Screening the City - Softcover

Mark Shiel is Faculty of Arts Fellow, and Tony Fitzmaurice is College Lecturer, in the Centre for Film Studies/UCD School of Film, University College Dublin

This anthology of academic essays from England and the U.S. addresses the changing conception of the "city" in the history of cinema, and vice versa, through the filter of ongoing debates about the definitions of postmodernism. In the opening essay, German and Russian studies professor Carsten Strathausen layers interpretations of Adorno, de Certeau and other critics of the Enlightenment onto the work of 1920s filmmakers DzigaVertov and Walter Ruttman, to arrive at the fairly bland conclusion that "the city, much like the cinema, presents an inherently ambivalent picture of modern life which cannot be rendered fully present in its entirety." Matthew Gandy situates Todd Haynes's Safe in its peculiarly suburban, Los Angeleno topos, the "tessellated landscapes of...its vast semi-arid hinterland," and explains the film's critique of New Age self help discourses through a detailed recapitulation of the plot. Other writers address the brothers Quay, "New Jack Cinema," and Annie Hall, using such theoretical heavyweights as Gilles Deleuze, Edward Soja, and Mike Davis for backup. Overall, the book's stylish, if greatly over-theorized premise, that popular cinema shapes and reflects the larger psychopathologies of Western culture, and the other way around, finds happy verification among its contributors. Using the inherent sex appeal of film studies to spice up such otherwise musty fields as geography, sociology and social theory, this collection's uneven and un-urgent arguments preach eloquently to the converted.
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