ENGL3047: Cinema and the City

This course will look at cinematic representation of urban life across several different periods, beginning with silent film. How does the camera imagine city spaces and the people who live in them? What are the epistemological, affective, aesthetic and political constructions that define the filmed city (or fail to)? A central focus will be on race, gender, sexuality, and class in connection to how different filmmakers think about urban spaces. Other topics to be considered include, among others: urban rhythms, both organic and mechanical, and montage; the camera?s epistemological ambivalence, both extending and limiting vision, offering ostensible ?reality? in highly mediated context; the filmed city as an epistemological puzzle, offering both new kinds of surveillance, and new ways to ?hide? from power; the filmed city as historiographic symbol. The course will introduce films from a variety of national cinemas and historical periods, ranging from the 1920s to the present, and including both mainstream Hollywood cinema and the avant-garde. Readings represent a wide range of points of view and theoretical agendas. We will view films ranging from Russian Formalism in the early 20th century to Expressionism, Neorealism, Film Noir, avant-garde and postmodern cinema. We will explore different ways of ?reading? cinema, the historical contexts surrounding particular films, and some of the theoretical debates that characterize the field of cinema studies.

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