Tilt-Shift Flânerie: Miniature View,Globalscape

Introduction

Recent animated modes of visualization have given us the possibility to experience the world at a variety of different spatial and temporal scales, producing unique and embodied experiences that influence the perceptual construction of meaning. The recent adaptation of tilt-shift photography by digital technology – wherein the lens is rotated to adjust perspective and create a surprising depth of field – has produced a fascinating optical illusion that transforms real landscapes into fake miniatures. ¹ One result of this process is an animated tilt-shift flânerie that focuses on encapsulating cities into toy-like versions of themselves, using time-lapse photography to create the effect of stop-motion animation. With the illusion of miniaturization, objects in the film appear to be toys or models that are animated or pixilated by the filmmaker. This process of distorting visual and temporal scale is in many ways a sophisticated animated version of 19th-century postcards (2D and stereoscopic) and their whimsical 3D cousin, the snow globe, both indicative of 19th-century ways of seeing, mass tourism, and flânerie. Discoveries made in early 20th-century aerial photography also inform this unique photographic perspective.

The radical shift in scale created by the 21st-century tilt-shift video postcard – both visual and temporal – employed in the digital re-mastering of urban spaces results in an ensuing alteration in perception, and a new phenomenology of seeing. In distinction to what Jay (1999) characterizes as the scopic regime of modernity inherent in Cartesian perspectivalism, the digital minimizing (and visual distortion) of major urban areas into a product that offers a ‘mini’ or ‘toy’ version of traditional landscapes will necessarily impact emerging understandings of visual space and global urban identity (see Figure 1). The confluence of micro and macro perception into one animated image (a ‘room with a view’ that is both room and view) challenges the human perception of time and space in a way that is indicative of both modernization and globalization. Animated tilt-shift films combine in one space the contrary sense of the gigantic with the miniature that typifies modern experience; they also emphasize the ensuing incongruous shifts in time and social instability with their stop-motion aesthetic.

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Figure 1.

A fake miniature of Boston by David Legnon (2008). Reproduced with the permission of David Legnon.

This article examines the two contrary and complementary components of tilt-shift flânerie: the subjective, intimate, and internalized versus the macro, referential, and cosmopolitan. One function of tilt-shift imagery is the sense of intimacy it creates for a space that is beyond our normal range of vision. The miniature yet comprehensive composition of tilt-shift imagery strongly resonates with the way in which objects are scaled in our thoughts and memories. While filmmaking has always been a way to chart this difference, depicting the ways in which the mind works remains difficult to achieve. Our perception and attention toward these spaces is therefore directed in a complex way, and one that evolves over time. The ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘global’ aspect of flânerie embraces the macro and referential elements of urban living as well as the multiplicity of forms that exist in a modern metropolis. It also accentuates a desire for and interest in heterogeneity rather than homogenization. The model of the flâneur’s perspective suggests not only a balance between observation and reflection, but also the understanding that social reality is comprised of both individual desires and larger social forces.

Focusing on animated films of urban miniature faking and the Eurovision Song Contest 2011 national video postcards, this article argues that the animated scaling of cities created by visual flânerie challenges viewers’ spatio-temporal assumptions about global urban spaces. Rather than minimizing their variety and meaning, however, tilt-shift flânerie echoes changes in global perspective that encourage greater cosmopolitan awareness and the reworking of cultural and national boundaries in line with a postmodern erosion of the monocular eye and universal vision. Tilt-shift flânerie urges spectators to adopt a spectatorial engagement with multiple attachments that begins with the ground we stand on and proceeds, via memory and imagination, to a new cosmopolitan perspective. This experience results in an enhanced spatial perspective that allows us, like Alice in Wonderland, to scale ourselves to an unexpected new relationship with the world, inscribing individuals into a landscape that fits energetically, tilting and shifting, into the eye of the beholder.

Postcards and an aerial perspective

Postcards were an invention of the 19th century made possible by advancements in the technology of visual representation and mass production. They were clearly tied to advertisement and consumption, but they were also attractive and easy ways to send a small message, providing a visual touchstone for an important moment in time. As Urry and Larsen (2011: 31) note, mass tourism grew steadily in the later half of the 19th century, along with the techniques for photographic reproductions. In a period when there was an emerging middle class, postcards were visual proof of the more democratized ability for people to be in contact with other cultures and traditions. This was especially true of World’s Fairs, which allowed for a more cosmopolitan sensibility to develop for those without the means or leisure to travel. Such experience offered a constructed ‘tourist gaze’ which could easily reinforce a colonialist reduction of other cultures and nations. ² But imperialist vision is by no means ubiquitous, and these encounters also opened up unexpected vistas for those who led largely provincial lives. The mass-produced postcards and stereoscopic images at World’s Fairs, such as the ones in Paris in 1878 and Chicago in 1893, helped popularize panoramas, dioramas, and other miniaturizations of urban spaces that tried to convey complex international realities. ³ Yet these images were also a testimony to new experiences and were immediately personalized by those who bought them.

Rabinovitz (2012: 102–104) notes that the practice of sending postcards was very popular, citing that by 1909 there were 968 million postcards sent annually. She also observes that while postcards began simply as images, personal messages were soon scrawled in the margins, resulting in the modern form of postcard being approved by the US government in 1907. Rabinovitz interprets postcard usage psychoanalytically, as an interpellation of consumption ‘that allowed anyone who bought a card and everyone who received one a sense of inclusion, mastery, and pleasure over this new spatial-temporal configuration’ (p. 106). She reads them as ‘the real dislocated into fantasy’ and an antidote to the chaos of modern urban life (p. 106). While it is certainly true that feelings of mastery can be experienced viewing panoramic views captured in a small image, it is not universally true. Additional possibilities include surprise and delight in the unfamiliar, pleasure (unrelated to mastery), reflection, education, and transformation. ⁴

It is important to note that there was a simultaneous attempt to achieve a three-dimensionality to spatial representation, a 3D aesthetic that has reached a kind of fruition in contemporary (primarily commercial) CGI animation. Stereoscopes emerged in the mid-19th century and urban spaces were popular subject matter. Stereoscopy creates an illusionary depth by using two 2D images that merge in the mind of the viewer (Zone, 2007: 9). In the 20th century such techniques became more personalized with the use of View-Masters™, 3D glasses and virtual reality goggles. The urge to create a sense of depth in an image, to add to its realism and provide a greater sense of embodied presence, has been a driving force for film and animation since their inception, as has the desire to replicate not only the world we see with our eyes, but the one we perceive in our mind. The snow globe, for example – another product associated with international exhibits in Europe in the 19th century – does not attempt to achieve verisimilitude, but embraces its function as a fake miniature. ⁵ While panoramas and dioramas more obviously convey the tilt-shift image’s use of space, the snow globe is perhaps the best perceptual precedent to tilt-shift miniature faking: its spherical and water-filled globe is prone to distort its contents in unexpected ways. In addition, rather than trying to mimic a monumental world it cannot replicate, it distorts and contains a world that becomes real only by triggering memory and imagination. With its further similarities to the crystal ball (a sphere that conjures a miniaturized reality), it also re-imagines mastery as mystery.

The camera’s ability to scale our perception of the world has only increased over the course of the 20th century with new technologies like aerial flight, space travel, and the manipulation of photorealistic images. In fact, tilt-shift is sourced in the advent of aerial flight and discoveries about the orientation of the plane of focus in cameras attributed to an Austrian army captain, Theodor Scheimpflug, who explored its geometric principles when engaged in making aerial photographs in the first decade of the 20th century (Ray, 2002: 500–501). Tilt-shift refers to the rotation of the lens in order to adjust the perspective; the blurring in the front plane and the background plane that results works against our normal sense of scale. When viewing this image, the eye is tricked into identifying it with a depth of field typical for close ups so the images appear to be small ones, corresponding to a scale model rather than to a life-size representation. ⁶ This principle underlies the construction of miniature faking, which put simply, takes a normal object or landscape and transforms it into a visual miniature by adjusting the relations between plane of focus, plane of lens and plane of image. The image can be created with selective focus at the time it is taken or adjusted later in digital postproduction.

There are a number of digital processing techniques developed for 3D/CGI compositing that allow film cinematography to simulate miniaturization, utilizing multiple planes of depth of focus and allowing for rack focus. ⁷ The act of misrecognition central to perceiving a fake miniature results in a unique image that combines macro and micro, near and far. Smallgantics is one technique that even embodies in its name the combination of small and gigantic perspectives. ⁸ The dialectic between tiny and immense can be seen, for example, in David Legnon’s miniature image of Boston, with city blocks appearing to be only inches tall (see Figure 1). The tilt-shift illusion of perspective is further enhanced by the digital insertion of a hand into the photograph. It is reaching in as if to move one of the models, which confirms our sense of distorted vision. The lighting is designed to match hand to landscape and the result looks like an interior landscape; a view within a room. This kind of aerial shot’s combination of micro and macro vision is expressed vividly by early aviator Saint-Exupéry (1967: 5), who described the images he saw as simultaneously intimate and distant, ‘tiny’ and ‘universal’ in a way that suggests a cosmopolitan perspective. De Certeau (1984: 116) distinguishes this as an itinerary rather than a map, with an itinerary universalizing from the particular.

Aerial shots are highly favored in the construction of miniature faking and aptly reflect an intimacy between early aerial travelers and landscape. Airports are a favorite subject for these films, allowing tilt-shift images to pay homage to their source and to focus on a key aspect of modern experience: global mobility and communication. ⁹ Thus, space, mobility, communication, narrative, and emotion join together, allowing us to take flight. Early on, Balzac (1901: 31) wrote of the flâneur as an aviator who can ‘indulge the flight of fancy’ and ‘pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences’. This is seen in a tilt-shift image of Oslo airport (see Figure 2). While the image encapsulates a large portion of the airport complete with aircraft, it appears tiny, and yes, cute. Any travelers who have flown during the holidays or tried to cram themselves into an economy seat will likely feel a sense of mastery and freedom in contemplating this miniaturized airport, but they may also launch into more reflective thoughts.

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Figure 2.

A fake miniature aerial shot of Oslo airport in Tiny Capital (2010). Screenshot from Tiny Capital (Eirik Evjen, 2010), available at: vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/39470129 (accessed 18 December 2013).

Tilt-shift flânerie and animated space

There are many shared aspects between early postcards and the video postcards created with miniature faking: the miniaturization of immense spaces, hand-tinting and color saturation, a focus on modernity. But while postcards are ‘destinations frozen in time’ (Rabinovitz, 2012: 107), miniature faking focuses a great deal on movement. Even photographic images that do not document actual movement often fixate on methods and images of transportation. Olivo Barbieri’s tilt-shift photograph of an interchange of highways in Shanghai, for example, reveals the conceptual elegance of a system of movement at the heart of a complex and chaotic urban space. Animating space is at the center of the concept of miniature faking, which is attested to by the hundreds of animated films of urban spaces (Mexico City, Hamburg, Mumbai, Bangkok, Johannesburg) that can easily be viewed on the internet. With names like This Cute, Tiny Moscow by English Russia (2011), Mini Mumbai by Little India (2013), and Little Big Berlin by Pilpop (2010), the images promise a new perspective: an animated and dynamic space that collapses the distinctions between the miniature and the gigantic, the micro and the macro, the local and the global. This kind of digital animated flânerie unites habits of modern urban spectatorship rooted in the 19th century with spatial and visual technologies introduced in the 20th and 21st centuries. In doing so, it offers fruition for ideas about perception arising from urban flânerie.

The flâneur is a figure primarily associated with 19th-century Paris, but as a mobile and curious observer, he has proven versatile enough to wander far beyond his origins. Flânerie has long been a critical concept for theorizing urban spectatorship and the experience of modernity and has consistently been associated with curiosity, investigation, observation, and perambulation. Other defining characteristics have highlighted different and sometimes contradictory aspects of the flâneur’s identity, vision, thoughts, and mobility. ¹⁰ The significance and function of the flâneur have been thoroughly interrogated over the years, but there is often agreement that Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s writing on flânerie and modernity have directed much of the conversation, and remain pivotal in the interpretation of the flâneur’s relationship to the modern metropolis.

In particular, I understand the flâneur through Baudelaire’s (1995: 7) description of illustrator Constantin Guys: a cosmopolitan flâneur who ‘wants to know, understand, appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe’. Of central importance is his perspective, which is a ‘deep and joyful curiosity’ (p. 8) typical of a child. He is a formal interpreter of the metropolis whose artistic expression hinges on imagination and memory. Baudelaire notes that: ‘For the perfect flâneur … it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’ (p. 9). He is inspired by multiplicity and recreates his experience like ‘a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness … reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life’ (p. 9). He channels this multiplicity into impressionistic sketches that reflect its animated and ever-changing surface: ‘The phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature. All the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized’ (p. 12).

Like these impressionistic sketches, fake miniatures animate space by focusing on the energy and vitality of the urban world, creating a moving image that emphasizes the repetitive actions of everyday life. It is not a vision that suggests control – the compactness of a Disneyland or Epcot Theme Park that brings the rest of the world to a static spot and allows us the leisure to feel we know the world without its real inhabitants. Rather it suggests the multiplicity of perspectives and spaces that are available in a real urban center and the constant movement, activity and business that build ceaselessly in a space where people live. In addition, though technically structured through time-lapse photography, the films read as animation: the miniaturized objects exactly replicate the stop-motion movement of models.

The films are kaleidoscopic in their portrayal of a shifting urban landscape that is shaped by people ceaselessly moving, whether on foot or in trains. The movement itself reveals curiosity and mobility – on the part of the subject matter, camera, and perspectives. The animated style suggests, through the intuition of unseen motion between frames, an inability to fully grasp the true nature and extent of a city. The child-like focus also allows the films to uncover unexpected and even magical visions, like the sequence on the Leather Souk in Fez in Morocco (see Figure 3). One of the oldest tanneries in the world, it appears from afar as a honeycomb lodged between buildings with people moving in it like bees. The mystery of such tilt-shift visions often produces further inquiry rather than a sense of mastery. Like a postcard, it piques interest for a space one longs to explore, and internet flânerie gives one the ability to track information, using knowledge to re-contextualize the images.

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Figure 3.

Tilt-shift image of the leather souk in Fez from Morocco (2011). Screenshot from Morocco (Anonymous, 2011), available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMCL4VL2muY (accessed 18 December 2013).

Flânerie also displays things as a ‘roving and impassioned daguerreotype’, as Fournel describes it, ‘that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city’ (Herbert, 1988: 33). This image of a moving photograph that reflects back the variable urban environment in a shifting mobile pattern follows the logic of a random collection; more of a ‘database logic’ without ‘beginning or end’ than a narrative (Manovich, 2002: 218). This focus on movement and energy distinguishes these films from travel brochures or ads, for example. The ‘tourist gaze’ is unlikely to be drawn to sequences where cars and people move quickly and average-looking areas of the city are featured heavily; the films move too rapidly to feel like leisure.

Rather, the time-lapse speed and fleeting nature of the images reflect the frantic pace of modern life, distilling a moment from an urban center in flux. The time-lapse animation of space clearly represents the kind of time–space compression that Harvey (1990: 240) describes as typifying our experience of modernity. The tilt-shift images literally compress time and space, creating an instability of movement that is a visual equivalent to stop-motion animation, with objects seeming to be moved in between shots, and people appearing pixilated. This stilted movement of the images themselves – the animation of the film – is a technique for ‘reception in a state of distraction’, as Benjamin (1968: 240) defines it. It highlights the instability and constructed nature of both the images and what they represent. The act of compression itself is highlighted in the visual grammar of the films as there is no attempt at realism; we are aware that time has been manipulated. ¹¹ By animating the passage of time, the films establish flow and flux – the continuous stream of information and change – as states central to urban identity. ¹² They do so in a way that showcases the action as having a symmetry and purpose impossible to discern in real time, as in nighttime images where the consciousness of temporality seems to pulse through the city along currents of light.

Thus, tilt-shift flânerie as a theoretical paradigm draws on its mobility and curiosity, the animated and active experience of the modern metropolis, and a balance between mastery and absorption. The balance between observing and participating, investigation and interpretation, is further developed in Benjamin’s (1985: 40–41) writing on the flâneur as a detective who looks closely at things yet remains aloof and uninvolved. Sherlock Holmes is such a ‘perfect flâneur’. His stories are introduced, in the recent BBC Sherlock, with a tilt-shift flânerie that utilizes and spells out the effects of this trait with urban miniaturization. The credits begin with tilt-shift images of London: streets, buildings, and a long shot of Big Ben and the London Eye, icons of the city. The intro moves from the miniaturized macro shots to layered images, combining a sense of intimacy and perspective that is indicative of Holmes’ way of thinking. The image sequence primes us for detection; it draws attention to and isolates specific images in a unique way. The ‘close-up’ is never isolated from the rest of the landscape, but rather achieves a special focal point, one that references both microscope and telescope. This introduces us to an unusual space that allows both the insight and overview a good detective must have: Holmes is renowned for correlating minute details into a larger pattern. Incidentally, this show is groundbreaking in its ability to convey thought processes with new media techniques.

As the landscape of cities and the nature of mass transit have changed, flânerie has transformed. Urry and Larsen (2011: 162) note: ‘While the flâneur is a central figure of modernity, so too are the train passenger, car driver and jet plane passenger.’ The mobility of the 21st-century flâneur is no longer tied exclusively to walking, nor need he or she be wealthy, male, or European. Internet flânerie facilitates the imaginary, and empowers those who have traditionally found it hard to melt into the crowd. One such flâneuse, Alice, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1866), helps to illustrate a particular perspective essential to tilt-shift flânerie. Like Sherlock, Alice not only observes and consumes, but also questions, reflects, and creates.

The phenomenology of miniaturized urban space: Scale and meaning

At first glance, the manipulated spatial dynamics of miniature faking may seem to represent a hyperreality as identified by Baudrillard (1994: 2), a hyperspace where we cannot distinguish between what is real and what is fiction. In some ways this is correct; the tilt-shift images and films collapse real city space with fictive ones. But fake miniatures move in another direction altogether. They do not appear to be real or hyper-real; they are clearly representations, and ones that depict space and perspective in a way that is otherwise inaccessible to us. Often hue is manipulated in color-saturated images that mirror the hand-tinting of early photographs, further emphasizing their fabricated nature. Space and appearance in miniature faking are distorted similarly to create the impression of a false landscape: an image that is based on tricking the eye and confounding the logic of reality. In a sense they are fake fakes.

As such they attempt the opposite of simulacra: mimicking or replacing reality is not the aim or the achievement of these films. Rather, space and time are distorted to recreate a city as it appears in the imagination, but in an exhilaratingly visceral way that heightens tangibility. In a fashion similar to stereoscopy or binocular vision, fake miniatures contradict what Crary (1998: 32) calls the camera’s ‘objective view of the world’ in order to focus on subjectivity. Merging two perspectives (the miniature and gigantic), this uniquely binary vision prompts us to question temporal and spatial assumptions, disrupting our sense of perspective and meaning. Just as a reverse tracking shot, or telescoping, combines the antithetical movements of zooming in and dollying out to create anxiety through a continuous distortion of perspective – the aptly nicknamed ‘Vertigo effect’ – miniature faking creates a bizarre sense of scale by joining in one image the simultaneous yet contradictory perception of both small and large. It telescopes and microscopes at the same time.

Miniature faking embodies a postmodern sensibility that monocular vision does not do justice to the complexity of visual or social reality. As with aerial photography and rapidly moving images, tilt-shift images offer the kinds of vision that a 19th-century flâneur could not achieve, but imagined nonetheless. The new scale of modernity that was developing was enhanced by the diminishment of distance and an increasingly networked globe. Tilt-shift flânerie joins together an excitement about this increasing global accessibility to a nostalgic vulnerability for an intimate and domestic past. One element of this is the united sense of inside and outside that is featured in tilt-shift imagery. This is perhaps most obvious in David Legnon’s image of Boston (see Figure 1). It unites public and domestic viewpoints in a way that was envisioned by Benjamin (1985: 37) in his writing about flânerie in the Paris arcades. Benjamin describes a world that is both outside and inside: the passageways ‘are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature’ (p. 37). The fusion of miniature and gigantic is thus expressed as a room and a view.

This experience is aptly expressed by Alice, a flâneuse who is inquisitive, creative, thoughtful, and child-like. Alice is a curious young Victorian girl who becomes the flâneuse of a strange and contrary space. Like most women and children at the time, she is denied city walking, and in a fit of boredom suddenly sees an anthropomorphized rabbit and follows him down a hole in the ground to an alternative world. Her entrance into this new space is tied to consumption but also creative problem solving. Her sense of scale is continually undermined as she is alternatively unable to fit through a door and incapable of reaching the top of a table. This collapsing of scale continues as she almost drowns in her own tears and outgrows a house. She embarks on her initial scalar adjustment when she sees ‘the loveliest garden you ever saw’ (Carroll, 1866: 8) through a tiny passage. But it is such a miniature landscape that she cannot even fit her head through the door. ‘Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!’ she yearns (p. 9). A way is soon supplied, but once she has become miniaturized, she realizes she does not have the key to get in, so she finds a way to increase her size and intones, ‘now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!’ (p. 15).

As flâneuse, Alice must navigate both the miniature and the gigantic in order to achieve the right perspective for the constantly evolving world she finds herself in. That she describes this journey in terms of telescoping in opposite directions aligns her experience importantly with that of tilt-shift and miniature faking, and describes a phenomenon that is only visualized a century later. As a human telescope, she is gaining the ability to scale herself – to adapt to changes in size and social complexity – in ways that she finds both frightening and exhilarating. Hers is a journey of perspective, constantly adjusting her expectations along with her size and point of view in a world whose rules she finds mysterious. She embraces a modern sensibility in a space that is strangely animated but in which she is also empowered to animate herself; yet she does not become a colonizer of difference. Her first encounter with the magnitude of a changing modernity (and immanent adulthood) is located in a space that combines a deceptively miniature space with epic proportions.

Alice’s adventures in Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, 1871) further explore the notion of a room with a view in that she moves from her living room through a mirror, experiencing another scalar journey in a world-in-reverse where she must adapt to strangeness. The opening scene takes place inside a house wrapped in snow, bringing to mind the contents of a snow globe. It also recalls the tiny house in the snow globe at the beginning of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Kane represents an important foil to Alice. While Alice as flâneuse is able to move between the miniature and gigantic in a child-like exploration of a confusing new world, Kane, as tourist, tries to master others and his past, but becomes a miniature in his own monument. We are first introduced to Kane from the outside of his fortress/tomb. The view becomes a room, and inside it, at first obscured by snow, we seem to see another view, a house, but the camera zooms out to reveal it is a snow globe held in his hand (see Figure 4). Kane’s need to control leads him deeper into the miniature with no corresponding expansion. Rather than opening up vision, this sequence doubly encloses and then shatters it. The world Kane mastered disappears, and the film leads us back through the narrative of his life to reveal that his hand may enclose the image, but he cannot access it; this toy, which signifies a miniaturization of his mother’s house, also signifies the reduction of his own life and ambitions into a miniature landscape. The optical power of the globe can both magnify and contain, and this scene demonstrates visually the difference between the perceptual mastery of an object, and the mystery that is suggested by tilt-shift images.

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Figure 4.

The snow globe in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Screenshot from the DVD of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).

With Alice and with tilt-shift flânerie we are contrarily ‘within’ the snow globe; we do not contain it and cannot master it. Similar to the well-known image drawn by MC Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), the ‘globe’ Alice is in signifies mystery more than mastery. Escher’s image portrays a hand holding a globe that reflects the artist and the room he is in. Like the snow globe, it miniaturizes reality but, like a crystal ball, it opens new vistas of imagined space that provoke ideas about the phenomenology of space, what is inside (room) versus outside (view), and temporal expansion as well. It is a similar optical process that structures the tilt-shift images and video postcards; they are scaled to memory and possibility rather than reality. The animated miniature city produces a phenomenology of seeing that plays with notions of containment and expansion. This is clear in the image of a miniature Boston with a hand reaching toward it; here the hand is ‘inside’ rather than outside the globe (see Figure 1).

Nostalgia and technologies of memory

In the following two sections I will examine two components of tilt-shift flânerie. The first is subjective and intimate, focusing on what is internalized; the second addresses more cosmopolitan aspects, thinking through implications of the macro and referential. In this section I examine two tilt-shift animated films of cities I have lived in and know well – San Francisco: The Miniature City and Little Big Berlin – in relation to ideas of vision, memory and nostalgia. One particular function of tilt-shift imagery is the sense of intimacy it creates for a space that is beyond our normal range of vision. The miniature yet comprehensive composition of tilt-shift imagery strongly resonates with the way in which objects are scaled in our thoughts and memories, which cannot be gauged in terms of our normal experience of space and time. While filmmaking has always been a way to chart this difference, depicting the ways in which the mind works – thought, consciousness, memory – remains difficult to achieve. This is especially true of places in our past and future; since any experience outside of the current moment is either remembered or anticipated, the scope is enormous. Our perception and attention toward these spaces is therefore directed in a complex way, and one that evolves over time.

No one describes the consciousness of anticipating a visit to a city better or more thoroughly, perhaps, than Proust (2003), whose In: Search of Lost Time Swann’s Way (written between 1870 and 1922), features a passage in which he reflects on perception and memory in relation to traveling to a place that is both imagined and longed for. He is an imaginary flâneur whose heightened awareness and curiosity transcend a lack of mobility. The way that he imagines and describes his excitement about a planned visit to Venice and Florence is a perfect prose version of the visual flânerie of miniaturized urban space outlined in this article. Proust describes the process in terms of abstraction, miniaturization, visual distortion and geometry. In his mind he sees each city ‘at a particular place on the earth’s surface and at no other’ (p. 557) and encapsulates his ideas of that place into a single word – its name – which distills its beauty, mystery, and singularity while also setting him up for eventual disillusionment in its reality. For him the name acts as a miniaturization of the place, which is comprised of a montage, a ‘confused picture’ of sense-based images or impressions (p. 551). He writes that the names ‘magnified the idea’ of a place, making it ‘more real’ and ‘different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing’ (p. 550). This miniaturization and distillation of imagined complexity encourages us to reach out physically and imaginatively to geographical and cultural diversity, to the unique spaces of the globe.

In his description of how he imagines a city, Proust references a toy souvenir: ‘in the name of Balbec’, he notes, ‘as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which one buys at seaside places, I could distinguish waves surging round a church built in the Persian style’ (p. 553). He notes that the ‘enforced simplicity’ of this miniature image holds our attention because it invests each object with layers of unspoken significance. Proust further telescopes himself to fit the image. He writes of the cities that he will ‘soon be able, by the most thrilling kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a page of my own life’ (p. 558). In this vision that brings together the urban other and personal experience, he imagines or recognizes himself as a ‘minute personage … in an enlarged photograph of St. Mark’s that had been lent to me’ as someone ‘in a bowler hat, in front of the portico’ (p. 559). Like the tourists of the World’s Fairs, he inscribes his presence onto the postcard, the souvenir of a particular place, to make it his own. As Stewart (1984: xii) notes in On Longing, ‘The souvenir contracts the world in order to expand the personal.’

A child-like curiosity, such as Alice’s, Proust’s, and Baudelaire’s, draws one into other possible worlds by means of the miniature. To imagine oneself as a ‘minute personage’ in a photograph or snow globe is to imagine shutting oneself up like a telescope to fit through a miniature door into an unknown world that also appears to be the ‘loveliest’. What one finds there will not be what one imagined, but it can be, like Alice’s adventures, challenging and intriguing. Thus, one of my favorite images from Little Big Berlin is a simple and private one: a garden like other courtyard gardens, though not one I have been to (see Figure 5). It is an entryway into other existences and stories, as the city is a gateway to history, experience, knowledge, and transformation. The image draws us to mystery rather than mastery of the space. There is of course no possible mastery of city space, which constantly changes around us, a realization that is reinforced in tilt-shift films by their focus on ceaseless movement; the apparent stop-motion animation in the films provides a sense of time passing to create a distilled memory.

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Figure 5.

Looking into a city garden in Little Big Berlin (2010). Screenshot from Little Big Berlin (Pilpop, 2010), available at: http://vimeo.com/14014317 (accessed 18 December 2013).

Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space (1994), scales the inversion of perspective that takes place in contemplating the miniature at the same level as fairy tales. He notes that the tiny things we imagine take us back to childhood, ‘to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys’ (p. 149). Aligning the miniature with imagination and daydreams, he notes that ‘values become condensed and enriched in miniature’ (p. 150), like a seed from which larger ideas and understanding germinate, expanding because of ‘liberation from all obligations of dimensions’ (p. 154). The tilt-shift images represent what we see in our minds: miniature and toy-like, they replicate the scale of our memories and imagination. They allow us to experiment, like Alice, with the scale of our existence. As Bachelard writes: ‘All memory has to be reimagined. For we have in our memory micro-films that can only be read if they are lighted by the bright light of the imagination’ (p. 175). The brightly lit tilt-shift miniatures exemplify a way of projecting such visions.

This equation of liberation from spatial restraint translates well into the tilt-shift world, which allows for a combination of the miniature with the gigantic, uniting the insights of the micro with that of the macro. Bachelard invokes the magnifying glass as the doorway into a miniature world that informs our understanding of the world it replaces. He writes:

The man with the magnifying glass – quite simply – bars the everyday world. He is a fresh eye before a new subject … It gives him back the enlarging gaze of a child … Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. (p. 155)

But the body telescopes in both directions and the miniature is seen to contain within it a mature universe. Bachelard identifies this way of seeing as belonging to poets:

The familiar world assumes the new relief of a dazzling cosmic miniature. The poet has shown us that large is not incompatible with small … If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing. (pp. 171–172)

Bachelard also sees this style of insight in medieval miniatures. ‘One must love space’, he observes, ‘to enclose an entire spectacle in a molecule of drawing’ (p. 159). The result of such works, whether they are medieval miniatures or tilt-shift ones, is to rivet attention: one must look closely at the details of a world so tiny yet complete.

The first miniature video postcard I ever viewed was of San Francisco, a place I know by heart. Thus, when I watched San Francisco: The Miniature City, I recognized every space in the video, though many were from perspectives I had never seen. Looking at the space in miniature opened up in my mind a thousand memories and the visual flânerie served to augment my pedestrian flânerie. Like Proust, I was able to telescope myself ‘by the most thrilling kind of geometry’ into the image, the past, and the future of this very particular place. For example, a view looking toward a section of Lombard Street – known primarily as a space constructed for tourists – was for me a seed containing layered and shifting memories of the neighborhood of Russian Hill. Although it has been photographed countless times, for me the miniaturized tilt-shift image of Lombard Street transcends the ‘tourist gaze’ (see Figure 6). It is instead a street liberated from utilitarian purpose, lending an almost whimsical shape to the city and germinating potential new narratives and meanings.

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Figure 6.

Tilt-shift image from San Francisco: The Miniature City, by Minimus (2010). Screenshot from San Francisco: The Miniature City (Minimus, 2010), available at: vimeo.com/10839224 (accessed 18 December 2013).

In his analysis, Bachelard mentions a particular text, ‘The egg in the landscape’ by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, which describes ‘befogged … cysts in the glass’ (p. 157) in a windowpane. The author, fixated with the way these foggy cysts transform the outside world, describes them as miniaturized visions distorted around a nucleus. This vignette perfectly describes the effect of a tilt-shift photograph: it appears to be a miniature vision distorted around a nucleus of focus. It both embodies and reverses the miniature world Bachelard has been explaining: he observes that ‘A bit of moss may well be a pine, but a pine will never be a bit of moss’ (p. 163). In fact, a pine does appear to be moss in a fake miniature: a reversal that is a uniquely 21st-century viewpoint (see Figure 5).

That tilt-shift images suggest we think in a child-like way, and encourage us to view the complex and chaotic realities of modern metropolises as something familiar and even beloved, points to a further possibility: they encompass our nostalgia for a past that is gone forever, and archive a specific moment in the life of a city for the future. As Don Draper notes about advertising in the TV series Mad Men, ‘Technology is a glittering lure’, and the technology of tilt-shift imagery is certainly one of its chief attractions. But there is something more there. Don calls it nostalgia: ‘the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.’ ¹³ The product he is pitching for is the Kodak Carousel, a kind of updated magic lantern that allows a series of images to be projected onto the wall. Even in this image constructed specifically to promote consumption there is emotional resonance. He insists it

is a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels: round and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

The pictures he uses for this sales pitch are of the family he has just lost.

Nostalgia generally plays some part in our relationship to the past whether we acknowledge it or not. We lose things for many reasons, and people live in one place or another often without a choice. People may lose access to a city due to migration, employment, poverty, familial responsibilities, deportation. One cannot always control one’s location, but memories can be revisited at will. Thus the metaphorical ideas of time-machine and carousel synch well with the tilt-shift time-lapse world. The carousel gives shape to the notion of a child’s journey, the ability to move away and back, invent and learn, and the time machine gives us access to cityscapes that are constantly changing: they archive a particular moment in time. Change and ephemerality are emphasized in the films themselves, as are temporal inevitability and a sense of loss. They also acknowledge that urban areas defy comprehension; they are complex entities that predate and outlive us. No form of representation will truly encapsulate them, and tilt-shift images do not try to do so.

Cosmopolitan flânerie

When writing of the habits of the cosmopolitan flâneur, Baudelaire (1995) noted that he ‘wants to know, understand, appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe’ (p. 7) from within ‘the heart of the multitude’ (p. 9). This ‘cosmopolitan’ aspect of flânerie embraces the macro and referential elements of the modern metropolis as well as its heterogeneity. Tilt-shift flânerie invites engagement with the multitude, but with the distance of the aviator. Since it is virtual, the smells, jostles, and insults of a city are absent, as is the face-to-face apprehension of individuals. Time-lapse representations of the crowd focus on visual synergy and the animation of matter rather than physical contact. This is a bonus in one way: there are no obvious stereotypes when people are the size of ants or moving so quickly you cannot focus on them. But neither is there usually a depth of representation. One exception is The Manhattan Project (2012), by Cameron Michael, which employs time-lapse to create a swiftly moving pixilated landscape, and uses a selective focus similar to tilt-shift. Along with the vistas of buildings and lights, he incorporates numerous close-ups on individuals: walking in the street, Grand Central Station, the subway, the park. It is only a frame or two so that their faces appear as blips, but it adds a great deal of individual variation within the multitude.

The virtual nature of tilt-shift flânerie also makes the world more accessible for anyone who would like to see other cities but cannot. Rather than glossy ads for leisure, films like Mini Mumbai and Little Big Berlin highlight inter-cultural connections by featuring a multitude of individual and group actions focusing on people living their everyday lives: walking, working, painting street art, greeting others, eating in the park. It is not hard to imagine oneself fitting into a pattern of existence here as a participant rather than a voyeur. Shanghighspeed (Tiny Carousel, 2012) is another interesting example that telescopes our point of view from vast futuristic vistas in to traditional, intimate alleys filled with people cooking and buying food.

The 2011 Eurovision Song Contest video postcards go further and make this oscillation the basis of their structure. They also develop narratives that offer a new cosmopolitan view of the nation. While they do not attempt to chart the actual process of globalization, they do reflect on how the representation of collective space may be used to promote a more cosmopolitan and hopeful understanding of the modern nation. In this sense they represent an attempt to show a more complex ethnoscape, what Appadurai (1996: 33) identifies as ‘tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals’. They do so within a ‘mediascape’ that utilizes tilt-shift images as a beginning point into a short narrative version of a new cosmopolitan Germany that is more true to life than the historically (and politically) aesthetic vision of German identity that still haunts public memory.

The Eurovision Song Contest is an immensely popular European music competition that has been taking place since 1956. A post-World War II effort on the part of the newly formed European Broadcasting Union, the song contest was designed to promote unity through entertainment and competition, and was an early technological experiment in transmitting a live television show to multiple countries simultaneously by means of an international network (European Broadcasting Union, 2014). The first transmission broadcast to 4 million households, and the show now has an estimated 125 million viewers. The contest has grown from 7 to over 40 countries, and the 56th competition was held in Düsseldorf in 2011. As one of Europe’s longest running and most popular broadcasts, it documents and enables a collective European space and memory, one that is often fantastical, but which imagines things in a way that can affect the way people think about other nations.

That Germany is the focal point for the 2011 competition creates an interesting opportunity, as it is famous for ultra-nationalism and genocide. Yet it is also known for incredible artistic, philosophical, and humanitarian achievements. Like many modern nations, its ideas of citizenship are also in a state of flux. The adoption of tilt-shift imagery for the video postcards is therefore a potentially powerful choice. Each nation competing in the 2011 Eurovision made a video postcard that represents the host nation, Germany. In distinction to other years, the 2011 videos use tilt-shift flânerie and focus on particular connections and narratives between the host country and individuals from visiting countries. Each country made a video postcard using a similar format: first, tilt-shift imagery focusing on a particular city in Germany; second, a short narrative that specifies individuals from the guest nation; third, the theme of the contest (‘Feel your heart beat’) written in that country’s language. For example, Poland’s postcard features Wuppertal’s monorail, where two would-be lovers from Poland leave each other at one station but reunite at another (see Figure 7). The scene finishes with ‘Poczuj bicie serca’. ¹⁴

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Figure 7.

An image of Wuppertal’s monorail station from the Eurovision Video Postcards (2011). Screenshot from the Eurovision Video Postcards (Tobi Baumann, 2011), available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXzW6gm2hdM (accessed 18 December 2013).

The video postcards compare to traditional panoramic postcards in that they visually compress great swathes of space, experience, and difference into beautiful images. But they also feature animated tilt-shift time-lapse imagery focusing on city- and nation-scapes as spaces in flux with movement being skillfully choreographed and orchestrated. This process invokes the curious, child-like perspective of tilt-shift flânerie, and significantly alters viewers’ spatio-temporal frames of reference before opening into a vision of an alternative national demographic. The aerial shots explore several different city locations before guiding us into a particular space where an ‘existence’ is explored. The structure of the entire sequence is focused on an itinerary of the city, with the images we see becoming familiarized to us through the experience of others. In Armenia’s postcard, for example, a father and son fly a kite on the beach in Langeoog, an island in the North Sea. Are they tourists, or do they live there? We don’t know, but they seem to belong.

The tilt-shift sensibility telescopes from the postcard’s landscape to one person’s sense of place. From the animated cityscape emerges one story from many ‘existences’. This new perspective not only offers a miniature environment to peruse, but one centered on a nucleus of human interaction. It is entirely possible to imagine oneself in such a landscape as flâneur or citizen. Thus, scenarios feature tourists, long-time visitors, and people who are a vital part of the city’s life. The places and people chosen challenge assumptions about identity without veering toward the exotic or inferior, drawing people into familiar patterns of existence without exalting or denigrating difference. As such they illustrate a new cosmopolitan sensibility. For example, a marine engineer from Bosnia and Herzegovina works on designing ships in Papenburg. At Heidelberg University, Bulgarian astrophysics postgraduate Vesselina teaches a class. Georgia’s postcard presents Sofie and Richard playing with a multitude of children in a playground in Berlin.

These postcards represent a vision for a new cosmopolitanism that typifies what Appiah (2006: 151) defines in its most general terms as ‘universality plus difference’. Appiah explores the philosophical implications of a new cosmopolitanism that ‘begins with a simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association’ (pp. xviiii–xix) and as ‘a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others’ (p. 85). Reminding us that migration is as natural an activity as settlement (p. xviii), Appiah explores the historical and contemporary implications of cosmopolitanism through his own ‘multiple attachments’ (Cheah and Robbins, 1998: 3) to cultural and national affiliations. Such attachments are featured in the postcards, which remind us that although European history is contentious, there are also traditions of cooperation. Russia’s postcard strikingly visualizes the idea of ‘multiple attachments’ by showcasing a Russian ballerina dancing in the Dresden Semper Opera House, ending in a sequence that splits her image in a mirror: at first she faces the camera and her reflection faces away, but then it turns around to greet us and there are two versions of her smiling at us.

The idea of being a citizen of the world is an old one, but theories about ‘new cosmopolitanism’ work toward giving it a postcolonial sensibility. ¹⁵ Its union with the figure of the flâneur creates a thread of connection across cultural borders. Rajan and Sharma (2006: 2–3) claim that new cosmopolitans ‘blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally, and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages, and technology to position themselves in motion’. They may be immigrants, students, tourists, refugees, artists, etc., but the key to their status as new cosmopolitans is the ability to adopt ‘fluid subject positions’ (p. 3). The cosmopolitan ability to sustain old and new attachments while negotiating complex identities is not a new phenomenon either, but since ‘the globalization of capital and travel’ it is a more widespread one (p. 4). One sees this in many of the Eurovision postcards: an Irish band in Hamburg, a Latvian exchange student in Frankfurt am Main, a Finnish member of the Berliner Philharmoniker, a Hungarian chef working at an Italian restaurant in Munich, the Israeli coach of the Berlin basketball team.

Pollock et al. (2002: 4) describe the current era of globalization as a time of transition rather than transformation, wherein ‘cosmopolitanism … catches something of our need to ground our sense of mutuality in conditions of mutability, and to learn to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural transition.’ These terrains are certainly evident in the postcards, and although they focus on hopeful images, there are clear undercurrents of the past. Reflecting on the history of German cities like Berlin and Dresden in the last 70 years reminds one that cityscapes can change radically, as can their inhabitants. These video postcards are sent from the visiting to the host nation, which reverses the normal trajectory of the gaze and flow of information. Like postcards with individuals’ writing on them, they intercede in official history. Turkey’s postcard, for example, reinterprets a medieval painting in Dresden’s Old Masters’ Gallery in light of a Turkish artist’s own creative style. The Romanian postcard features two graffiti artists who write their message on a section of the Berlin Wall at the East Side Gallery, an act that echoes with several eras of German history.

Animated tilt-shift postcards are a new digital form that will certainly develop in interesting ways. For now they allow viewers to experience an aerial vision that uproots them from their bit of earth to gain a new perspective. They set the scale at both macro and micro, allowing us to observe urban landscapes as a whole while imagining the everyday experience of individuals within. They also demonstrate a spectatorial engagement of multiple attachments, which begins with our own turf, and proceeds, via memory and imagination, to tilt-shift imagery in a way that can circumnavigate national boundaries and contribute to a new cosmopolitan perspective. The ‘tiny’ city is something small enough to reach out and touch, as David Legnon literally enacts in his image of Boston. Both a room and a view, it allows us to contain some part of it while avoiding being lost within. As with the snow globe, we can re-examine these miniature tilt-shift postcards at will, suspending experience in time, keeping it alive.