Searching for the City: Cinema and the Critique of Urban Space in the Films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz and Chanan (original) (raw)
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The subject of the city has long been central in studies and writings from different fields; architecture, urban and film studies, literature and photography. This is an exploratory paper, one that cuts across several disciplines with the intent of providing a wider knowledge on the cinematic of the city and its reproduction in filmic narratives. This paper explores not the complex relationship between film and place, but rather the ways in which the city has been represented through the ‘moving image’ both dramatised and envisioned, allowing us, as audience, to step into environments we have been before and/or will never directly experience. City space is both a filmic construction and an architectural construction. Filmic narratives of the city can also become an architectural practice: an art form of the city’s space. They are agents for building our views of the city, influencing the ways we live and perceive the city, and filmic representations will growingly be channelled into the city’s image. More than being a testament of the city’s history, could film be an instrument for testing and applying new perspectives to the city’s physical production? This paper suggests that filmic narratives are a major source for understanding the city and comprehending its processes of production. They can also be potential tools for recreating environments and ‘virtually’ explore the effects of the built environment on society and the urban whole. Both dramatised and envisioned cities are imagery constructs that allow reflecting about the conditions of urban life.
The City on Screen: A Methodological Approach on Cinematic City Studies
The city has a strong memory and it never forget its own experience. The past, the present and the future of the city can be read through its streets, buildings, sounds, myths, rhythms and stories. More importantly, if the city is portrayed through a camera, it becomes as fictional and designable as films. At this stage, there is no difference between watching a film and seeing a city. Also, cinema itself turns into a paradigm that belongs to the city. The parallelism between the city and film is like an inevitable destiny, so much so that they constitute and develop each other. Accordingly, those who attempt to understand the notion of the city should consult with films and vice versa; hence, this paper deals with the question of how the city is cinematized, and this question involves another question: how does the cinematic imagination fictionalize itself in the city?
A City Visible But Unseen: Notes On The Cinematic Space
Close Up journal of National University of Theatre and Film “I. L. Caragiale”, 2019
This essay focuses on Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), analysing it as an attempt to approach the subject of the cinematic city in an alternative way, by opting for a consciously political stance, which merges the historical with the contemporary. The film is linked to Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, Marshall Berman’s view of modernism and Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur. It is also related to Walter Benjamin’s ideas, Michel de Certeau’s concept of walking as a speech act, whilst also being connected to Edward Said’s notion of exile as the right state for the intellectual. As London is a film that narrativizes theoretical discourse, merging the literary with the cinematic, it is then briefly compared to Chapter V of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), a chapter which deals with space and the figure of the exile, in a book which significantly borrows from the language of cinema.
The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City
2014
In the 1970s, cities across the United States and Western Europe faced a deep social and political crisis that challenged established principles of planning, economics and urban theory. At the same time, film industries experienced a parallel process of transition, the effects of which rippled through the aesthetic and narrative form of the decade's cinema. The Cinema of Urban Crisis traces a new path through the cinematic legacy of the 1970s by drawing together these intertwined histories of urban and cultural change. Bringing issues of space and place to the fore, the book unpacks the geographical and spatial dynamics of film movements from the New Hollywood to the New German Cinema, showing how the crisis of the seventies and the emerging 'postindustrial' economy brought film and the city together in new configurations. Chapters cover a range of cities on both sides of the Atlantic, from New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco to London, Paris and Berlin. Integrating analysis of film industries and production practices with detailed considerations of individual texts, the book offers strikingly original close analyses of a wide range of films, from New Hollywood (The Conversation, The King of Marvin Gardens, Rocky) to European art cinema (Alice in the Cities, The Passenger, Tout va Bien) and popular international genres such as the political thriller and the crime film. Focusing on the aesthetic and representational strategies of these films, the book argues that the decade's cinema engaged with - and helped to shape - the passage from the 'urban crisis' of the late sixties to the neoliberal 'urban renaissance' of the early eighties. Splicing ideas from film studies with urban geography and architectural history, the book offers a fresh perspective on a rich period of film history and opens up new directions for critical engagement between film and urban studies. Reviews: Selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2016. “The Cinema of Urban Crisis is instantly a classic study on the relationship between the city and the cinema. The breadth and scope of this magnificent work is remarkable; Webb . . . has a seemingly limitless knowledge of urban history, political movements and ideology, and film. . . . This is an outstanding and important work. . . . Essential.” (Choice) https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089646378/the-cinema-of-urban-crisis
Urban Encounters: Stasis, Movement, Editing and Memory in Contemporary cinema
This article employs a comparative approach to connect cities and cinemas by discussing the presence of the urban space in the films Foreign Land (Terra Estrangeira, Walter salles and daniela Thomas, 1995), Head-On (Gegen die Wand, Fatih akin, 2004), Import Export (Ulrich seidl, 2007) and What Time Is It There? (Ni Neibian Jidian, tsai Ming-liang, 2001). shot mainly on location, these films are structured upon a movement between two cities, located in two different countries, and tackle questions of time and space and the fabrication of memory. a focus on their interconnectedness enables me to turn away from usual centre-periphery schemes and propose a new, and more complex, geography for recent and contemporary cinema.
The Leftover City: Leftover Sites as Disruptors of Urban Narratives in the Work of
informa Issue #13 ‘Urban Disruptors’, 2020
During the 1970s and 1980s, emerged a second wave of architectural criticism to Modernism related with the global oil and fiscal crises of the period. This criticism, targeting the issues of the ongoing urbanization, the unlimited spending of resources and the environmental degradation rendered the fragmentation of cities a critical problem for social coherence. In this second period, leftover sites were rediscovered and appeared as a favorite subject in narrative arts. Literature and cinema explored the lyrical role of such sites as allegories of alternative forms of urban life, romantic forms of unlawfulness, and the re-establishment of the senses or the rediscovery of lost identities. In these cases, leftover sites in cities appear as a more complicated phenomenon, one that had already been established and had evolved in cities for more than four decades. Leftover sites became more internalized and they were used to project the profound psychological concerns of the contemporary inhabitants of the city, such as the experience of a lost identity in the city, the shattering of social coherence of urban life, the overwhelming presence of dominant patterns of use in the city, or the city’s problematic relation with nature. This article examines the ways that various narrative artistic projects from cinema and literature refer to the presence of the leftover sites in cities. It investigates the way that these artistic projects can form a consistent narrative about alternative forms of urban life, one that exists in parallel to the dominant patterns of use of the city. The article also aims to contribute to the discussion on the role that artistic narratives can play in transcending architectural and urban design stereotypes in acknowledging, and documenting the leftover sites and possibly re-introducing them in the urban environment.
2012
Traditional forms to research history of architecture have been focused on influential architects, built projects and architectonic movements. On the other hand, scholars who explore films to approach architecture have analyzed set designs, architects who collaborate with the film industry, or specific films, cities or specific architectonic projects that appear in films. This dissertation is focused on discourses of the city and explores (1) dominant discourses that helped to the popularity of certain urban and architectonic solutions, (2) conditions that helped that city's authorities promoted certain urban solutions over others, and (3) how cinema and film genres contributed to these solutions were so popular. This interdisciplinary project understands discourses as systems of thought and practices that construct conceptual categories. Discourses work as cultural frameworks within larger systems of power, whereby truth and knowledge are produced. On the other hand, films strongly influence the construction of spatial meanings, and their analysis opens up new approaches to understanding architectonic spaces not only in terms of physical and perceptual features, but also in terms of social constructions. The objective of this project is to understand how America and Britain have represented and commented upon the city space between the 1930s and 1960s. To achieve this goal, the study analyzes 87 films than belong to diverse genres, in order to illuminate on the one hand, the main urban and architectonic models represented on screen and the discourses associated with these models; and on the other hand, to analyze the relationship between urban discourses and film genres.The theoretical framework is based upon the discourse analysis proposed by Michel Foucault and genre theory. The final products will be: a framework for future inquiries that combines architectonic and film approaches to understanding how both disciplines interact in the distribution of city’s discourses, and the analysis of a body of films according to their spatial models, in order to demonstrate that film genres distribute dominant discourses and function as frames that shape taken-for-granted assumptions of city’s spaces.