For ages scholars, sociologists, cultural theorists and people in the creative fields have been fascinated by the representation of cities in movies. From Metropolis to Blade Runner to City Lights, the city film as a genre has continued to intrigue and enthrall film critics and audiences worldwide. Cities symbolize memories crafted in stone and concrete and cinema, like a liquid, dynamic, dream captures fleeting moments from life. Cities are social organizations—units of power and domination, struggle and survival and each of them have innumerable stories woven into their very brick and mortar. Some are documented while most remain buried in the silent looming tombstones we call modern architecture. From as early as the 1940’s to contemporary times, directors all across the globe have attempted to capture the magic of cities in celluloid. Critic Barbara Caroline Mennel comments on the importance of cinema as an artistic genre that not only represents but comments on and intervenes in the social reality of cities as particular forms of social organization (152).Therefore as documenters of city movies also capture and critique the effects of globalization and global capitalism on cities and the transformation that it brings about.

 

According to scholar and theorist Mark Shiel cinema has contributed significantly to the cultural economics of particular cities across the globe (2). Cinema has played an important part in “constituting the civic identity and built environment” of these cities (Shiel 2). In this sense city movies are inherently unstable discursive sites, where historical and cultural identities of particular societies are constantly challenged and negotiated. Thus when cinema represents a city it really represents a discursive and ideological space, continuously in transformation. Shiel takes particular interest in exploring the spatiality of cinema which gives it the potential to depict the geographical and cultural dynamism and politics of “lived urban spaces” (6). Hence theoretically city movies become an articulation of history which contains the inherent paradox of the actual representation of ideological “spaces” in terms of power, progress or degradation and cultural decadence as the case may be, and by (un)representing the shared history of colonization, oppression and exploitation on which these cities are built.

 

Movies like Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) have immortalized the spirit of the cities they depict and they remain permanently etched in public memory. One is also reminded of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), a classic of the film noir tradition, set in Los Angeles and Yasujiro Ozu’s The Tokyo Story (1953) with its fabulous industrial landscape shots. These films created everlasting memories of the cities they were set in—the looming shadowy skyscrapers of New York in Manhattan, the helicopters flying out with the statue of Christ while the heroes helicopter flying into the city of Rome, in La Dolce Vita. The scenes have been engraved in the public mind much like the stone and concrete architecture of the cities themselves.

 

Listed in this issue are some essays on city movies from all across the globe. From New York to Morocco to Bombay to Calcutta, theses essays explore movies which have immortalized these cities in cinema. The first essay by Jackson Petsche examines Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Srijan Banerjee our next author from India, explores Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, Akshay Govind Dixit our third author also from India writes on Ronald Joffe’s City of Joy based on the vibrant spirit of the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata).

 

 

 

Mennel, Barbara Caroline. Cities and Cinema London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Shiel, Mark. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory”  Wiley Online Library 2008. Web.