A Shout in the Street: An Excursion Into the Modern City

The modern city as arena where public lives are played out and where chance encounters shape one's destiny is the topic of these eloquent, winding, meditative essays on four metropolises. To British playwright/director Jukes, Paris is a marketplace of desire, London a museum overlaid with nostalgic remnants of history. He views New York as illusory magnet of material promise, and Leningrad (once St. Petersburg) as emblematic of new beginnings, a link providing continuity between tsardom and revolution. Each essay is spliced with photographs and prefaced by a montage of quotations by the likes of Dickens, Freud, Orwell, Turgenev, Foucault, Lewis Mumford, Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Ellison, along with occasional lyrics from Hart Crane, Bob Dylan, the Clash. Best read in snatches, this travelogue touches upon all manner of topics ranging from the ``image industry'' to subways, arcades, Dostoyevski's ``underground man'' and personal freedom. (Apr.)