Cinema and the City PDF Download

Author: Mark Shiel
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 144439973X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.

Author: Barbara Mennel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134219830
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Films about cities abound. They provide fantasies for those who recognize their city and those for whom the city is a faraway dream or nightmare. How does cinema rework city planners’ hopes and city dwellers’ fears of modern urbanism? Can an analysis of city films answer some of the questions posed in urban studies? What kinds of vision for the future and images of the past do city films offer? What are the changes that city films have undergone? Cities and Cinema puts urban theory and cinema studies in dialogue. The book’s first section analyzes three important genres of city films that follow in historical sequence, each associated with a particular city, moving from the city film of the Weimar Republic to the film noir associated with Los Angeles and the image of Paris in the cinema of the French New Wave. The second section discusses socio-historical themes of urban studies, beginning with the relationship of film industries and individual cities, continuing with the portrayal of war torn and divided cities, and ending with the cinematic expression of utopia and dystopia in urban science fiction. The last section negotiates the question of identity and place in a global world, moving from the portrayal of ghettos and barrios to the city as a setting for gay and lesbian desire, to end with the representation of the global city in transnational cinematic practices. The book suggests that modernity links urbanism and cinema. It accounts for the significant changes that city film has undergone through processes of globalization, during which the city has developed from an icon in national cinema to a privileged site for transnational cinematic practices. It is a key text for students and researchers of film studies, urban studies and cultural studies.

Author: Jason Bailey
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647004691
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 1206

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Book Description
A visual history of 100 years of filmmaking in New York City, featuring exclusive interviews with NYC filmmakers Fun City Cinema gives readers an in-depth look at how the rise, fall, and resurrection of New York City was captured and chronicled in ten iconic Gotham films across ten decades: The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), The Naked City (1948), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Taxi Driver (1976), Wall Street (1987), Kids (1995), 25th Hour (2002), and Frances Ha (2012). A visual history of a great American city in flux, Fun City Cinema reveals how these classic films and legendary filmmakers took their inspiration from New York City’s grittiness and splendor, creating what we can now view as “accidental documentaries” of the city’s modes and moods. In addition to the extensively researched and reported text, the book includes both historical photographs and production materials, as well as still-frames, behind-the-scenes photos, posters, and original interviews with Noah Baumbach, Larry Clark, Greta Gerwig, Walter Hill, Jerry Schatzberg, Martin Scorsese, Susan Seidelman, Oliver Stone, and Jennifer Westfeldt. Extensive "Now Playing" sidebars spotlight a handful of each decade’s additional films of note.

Author: James A. Clapp
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412850533
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The American city and the American movie industry grew up together in the early decades of the twentieth century, making film an ideal medium through which to better understand urban life. Exploiting the increasing popularity of large metropolitan cities and urban lifestyle, movies chronicled the city and the stories it generated. In this volume, urbanist James A. Clapp explores the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema within the dimensions of time and space. A variety of themes and actualizations have been repeated throughout the history of the cinema, including the roles of immigrants, women, small towns, family farms, and suburbia; and urban childhoods, family values, violent crime, politics, and dystopic futures. Clapp examines the different ways in which the city has been characterized as well as how it has been portrayed as a "character" itself. Some of the films discussed include Metropolis, King Kong, West Side Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, Rebel without a Cause, American Graffiti, Blade Runner, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, LA Confidential, Sunrise, Crash, American History X, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Deer Hunter, and many more. This work will be enjoyed by urban specialists, moviegoers, and those interested in American, cultural, and film studies.

Author: Johan Andersson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231850999
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Cinema and audiovisual media are integral to the culture, economy and social experience of the contemporary global city. But how has the relationship between cinema and the urban environment evolved in the era of digital technology, new media and globalization? And what are the critical tools and concepts with which we can grasp this vital interconnection between space and screen, viewer and built environment? Engaging with a rapidly transforming urban world, the contributions to this collection rethink the 'cinematic city' at a global scale. By presenting a global constellation of screen cities within one volume, the book encourages juxtapositions and comparisons across the North and South to capture the global city and its dynamics of exchange, hybridity, and circulation. The contributions examine film and screen cultures in a range of locations spanning five continents: Antibes, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Busan, Cairo, Caracas, Copenhagen, Jakarta, Kolkata, Lagos, Los Angeles, Malmö, Manila, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Seoul, Sète, and Shanghai. The chapters address topics that range across the contemporary film and media landscape, from popular cinema, art cinema, and film festivals to serial television, public screens, multimedia installations, and video art. Contributors: Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Jinhee Choi, Pei-Sze Chow, Thomas Elsaesser, Malini Guha, Jonathan Haynes, Will Higbee, Igor Krstic, Christian B. Long, Joanna Page, Lawrence Webb.

Author: Steven Jacobs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317215575
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the city symphony, an experimental film form that presented the city as protagonist instead of mere decor. Combining experimental, documentary, and narrative practices, these films were marked by a high level of abstraction reminiscent of high-modernist experiments in painting and photography. Moreover, interwar city symphonies presented a highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life, and they organized their urban-industrial images through rhythmic and associative montage that evoke musical structures. In this comprehensive volume, contributors consider the full 80 film corpus, from Manhatta and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt to lesser-known cinematic explorations.

Author: Stephen Barber
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861891273
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The books that comprise the Locations series address the links between film and society. In Cinema and Urban Space Stephen Barber explores the use of urban images in film from early to contemporary cinema.

Author: Lisa Odham Stokes
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859842034
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Uncertainty about the post-handover era accelerated Hong Kong's race for economic growth, and found expression in cinema's depictions of a city on fire. This book reviews the directors and films that have established Hong Kong's cinema's reputation.

Author: George Melnyk
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1927356598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to create and reflect multiple versions of a single city. Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo’s Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and “urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life. Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films, and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period has aided in articulating a new national identity.

Author: Yomi Braester
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Painting the City Red illuminates the dynamic relationship between the visual media, particularly film and theater, and the planning and development of cities in China and Taiwan, from the emergence of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the staging of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Yomi Braester argues that the transformation of Chinese cities in recent decades is a result not only of China’s abandonment of Maoist economic planning in favor of capitalist globalization but also of a shift in visual practices. Rather than simply reflect urban culture, movies and stage dramas have facilitated the development of new perceptions of space and time, representing the future city variously as an ideal socialist city, a metropolis integrated into the global economy, and a site for preserving cultural heritage. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with leading filmmakers and urban planners, and close readings of scripts and images, Braester describes how films and stage plays have promoted and opposed official urban plans and policies as they have addressed issues such as demolition-and-relocation plans, the preservation of vernacular architecture, and the global real estate market. He shows how the cinematic rewriting of historical narratives has accompanied the spatial reorganization of specific urban sites, including Nanjing Road in Shanghai; veterans’ villages in Taipei; and Tiananmen Square, centuries-old courtyards, and postmodern architectural landmarks in Beijing. In Painting the City Red, Braester reveals the role that film and theater have played in mediating state power, cultural norms, and the struggle for civil society in Chinese cities.