Lewis Mumford on the City, Part 2: The City: Cars or People?
1963 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Christopher Chapman, Jean-Claude Chiabaut, Léonard Forest, Bert Haanstra, Robert Humble, Kirk Jones, Derek Knight, Ian MacNeill, Reginald Morris, Bryan Probyn
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Lewis Mumford asks whether cities can stay accessible without surrendering streets to cars, examining congestion as a threat to urban life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1963 essay film about urban planning shouldn't work this well as provocation—but Chapman and his collective are basically making a Mumford manifesto that treats the car as villain with a straight face while the city itself becomes the dramatic subject, which is deliciously backwards.
This is canonical post-war documentary essays in conversation with urbanism theory; the ten-director collective approach channels the structural rigor of the NFB tradition while Mumford's voice anchors a meditation on public space that still reads as formally urgent and intellectually considered.
The decision to let Mumford's measured prose do the argumentative heavy lifting while the cinematography documents lived street space—rather than illustrating his points—creates this rare friction where image and ideology actually resist each other, which is where the film gets its teeth.