Urban Cinematics
Urban Cinematics (Book)
Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image
Urban Cinematics surveys the mechanisms by which cinema contributes to our understanding of cities to address two key issues: How do filmmakers make use of urban spaces, and how do urban spaces make use of cinema? Merging the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urban planning with film studies, this book explores the potential of cinema as a tool to investigate the communal narratives of cities. A series of dialogues with filmmakers rounds out this insightful and methodologically innovative volume.
Edition
Urban Cinematics surveys the mechanisms by which cinema contributes to our understanding of cities to address two key issues: How do filmmakers make use of urban spaces, and how do urban spaces make use of cinema? Merging the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urban planning with film studies, this book explores the potential of cinema as a tool to investigate the communal narratives of cities. A series of dialogues with filmmakers rounds out this insightful and methodologically innovative volume.
François Penz is an architect and a teacher in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Andong Lu is a research associate at the University of Cambridge.
Introduction
Andong Lu
Section 1: City symphonies: Montaged urban cinematic landscapes
Ciné-City strolls: Imagery, form, language and meaning of the city film
Helmut Weihsmann
I am here, or, the art of getting lost: Patrick Keiller and the new city symphony
Patrik Sjöberg
Get out of the car: A commentary
Thom Andersen
Section 2: Cinematic urban archaeology
Aids to objectivity? Photography, film and the new ‘science’ of urbanism
Nicholas Bullock
Which role for the cinema in a working-class city: The case of Saint-Etienne
Roger Odin
A film of two cities: Sean Connery’s Edinburgh
Murray Grigor
Film as re-imaging the modern space
Mark Lewis
Section 3: Geographies of the urban cinematic landscape
Mobility and global complexity in the work of Van der Keuken
Hing Tsang
From maps of ‘progress’ to crime maps (and back again?): The plasticity of the aerial shot in Mexican urban film
Celia Dunne
Night on Earth, urban wayfinding and everyday life
Andrew Otway
Section 4: The cinematic in the urban
Sleepwalking from New York to Miami
Alison Butler
Film in our midst: City as cinematic archive
Rachel Moore
Parkour vision
Layla Curtis
Section 5: Cinematic urban design practice
Urban anagram: A bio-political reflection on cinema and city life
Maria Hellström Reimer
Reconsidering cinematic mapping: Halfway between collected subjectivity and projective mapping
Marc Boumeester
Mapping urban space: Moving image as a research tool
Wowo Ding
The moving image of the city: Expressive space/inhabitation/narrativity
Maureen Thomas
Contributors
Index
