Cinema and the City

Cinema and the City PDF 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.

Cinema and the City

Cinema and the City PDF Author: Mark Shiel
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 144439973X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book

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.

Film and the City

Film and the City PDF 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.

Welcome to Fear City

Welcome to Fear City PDF Author: Nathan Holmes
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438471211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life—in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture. “Rejecting the easy abstractions and postmodern playfulness of noir and neo-noir criticism, Holmes places 1970s crime films, as he says, ‘in relation to the urban context that was their location, setting, and subject.’ He does this brilliantly, convincingly, and uniquely.” — David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

Dark City

Dark City PDF Author: Eddie Muller
Publisher: Running Press Adult
ISBN: 076249896X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller's Dark City is a film noir lover's bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in a definitive, highly illustrated volume. Dark Cityexpands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that illustrate the mythic landscape of the imagination. It's a place where the men and women who created film noir often find themselves dangling from the same sinister heights as the silver-screen avatars to whom they gave life. Eddie Muller, host of Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley, takes readers on a spellbinding trip through treacherous terrain: Hollywood in the post-World War II years, where art, politics, scandal, style -- and brilliant craftsmanship -- produced a new approach to moviemaking, and a new type of cultural mythology.

Black City Cinema

Black City Cinema PDF Author: Paula Massood
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439905657
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.

Somewhere in the Night

Somewhere in the Night PDF Author: Nicholas Christopher
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439137617
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war period, a strange time of hope and optimism mixed with fear and even paranoia. The shadow of this rich and powerful cinematic style can now be seen in virtually every artistic medium. The spectacular success of recent neo-film noirs is only the tip of an iceberg. In the dead-on, nocturnal jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the chilled urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, and postwar literary fiction from Nelson Algren and William S. Burroughs to pulp masters like Horace McCoy, we find an unsettling recognition of the dark hollowness beneath the surface of the American Dream. Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance. Somewhere in the Night can be appreciated as a lucid introduction to a fundamental style of American culture, and also as a guide to film noir's heyday. Ultimately, though, as the work of a bold talent adeptly manipulating poetic cadence and metaphor, it is itself a superb aesthetic artifact.

Precarious Creativity

Precarious Creativity PDF Author: Michael Curtin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520290852
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges workers face. The authors take on crucial issues and provide insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, they investigate working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in places such as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad, across a range of job categories that includes visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, Tejaswini Ganti, and others, this collection offers timely critiques of media globalization and broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity. “Every case study is an eye-opener, and no other book comes close in assessing the plight of creative workers in the era of global conglomerate Hollywood.” -THOMAS SCHATZ, University of Texas at Austin “A corrective to previous, U.S.-centric attempts to understand the global media economy by offering a bracing look at the dark underbelly of life for most media workers today.” -DENISE MANN, University of California, Los Angeles “A balanced and comprehensive portrayal of the reshaping of the contours of work and industry organization under the twin circumstances of digital disruption and a globalizing media system.” -TOM O'REGAN, The University of Queensland MICHAEL CURTIN is a professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. KEVIN SANSON is a Lecturer in Entertainment Industries at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

The City Symphony Phenomenon

The City Symphony Phenomenon PDF Author: Steven Jacobs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317215575
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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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.

Walls Have Feelings

Walls Have Feelings PDF Author: Katherine Shonfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134564104
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
For the first time, this book brings the insights, methodologies and visions of film to the practice of architecture. Walls Have Feelings poses unanswered questions from our immediate past, crucial for the future of the city: what was the cultural mindset leading to the triumph of Brutalism? What is the urban and domestic impact of large scale office building? Are there alternatives to the planners' city of object? and, Why does your flat leak? This book uniquely brings to bear questions of urgent cultural relevance on critical design decisions. As such, it is of as much importance to architects, planners and students of design, as to students of cultural history, geography and all enthusiasts of cities and of film.

The City in American Cinema

The City in American Cinema PDF Author: Johan Andersson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350115622
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
How has American cinema engaged with the rapid transformation of cities and urban culture since the 1960s? And what role have films and film industries played in shaping and mediating the “postindustrial” city? This collection argues that cinema and cities have become increasingly intertwined in the era of neoliberalism, urban branding, and accelerated gentrification. Examining a wide range of films from Hollywood blockbusters to indie cinema, it considers the complex, evolving relationship between moving image cultures and the spaces, policies, and politics of US cities from New York, Los Angeles, and Boston to Detroit, Oakland, and Baltimore. The contributors address questions of narrative, genre, and style alongside the urban contexts of production, exhibition, and reception, discussing films including The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Cruising (1980), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), King of New York (1990), Inception (2010), Frances Ha (2012), Fruitvale Station (2013), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Doctor Strange (2016).