Screening the City

by Fitzmaurice, Tony; Shiel, Mark; Davies, Jude; Gandy, Matthew; Gaughan, Martin

• ISBN13: 9781859844762
• ISBN10: 1859844766
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

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 Crash are 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 Alexanderplatz to 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 blok in Dekalog in 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.

Author Biography

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

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(14)
PART I The Modern City: Central and Eastern Europe
Uncanny Spaces: The City in Ruttmann and Vertov	15	(26)
Carsten Strathausen
Ruttmann's Berlin: Filming in a ``Hollow Space''	41	(17)
Martin Gaughan
The City Vanishes: Piel Jutzi's Berlin Alexanderplatz	58	(22)
Peter Jelavich
``Cut out from last year's moldering newspapers'': Bruno Schulz and the Brothers Quay on The Street of Crocodiles	80	(20)
Tyrus Miller
Architorture: Jan Svankmajer and Surrealist Film	100	(13)
David Sorfa
Kieslowski's Dekalog, Everyday Life, and the Art of Solidarity	113	(24)
Jessie Labov
PART II The Postmodern City: North America
After the Sixties: Changing Paradigms in the Representation of Urban Space	137	(23)
Allan Siegel
A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles, and American Cinema in the 1970s	160	(20)
Mark Shiel
The Affective City: Urban Black Bodies and Milieu in Menace II Society and Pulp Fiction	180	(20)
Paul Gormley
City Spaces and City Times: Bakhtin's Chronotope and Recent African-American Film	200	(16)
Paula J. Massood
Against the Los Angeles Symbolic: Unpacking the Racialized Discourse of the Automobile in 1980s and 1990s Cinema	216	(23)
Jude Davies
Allergy and Allegory in Todd Haynes' [Safe]	239	(23)
Matthew Gandy
The Deleuzean Experience of Cronenberg's Crash and Wenders' The End of Violence	262	(22)
Darrell Varga
CODA The City Reborn: Cinema at the Turn of the Century	284	(15)
John Orr
List of Contributors	299	(4)
Index	303