The Cinematic City
Academic Responsibility: Mr Ken Fox
Module Aims
The module builds on the content of the Year Two American Cinema course and focuses on the study of the representations of space and place in cinematic constructions of the city. The organising principles of space, place and the cinematic city are defined and illustrations of how these elements conjoin are used in the screenings. The course concentrates on contemporary cinema, in the main, the cinema of the U.S.
Developing the student's understanding of the meanings of space and place also involves some cross-disciplinary investigations of geography and urban studies. Case studies of the cinematic city may include, for example, Los Angeles and New York as the sites for investigations of how the cinema constructs images of the city. In developing their written work the students may wish to choose another city within the U.S. as a case study for investigation.
Module Content
The films of Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye,1973, The Player, 1993, Short Cuts, 1993), Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1972, Taxi Driver, 1975, New York, New York, 1978, After Hours,1985, Goodfellas, 1990), Spike Lee (She's Gotta Have It, 1986, Do the Right Thing 1988, Jungle Fever, 1992) and Woody Allen (Annie Hall, 1976, Manhattan, 1978), and, for example, individual texts such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown(1974), Blade Runner (Scott, 1981), Falling Down (Schumacher, 1993) will be screened and analysed critically to investigate how they might contribute to the geography of the cinematic city. The contribution of Latino/a, Black, and Women filmmakers to the construction of different categories of space and place in the cinematic city are also addressed.
Assessment
Students have a choice of either two assignments of 2500 words each or one assignment of 5000 words. There is no examination.