrinth,” an analyst of film noir points out. 35
There are several layers to the voice-over narration of The Naked
City that help establish a cognitive map for the spectator and remind the audience
that there are “eight million stories in the Naked City and this is just
one of them.” 36 The narrator, Mark Hellinger, is above all a storyteller who
maps out the space of New York while simultaneously directing the flow of
narration. His voice-over remarks on the next move, the next action, in syn-