City Lights (disambiguation)

City Lights is a 1931 film starring Charlie Chaplin.

City Lights may also refer to:

Literature

Music

Film and television

City Lights Bookstore

City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue, on the nexus of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco.

History

Founding and Early Years

City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New York City to San Francisco in the 1940s to teach sociology. He first used City Lights—in homage to the Chaplin film—in 1952 as the title of a magazine, publishing early work by such key Bay Area writers as Philip Lamantia, Pauline Kael, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Ferlinghetti himself, as “Lawrence Ferling.” A year later, Martin used the name to establish the first all-paperback bookstore in the U.S., at the time an audacious idea.

City Lights

City Lights is a 1931 American Pre-Code silent romantic comedy film written by, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a turbulent friendship with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers).

Although sound films were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working with silent productions. Filming started in December 1928, and ended in September 1930. City Lights marked the first time Chaplin composed the film score to one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl is the song "La Violetera" ("Who’ll Buy my Violets") from Spanish composer José Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.

City Lights was immediately successful upon release on January 30, 1931 with positive reviews and box office receipts of $5 million. Today, critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films ever made. In 1992, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2007, the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies ranked City Lights as the 11th greatest American film of all time. In 1949, the critic James Agee referred to the final scene in the film as the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid".

San Francisco

San Francisco (/sæn frənˈsɪskoʊ/), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California and the only consolidated city-county in California. San Francisco encompasses a land area of about 46.9 square miles (121 km²) on the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, which makes it the smallest county in the state. It has a density of about 18,187 people per square mile (7,022 people per km²), making it the most densely settled large city (population greater than 200,000) in the state of California and the second-most densely populated major city in the United States after New York City. San Francisco is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose, and the 13th-most populous city in the United States—with a Census-estimated 2014 population of 852,469. The city and its surrounding areas are known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and are a part of the larger OMB designated San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth most populous in the nation with an estimated population of 8.6 million.

City

A city is a large and permanent human settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town in general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.

Cities generally have complex systems for sanitation, utilities, land usage, housing, and transportation. The concentration of development greatly facilitates interaction between people and businesses, benefiting both parties in the process, but it also presents challenges to managing urban growth.

A big city or metropolis usually has associated suburbs and exurbs. Such cities are usually associated with metropolitan areas and urban areas, creating numerous business commuters traveling to urban centers for employment. Once a city expands far enough to reach another city, this region can be deemed a conurbation or megalopolis. In terms of population, the largest city proper is Shanghai, while the fastest-growing is Dubai.

Origins

There is not enough evidence to assert what conditions gave rise to the first cities. Some theorists have speculated on what they consider suitable pre-conditions and basic mechanisms that might have been important driving forces.