Course Description
Examination of the interrelations between cities and films, which are both tightly intertwined and quintessential elements of modern life. To do so, we analyze films to understand how the urban experience has been narrated. We also explore how cinematic narratives relate to the historical development of cities.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
For graduate students, The City and Film course will act as a
graduate-level introduction to the theory and methods of
cultural studies as it relates to urban studies and geography.
As such, graduate students will have additional readings
examining the ways films, along with other types of visual and
literary texts, have been used in geographic analysis. This
includes reading foundational work in cultural studies by
scholars such as Raymond Williams, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter
Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgewick, Edward Said, and others. Graduate students
will also have additional writing assignments through the
term, including reaction papers analyzing both films and
readings. For their final assignment, graduate students will
write a full research paper of 7000-8000 words. Such papers
should be the foundation of publishable articles in journals
such as Cultural Geography.
Athena Title
The City and Film
Non-Traditional Format
This course requires a lab section in order to provide the time to show feature length films.
Semester Course Offered
Offered spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Since its inception as an art form and technology, the city has served as a background and subject for films. Likewise, films are one of the primary mediums by which we come to know about and experiences cities. This course examines these interrelations. Yet, rather than treating films as straightforward documents that tell us the truth about cities, this class explores films as narratives that must be analyzed and interpreted. Thus, the goals of this course are two-fold: 1) students will learn how to analyze and interpret films in order to understand the different ways the city has been conceptualized; 2) students will also explore how these notions of the city relate to the real historical phenomena shaping cities and the urban experiences over the past century. This also requires students to understand two overlapping literatures. The primary literature for this course is comprised by work from geography, urban studies, and allied disciplines that chronicles the changing spatial form, politics, social relations, underlying economies, and daily life of cities. This is supplemented by literature from film studies that considers the specific ways that films are produced and consumed. Although this course is not an introduction to the history of film, film production, or film theory, any study of the relations between city and film must take seriously film as a technology, art form, and commodity. This entails understanding not only how films get made (and the urban political economies of film production), but also how films are formally organized to communicate meaning and how film spectators receive and experience these objects.
Topical Outline
Specific films, readings, and topics will vary by instructor, but below is a sample set of topics, films, and readings: Cities, Cinema, and Modernity • What is modernity? • What is the relationship between modernity and the rise of the urban? • What is the relationship between modernity and the moving image? • How did cities come to play such an important role as the subject for early cinema? • How did film narratives and the film industry shape the process of urbanization politically, economically, and culturally? The City and the Country • How did the city develop in relation to its rural hinterlands? • How have films treated the relations between the rural and the urban as not only a narrative framing device, but also as an important metaphor for society as a whole? The Corrupted City • What are the historical relations between cities and crime? How is it that the city, as opposed to other spaces and places, became identified with corruption and criminality? • How have cinematic genres, such as film noir, dealt with questions about urbanization? • What purpose does the city serve as a cultural signifier in films noir? Imagining the Urban Community • How have different types of urban communities and urban social relations been presented in films? How do films represent both dominant and marginalized groups in society? • How do these representations help and hinder our understanding of the social processes transforming urban space? Racism, Violence, and the Fractured City • How have race and racialized violence shaped urbanization both in the United States and abroad? • How have films portrayed and commented on this violence? • How does the filmic presentation of race and violence structure on-going political projects and social movements addressing racialized urbanization? Speculative Cities • How have films imagined the future of the city? • In what ways do contemporary problems shape the vison of the future? How does the geography of cinematic cities respond to contemporary social problems?
Syllabus