The City in Film

Cinema and the city are historically interrelated. The rise of cinema followed on the heels of urbanization and industrialization, and early cinema production and exhibition was largely urban. Moreover, the city has proved to be a rich and diverse cinematic setting and subject. Early cinema recorded scenes of urban life in actuality, melodrama, and City Symphonies. Gangster films, German expressionism, and Film Noir rendered an urban underworld; the musical and romantic comedy produced a more utopian view of the city; and art cinema rendered the everyday reality of urban life. Recent films imagine dystopic post-urban settings and, alternately, megacities populated by superheroes. The relationship between the cinema and the city can be examined in numerous ways. In part, cinema provides an urban archive or memory bank that reflects changes in the urban landscape. At the same time, cinema serves to produce the city, both literally—in the way that film production shapes Los Angeles, Mumbai, Rome, Hong Kong, and other centers of production—and also by producing an imaginary urbanism through the construction of both fantasy urban spaces and ideas and ideals of the city. Theorists suggest that there is an inherent urbanism to cinema. Kracauer 1997 (cited under General Overviews) claims the city, and especially the street, as exemplary and essential cinematic space, attuned to the experience of contingency, flow, and indeterminacy linked to modernity. Hansen 1999 (also cited under General Overviews) suggests that cinema worked as a kind of vernacular modernism to articulate and mediate the experience of modernity—and especially urbanization. More recently, attention to theories of space and urbanism across the academy have generated broad interest in cinematic urbanism. Much of this work brings film scholars into conversation with urban planners, geographers, and architects. Of course neither cinema nor the city is singular. Thus work on the city and film must attend to multiple global cities at different historical periods and, furthermore, consider that cinema produces multiple versions of even a single city, such as New York, as different narratives, genres, studios, directors, and individual films will each produce a different city. Some books and articles tangentially examine films set in cities. This article will include only those texts that have the urban sphere as a primary focus of their investigation.