Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series 50)

"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"--Publisher's website CINEMA AND THE CITY: FILM AND URBAN SOCIETIES IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT 6 Contents 10 List of Illustrations 13 Illustrations Acknowledgments 15 List of Contributors 16 Series Editors’ Preface 21 Preface 23 1 Cinema and the City in History and Theory 26 2 Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context 44 Part 1: Postmodern Mediations of the City: Los Angeles 56 3 Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow 58 4 Film Mystery as Urban History: The Case of Chinatown 71 5 Return to Oz: The Hollywood Redevelopment Project, or Film History as Urban Renewal 84 Part 2: Urban Identities, Production, and Exhibition 98 6 Shamrock: Houston’s Green Promise 100 7 From Workshop to Backlot: The Greater Philadelphia Film Office 113 8 Cities: Real and Imagined 124 9 Emigrating to New York in 3-D: Stereoscopic Vision in IMAX’s Cinematic City 134 10 Finding a Place at the Downtown Picture Palace: The Tampa Theater, Florida 147 11 Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy 159 Part 3: Cinema and the Postcolonial Metropolis 170 12 Streetwalking in the Cinema of the City: Capital Flows Through Saigon 172 13 Cityscape: The Capital Infrastructuring and Technologization of Manila 183 14 The Politics of Dislocation: Airport Tales, The Castle 196 15 Representing the Apartheid City: South African Cinema in the 1950s and Jamie Uys’s The Urgent Queue 210 16 The Visual Rhetoric of the Ambivalent City in Nigerian Video Films 220 17 Montréal Between Strangeness, Home, and Flow 231 18 (Mis-)Representing the Irish Urban Landscape 242 Part 4: Urban Reactions on Screen 254 Idealism and Defeat 256 19 Postwar Urban Redevelopment, the British Film Industry, and The Way We Live 258 20 Naked: Social Realism and the Urban Wasteland 269 Escape and Invasion 280 21 Jacques Tati’s Play Time as New Babylon 282 22 Poaching on Public Space: Urban Autonomous Zones in French Banlieue Films 295 Index 307 Cinema and the City provides a vehicle for the expression of new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship of film and the city, as these impact upon the lived realities of urban societies. The emphasis is on international diversity and a conceptual organization that attempts to map out different relations of power in the geopolitical system in terms of dominance, subordination, mediation, and resistance, and their articulation in cinema and its political economy.The contributors show how various international cinemas, in their exploration of the fabric of contemporary urban spaces, articulate power in the contemporary world. The case studies presented range from prototypical postmodern cities such as Los Angeles to the colonial and post-colonial. Specific attention is devoted to the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This book is concerned with the relationship between the most important cultural form - cinema - and the most important form of social organization - the city - in the twentieth century (and, for the time being at least, the twenty-first century), as this relationship operates and is experienced in society as a lived social reality.