The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City (2024)

New Hollywood in the Rust Belt: Urban Decline and Downtown Renaissance in 'The King of Marvin Gardens' and 'Rocky'

Cinema Journal, 2015

This article reviews the geographical dynamics of New Hollywood, arguing that the industrial crisis of 1969–1971 catalyzed further decentralization of location shooting beyond Los Angeles, bringing new types of urban space into view. It examines the parallel crisis and restructuring of the film industry and the inner city via two films, The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972) and Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), which are emblematic of distinct phases in the development of New Hollywood. Through their aesthetic strategies, narrative structure, and mapping of cinematic space, these films produced allegories of urban decline and renewal that closely engaged with the transformation of the American city, from the urban crisis of the late 1960s to neoliberal programs of renewal in the late 1970s.

American Cinema and Urban Change: Industry, Genre, and Politics from Nixon to Trump

The City in American CInema: Film and Postindustrial Culture (ed. Andersson and Webb), 2019

Introduction to The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb (Bloomsbury, 2019) https://www.amazon.co.uk/City-American-Cinema-Post-industrialism-Gentrification/dp/1788313186

Noir Urbanism

Interesting read from the author of Mumbai Fables

Filmjournal

Made in New York: Film Production, the City Government, and Public Protest in the Koch Era

The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture (ed. Andersson and Webb), 2019

This chapter examines the promotional activities of the Mayor's Office of Motion Pictures and Television in New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s, arguing that it developed as a prototypical institution of the neoliberal city. It examines the production history of two films in this period – Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) and Fort Apache, the Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981) – and the high profile protests organized against them by gay activists in Greenwich Village and Latino activists in the South Bronx, respectively. Each campaign sought to disrupt the film’s progress at every phase, from location shooting to exhibition, and both were arguably designed and staged as media events, with the express intention of engaging the studios, the city government, and the public through local and national media coverage. Keywords: New Hollywood; New York City; media activism; neoliberalism; Fort Apache, the Bronx; Cruising; William Friedkin

Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

Antipode, 2017

In this article I discuss 1980s New York cinema through the conceptual lens of landscape, drawing in particular on the interconnected but separate traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque. While the former mode of representing landscape is idealizing (the shepherd/nymph-motif), the latter with its origins in the period of the enclosures of the English countryside tends to aestheticize poverty and dispossession. This distinction can productively be deployed in relation to tensions between glamorization and exploitation in 1980s New York cinema, which often dealt with the themes of rent, eviction, and unemployment in postindustrial settings. Focusing in particular on Downtown 81 (Edo Bertoglio, 1981/2000) and Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985), I argue that the current nostalgia for a pre-gentrified and less regulated New York in popular culture is dependent on these idealizing and aestheticizing tendencies insofar that they conceal or prettify some of the darker aspects of the period.

When Harry Met Siri: Digital Romcom and the Global City in Spike Jonze's 'Her'

Variations of an archetypal scene: the Paris Métro confrontation in Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown

Michael Haneke’s film Code Unknown (2000) depicts an interracial confrontation on the Paris Métro, which the critical literature has tended to discuss as a comment on European multiculturalism. In this paper I argue that this scene must also be understood as a variation of a string of similar interracial subway scenes that emerged in the New Hollywood era of American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s. Reflecting interconnected changes in the American city and film industry, this subterranean scene constitutes a key example of a new form of graphically violent urban cinema. Haneke being an ardent critic of American entertainment violence, the appropriation of this scene in Code Unknown allows us to evaluate his counteraesthetic in ways that bridge thematic and auteurist approaches, and that take into account the crucial role of the spectator.

Kogonada's Urban Neorealism

Film Criticism , 2020

Kogonada's first full-length feature film, Columbus (2017) is about a little-known Midwestern city and bastion of modern architecture. In method and content, Columbus is both ethnographic and playful, documentary and fiction. This article argues that Kogonada embodies a neorealist filmmaking method and in doing so defies traditional boundaries on multiple levels, prioritizing marginality through a preoccupation with visual lingering. Through its neorealist, ethnographic gaze, the film critically attends to entrenched hierarchies and divisions regarding gender, race, built artifacts, and socioeconomics. As a neorealist project, Columbus is an emotive meditation on urban space and rich visual theory of architecture, design, and metropolitics.

City-Symphonies-in-Reverse: Urban Historical Consciousness through the Baroque Moving Image Archive

Dissertation--Spectrum Research Repository, 2017

In this dissertation, I argue that twenty-first-century urban archival montage films eschew the dominant historiographical strategies of documentary film and encourage the development of a historically conscious spectatorship. The thesis examines three North American city-symphonies-in-reverse, Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003), the Lost Landscapes film programs (Rick Prelinger, 2006-2017), and My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007). Each film takes as its explicit subject a North American city significant to its author—Detroit, Winnipeg, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—as seen through specific types of archival material. These particular cities have had geographically unique film cultures, and the archival material related to those film cultures shows the importance of investing in and recognizing local film cultures and histories. These films demonstrate that we have been alienated from our local histories in North America, and they provide key strategies to create historical consciousnesses. Each film in this corpus aims to persuade audiences to deal with local pasts themselves without the aid of an infallible historian to create a narrative that assembles and motivates moving image fragments to cohere with other documents into a coherent, plausible, and complete narrative. City-symphonies-in-reverse use the baroque critical methodologies of essay, anamorphosis, and reflective nostalgia to combat the effects of the abstraction of time and space. Such abstractions began to disrupt social structures and subjectivity in Western cultures some 500 years ago with central perspective and the standardization of time. I argue that these critical methodologies help to us to reconsider relationships to time and space within dominant historiographical discourse in documentary by emphasizing subjective embodied experiences of the archive. The films under analysis in this dissertation articulate valuable ways of addressing current crises in historiography, the urban imaginary, and the moving image archive, precisely through their strategic engagement with archival materials.