Product Description

Exploring the relationship between cities and their cinematic portrayals in over a century of film, this book shows how notions of society inform and are influenced by the images we have come to know on screen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #531426 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From the Back Cover

Cinematic Urbanism presents an urban history of modernity and postmodernity through the lens of cinema while arguing that urbanism cannot be understood outside the space of the celluloid city.

Nezar AlSayyad traces the dissolution of the boundary between real and reel through time and space via a series of films that represent different modernities. He contrasts the "rational" European city of early twentieth-century industrial modernity as portrayed by Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (1927) with its American counterpart in Modern Times (1936). He illustrates the different forms of small town life and an urbanizing modernity across the Atlantic as exemplified by Cinema Paradiso (1989) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Using Metropolis (1927) and Brazil (1985), he shows how utopian ideals harbour within them their dystopian realities, while Jacques Tati's nostalgia for tradition in Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) reveals a cynical modernity and a rebelling against its idealism.

AlSayyad argues that the postmodern city of Blade Runner (1982) and Falling Down (1993) illustrates some of the urban outcomes of a globalizing economy. Turning to spectacle and surveillance, he examines Rear Window (1954), Sliver (1993), and The End of Violence (1997) as a voyeuristic modernity. To understand the city experienced by individuals of different social backgrounds, he takes Manhattan (1979), Annie Hall (1977), and Taxi Driver (1976), while Do the Right Thing (1989) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) are used to explore a modernity of race and ethnicity. Finally, he uses Pleasantville (1998)and The Truman Show (1998) to unpack the hyperreality of exurban postmodernity and to demonstrate how today the real and the reel have become mutually constitutive.

By considering how the real city and the reel city reference each other in an act of mutual representation and definition, this book advances the discussion on cinematic space and theories of the city.