Literature

The connection between the city and cinema has been the subject of many scholarly and popular writings across multiple disciplines and genres. Beyond film studies and urban studies, sociologists, cultural theorists, semioticians, and writers as well as their critics have engaged in the trans-disciplinary study of cinematic depictions of urban spaces.

The 1997 publication The Cinematic City edited by David B. Clark brought together for the first time contributions from a diverse group of scholars ranging from those of visual and environmental studies to cultural and feminist studies, placing their works alongside those of urban planners and geographers at a time where extensive exploration of the connection between city and cinema was thought to be lacking in both the filmic and urban sides. Studies of the cinematic city may address the materiality of the lived city as depicted in films such that they may consider the concrete, steel, and glass that make up the filmed skyscrapers, for example, as strategic visual articulations that distinguish the city from the country (McArthur, 1997). All the while, studies of cinematic cities may recognize the ambiguous position its subject occupies between the real and the representation, a position that provokes engagements with semiotic-psychoanalytic approach to film where the subject that appears in film are thought of in terms of their relation to the Lacanian Other, a structure that the city brings out with special vividness (Lapsley, 1997; see also, Žižek, 1992). Filmic subjects are also treated as social subjects by contributors to the volume, which sets precedent for the studies of cinematic cities to engage with works of theorists such as Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Simmel, to name a few, as frameworks by which one can understand the urban space, spatiality, and geography in film and in real life in specific relation to modern and post-modern societies (Bruno, 1997; Gold and Ward, 1997; Straw, 1997; Doel and Clarke, 1997; Mahoney, 1997).

Following the publication of the above volume cinematic cities became subjects to scholarship that expanded on the framework that encompasses the interelation between the material aspects of the city, its representational meaning in film, and the consideration of film characters and audience as social subjects. A 2001 publication edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice expands the scope covered in The Cinematic City to include works that considers the concept of “Global Cities” and addresses the economic aspects of film to ones that address cinema’s relationship to “Postcolonial Metropolis” (Stringer, 2001; Narkunas, 2001 on Saigon; Baines, 2001 on South African cinema; Marshall, 2001 on Montréal; Rockett, 2001 on the Irish Urban Landscape).

While it is common for scholars of cinematic cities to draw on examples of a single film set in one city, other scholars have approached the subject in terms of how certain cities produce distinct forms of cinema. Barbara Mennel, in her recent 2019 publication, explores Berlin, Los Angeles, and Paris in relation to three different groups of films, highlighting the city’s contribution to films as physical backdrops (ones that highlight public spaces such as streets) but also as sites of distribution and consumption of films. The University of Chicago Press’ World Film Locations series takes a similar approach, focussing on the cities as case studies rather than individual films, bringing critical attention to a number of cities less known for their cinematic depictions including Melbourne, Cleveland, Sydney, and Glasgow.