Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media

272 Pages·2016·8.401 MB·English

by  Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb

GLOBAL
CINEMATIC
CITIES
New Landscapes of Film and Media
EDITED BY JOHAN ANDERSSON & LAWRENCE WEBB
Global Cinematic Cities

Global Cinematic Cities
NEW LANDSCAPES OF FILM AND MEDIA
EDITED BY
Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb
WALLFLOWER PRESS
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A Wallflower Press Book
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Cover image: Her (2013) © Annapurna Pictures
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction: Decentring the Cinematic City – Film and Media in the Digital Age 1
Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb
TRANSNATIONAL SCREEN CITIES
In the City but Not Bounded by It: Cinema in the Global, the Generic
and the Cluster City 19
Thomas Elsaesser
Traversing the Øresund: the Transnational Urban Region in Bron/Broen 36
Pei-Sze Chow
Neoliberalism, Nollywood and Lagos 59
Jonathan Haynes
GLOBAL CITY IMAGINARIES
New Urban and Media Ecologies in Contemporary Buenos Aires 79
Joanna Page
When Harry Met Siri: Digital Romcom and the Global City in Spike Jonze’s Her 95
Lawrence Webb
Cinephilia and the City: the Politics of Place in Contemporary Bengali Cinema 119
Malini Guha
v
PUBLIC SCREENS AND NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPES
Screen Cultures and the ‘Generic City’: Public Screens in Cairo and Shanghai 143
Chris Berry
The City as Found Footage: The Reassemblage of Chinese Urban Space 157
Yomi Braester
Remediating the ‘Other Half’: Planet Slum as Transmedia Project 178
Igor Krstic´
NEW NARRATIVE TOPOGRAPHIES
Interstitial Cityspace and the Immigrant Experience in Contemporary
French Cinema 201
Will Higbee
Seoul, Busan and Somewhere Near: Korean Gangster Noir and Social Immobility 218
Jinhee Choi
Chase Sequences and Transport Infrastructure in Global Hollywood Spy Films 235
Christian B. Long
Index 253
vi
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
JOHAN ANDERSSON is Lecturer in Urban Geography at King’s College London. He is the
co-author, with Nick Gallent and Marco Bianconi, of Planning on the Edge (Routledge,
2006) and has published articles in journals such as Antipode, IJURR, Society and Space and
Urban Studies. He is the co-editor, with Lawrence Webb, of The City in American Cinema:
Postindustrialism, Urban Culture and Gentrification (IB Tauris, forthcoming).
CHRIS BERRY is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. He is the author
and editor of numerous books and articles on Asian cinema, screen cultures, and gen-
der and sexuality. His most recent publications include Chinese Films in Focus (British
Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and
Social Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Public Space, Media Space (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
YOMI BRAESTER is Byron and Alice Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor
of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington. He is
the author of Witness Against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in Twentieth-
Century China (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema
and the Urban Contract (Duke University Press, 2010), and co-editor, with James Tweedie,
of Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (Hong Kong University
Press, 2010).
JINHEE CHOI is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author
of The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press, 2010) and the co-editor, with Nöel Carroll, of The Philosophy of Film and
Motion Pictures (Wiley Blackwell, 2005), Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in
Asian Cinema (Hong Kong University Press, 2010) and Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of
Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship (Routledge, 2013).
vii
PEI-SZE CHOW received her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from University College London.
She is currently preparing a monograph based on her thesis, which examines film pol-
icy and representations of the transnational Øresund region on film and television. Her
research and teaching focus on contemporary Nordic and European transnational cinema
and the cinema of small nations, the aesthetics of space and place, and the relationships
between screen media policy and cultural identity.
THOMAS ELSAESSSER is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture,
University of Amsterdam. He is the author of a wide range of books and articles on film and
media studies, most recently The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012) and German
Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (Routledge, 2013).
MALINI GUHA is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. She is the author
of From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema (Edinburgh University
Press, 2015) and articles in the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Visual Culture
in Britain. 
JONATHAN HAYNES is Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New
York. He is the author of Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres (University
of Chicago Press, 2016), the co-author, with Onookome Okome, of Cinema and Social
Change in West Africa (Nigerian Film Corporation, 1995) and the editor of Nigerian Video
Films (Ohio University Press, 2000) and a special issue of the Journal of African Cinemas
(2012).
WILL HIGBEE is Professor at the University of Exeter. Amongst other publications, he is the
author of Post-Beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in
France Since 2000 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the co-editor, with Saer Maty
Ba, of De-Westernizing Film Studies (Routledge, 2012).
IGOR KRSTIC´ is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Reading. He is the author of
Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
He is currently assembling an edited collection entitled World Cinema and the Essay Film.
CHRISTIAN B. LONG works at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of
The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema, 1960–2000 (Intellect, forthcoming) and
articles on film and literature in the Canadian Review of American Studies, Senses of Cinema,
the European Journal of American Culture and Post 45. He is also co-editor, with Jeff Menne,
of Film and the American Presidency (Routledge, 2015).
JOANNA PAGE is Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of
Cambridge and a specialist in Southern Cone literature and cinema. She is the author
of Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Duke University Press,
viii
2009), Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism
and Formalism (University of Calgary Press, 2014) and Technologies of the Text in a Material
Multiverse: Science Fiction from Argentina (University of Michigan Press, 2016). She is the
Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded international research network ‘Science in
Text and Culture in Latin America’, and a further book is forthcoming on technology and
the post-human in the Latin American graphic novel.
LAWRENCE WEBB is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is author of
The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City (Amsterdam
University Press, 2014). He is the co-editor, with Joshua Gleich, of Hollywood On
Location: An Industry History (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor, with
Johan Andersson, of The City in American Cinema: Postindustrialism, Urban Culture and
Gentrification (IB Tauris, forthcoming).
ix