New York on Film: "The Naked City" with Imogen Sara Smith and Lilly Tuttle

Celebrate Noirvember with LM Live’s latest New York on Film screening: Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City” (1948). Celebrate Noirvember with LM Live’s latest New York on Film screening: Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City” (1948). Produced by Mark Hellinger, this landmark police procedural was filmed almost entirely on location, across more than 100 sites throughout New York City. A groundbreaking achievement in cinematic realism, the film helped redefine how New York City could be portrayed on screen. Breaking from Hollywood’s tradition of studio backlots and soundstages, “The Naked City” took its cameras into the streets, alleyways and neighborhoods of New York, embracing a documentary-style approach that lent the film an unprecedented sense of immediacy and authenticity. Its naturalistic visual style set a new benchmark for location filmmaking and helped create the look and feel of generations of crime shows, from “Dragnet” to “Law & Order.” A landmark of both film noir and mid-century American cinema, the film remains unforgettable for its iconic closing narration: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” Following the screening, film critic Imogen Sara Smith and curator Lilly Tuttle (Museum of the City of New York) will explore the film’s distinctive visual style, its roots in the gritty street photography of Weegee and its portrait of postwar New York. Their conversation will consider how Dassin’s documentary-inspired approach blurred the lines between fiction and reality, capturing the city not simply as a backdrop, but as a central character in the story and how it established a visual legacy that continues to shape crime films and urban storytelling. Tickets are $5 and include popcorn and a beverage. All proceeds will be donated to an organization of our speakers’ choice. Imogen Sara Smith is a writer and film historian based in New York City. She is the author of “In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City” and the forthcoming “Noir Around the World,” co-authored with Eddie Muller and due out in March 2027. Her work appears in Sight & Sound, Film Comment, the Criterion Collection and many other venues, and she has taught film history and criticism at NYU and the School of Visual Arts. Lilly Tuttle has been a curator at the Museum of the City of New York since 2012. In that time she has curated numerous exhibitions including “City Game: Basketball in New York” (2020), “Analog City: NYC Before Computers” and “People, Place, and Influence: The Collection at 100” (2023). She has also served as co-curator on exhibitions including “This is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture” (2023) and “New York at Its Core” (2016), “Art Deco City: New York Postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection” (2024), and most recently, “Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural” (2026).