This course will explore the complex and longstanding intersections and exchanges between cinema and the city. The rise of cinema interacted closely and from the beginning with the culture of emerging urban modernity and new forms of consciousness, time, and motion. The city has proved to be a stimulating and diverse cinematic setting and subject, and provided constant inspiration for cinematic experimentation. Exchanges between the city and cinema have continued and intensified throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, with the identities of places becoming intertwined with their cinematic depictions. In this course, we will focus on the medium’s technical features, especially montage and spatial manipulation, and examine how themes, narratives, affects, and cultural meanings are embodied in the cinematography, editing, location shooting and set design of cinematic cities. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary approaches to film and urban space, we will analyze various genres and modes of filmmaking including the “city symphonies” of the 1920s, film noir, and dystopian science fiction film. And we will examine the image of the city in films from French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Hong Kong Cinema and Korean Cinema, among others. In turn, students will develop an understanding of the evolving relationship between cinema, architecture, and urban life across multiple global cities and different cultures and historical periods. Moreover, we will examine how cinematic cities express and contest issues of the national and the global, the modern and the postmodern, and the networks of power relations associated with race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and migration. HAAVC 3000 seminars continue developing students' visual analysis and research skills while providing students the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the specific topic/theme. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created. This course cannot fulfill the HAAVC 2000 requirement.

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