Andrew Feffer: Review of Stanley Corkin's Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s (Oxford 2011)

As long as it sticks to formal and narrative interpretation of films this book works.  And one wishes it did more of that.  Problems arise, however, when Corkin tries to align groups of films too closely with a murky and imprecisely reconstructed history of urban economies in general and New York’s in particular.  The book’s main historical shortcoming is its radical compression into the 1970s of a chronology of urban decline and renewal that had little to do with abandonment of the gold standard and actually spread over half a century, beginning in the 1920s when northeastern garment and textile manufacturers began to move south and abroad.  This was about the time that sound films, many of them set in New York, began to appear in American theaters.  Those earlier films showed a very different New York, and Corkin could have profitably compared their evolving picture of the city to his collection of 1970s productions. If he had done that, he might have gotten a richer and more nuanced historical analysis of how New York was rendered on the silver screen. 

It also would have also been more useful if this book combined such a broader comparison film-wise with a narrower or more carefully organized framework of sociological terms.  At the center of Corkin’s argument about the relationship between film and the city is a transition from “Fordism” to post-Fordism that is imprecise and incautiously applied.  Corkin defines that transition not only as the abandonment of mid-twentieth-century industrial production methods and labor relations, but also as the broad transition from an industrial to a “post-industrial” or “informational” society, the even broader cultural shift from the modern to the post-modern, as well as New York’s emergence as a global city, the gentrification of Manhattan neighborhoods and the rising culture of narcissism.  Such alignments are controversial enough when argued on their own (financially speaking, for instance, New York has been a global center since at least the end of World War II).  To apply them to the history of film would require a much more extensive study of Hollywood production over a longer period in the history of cities.  Perhaps this volume is merely Corkin’s starting point.  I hope so, as such a study needs to be done.