The Cinema of Urban Crisis
The Cinema of Urban Crisis

Author: Lawrence Webb

Publisher: Cities and Cultures

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 9789089646378

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The Cinema of Urban Crisis explores the relationships between cinema and urban crises in the United States and Europe in the 1970s. Discussing films by Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, Lawrence Webb reflects on processes of globalization and urban change that were beginning to transform cities like New York, London, and Berlin. Throughout, the 1970s are conceptualized as a historically distinctive period of crisis in capitalism, which reorganized urban landscapes and produced cultural innovation, technological change, and new configurations of power and resistance. Addressing themes of interest for film, cultural, and urban studies, this book is a compelling take on cinema from both sides of the Atlantic.

Welcome to Fear City
Welcome to Fear City

Author: Nathan Holmes

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1438471211

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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

The Urban Crisis
The Urban Crisis

Author: Edgar W. Butler

Publisher: Santa Monica, Calif. : Goodyear Publishing Company

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780876209325

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Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film and the Urban Imagination, 1970--1975
Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film and the Urban Imagination, 1970--1975

Author: Nathan Holmes

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 9781267603883

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This dissertation considers the construction of space and place in a cycle of contemporary-set urban crime films of the early 1970s, exploring how cinema and the city interacted with each other in the context of ongoing urban crisis and decline. Moving between formal analysis and cultural history, this study places location-shot American crime films of this era in the context of a national consciousness that questioned the suitability of the city as both an architectural and social form. Focusing on motifs of investigation and pursuit, I show how the generic production of movement, encounter, and observation on streets, through abandoned buildings and lots, and on roadways is inflected by popular discourses of urban anxiety. In applying emerging visual techniques and cinematographic styles to urban places, however, crime films also connected the city to new energies, producing new ways of understanding the changing urban form. As the declining centrality of American cities led to the promulgation of urbanity as a lifestyle choice, crime films introduced ways of seeing that both sustained fears and limned urban horizons.

Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema
Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema

Author: Addamms Mututa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-09

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 100046220X

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This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.

The City in American Cinema
The City in American Cinema

Author: Johan Andersson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1350115622

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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).

Global Cinematic Cities
Global Cinematic Cities

Author: Johan Andersson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0231850999

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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.