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Urban Cinematics

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.


324 pages | 11 halftones | 7 x 9 | © 2011

Film Studies


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Table of Contents

Introduction: What is Urban Cinematics?
      François Peng and Andong Lu
Part I: City Symphonies: Montaged Urban Cinematic Landscapes
1. Ciné-City Strolls: Imagery, Form, Language and Meaning of the City Film
      Helmut Weihsmann
2. I Am Here, or, The Art of Getting Lost: Patrick Keiller and the New City Symphony
      Patrik Sjöberg
3. Get Out of the Car: A Commentary
      Thom Andersen
Part II: Cinematic Urban Archaeology
4. Aids to Objectivity? Photography, Film and the New ‘Science’ of Urbanism
      Nicholas Bullock
5. Which Role for the Cinema in a Working-class City: The Case of Saint-Etienne
      Roger Odin
6. A Film of Two Cities: Sean Connery’s Edinburgh
      Murray Grigor
7. Film as Re-imaging the Modern Space
      Mark Lewis
Part III: Geographies of the Urban Cinematic Landscape
8. Mobility and Global Complexity in the Work of Van der Keuken
      Hing Tsang
9. From Maps of ‘Progress’ to Crime Maps (and back again?): The Plasticity of the Aerial Shot in Mexican Urban Film
      Celia Dunne
10. Night on Earth, Urban Wayfinding and Everyday Life
      Andrew Otway
Part IV: The Cinematic in the Urban
11. Sleepwalking from New York to Miami
      Alison Butler
12. Film in our Midst: City as Cinematic Archive
      Janet Harbord and Rachel Moore
13. Parkour Vision
      Layla Curtis
Part V: Cinematic Urban Design Pratice
14. Urban Anagram: A Bio-political Reflection on Cinema and City Life
      Maria Hellström Reimer
15. Reconsidering Cinematic Mapping: Halfway Between Collected Subjectivity and Projective Mapping
      Marc Boumeester
16. Mapping Urban Space: Moving Image as a Research Tool
      Wowo Ding
17. The Moving Image of the City: Expressive Space/Inhabitation/Narrativity: Intensive studio workshop on ‘Continuity of Action in space’
      Maureen Thomas

Contributors
Index

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