| Screening the City Contributor(s): Fitzmaurice, Tony (Editor), Shiel, Mark (Editor), Davies, Jude (Contribution by) |
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ISBN: 1859844766 ISBN-13: 9781859844762 Publisher: Verso OUR PRICE: $23.70 Product Type: Paperback Published: March 2003 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Performing Arts | Film - History & Criticism - Social Science | Sociology - Urban |
| Dewey: 791.436 |
| Physical Information: 0.66" H x 7.52" W x 7.9" (1.56 lbs) 322 pages |
| Themes: - Demographic Orientation - Urban |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The city has long been an important location for film-makers. Visually compelling and always "modern," it is the perfect metaphor for man's place in the contemporary world. In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse range of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and paradigmatic urban experience in Europe and North America since the early twentieth century. Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, Prague and Warsaw--sites of dramatic upheaval in the 1920s-1930s, and again in the 1970s-1980s--feature strongly in the first part of the book. In the cinematic representation of these cities, modernist experimentation combined with social and political change to produce such memorable films as The Man with the Movie Camera, Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City, Berlin Alexanderplatz and, more recently, the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. The different but comparable space of the North American city since World War Two provides the primary focus for the second part of the book. Here, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto provide the settings for an investigation of the relationship between cinema and race, and cinema and postmodern global capitalism, in a comprehensive range of films from Point Blank, Medium Cool, Network and Annie Hall in the 1960s and 1970s, to Boyz N the Hood, Falling Down, Pulp Fiction, Safe], Crash and The End of Violence in the 1990s. 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. |