The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Double Erasure of Times Square
chronicity with the visual narrative. At bottom, the voice-over informs the
viewer of police routines and offers background information on the characters.
It enables the spectator to dip in and out of “representative” New Yorkers’
minds as they go about their daily routines. For example, during the
opening series of early morning shots we are told that “a city has many
faces—it’s one o’clock in the morning now—and this is the face of New
York City—when it’s asleep on a hot summer night,” 37 while the shots
themselves, such as a deserted Wall Street, a cat digging into a garbage pan,
a tugboat on the Hudson towing two barges, are reminiscent of the exploratory
techniques of the Lumière brothers’ Actualities of the 1890s. 38
Then the narrator withdraws omnisciently to a higher contemplative
level—gazing back on the city—from which he weaves together the montage
of images and story lines as the camera constantly shifts its visual and
narrative focus. 39 Hellinger speaks as the young detective Halloran is staring
out a large window that looks out over the city: “There’s the layout, Jim.
The man who killed Jean Dexter is somewhere down there. Can’t blame him
for hiding can you?” 40 It is up to this detective to make the connections that
solve the mystery, just as he slowly blocks out one street after another street
on his sectional map of lower Manhattan, searching step by patient step for
the killer’s address. The framing of the city as a closed system and the solving
of a crime, as the spectator visually progresses alongside the detective
through the streets of the city, become important elements of the miseen-scène.
Voice-over narration functions much as do the film’s many images
of telephone exchanges and communication devices. The telephone is one of
the many invisible networks that tie the city together, that move the story
line along. Police telephone switchboards, police radio operators, the detective’s
office phone, the young detective’s home phone, the phone in the subway
booth, the older detective’s bedroom phone, and the drugstore phone
booth are all represented in the film. As the chase closes in, the police headquarters
radio operator speaks into the microphone:
Emergency. ... All squad cars on the East Side of 14th Street to the
Williamsburg Bridge, from 1st Street to 5th Avenue, proceed immediately
to Rivington Street between Essex and Delancey. Block
off and surround both sides of the street. Institute immediate
house-to-house search for . . . two men—Detective James Halloran
and William Garza. Halloran is twenty-eight years old. 41
The film thus actually maps out sections of the city for the spectator, sections
that were threatened with urban renewal and blocks that would never
survive the bulldozer’s rout. The closing shots on the Williamsburg Bridge