Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (Reaktion Books - Locations)
Stephen Barber
Language: English
Pages: 210
ISBN: 2:00129064
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this illuminating and provocative survey, Stephen Barber examines the historical relationship between film and the urban landscape. Projected Cities looks with particular focus at the cinema of Europe and Japan, two closely linked cinematic cultures which have been foremost in the use of urban imagery, to reveal elements of culture, architecture and history. By examining this imagery, especially at moments of turmoil and experimentation, the author reveals how cinema has used images of cities to influence our perception of everything from history to the human body, and how cinematic images of cities have been fundamental to the ways in which the city has been imagined, formulated and remembered. The book goes on to assess the impact of media culture on the status of film and cinema spaces, and concludes by considering digital renderings of the modern city. Projected Cities will appeal to all readers engaged with the city, film and contemporary culture.
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infinite worlds away from the revolutionary urban uproar and speed of Vertov’s images from a decade earlier. Europe’s film cities existed largely through the medium of newsreel during the subsequent years of conflict. With the exception of Humphrey Jennings’s wartime experiments in recreating the perception of Britain by means of short films that allied intricate elements of fiction or invention with surreal strategies of documentary, fiction films across Europe largely became confined to cramped
Pont-Neuf allows Alex and Michèle to view the city from a distance, since the bridge has been barricaded in order to be renovated. It forms a unique space in the city: the point of origin for a challenge to Paris, as well as an endangering zone that incessantly provokes the two protagonists to intensify the brief time in which they can inhabit it. Carax had intended to shoot the entirety of his film on the actual 94 Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Leos Carax 95 Pont-Neuf, but following a delay
its inhabitants were propelled headlong through the city’s transformations (often moving simultaneously forwards and backwards), and viewed film 120 images as the instilling of calm and silence within agitated lives, or of furore and anger within routine ones. Film came to possess a salutary, contrary force, repositioning bodies and rearranging urban elements. Through the channelling medium of the film image, the eye could construct an individual sense of distance from the vivid horrors of
humanity, while simultaneously raising the exhilarating creative potential for unrest, turmoil and even revolution. In Europe, the origins of cinema released exactly such a volatile upheaval into the visual perception of cities by their inhabitants. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, cities became transformed and even brought into 17 existence through the impetus and movement of film images, viewed collectively in the form of exhortative newsreels and feature films within
revolution and sex was Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). By the time the film was shot, the determined belief in revolution which had sustained the riotous inhabitants of Shinjuku was rapidly disintegrating; the film’s exhausted figures still adopt the iconography and visual stylization of urban revolutionaries, but they have lost all tangible connection with their city. The 138 sexual focus of Funeral Parade of Roses is on the transvestite culture of Shinjuku, but the film