Sightlines · Setting course
The Village and the Lie: A Century of Small Towns on Screen
Every small town in the movies is built twice — once by carpenters, once by the camera — and the whole history of this theme is the story of the widening gap between the two. These twelve films trace an extraordinary arc: the town begins as a paradise lovingly constructed on a Hollywood soundstage, is almost immediately revealed as a mask, and then, over seventy years, is dismantled piece by piece — its color drained, its walls removed, its warmth turned into evidence — until filmmakers are photographing not a place at all but the social machinery that a place conceals. Watch these in order and you watch cinema fall out of love with the village and then, unable to stay away, keep circling back to see what it left buried there.
Start here, at the source: a Welsh mining valley built entirely in California, and all the more perfect for never having existed. Ford's invention is the town as one legible organism — cinematographer Arthur C. Miller composes in deep, layered space so that the family kitchen, the chapel, the climbing street, and the pithead all read in a single frame, and the miners' choral singing binds them together on the soundtrack before you've sorted out a single name. Watch how the camera waits rather than chases: it plants itself at the foot of the street and lets the singing men walk up into the shot, so that community arrives as sound before it arrives as people. Everything is filtered through memory — the valley is narrated as something already lost — and that gives the film its secret modernity: from its very first frames, the movie small town is a place that exists only in the remembering. Fellini will build his own remembered town on a soundstage thirty-two years later in Amarcord, and the debt runs straight back to this.
Two years later, Hitchcock takes Ford's paradise and slips a stranger into it. His masterstroke is photographic: cinematographer Joseph Valentine shoots the real Santa Rosa, California in flat, even, almost documentary daylight — wide streets, friendly cops, a house you'd trust with your children — precisely so that when shadow starts creeping laterally into those sunlit rooms, you feel the temperature drop in your own skin. Where Ford's deep space expressed belonging, Hitchcock's brightness expresses concealment: the town looks legible, and the film is about how badly it reads itself. The technique to watch is the doubling — two characters presented as mirrors of one another, staircases and doorways framing them into rhymed positions — so that the menace isn't outside the family home but folded into its warmest relationships. Every later film in this course that treats the idyll as a surface with something underneath — Lynch above all — is elaborating on what Hitchcock does here with nothing but sunlight and a camera that notices too much.
Now cross the Atlantic and meet a different danger: not the stranger who comes to town, but the town's own gravity. Fellini's five overgrown boys drift through a seaside province in the off-season, and the film's invention is structural — it has almost no plot, just a chain of episodes, because these young men never convert their daydreams into action, and the film's shape honestly reflects that. Coming out of Italian neorealism (Fellini had co-written its landmark street-level chronicles), he keeps the real locations and the ordinary faces but turns the camera from the laboring poor to the loafing middle class, from social urgency to moral inertia. Watch the empty spaces: the wind scouring the piazza after dark, a ballroom slowly emptying while a costumed man dances with a giant papier-mâché head because no one else is left. Where Ford's town held its people, Fellini's town holds them back — and that image of the province as a soft trap will echo through Bogdanovich's Texas and the Coens' Minnesota.
Back in America, Sirk films the postwar small town as a beautiful prison, and he does it with the boldest tool in this whole course: color used as open editorial comment. Cinematographer Russell Metty pours unnatural light through these interiors — autumn oranges where feeling lives, cold blues and sickly lavenders where the town's judgment falls — so that a well-appointed living room can look like a diagnosis. The story is a widow's romance across class lines, but the real subject is surveillance: the country club, the grown children, the picture window, everything arranged to watch and correct her. Watch for the frames within frames — mirrors, windows, and one famous dark glass screen that catches a face like a specimen — Sirk's way of showing a person being turned into an image by her neighbors' eyes. He shot it as a fast commercial weepie; what he smuggled inside is the sharpest anatomy ever made of how a "nice" town enforces niceness, and its influence on later portraits of suburban conformity (Lynch's lacquered roses very much included) is direct.
Twelve years on, the temperature changes — literally. Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer trained in documentary, shoots the fictional Sparta, Mississippi in hot, close, sweat-sheened close-ups and long lenses that compress the streets around a Black detective from Philadelphia, so that the town itself becomes a physical pressure on his body. This is the small-town film after the studio era's politeness: real-feeling locations, a jazz-inflected score, and confrontations staged around the smallest units of respect — who is addressed how, who stands where, whose hand is allowed to move. Watch the film's most famous gesture purely as filmmaking: a slap answered instantly by another, and the camera skipping the blow itself to study the ring of watching faces, because in this town the witnesses are the event. Where Sirk's community disciplined with dinner invitations, Jewison's disciplines with heat, proximity, and stares — the idyll is gone entirely, and the town has become a place you get out of alive.
Then the town simply starts to die, and Bogdanovich films the death in black and white — a defiant choice in 1971, made with Orson Welles's personal encouragement, using deep-focus compositions that let a whole peeling street sit sharp in the frame the way Ford's valley once did. The invention here is elegy as texture: cinematographer Robert Surtees makes wind and dust visible, keys the light hard and plain so faces flatter no one, and lets the radio and jukebox supply all the music, as if the town can no longer afford a score of its own. Anarene, Texas is a frontier town after the frontier — the film consciously summons Ford's iconography (a picture house is literally showing a classic Western) only to photograph it exhausted and half-shuttered. Watch the held wide shots where nothing happens and the nothing is the point: this is I Vitelloni's drift transplanted to America, young people circling a place whose reasons for existing have quietly stopped. The whole New Hollywood revision of the American myth passes through this dusty street.
Fellini returns to his seaside province twenty years after I Vitelloni — but this time he refuses to go home at all, rebuilding the entire town, piazza to sea, on a soundstage at Cinecittà. That artificiality is the film's argument: this is the small town as pure memory, and memory decorates, exaggerates, lies. Giuseppe Rotunno's photography holds farce, adolescent fantasy, and political satire in one continuous glow, and the town is played as a collective character — the year turns, rituals recur, marvels appear (manufactured snow, a peacock spreading its tail in a white piazza) that no story logic asked for. Yet inside the warmth is a needle: the same communal togetherness that Ford sanctified is shown here breeding conformity, gossip, and an easy embrace of the Fascist parade. Watch how Fellini completes the circle this course opened with — Ford built a fake town to grieve a real one; Fellini builds a fake town to show that the grieving itself was always partly invention.
Lynch's opening two minutes are the most famous thesis statement in this entire tradition: roses too red, a picket fence too white, a lawn too green — and then the camera physically burrows beneath the grass into a seething colony of insects while the soundtrack turns into an industrial roar. The invention is vertical: where Hitchcock let shadow creep into the sunny town sideways, Lynch drills straight down, splitting the small-town film into a daylight world and an underworld occupying the same address. He inherits the watcher-in-the-closet grammar of Hitchcock's voyeur thrillers and welds it to Sirk's radioactive color palette, so that the town's prettiness itself becomes the most sinister thing on screen. Watch the sound design as much as the images — the hum under the quiet scenes, the way ordinary rooms are scored like dreams. After this film, no white fence in American cinema is ever innocent again; the Coens and Haneke both build on the suspicion Lynch made permanent.
The Coens' stroke of genius is to relocate the crime film — shadows, schemes, a small man in over his head — into the brightest, whitest, friendliest landscape imaginable. Roger Deakins shoots the snowbound upper Midwest as a vast blank page: flat white ground meeting flat grey-white sky, human figures reduced to small dark marks flailing in a field that does not notice them. Watch the shot of a desperate man scraping ice off a windshield in an empty white lot, held longer than comfort allows — the town here isn't hostile like Jewison's Sparta or rotten like Lynch's Lumberton; it's simply indifferent, and that's somehow worse. Against the blankness the Coens set the region's talk — the singsong politeness, the "you betcha" warmth — played straight enough that decency and venality wear the same friendly accent. It's the most precisely regional American small-town film since Bogdanovich's, and it proves the theme's flexibility: the town no longer needs shadows to hide things; niceness itself is camouflage enough.
Then von Trier performs the experiment the whole tradition had been building toward: he deletes the town. No houses, no streets, no lawns — just chalk outlines on a black soundstage floor, hand-lettered labels ("Elm St."), mimed doors whose latches you hear but never see, and a handheld camera hunting among the actors like a restless witness. Borrowing the bare-stage convention of American theater's Our Town tradition and the distancing tricks of Brecht, he strips away everything Ford, Sirk, and Lynch used — architecture, color, light, weather — to test what remains of "community" when only behavior is left. What remains, the film argues through form alone, is the social mechanism itself: with no walls, every household can see into every other, and the audience becomes the town's one honest witness. Watch how quickly you stop noticing the missing scenery — that's the film's trap working on you. It is the theme reduced to its skeleton, and everything in the skeleton still moves.
Haneke rebuilds the village — a German farming community on the eve of the First World War, in severe black and white — but keeps von Trier's coldness and adds a devastating new tool: the withheld shot. Christian Berger's camera almost never moves; it sits locked at middle distance, and Monika Willi's editing cuts away from events before they finish and rejoins the world afterward, so that a tripwire strung across a riding path is seen only in its consequences, never in the hands that tied it. The film systematically strips out the golden nostalgia in which German-language cinema had traditionally bathed its villages, replacing warmth with a hierarchy you can read in the blocking itself — landowner over farmer, pastor over child, every doorway a checkpoint. Watch what you are not shown and notice how the not-showing forces you to suspect everyone, which is precisely the village's own condition. Where Ford's deep frame said we belong to each other, Haneke's locked frame says we answer to each other — and the difference between those two sentences is the entire journey of this course.
The arc ends in a contemporary Danish town so warm you could live there — and that warmth is the final, cruelest invention. Charlotte Bruus Christensen shoots autumn golds and foggy greys, hunting parties and nursery schools and toasts among old friends, and when a child's few muddled words put a suspicion into the room, Vinterberg refuses to change a single visual register: the light stays burnished, the kitchen stays ordinary, and only the way people look at one man changes. That is the technique to watch — a whole persecution conducted through glances, seating arrangements, and the space that opens around a body in a supermarket aisle, with none of the shadows, storms, or musical warnings the tradition trained you to expect. Coming out of the same Danish movement as von Trier (Vinterberg co-authored its stripped-down manifesto), the film brings the experiment home from the abstract stage to a photographable town, and shows that the machinery Haneke diagrammed and von Trier chalked onto a floor runs perfectly well in beautiful natural light. Ford's community absorbed its people; this one processes them.
Run the thread back through and the shape is clear. The small-town film begins with belonging made visible — Ford's deep frames where home, chapel, and workplace hold together in one image — and every subsequent filmmaker keeps the frame but changes what it holds. Hitchcock proves the sunlight can lie; Fellini proves the belonging can smother; Sirk turns the town's gaze into color; Jewison turns it into heat; Bogdanovich films the whole arrangement dying of old age; Fellini again, in Amarcord, confesses that the beloved town was always a memory-set built on a stage. Then the late films perform the autopsy: Lynch digs under the lawn, the Coens bleach the landscape to blank paper, von Trier erases the buildings entirely, Haneke locks the camera and withholds the hands, Vinterberg shows the machine running in golden light with everyone smiling. The inventions that stuck are all ways of photographing the same double exposure — the town as it sees itself laid over the town as it is — and the reason the theme never exhausts itself is that everyone watching has lived in some version of that gap. Twelve films, one street, and the camera still deciding whether to wait at the foot of it, like Ford, or to go down under the grass.