Anatomy of a City
Film Treatment
We start deep inside the body, looking at the skeletal structures of the city,
the ironwork and scaffolding, structural girders over which buildings are
constructed. Electricity pylons spark and crackle as their nerve-like
conductors stretch across large areas of the city. Clouds gather and rain
falls, taking us down into the sewerage system. As we come back to the surface,
we hear the sound of breathing. Gasometers rise and fall rhythmically. A smoker
takes a draw from a cigarette, and a chimney exhales smoke over the city
skyline. We see the exhaust pipe of a car, accelerating from rest to a
breakneck speed, and as we head towards the centre of the city, the dull thud
of a heartbeat can be heard, faintly. Day staggers into night, and the red
tail-lights of cars on the motorway blur into solid red lines – blood
corpuscles float along the course of the road, getting larger as we look
closely at the pulsating blur of traffic crossing a junction. The red blur
resolves into a red-man on some traffic lights. He goes green, and as he walks,
people walk too. The pillars and supports of buildings and legs of statues
appear to move faster than the human beings' legs. We see a digger pull at the
turret of a building, and a sculptors hands building clay onto a statue's hand.
A hand pulls at some rubble as another digger rakes at some earth. We pass
through several archways until, with a sudden biting noise, we are inside a
mouth where stones and teeth rise up to obscure our view. The teeth open,
revealing a girl's eye. She blinks, and we enter a rose window within her eye,
seeing images of security cameras, windows and a mosaic of an eye. An ear
dissolves into a speaker cone, we see the curves of an auditorium, and a mosaic
of an ear becomes an ear. As the bass booms over the soundtrack, a speaker cone
throbs in time with the music. Stone heads and assorted statues stare down from
buildings. We look closely at some old people's faces, and see an old man's
face made from dark metal. A patch of mosaic skin becomes corrugated & metallic
then wrinkled and pink, then transforms into a slowly breathing brick shape. A
celtic tattoo dissolves into a close-wall stencil, and we slowly see the
glimmer of two Stained Glass windows appearing out of the darkness. As we move
towards the windows of Adam & Eve, we begin to see people's whole bodies for
the first time. They are moving slowly along a street, but gradually they
appear to be speeding up, until we are watching several shops and streets move
at a frantic pace with people scurrying about like ants in an anthill. We begin
to move even further away, until these people
become clusters of black specks, and sunlight dapples the panorama of the city
as it pierces the fast-scudding grey clouds. Darkness falls very suddenly, and
the city lights come-on. Lights in a distant multi-storey flat flicker on and
off while lit-up buildings pulsate against the night sky. We move further away
still, until we can just see the city as a large patch of orangey glowing
lights. We pull back with a jump, as this pool of light becomes several pools
of light. Then this one in turn divides into sections that also then split up
until there is a honeycomb of glimmering patches. We move further away, and as
the colour drains from the image, and the music reaches a crescendo, the
closing title 'Anatomy of a City' resolves from this cellular structure of
pixel-like patches.
© R.Gillett & Mandragora Productions Ltd. 1999
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