history | film by sarah walsh
utopia historiography haunting cities fai lure
The Life of a Saint is a composition of places… The organisation of the space through which the saint passes folds and unfolds in order to display a truth which is a place 1
Urban Hagiography Saints of the Old City and the aftermath of utopia
Saints of the Old City , a ten-year project by Boston-based filmmaker Greg Mahoney, is an experimental film about utopia and its failure. Set in Brockton, a southeastern Massachusetts city and former international capital of shoe manufacture, the film deals with the life of a boom town after its bust, and is deeply engaged with the city’s real history as an intentional metropolis. Saints was filmed in the actual abandoned spaces of Brockton – factories and streets that once constituted the urban interventions of a bombastic, nineteenth-century idealism – and grapples with the question of how to tell, revise, or erase the uses and the stories of these relics. Brockton’s early development, following its incorporation in 1881, was remarkable for its leaders’ pursuit of progressive milestones and the promotion of civic pride. To support its industrial population, Brockton had the first three-wire underground electrical system, was the first city to abolish grade crossings on its railways, and had both Frederick Law Olmsted consulting on a park design above ground and one of the earliest and most comprehensive public sewerage systems in the area below. 2 If one is to judge from the historical documents Mahoney uses in the film, the city was built by leaders of government and industry half-deranged with the idea of ‘Progress’. In retrospect, these documents, as well as the world Mahoney creates from them, cast a cold light on the naïveté of this positivist modernism. Brockton’s industrial base entered a slow decline in the 1920s, and the depression of 1929 only quickened an economic collapse from which the city still has not recovered. Saints, however, is not a fictionalised parable of flawed, old ideals, nor of cities and their tendency to rise and fall. The skeleton of Mahoney’s film contains a critique of both interpretation and intent: how we conceive of urban
spaces as we strive to build them, and how we understand them when their time is past.
a founding place become liturgical site 3 Saints opens with a flood of historical images and manufactured iconography, in some part drawn from the existing city’s archives, but combined with hallucinatory animation and an eerie soundtrack. From the beginning, the film crisscrosses rather than replicates the ‘real’ Brockton’s spaces and stories, here through the inclusion of documentary footage of the city’s former industrial buildings being demolished in the present day. The audience is drawn along with The Green Figure , a nearly anonymous transient who serves as the main narrative vehicle as he makes his way through the city. Intertitles display the crossed-out lyrics of a civic hymn drawn from a play performed at Brockton’s centennial celebration: Sing the City’s glory! Unity her shield. Visions of our fathers, in her power revealed . This song is our first clue to deciphering Saints ’ stance on the writing on urban histories: it was written in 1931, well after the killing blow to Brockton’s industry. In other words, this hyperbolic textual monument to Brockton’s greatness was commissioned and staged by the city’s leaders ‘when it became clear that they had failed’. 4 In Saints ’ opening moments, it represents the first of many subsequent, backward-looking attempts to resurrect the city’s glory days. Within the Brockton of the film, a group of ragtag archaeologists whom The Green Figure encounters as he walks sing an alternate, post-ruin version of this Song of the City: Sing the City’s glory! And we’ll fortify her shield; against the Wrecker’s mortal aim, our fathers failed to wield. This is the first of a constellation of revisionist,
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