The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City (2024)

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CECILIA MOUAT / English - Español

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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.

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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.

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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?

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San Cornelio, G. (2008) “Live Cities: film and media approaches to European Cities” in Shifting Landscapes. Film and Media in European Context .

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Urban Phantasmagorias: Cinema and the Immanent Future of Cities

Andrei Mikhail Zaiatz Crestani

Cities experienced profound changes in the early 20th century, mainly as a result of industrialization. Along with architects and urban planners, fiction writers played a part in shedding light on some perverse or still unknown consequences of technology on society. Cinema is probably the first industrial art form and was from its beginning deeply involved in the creative portrayal of these changes. This ever-present urban imagery, rooted in concrete aspects of a changing reality and supported by existing and fictional technological systems, forms what we call urban phantasmagorias. This article develops this theoretical approach through a brief analytical review of some of the emblematic films that have anticipated shifts in our cities and lifestyle, influenced by the emerging technologies of their time, focusing on Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), Alphaville (1965), and The Matrix (1999).

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A City Visible But Unseen: Notes On The Cinematic Space

Maria Andronikou

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.

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The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City (2024)

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