Cine-scapes ignites new ways of seeing, thinking and debating the nature of architecture and urban spaces.Drawing on the author's extensive knowledge it: offers insight into architecture and urban debates through the eyes of a practitioner working in the fields of film and architectural design emphasizes how filmic/cinematic tendencies take place or find their way into urban practices can be used as a tool for educators, students and practitioners in architecture and urban design to communicate and discuss design issues with regard to contemporary architecture and cities
This book is the first of its kind to bring basic notions of contemporary physics to bear on African cine-scapes. In this book, renowned African cinema scholar Kenneth W. Harrow presents unique new ways to think about space and time in film, with a specific focus on African and African diasporic cinema. Through a series of case studies, he explores how cinema creates and represents time and space and, more specifically, how a cinema centered in African landscapes and figures accomplishes this. He reflects on the issues and problems posed by scientists when faced with the basic questions of what space and time are and their solutions or conclusions, giving both film studies and African studies scholars access to new ways to formulate their thinking about African cine-scapes. Working beyond the limits of a framework based in a postcolonial and cultural understanding of time and space, Harrow demonstrates how a scientific understanding of time and space can open up new approaches to African cinema and cinema in general. A unique, interdisciplinary book that encourages brand new ways to approach cinematic texts and, specifically, African cine-scapes.
This book traces the developments in African films that were made from the 1990s to the present within the evolving frame of what came to be called ‘World Cinema’ and, eventually, ‘Global Cinema.’ Kenneth W. Harrow explores how, from the time video and then digital technologies were introduced in the 1990s, and then again, when streaming platforms assumed major roles in producing and distributing film between the 2010s and 2020s, African cinema underwent enormous changes. He highlights how the introduction of the continent’s first successful commercial cinema, Nollywood, shifted the focus from engagé films, with social or political messages, to entertainment movies, but also auteur cinema. Harrow explores how this transformation liberated African filmmakers and resulted in an incredible, enduring flow of creative, inventive, and thoughtful filmmaking. This book presents a number of those critical films that mark that trajectory, projecting a new sense of African film spaces and temporalities, while also highlighting how African films continue to find independent pathways. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African cinema and world cinema, as well as researchers specifically examining African cinemas and their relationship to globalization.
'Paris in the Cinema' offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, the volume introduces, challenges and extends ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, ranging from particular districts such as Saint-Germain-des-Pres and les banlieues (the suburbs) in French cinema, to iconic figures such as the detective Maigret and the lovers, and from locations such as the hotel, the building site and the Eiffel Tower to filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory.
Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.
Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture—since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly. The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce. This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture.
This book focuses on literature and cinema in English or French by authors and directors not working in their native language. Artists with hybrid identities have become a defining phenomenon of contemporary reality following the increased mobility between civilisations during the postcolonial period and the waves of emigration to the West. Cinema and prose fiction remain the most popular sources of cultural consumption, not least owing to the adaptability of both to the new electronic media. This volume considers cultural products in English and French in which the explicitly multi-focal representation of authors' experiences of their native languages/cultures makes itself conspicuous. The essays explore work by the peripheral and those without a country, while problematising what might be meant by the widely used but not always well-defined term ‘bicultural’. The first section looks at films by such well-known filmmakers working in France as Bouchareb, Kechiche, Legzouli and Dridi, as well as the animated feature Persepolis. Here the focus is on the representation of human experience in spatial terms, exploring the appropriation of territory cohabited by ‘local’ people, newcomers and their children, haunted by the cultural memories of distant places. The second part is devoted to multicultural authors whose ‘native’ language was English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Spanish (Beckett, Herzen, Voyeikova, Triolet, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kristof, Dorfman), and their creative engagement with difference. A study of the emergence of multilingual writing in Montaigne and an autobiographical essay by Elleke Boehmer on growing up surrounded by English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Zulu frame the volume's chapters. The collection relishes the freedom provided by liberation from the confines of one language and culture and the delight in creative multilingualism. This book will be of significant interest to those studying the subject of biculturalism, as well as the fields of comparative literature and cinema.
This book proposes new methodological tools and approaches in order to tease out and elicit the different facets of urban fragmentation through the medium of cinema and the moving image, as a contribution to our understanding of cities and their topographies. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to the literature in the growing field of cartographic cinema and urban cinematics, by charting the many trajectories and points of contact between film and its topographical context. Under the influence of new technologies, the opening and the availability of previously unexplored archives but also the contribution of new scholars with novel approaches in addition to new work by experienced academics, Cinematic Urban Geographies demonstrates how we can reread the cinematic past with a view to construct the urban present and anticipate its future.
African Film Studies is an accessible and engaging introduction to African cinemas, showcasing the diverse cinematic expressions across the continent. Bringing African cinemas out of the margins and into mainstream film studies, the book provides a succinct overview of the history, aesthetics, and theory of sub-Saharan African cinematic productions. Updated throughout, this new edition includes new chapters on Nollywood, Ethiopian cinema, Streaming, and the rise of televisual series, which serve to complement the book’s main themes: Overview of African cinema(s): Questions assumptions and defines the characteristics of African cinemas across linguistic, geographic, and filmic divides History of African cinemas: Spans the history of film in Africa from colonial import and ‘appropriation of the gaze’, the rise of Nollywood and local TV series to streaming, as well as building connections with the development of African American cinema Aesthetics: Introduces new research on previously under-explored aesthetic dimensions such as cinematography, animation, and film music Theoretical Approaches: Addresses a number of theoretical approaches and critical frameworks developed by scholars in the study of African cinemas Traditions and practices in African screen media: Features Ethiopian cinema, Nollywood, Local Televisual Series in Burkina Faso and South Africa, and the Streaming rush for Africa All chapters include case studies, suggestions for further reading, and screening lists to deepen the reader’s knowledge, with no prior knowledge of African cinemas required. Students, teachers, and general film enthusiasts would all benefit from this accessible and engaging book.
Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York examines the cinematic representation of New York from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, placing the dominant discourse of urban decline in dialogue with marginal perspectives that reimagine the city along alternative paths as a resilient, adaptive, and endlessly inspiring place. Drawing on mainstream, independent, documentary, and experimental films, the book offers a multifaceted account of the power of film to imagine the city’s decline and reimagine its potential. The book analyzes how filmmakers mobilized derelict space and various articulations of “nature” as settings and signifiers that decenter traditional understandings of the city to represent New York alternately as a desolate wasteland, a hostile wilderness, a refuge and playground for outcasts, a home to resilient and resourceful communities, a studio for artistic experimentation, an arcadia conducive to alternative social arrangements, and a complex ecosystem. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, media studies, urban cinema, urban studies, and eco-cinema.
