FS30230 Cinema and the City: New York

Academic Year 2020/2021

This module focuses on the multifaced relationship between cities and cinema, drawing on the rich interdisciplinary scholarship on the topic that has been produced over the last 20 years or so, examining how cinema represents cities and how cities have served as sites of film production and film culture, situating cinema as a spatial form, continually shaped by and responsive to urban change. It uses New York as a case study, given its cinematic prominence, but will also provide skills and theoretical and historical frameworks to bring to other urban contexts. The module is organised historically, from New York’s role in the development of cinema—as a subject and a production centre—to the relationship between cinema and urban modernity, the construction of New York in the Hollywood studio system, the impact of postwar suburbanisation and urban decline, up to more contemporary issues such as globalisation and gentrification. The module will encourage students to think about how film studies and urban studies can speak to each other and how film studies methodologies (e.g. textual analysis, film history) can be adapted to the study of cinema and the city.