Evocative and evidentiary : interpreting the city through non-fiction filmmaking (2025)

Documenting Cityscapes. Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

While film studies has traditionally treated the presence of the city in film as an urban text operating inside of a cinematic one, this approach has recently evolved into the study of cinema as a technology of place. From this perspective, Documenting Cityscapes explores the way the city has been depicted by nonfiction filmmakers since the late 1970s, paying particular attention to three aesthetic tendencies: documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits, and metafilmic strategies. Through the formal analysis of fifteen works from six different countries, this volume investigates how the rise of subjectivity has helped to develop a kind of gaze that is closer to citizens than to the institutions and corporations responsible for recent major transformations. Documenting Cityscapes therefore reveals the extent to which cinema has become an agent of urban change, in which certain films not only challenge the most controversial policies of late capitalism but also are able to produce spatiality themselves.

Filmic Narratives of the City

The subject of the city has long been central in studies and writings from different fields; architecture, urban and film studies, literature and photography. This is an exploratory paper, one that cuts across several disciplines with the intent of providing a wider knowledge on the cinematic of the city and its reproduction in filmic narratives. This paper explores not the complex relationship between film and place, but rather the ways in which the city has been represented through the ‘moving image’ both dramatised and envisioned, allowing us, as audience, to step into environments we have been before and/or will never directly experience. City space is both a filmic construction and an architectural construction. Filmic narratives of the city can also become an architectural practice: an art form of the city’s space. They are agents for building our views of the city, influencing the ways we live and perceive the city, and filmic representations will growingly be channelled into the city’s image. More than being a testament of the city’s history, could film be an instrument for testing and applying new perspectives to the city’s physical production? This paper suggests that filmic narratives are a major source for understanding the city and comprehending its processes of production. They can also be potential tools for recreating environments and ‘virtually’ explore the effects of the built environment on society and the urban whole. Both dramatised and envisioned cities are imagery constructs that allow reflecting about the conditions of urban life.

Introduction: Projecting the Urban

The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections, 2010

(Re)Presenting the Street: Video and Visual Culture in Planning

2010

'Cinematic Urbanism: a History of the Modern from Reel to Real' by N AlSayyad

Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 2009

The City on Screen: A Methodological Approach on Cinematic City Studies

The city has a strong memory and it never forget its own experience. The past, the present and the future of the city can be read through its streets, buildings, sounds, myths, rhythms and stories. More importantly, if the city is portrayed through a camera, it becomes as fictional and designable as films. At this stage, there is no difference between watching a film and seeing a city. Also, cinema itself turns into a paradigm that belongs to the city. The parallelism between the city and film is like an inevitable destiny, so much so that they constitute and develop each other. Accordingly, those who attempt to understand the notion of the city should consult with films and vice versa; hence, this paper deals with the question of how the city is cinematized, and this question involves another question: how does the cinematic imagination fictionalize itself in the city?

Searching for the City: Cinema and the Critique of Urban Space in the Films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz and Chanan

The City and the Moving Image

PHD DISSERTATION 2012-The Discourse of the City in American and British Films between the 1930s and 1960s

2012

Traditional forms to research history of architecture have been focused on influential architects, built projects and architectonic movements. On the other hand, scholars who explore films to approach architecture have analyzed set designs, architects who collaborate with the film industry, or specific films, cities or specific architectonic projects that appear in films. This dissertation is focused on discourses of the city and explores (1) dominant discourses that helped to the popularity of certain urban and architectonic solutions, (2) conditions that helped that city's authorities promoted certain urban solutions over others, and (3) how cinema and film genres contributed to these solutions were so popular. This interdisciplinary project understands discourses as systems of thought and practices that construct conceptual categories. Discourses work as cultural frameworks within larger systems of power, whereby truth and knowledge are produced. On the other hand, films strongly influence the construction of spatial meanings, and their analysis opens up new approaches to understanding architectonic spaces not only in terms of physical and perceptual features, but also in terms of social constructions. The objective of this project is to understand how America and Britain have represented and commented upon the city space between the 1930s and 1960s. To achieve this goal, the study analyzes 87 films than belong to diverse genres, in order to illuminate on the one hand, the main urban and architectonic models represented on screen and the discourses associated with these models; and on the other hand, to analyze the relationship between urban discourses and film genres.The theoretical framework is based upon the discourse analysis proposed by Michel Foucault and genre theory. The final products will be: a framework for future inquiries that combines architectonic and film approaches to understanding how both disciplines interact in the distribution of city’s discourses, and the analysis of a body of films according to their spatial models, in order to demonstrate that film genres distribute dominant discourses and function as frames that shape taken-for-granted assumptions of city’s spaces.

Narrating the Cinematic City: Constructing Filmic Arguments

INTER[SECTIONS]. A Conference on Architecture, City and Cinema Conference Proceedings. Porto, September 11-13, 2013, 2013

This paper presents a novel analytical toolkit for researching the multiple reconstructions of the urban terrain on the canvas of the screen. Our conceptual tool aids the mining and retrieval of spatial cues embedded in the cinematic frame by means of a rigorous annotation strategy with descriptive metadata. Metadata fields have been sourced from our gleaning of relevant literature on urban history and theory. This method is modelled on an extensive study of the formal and stylistic characteristics of city symphonies, conducted previously by the first author. The examination of the cinematic reconfiguration of Athens is utilised here as a proof-of-concept case-study that demonstrates the heuristic value of the proposed method and showcases potential applications with on-line digital media content delivery. Our rigorous and systematic analyses and interpretations of two tourist documentaries from the late 1960s, John Christian’s ‘White City’ (Greece, 1968) and Carl Dudley’s ‘Wide Wide World: Blue Holiday’ (USA, 1965), are expected to sustain a more comprehensive understanding of the way the cinematic image of the city was constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed during the period of optimism that was associated with the rapid development of the Greek city alongside the growth of the Greek economy. The shot-by-shot neo-formalist analysis of these two works and the ensuing statistical processing of the accumulated metadata afford us the opportunity to consider how spatial narratives are structured. In this respect, our research puts forward a coherent proposal for dealing with archival material creatively, drawing extensively on literature on urban history and theory.

The Grey Area between reality and representation: The practices of architects and film-makers

There is a well-documented relationship between cinema and the city-but what of their creators, the filmmaker and the architect? It is clear that both propose conditions for inhabitation, compose spatial sequences and communicate multiple narratives, but what other insights can we draw about their operation within the grey area between reality and representation? Act 1 of this paper looks to set the scene; establishing the characteristics, presence and parameters of the grey area, Act 2 investigates this shared territory through the frames of 'the city' and 'the narrative'-chosen for exploration as these are the exchange points, the positions of interaction, and the methods by which each other can be recognized and explained. Here the nature of practicing in the third space is explored through quotes from and interviews with those currently producing work in this territory. Through my practice as an academic, editor and writer, my skills and knowledge lie in communication, thus my methodology derives directly from my experience of the dissemination of conversation, and by association considers the role of the architect and the filmmaker as 'communicators'. CHAPTER 10: Filming the City Urban Documents, Design Practices and Social Criticism Through the Lens (Edited by Edward M. Clift and Mirko Guaralda and Ari Mattes) https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=5178/