Synopses & Reviews
The city has long been an important location for filmmakers. Visually compelling and always modern, it is the perfect metaphor for man's place in the contemporary world.
In this provocative collection of essays, films as diverse as The Man with the Movie Camera, Annie Hall, Street of Crocodiles, Boyz N the Hood, Three Colors Red, and Crashare examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and the changing urban experience in Europe and the United States since the early twentieth century. Peter Jelavich, for example, links the suppression of the creative, liberal Weimar Berlin in the 1931 film Berlin Alexanderplatzto the rise of the Nazi regime and the end of one of the great eras of modernist experimentation in German visual culture; Jessie Labov considers Kieslowski's treatment of the Warsaw housing blokin Dekalogin terms of Solidarity's strategy of resisting totalitarianism in 1980s Poland; Allan Siegel examines the motif of the city in a broad range of American and international cinema to demonstrate how film and society since the 1960s have been driven by the fading of mass political radicalism and the triumph of privatization and capital; Paula Massood uses the socially illuminating theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to examine the representation of the ghetto and urban underclass in recent African-American films such as Menace II Society; and Matthew Gandy examines the focus on disease in Todd Haynes's [Safe]as a metaphor for social and spatial breakdown in contemporary Los Angeles.
Synopsis
Throughout the book, the cinema's artistic encounter with the city always intersects with a social and political engagement in which urgent issues of class, race, sexuality, the environment, liberty, capital, and totalitarianism are everywhere at stake.
About the Author
Tony Fitzmaurice is College Lecturer in Film Studies at the Centre for Film Studies/UCD School of Film, University College Dublin.
Mark Shiel is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College, London.
Matthew Gandy teaches geography at University College London and has published widely on urban and environmental issues.
Table of Contents
Uncanny spaces : the city in Ruttmann and Vertov / Carsten Strathausen -- Ruttmann's Berlin : filming in a "hollow space" / Martin Gaughan -- The city vanishes : Piel Jutzi's Berlin Alexanderplatz / Peter Jelavich -- "Cut out from last year's moldering newspapers" : Bruno Schulz and the Brothers Quay on The street of crocodiles / Tyrus Miller -- Architorture : Jan Svankmajer and surrealist film / David Sorfa -- Kieâslowski's Dekalog, everyday life and the art of solidarity / Jessie Labov -- After the sixties : changing paradigms in the representation of urban space / Allan Siegel -- A nostalgia for modernity : New york, Los Angeles and American cinema in the 1970s / Mark Shiel -- The affective city : urban black bodies and milieu in Menace II society and Pulp fiction / Paul Gormley -- City spaces and city times : Bakhtin's chronotope and recent African-American film / Paula J. Massood -- Against the Los Angeles symbolic : unpacking the racialized discourse of the automobile in 1980s and 1990s cinema / Jude Davies -- Allergy and allegory in Todd Haynes' Safe / Matthew Gandy -- The Deleuzean experience of Cronenberg's Crash and Wenders' The end of violence / Darrell Varga -- The city reborn : cinema a the turn of the century / John Orr.