Talking Heads

Helvetica suffers when seen soon before Urbanized, because of the distractions of sets in an endless parade of selfconsciously designed offices (of typeface and graphic designers), and the ever-present risk of nerdish obsessing over micro-detail. It's most successful interviewees are Erik Spiekermann, whose spiky and arch asides mark him out from the faintly childish miasma surrounding most of the designers (Paula Scher ludicrously attempts to align a comfily boho 60s New York cultural touchstone with opposition to the war in Iraq; David Carson talks like a shambolic surfer) and the relaxed yet rigorous commentaries of Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs. They are the only interviewees who actually reach the point of saying what a few others hint at or do not have the language to say: You can only say what your typeface will let you say, or wants to say.

Urbanized repeats the structure of Hustwit's earlier film (talking head followed by scene-establishing or atmosphere-generating still camera shot) but draws its commentary from a much wider population, and never quite drifts into picture-postcardisms for it's cinematography. The sequence shot from the front of an over-ground train on a weekday in central Detroit, clearly and shockingly empty of people is as arresting as 'Day of the Triffids'. Each section (Bombay, Detroit, Stuttgart, Phoenix, Cape Town, Bogota) is a little too self-contained, and the final thought (city as an idea) might just as well have been a starting point (though for a very different documentary).