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The attractions of the cinematic city

C H A R LO T T E B R U N S D O N

This essay places the bright lights of the cinematic city at the centre of a
series of explorations. Starting with the lure of the city for characters
within fiction film, I then proceed to map the growing fascination of the
cinematic city for scholars from many disciplines. My governing question
is this: what does the study of the cinematic city offer to scholars in the
period of cinema’s declining significance as a mass urban entertainment?
I explore the contours of the cinema/city canon and what I characterize as
a crossdisciplinary ‘city discourse’. The essay then becomes rather more
speculative and polemical as I make a series of suggestions about the ways
in which ‘city discourse’, and the continuing scholarly romance with the
figure of the flâneur, function in the contemporary ‘neoliberalizing’
university, as well as considering the changing status and location of the
study of film in the twenty-first century academy. These are matters of
particular pertinence for Screen, so strongly associated with film theory, in
a period in which not only is the matter of medium specificity in crisis but,
in my view, so much film theorizing has proved itself deadening rather
than enlivening for its object of study. As the notable shift to the historical
and the empirical in film study is accompanied by the increased study of
film in other disciplines, the cinematic city has provided a heterogeneous
meeting – and missing – place. My starting point has been with the simple
observation that a lot of work on cinematic cities was being published. In
trying to understand why this might be, and what this topic area offered
scholars in a range of fields, I became convinced that the attractions of the
cinematic city were symptomatic of broader transformations in the study
of the moving image and also of the role of cinema in ideas of
interdisciplinarity.

209 Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjs021
 To ground my discussion in a particular instance of a cinematic city, I
refer to the 1968 musical film Oliver!, an Oscar-winning movie based on
Lionel Bart’s successful 1960 musical, itself one of many retellings of
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Oliver! provides a vision of an exuberant
and energetic London which has, apart from the work of Lawrence
Lawrence Napper, ‘“There’s no Napper, remained outside the cinema/city canon.1 This is notable as its

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1
place like London”: London
director, Carol Reed, was also responsible for such distinguished noirish
musicals and the traffic in souls’,
Journal of British Cinema and cities as the Belfast of Odd Man Out (1947), the London of The Fallen
Television, vol. 6, no. 2 (2009), Idol (1948), the Vienna of The Third Man (1949) and the Berlin of The
pp. 220–31.
Man Between (1953). Questions of genre seem likely to be significant in
this exclusion, and I shall return to this later, but I should make it clear that
this essay does not seek to provide a developed critical reading of the film,
instead using it to embody some key themes in a discussion of the
attractions, and personae, of the cinematic city.
There have been many versions of the story of the orphan Oliver
making his journey from the workhouse, where he asks for ‘more’, to
London, where he encounters both villainy and charity. Christine
Geraghty, in her discussion of screen adaptations of Oliver Twist, suggests
that two aspects of the story consistently recur: first the child’s isolation
and vulnerability, and second the city, which is constituted through a
combination of landmarks (such as St Paul’s and Covent Garden) and the
2 Christine Geraghty, Now a Major vigour and danger of its streets.2 It is on Oliver’s arrival in London that I
Motion Picture… (Lanham, MD: will concentrate, the moment that brings together these two elements of
Rowman and Littlefield, 2008),
p. 28.
his story to produce the image of the friendless orphan, alone in the
greatest metropolis of its day.
The journey to the city is a familiar trope of cinema, just as it is in the
literature of many cultures. It is in the encounter between the unformed
sensibility of the traveller and the wicked ways of the city that many a
Bildungsroman is structured, and readers observe the maturing of the
protagonist through his or her accommodation to this new world. It is not,
though, only the hero (or occasionally the heroine) who is formed in this
encounter but also our ideas of the city. For the fresh eyes of the ingenue
challenge what is taken for granted in city life, defamiliarizing its
landmarks, manners and conditions. So this is a both a general story about
the city, but also, always, in each instance a narrative about a particular
3 My account is of London. See, for city.3 This opposition and relation between the and a city is one of my
example, Anton Kaes, ‘Leaving
concerns in what follows.
home: film, migration and urban
experience’, New German Critique,
There are many versions of the ‘arrival’ trope, incorporating travel both
no. 74 (1998), pp. 179–92, in voluntary and forced, but one which recurs across different national
relation to Berlin: Symphony of a
cinemas is that of the arrival of the rural innocent. Analysis of how this
Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927).
trope stages the cinematic city in any particular film must attend to a range
of factors such as the genre of the film, the character of the traveller,
the nature of the journey or point of origin, and, finally, the elements of the
city to which our attention is first drawn cinematographically in that
moment of arrival. The destination ‘city’ is partly produced through the
comparison with the ‘not-city’, which can be shown as an origin or, more
economically, embodied in the sensibility of the traveller. The country-

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
210
 dweller is characteristically shown as slow, naive and gullible, character
traits that are demonstrated to be unsuitable for city life. Oliver Twist’s
arrival in London forms an appropriately spectacular scene in all the film
and television versions of the story, and his naivete and wonder are
characteristic of a visitor from the provinces. As he is a child, however,
these qualities signify innocence rather than rural idiocy, and he is

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immediately recognized by Fagin as being anything but slow.
In Oliver!, the revelation of the city is preceded by Oliver’s long
solitary journey through the countryside. His vulnerability on this journey
is emphasized by his small stature, contrasting with the long road and the
wide framing of the rolling landscape (figure 1), and his pathos by his
drenching from the rain and his solitary night in the hayrick. The last leg
of the journey is accomplished in a cart bringing produce to market, on
which Oliver conceals himself in a basket of cabbages (figure 2).
The arrival in a basket, the small boy nestled among agricultural
produce, rhymes with the nighttime nestling in hay to accentuate Oliver’s
innocence and non-urban origins. Both devices bring his ruralness to the
city, but also cleverly address one of the problems of the cinematic arrival
trope, which is that it is very difficult to ‘arrive’ right in the middle of a
city, which is where the landmarks that permit the identification of the city
are found. Hiding the child in produce destined for Covent Garden
market allows him to leap forth directly into a busy market, which, as will
be seen later, does its own work in the representation of the city.
As Oliver emerges, newly born from beneath a cabbage leaf into the
bustle of the metropolis, the character of his destination is partly
established through closeups and medium closeups on his awestruck face.

Fig. 1. Oliver (Mark Lester) on the

road to London. This and
subsequent images from Oliver!
(Carol Reed, Romulus Films/
Columbia Pictures, 1968).

Fig. 2. Oliver, born under a cabbage

leaf, on arrival in London.

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
211
 This speechless wonder is as significant as the shot of his surroundings in
establishing the scale of the city and its absolute contrast with the other
environments Oliver has known (figures 3 and 4).
Oliver’s journey is narratively motivated by the need to escape. In
London he discovers where he does and does not belong, revealing
visions of the city that are both utopian (Mr Brownlow’s well-ordered

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middle-class home) and dystopian (the criminal juvenile gang). London’s
initial attraction is that it is not where he has come from; only on arrival
does he begin to sense its scale and diversity. In city-set films which lack
this clear journey from the rural periphery and its moment of arrival, there
is often an internal, parallel trip ‘up to town’. Characters travel to the
bright lights of Piccadilly, Times Square or Montmartre to participate in
city life, perhaps by going to a show or the cinema, perhaps just to
window shop or wander among the crowds. These journeys to the
attractions of the city have both metaphoric and metonymic relations to
4 See Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Going up watching films and going to the cinema.4 The journey within diegetic
West’, in London in Cinema
space to participate in the spectacle of the city enacts the very activity of
(London: British Film Institute,
2007), pp. 89–97.
the cinema spectator in extradiegetic space. There are qualities to these
journeys which provoke self-reflexivity about cinematic pleasures, and I
want to give this a further twist by investigating the attractions of the
cinematic city not for the suburban or provincial character who travels
within the world of a film, but for the scholar. For it is not just Oliver who
is entranced by the promises of the cinematic city but many writers in a
range of disciplines. A time-line of the books published on the cinema/
city in the last twenty years or so (see Timeline, p. 214), demonstrates that
this attraction is compelling, and apparently growing.

Figs 3 & 4. Oliver’s open-mouthed

amazement at the spectacle of
London.

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
212
 The characteristic form of publication in this area is the edited collection,
of which David Clarke’s 1997 The Cinematic City is the first. The
Cinematic City can be seen, retrospectively, to be typical in other ways: it
draws its contributors from a range of disciplines (geography, planning,
film studies, literature, cultural studies); it mixes essays on particular cities
or films with essays on genre and the city in general; there is a historical

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range across the twentieth century; it deals mainly with European and US
cities. Later collections, such as those by Griffith and Zeniti or Webber and
Wilson, extend the geographical range somewhat, but the template recurs.
The form of the edited collection is particularly appropriate for a topic
which sprawls over disciplines, periods, specialisms and nations. Quite
apart from its frequent origin in a multidisciplinary conference (Clarke,
Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Marcus and Neumann, Koeck and Roberts, for
example), the edited collection appears to solve, at a formal level, some of
the difficulties of writing about the cinematic city. The scale of the
intellectual undertaking, its necessary multidisciplinarity and its resistance
to singular narrative and exposition make the montage of the edited
collection particularly attractive. Outstanding scholarship on specific
aspects of the cinema/city relation can be commissioned and combined
while intractable epistemological issues can be confined to the blank pages
between chapters. As the field has developed, the commissioning of edited
volumes on a single city becomes more possible, and there is a growing
number of such collections, including Cunningham and Barber (London),
5 Gail Cunningham and Stephen Pomerance (New York) and Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli (Istanbul).5 These
Barber (eds), London Eyes:
can offer excellent individual essays while also, as a whole, involuntarily
Reflections in Text and Image
(Oxford: Berghahn, 2007); Murray
testifying to the sometimes insuperable difficulties of interdisciplinary
Pomerance (ed.) City that Never projects, a topic to which I shall return at the end of this essay.
Sleeps: New York and the Filmic
Clarke’s The Cinematic City is not, however, merely chronologically and
Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2007);
formally inaugural. Its introductory essay maps out the cinema/city field
Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal and through arguments and references which recur – or are assumed – in much
Ipek Türeli (eds), Orienting Istanbul:
subsequent work. Written in the mid 1990s by a scholar from a geography
Cultural Capital of Europe (London:
Routledge, 2010).
department, the introduction engages with the then waning ‘Screen film
theory’ paradigm and more modish notions of postmodernity to argue for a
recognition of cinema’s complex relation with the real, and the constitutive
imbrication of cinema and city. Clarke is able to point to the relative lack of
attention paid to ‘understanding the relationship between urban and
cinematic space’ by identifying the exceptions of Bruno, Friedberg, and
Aitken and Zonn, all published between 1993 and 1994. Commencing with
Baudrillard, and the subsequently much cited injunction to those who wish
to understand Los Angeles to ‘begin with the screen and move outwards
6 Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City, towards the city’,6 Clarke moves initially through Benjamin, Baumann,
p. 1.
Derrida, Baudelaire and Simmel in his quest to understand the relationship
between urban and cinematic space. For our purposes, apart from his
mapping of the field, uniting authors who recur in nearly all subsequent
accounts, Clarke makes three connections. First, he points to the significance
of the ‘stranger’ and the flâneur in theorizations of modernity, citing
Baudelaire’s characterization of modern life as ‘the transitory, the fleeting

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7 Ibid., p. 4. and the contingent’.7 Second, he proposes that the ‘representation’ paradigm
which has dominated film studies is inadequate to the cinema/city relation,
exploring instead theorizations of the ‘hapticality’ of cinematic space. And
third, he moves to suggest that there is an experiential reciprocity for the
cinemagoer between cinema and city: ‘The camera’s penetration of reality
entails a transformation in the perception of the cinemagoer, and does so in a

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manner consonant with the experiences offered by the flickering, virtual
8 Ibid., p. 10. presence of the city’.8 Clarke’s essay, then, draws together scholarship on
modernity, postmodernity, space, cinema and the city in what becomes a key
template for the topic.
In 1999 Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice organized a conference at
University College Dublin, from which two volumes were published in
2001 and 2003. The first of these, Cinema and the City, has a substantial
introduction by Shiel which surveys the cinema/city field with different,
rather less textual, emphases. Arguing that cinema is primarily a spatial
system (comprising both ‘space in films’ and ‘films in space’), Shiel argues
that it is the ideal cultural form to examine the flows of global culture in the
context of the much heralded ‘spatial turn’. Here, the ‘cinema/city nexus’ is
seen to do some familiar work, with cinema seen as ‘culture’ and the city as
9 Shiel and Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema ‘society’,9 and the two operative disciplines are film studies and sociology.
and the City, p. 2.
However, the call here is for a reconfiguring of film studies as the study of ‘a
spatially configured industry’ rather than a collection of filmic texts, and a
recognition of the city as ‘the fundamental unit of the new global system
10 Ibid., p. 7. that has emerged since the 1960s’.10 The cinema/city nexus then becomes
nothing less than the privileged site for the development of multi-
dimensional critical scholarship if, as Shiel argues, ‘Films are
globalization, not its after-effects’. It is in the context of this argument that
11 Ibid., pp. 11, 7.
12 Focusing on only published books
Shiel comments on the ‘the now almost quaint notion of national cinema’.11
necessarily distorts these The collections by Clarke and Shiel and Fitzmaurice are instances of
genealogies. For example, James two slightly different genealogies for work on the cinematic city. Clarke’s
Donald, a key exponent of
‘metropolis as text’, published a
engagement with film theory and the experiential equivalence of cinema
chapter of that name in 1992 as part and city in European modernity has a more textual emphasis.12 Shiel and
of a widely disseminated Open Fitzmaurice’s genealogy, which emphasizes notions of globalization and
University course, although his own
monograph was not published until
postmodernity (citing, in particular, Sassen, Castells, Soja and Jameson),
1999. James Donald, ‘The and the rise of the world or global city, can be characterized as a more
metropolis as text’, in R. Bocock and sociological ‘globalized’ paradigm, within which Los Angeles,
K. Thompson (eds), Social and
Cultural Forms of Modernity
nevertheless, remains preeminent. Within the collections, though, there is
(Cambridge: Polity Press in clear evidence of the persistence of another paradigm, one which, for quite
association with The Open different reasons, both Clarke and Shiel/Fitzmaurice claim that cinema/
University, 1992), pp. 417–70.
Similarly the work of Tom Gunning,
city scholarship must surpass, and that is the paradigm of representation.
to which I allude in my title, has Later in this essay I argue that it is the persistence of representation which
been formative. allows us to understand something of how the cinema/city nexus works in
13 Susan Sontag, ‘The decay of
cinema’, The New York Times, 25
relation to film studies as a discipline.
February 1996, <http:// The date of these publications is worth noting. 1995 was celebrated
partners.nytimes.com/books/00/ internationally as marking ‘a century of cinema’, and in 1996 Susan
03/12/specials/sontag-
cinema.html> accessed 12 June
Sontag’s much-cited lament for the cinema of her youth appeared in the
2012. New York Review of Books.13 By this time, too, most countries had been

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
216
 opened up to satellite broadcasting, inaugurating what television scholars
have called TVIII or ‘the age of abundance’, marking the beginning of the
end of nationally controlled broadcasting economies. The home computer
started penetrating homes in the West in the 1980s, and in the 1990s it was
joined by the mobile phone. DVDs became commercially available in
1997 and were one of the fastest adopted home technologies. The lament

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for cinema expressed by writers such as Sontag through cinephilia
revisited was joined by declarations of the end of television. All of this
points to the transformation of the fields of audiovisual media in which
cinema was king for much of the twentieth century. As the Timeline
shows, the growth in the scholarship on cinema/city picks up from the mid
1990s to become diversified and vigorous in the early twenty-first century.
Ideally this table would integrate the DVD publication of individual
canonical titles (by, for example, Criterion or the BFI) that makes films
such as Man with a Movie Camera widely available. While co-occurrence
should not be read as causality, it is certainly the case that cinema/city
scholarship develops at the end of ‘cinema’s century’, well after the period
in which theatrical cinema is the mass urban entertainment form, and
also after the unquestioned dominance of broadcast national television.
New – or different – times for film and television, but also different times
for the disciplines of film and television studies.
At the beginning of this essay I posed some questions about the growth
in scholarship on the cinematic city. Having established something of the
contours of this scholarship, I now want to return to discuss its attractions
and effects, of which I suggest there are three: interdisciplinarity,
paradigm shift, and position within the intellectual field. As will become
clear, these three are lures both inside and outside the disciplines of the
audiovisual. However, in what follows, I will be writing from the
identifiable position of a scholar of film and television rather than striving
for a supradisciplinary overview. Apart from my scepticism about the
possibilities of the latter position (although the second edition of the
14 Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson Bridge and Watson reader makes an impressive attempt14), I want here to
(eds), The New Blackwell
draw attention to what I see as very particular implications for the
Companion to the City (Oxford:
Wiley–Blackwell, 2011), for sale at
disciplines of the moving image in some of these developments.
over £100. As the importance of the edited book form to this field suggests, it is one
which has a founding recognition of the necessity of multi- and
interdisciplinary scholarship, drawing on the protocols and knowledge of
different disciplines in order to better apprehend the cinematic city. The
particularities of national contexts, city histories, built environments and
film cycles all combine to add to the demand of scholarship which
traverses disciplinary boundaries. This has evidently proved enormously
attractive to scholars, and I was in part attracted to the field myself because
it offered possibilities for positioning film and television within a broader
cultural history, one attentive to both other artforms and non-mediacentric
social change. Like Oliver, I wanted to escape – in my case from what
seemed to be endless speculation about ‘multiplatform delivery’ and the
death of film and television. And I am not alone. To be slightly facetious

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
217
 about it, in pursuit of the audiovisual city, architects can discuss cinema,
cinema scholars can discuss geography, literary scholars can discuss
montage, and television scholars can discuss cocktail bars in New York
City and drug dealing in Baltimore.
There is often something of the manifesto about the introductions to
these edited collections. Their authors display the excitement and

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optimism that drives new projects, and there is a sense of
interdisciplinary work to be done and new intellectual terrain to be
mapped, as in Webber and Wilson’s assertion of ‘the particular
15 Webber and Wilson (eds), Cities in importance of the city/screen relation as a defining cultural nexus’.15
Transition, p. 1.
Individual essays are often less ambitious, usually – and prudently –
limited to a city, a period, a genre, a cycle, a director or even a single
film. Indeed, it could be suggested that one of the faultlines of the field
can be discerned across these edited books. For if it is the city in general
– cinema and the city – through which the field is nominated (and which
the book’s introduction addresses), for most individual chapters it is a
particular city, or a particular conception of a city–film relation which
forms the object of study. If the ‘spatial turn’ is one of the generative
contexts for the study of the cinema/city nexus, these collections
themselves display spatially the complexity of the relation between the
and a cinematic city. This in turn makes the edited collection on the
cinematic city a rather interesting commodity object, for it promises
‘capital T’ Theory (the academic publishing success of the late twentieth
century), interdisciplinarity and transnational local detail.
As anyone who has undertaken interdisciplinary work will testify, the
question of how knowledge produced within one disciplinary paradigm
can be related to knowledge produced within another is not simple. The
scholar skilled in the textual analysis of film may have a poor
understanding of debates about evidence within historiography, while the
historian, in turn, may not fully grasp the complexities of cinematic genre.
However, the city lures us into disciplinary alleys sometimes best entered
only in the company of residents, and this can have both wonderful and
sometimes very banal consequences. Successful interdisciplinary work
16 Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the
Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar
(and my examples are all drawn from London studies) such as Richard
London (Minneapolis, MN: Hornsey’s reading of the Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) in
University of Minnesota Press, the context of postwar London,16 Lynda Nead’s attention to painting,
2010), pp. 81–116.
17 Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery:
photography and film in London in 1900,17 or David Mellor’s and
Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900 Roland-François Lack’s (separate) engagements with Blow-up
(New Haven, CT: Yale University (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)18 can be exhilarating, and this is because
Press, 2007).
18 David Alan Mellor, ‘“Fragments of
film is integrated into a larger historical inquiry, within which it too is
an unknowable whole”: subject to analysis, rather than functioning illustratively in relation to a
Michelangelo Antonioni’s thesis, or theory, elaborated elsewhere.
incorporation of contemporary
visualities in London, 1966’, Visual
New canons are emerging, clustered round particular cinematic
Culture in Britain, vol. 8, no. 2 cities. For example, the Parisian canon augments the extensive scholarship
(2007), pp. 45–62; Roland-Francois on French poetic realism and the new wave with the films of Jacques Tati,
Lack, ‘London circa sixty-six: the
map of the film’, in Cunningham
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001),
and Barber (eds), London Eyes. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005) and Agnès Varda’s Cleo de 5 à 7 (1962),

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
218
 which between them offer the grands ensembles, the postcolonial and the
19 See, for example, Myrto flâneuse.19 The Berlin canon, in which there has long been a very
Konstantarakos, ‘Which mapping of
rewarding engagement with the interfaces of film, photography and
the city? La Haine and the cinema
de banlieue’, in Phil Powrie (ed.),
architecture of the Weimar period, includes Wim Wenders’s Wings of
French Cinema in the 1990s Desire (1987), the films of Fatih Akın and Tom Twyker’s Run Lola Run
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
(1998) (postmodernity, the heritage of the Gasterarbeiter policy, digital

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1999), pp. 160–71; Carrie Tarr,
Reframing Difference: Beur and
cities). There is a literature of imaginary, sci-fi and digital cities, which
Banlieue Filmmaking in France can refigure the city symphony canon, as an inheritance from Metropolis
(Manchester: Manchester
to The Matrix.20 Noticeably, too, this is a field in which the African
University Press, 2005); Ginette
Vincendeau, La Haine (London: IB
American experience has more than a token presence, in part responding
Tauris, 2005); Tom Conley, to the work of filmmakers from Oscar Micheaux to Charles Burnett and
Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis,
Spike Lee. The significance of My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears,
MN: Minneapolis University Press,
2007); Matthew Taunton, Fictions
1985) and the black film workshops of the 1980s to scholarship on
of the City (Basingstoke: Palgrave London and ideas of the multicultural city is well attested, and not
Macmillan, 2009); François Penz,
immediately visible from the timeline. National cinemas more generally
‘The real city in the real city:
towards a methodology through the
are reconceptualized through migrancy, topography and tourism,
case of Amélie’, in Koeck and emphasizing not the nationalness of cinemas but their porousness and the
Roberts (eds), Urban Projections;
constant labour of the production of nations.21
Janice Mouton, ‘From feminine
masquerade to flâneuse: Agnès
The most noticeable move, though, has been a paradigm shift – or the
Varda’s Cléo in the city’, Cinema appearance of one – from representation to performance. The cinema/city
Journal, vol. 40, no. 2 (2001),
paradigm has always to some extent been a performative paradigm with its
pp. 3–17.
20 The large literature here is
apprehension of the cinema as a quintessentially urban form, which, in its
contextualized generically in flickering images, renders for us, its audience, something of the experience
Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II:
of urban modernity. The study of film and television, on the other hand,
the Spaces of Science Fiction
Cinema (London: Verso, 1999). See
particularly in text books and introductory curricula, was in the later
particularly the contributions from twentieth century much occupied with questions of representation – of
Janet Bergstrom and Vivian
nations, social classes, genders, ethnicities, sexualities. A focus on the city
Sobchack.
21 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli
can provide a site on and through which this investigation of identities and
(eds), From Moscow to Madrid: social groups continues, but in more modern, flux-driven conditions, which
Postmodern Cities, European
can in some ways be seen to enact the epistemological uncertainty that
Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2003);
Tim Bergfelder and Christian
characterizes much scholarly endeavour in the twenty-first century. City/
Cargnelli (eds), Destination London: cinema is, quite literally, a modernizing paradigm. In these crowded streets,
German-Speaking Emigrés and
old skills can be remobilized so that the ‘new’ figures of the global migrant,
British Cinema, 1925–1950 (Oxford:
Berghahn, 2008); Yosefa Loshitzky,
the illegal immigrant, the trafficked woman, ‘the Russian’ can be discussed,
Screening Strangers (Bloomington, while paradigms of ‘performance’ and ‘staging’ can be invoked instead of –
IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).
or in addition to – those of representation.22
22 See, for example, the essays in
Third Text 83, vol. 20, no. 6 (2006), It is not just paradigm shifts that are of interest, though. There are also
special issue ‘Fortress Europe’; and discernible shifts in the position of the study of cinema within the academy. I
William Brown, Dina Iordanova and
propose that the study of cinema is going upmarket, being separated from –
Leshu Torchin, Moving People,
Moving Images: Cinema and ironically – such ‘Mickey Mouse’-nominated disciplines as ‘media studies’.
Trafficking in the New Europe This is a tricky argument because film studies has such heterogeneous
(St Andrew’s: St Andrew’s Film
origins – often, in Britain, starting within English Departments – and there
Studies, 2010).
are marked national distinctions, with the demonization of media studies a
very British discourse. With these provisos, however, within the academy
the strategic function served by the cinematic city is that it shifts the position
of cinema within what Pierre Bourdieu has described as the intellectual field.
It provides a route, through the ‘modernity’ paradigm, for cinema – not

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219
 television – to move into the more privileged terrains of literature, art history
and architecture, repositioning it within a ‘high culture’ paradigm at the
historical moment at which its threat and energy as a mass cultural urban
23 I discuss the television city in a entertainment is conclusively spent.23 At the same time, in a reciprocal
separate essay, delivered in an
move, cinema enlivens disciplines formed in precinematic days, its visceral
early form as a paper, ‘Living-room
pleasures recruited not least to appeal to students in an increasingly market-

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London’, to the London: City of
Paradox conference, University of led higher education sector.
East London, April 2012.
One of the genealogies for scholarship on the cinematic city is,
evidently, through more established humanities disciplines such as
literature and art history. The Paris of Balzac and Baudelaire, the London
of Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, and Weimar Berlin all have
extensive scholarly literatures. Influential single works, such as
T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life or Susan Buck-Morss’s book on
Benjamin’s Arcades project, have provided theorizations of modernity
and the city which have shaped scholarship on the cinematic city, even
24 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern though they make little reference to cinema.24 As we have seen, cinema
Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and
has been understood as both expressive and constitutive of the experience
his Followers (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1984); Susan Buck-Morss,
and sensibility of modernity. The formative canon of the cinematic city, in
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter the early city symphonies of the 1920s (Berlin, Manhatta [Paul Strand,
Benjamin and the Arcades Project 1921], Man with a Movie Camera [Dziga Vertov, 1929]) is allied to
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
central texts of the western modernist canon such as James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) or Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway (1925) in their formal experimentation and
selfconsciousness about urban experience. This inheritance has attracted
renewed attention in engagements with cinema emerging from English
studies such as Laura Marcus’s The Tenth Muse and David Trotter’s
25 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Cinema and Modernism. 25 Trotter is very bracing about the use of
Writing About Cinema in the
generalized ‘cinematic’ metaphors in literary criticism, and is insistent that
Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007); David
attention should be paid to films such as those of D. W. Griffiths and
Trotter Cinema and Modernism Charlie Chaplin that authors such as Joyce might actually have seen.26 The
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
rewards of his argument are evident in his book. Nevertheless, although
26 Trotter, Cinema and Modernism,
p. 2
Trotter is, refreshingly, not writing just about city symphonies and has
read widely within film history and theory, his book is still, within a
sketch of a Bourdieusian intellectual field, a ‘high’ version of cinema. It is
cinema within the study of literary modernism. Similarly, Lynda Nead’s
The Haunted Gallery, which in its concentration on London in 1900 and
its investigation of the still and moving image in this particular Victorian
modernity challenges the generalized version of modernity that has
performed so successfully in the cinema/city nexus, is itself symptomatic
of the shifts within the cultural field which are repositioning cinema – or
some approaches to some cinema – within the study of legitimate culture.
My conclusion is thus rather the opposite of Thomas Elsaesser’s in his
essay on the Weimar cinematic city, ‘City of light, gardens of delight’, in
which he proposes that the rise of the cinematic city paradigm (and
particularly the rich historical archaeology of pre and early cinema) ‘finally
cancelled the kind of residual debt that film studies still owed to literary
models and art historical assumptions about authors, works, movements,

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27 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘City of light, genres, influence … ’.27 While intellectually he is clearly right about the
gardens of delight’, in Webber and
rise, and role, of ‘modernity’ within the ‘cinematic city’, institutionally, I
Wilson (eds), Cities in Transition,
p. 90.
think it possible that the opposite is happening. The much greater cultural
prestige and institutional embeddedness of literary and art historical study,
as opposed to the Johnny-come-lately nature of film studies, through the
paradigm of the cinematic city comes to embrace the study of film.

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The study of cinema as it developed over the twentieth century has paid
attention to the way in which the medium is both text and industry, popular
mass entertainment medium and art form. It has been precisely the
inextricably industrial and vulgar aspects of the medium which have
excluded – or preserved – it from full cultural legitimacy. Now that
television, gaming and the internet have undercut cinema’s low cultural
status, it is available for a certain reevaluation. Hitchcock films turn out not to
28 Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: be nasty little shockers but full of mid-century architectural modernism.28
the Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock
My suggestion is that in a context where the necessity of interdisciplinary
(Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007).
approaches is widely recognized but film studies has much less gravitas than
longer established disciplines such as the studies of history, architecture and
literature, the study of film sometimes functions as a sign of
interdisciplinarity. This is particularly germane in the British context, where
external state funding for research has for some years emphasized the
29 These remarks are partly informed desirability of interdisciplinary approaches.29 That is, adding attention to the
by the four years (2000–04) I spent
cinema signifies interdisciplinary endeavour for more established disciplines,
on Panel 2 (Visual Arts and Media)
of the Arts and Humanities
yet the reverse is not true. The historian or literary scholar who includes film
Research Board (the primary source within their sources is conducting interdisciplinary scholarship; the film
of state funding for large
studies scholar who cites poetry is seen as merely pretentious.
humanities research grants in
Britain, now the Arts and
Humanities Research Council). I have argued so far that what Mark Shiel calls the cinema/city nexus
has been enormously productive in the period from the 1990s onwards.
A necessarily inter- and multidisciplinary field, it has stimulated new
modes of scholarship, enlivened old debates, and brought many people of
different disciplines into contact with each other. I have also tried to
emphasize the difficulties of fulfilling the interdisciplinary ambitions that
the field inspires, and want to suggest, in the final part of this essay, that
these genuine theoretical and intellectual difficulties are sometimes solved,
or displaced, at a formal level. That is, just as I have argued that the edited
book is the ideal form of publication in the field, I also want to draw
attention to a widespread mode of discourse which I will call ‘city
discourse’. I will delineate the characteristics of this discourse below.
My point is that city discourse functions, in a crossdisciplinary context,
to obscure substantial intellectual lacunae and potential disagreement. City
discourse can be used about most cities – and so paradoxically becomes a
way both of bringing together different objects of study (different particular
cities) and of making them all the same (the city in general).
Before I embark on this discussion, I want emphasize that I am myself
implicated in what I describe, and that I do not hold my own work as
separate from these trends. My concerns here can be seen as emerging
from projects in which I have been involved, and are offered here partly in

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 a spirit of what used to be called ‘constructive self-criticism’. Perhaps like
Oliver – and many a traveller to the city – I find that where I have arrived,
in the land of city discourse, is not where I thought I was going.
City discourse does not originate in the study of the cinematic city, but
it has a privileged relation to it because of the productivity, for many
different thinkers, of film as a metaphor for modernity and urban

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experience. In 1985, for example, near the beginning of this cycle in
academic publishing, Edward Timms and David Kelley, editors of the
collection Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European
Literature and Art, which includes one essay on cinema, observe: ‘These
films [Metropolis, Berlin and October] suggest that the cinema may be
more successful than any other art forms in conveying the dynamics of the
30 Edward Timms and David Kelley city’.30 Twenty-five years later, Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, in
(eds), Unreal City: Urban Experience
the introduction to their collection Restless Cities, suggest that ‘the book
in Modern European Literature and
Art (Manchester: Manchester
might therefore be conceptualised as a series of brief city symphonies in
University Press, 1985), p. 10. the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttman by Dziga Vertov to
31 Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Terence Davies, transposed into print’.31
Dart (eds), Restless Cities (London:
The self-generative power of an autonomous, non-specific city discourse
Verso, 2010), p. x.
registered for me as a response to reading Restless Cities, a book I had been
‘saving up’ with some anticipation. This is a well-edited, rather elegant
collection, each essay title a present participle (‘Driving’, ‘Waiting’,
‘Potting’, ‘Commuting’), many of the essays excellent, many of the
contributors respected scholars. This is not a point about the quality of this
collection, but instead about the book as a participant in – an accomplished
contributor to – city discourse. The feeling I had when I began reading this
book, which I had not previously opened except to look at the list of
contributors, was one of intense familiarity. I was suddenly in ‘city world’,
a discursive field which has its own canon, its own tropes, its own mood
and its own narrative voice. In this instance, the key theoretical referent is
Henri Lefebvre and his idea of rhythmanalysis, quoted in the preface as
providing an account of the ‘contradictory space’ which the book seeks to
inhabit. However, it could have been Baudelaire, Simmel (‘The metropolis
and modern life’), Walter Benjamin (the flâneur, the Arcades project), or
the other main members of the city-discourse canon. To contextualize the
sentence already cited, Beaumont and Dart declare of their book that:
It inhabits the inside and the outside of the city. It attempts to apprehend
the characteristic rhythms of the city for analytical purposes; but at the
same time it abandons itself to them. Both melancholic and celebratory in
spirit the book might therefore be conceptualised as a series of brief city
symphonies in the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttman by
Dziga Vertov to Terence Davies, transposed into print. Its contributors
drift through the cities they reconstruct moving at different rhythms in
multifarious directions tracing trajectories that are once geographical,
32 Ibid. historical and psychological, and crisscrossing one another’s parts.32
This passage mobilizes some recurrent tropes of city discourse: the
rhythms of the city (which can be analyzed, but to which there must also

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 be surrender); a mood of melancholy, but also one of festivity; the
situationists’ and psychogeographers’ ‘dérive’ and ‘drift’ as a way of city
wandering. There are other terms not present here, which can perhaps be
recorded something like this: alone in the crowd; unexpected
juxtaposition; disregarded detail; fleeting glimpse of beauty; scarred
building; material traces of past history; vanished landmarks.

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This is a vocabulary of a particular sensibility (and I am talking
generally here, not about Beaumont and Dart), and one which has become
familiar within scholarship on the city. It is by no means only or
principally found in cinematic-city writing. Strongly dependent on
nineteenth-century Paris, this is, in some ways, a voice of old Europe. It is
a style that tends towards the aphoristic and the gnomic, the elusive and
the suggestive. It is not so much interdisciplinary as postdisciplinary,
world weary at these academic distinctions. It is, above all, the voice of
one familiar with the city. Perhaps, to quote Simmel myself, it is a ‘blasé’
attitude (‘There is no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally
33 Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and reserved for the city as the blasé attitude’33).
mental life’, in Simmel on Culture,
This, I suggest, is a twenty-first-century version of the flâneur – not,
ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone
(London: Sage, 1997), p. 178.
heaven forfend, a peasant who has followed the lure of the bright lights,
but someone who is already there, a man of the crowd. The romance of the
flâneur has been much discussed – as has the way in which the focus on
this city drifter has obscured our vision of others who are mobile within
34 Anke Gleber’s The Art of Taking a the city: the working woman, the migrant, the labourer.34 However, the
Walk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
attraction of the flâneur figure has persisted, and it is worth considering its
University Press, 1999), as well as
contributing to the cinema/city
allure, with its connotations of a reflective, self-determined life, to
literature by historicizing the scholars and university teachers, just at the point in which the micro-
flâneur within Weimar, also
managerialism of the neoliberal university makes so much of what we do
surveys much of the literature of
flânerie.
seem driven only by the necessity of having to provide evidence of
meeting targets and objectives. It is perhaps also feasible that the flâneur,
although a romantic and sometimes rather enervated figure, is not
completely unrelated to a very old type, the city smart-arse, and there is
often a kind of cultural condescension in this city discourse, which takes
us back to Oliver! and the encounter of the rural innocent with a junior
version of this type, the Artful Dodger.
Oliver’s stunned response to London is observed by this sharp-eyed
ragged boy, dressed, in emulation of his social superiors, in a tailcoat and
top hat (figure 5), He provides Oliver’s first human contact in London and
accurately assesses Oliver’s vulnerability and naivete as he grills him
about his situation. The Dodger’s absolute scorn for Oliver’s innocence –
‘Haven’t you ever seen a toff before? … How green can you get?’ – enacts
the classic response of the city wise-guy to his mark, and we see, in this
oldest of city stories, the setup for Oliver’s exploitation. The Dodger is not
a flâneur – although Jack Wild’s lounging posture, observing the bustle
around him, has similarities with the deciphering gaze of modernity’s
most celebrated stroller – yet he is at home in the city in a decisively
modern way. What I am interested in are the coalescences between these
different ways of being at home in the city. I think these produce the voice

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Fig. 5. The Artful Dodger (Jack
Wild), ‘Haven’t you ever seen a toff
before?’

of city discourse, which could perhaps be characterized as asking

‘Haven’t you ever seen a city before?’ If I am right that the voice of city
discourse has something in common with the voice of the Artful Dodger,
then I think this does raise some questions about the use of this ‘city
voice’ in scholarship produced in the context of education. For in a
paradoxical way it seems to render all cities, and the experience of all
cities, as the same, and, in its very discursive repertoire, is quite difficult
for those quintessential greenhorns, the students, to challenge.

Drawing conclusions from these remarks is a matter of some delicacy, as I

have obvious interests in where and how film is taught – I am employed as a
teacher of film and television studies, in a department of that name. In the
many years that I have been thus employed, I have witnessed the changing
attitudes of fellow academics towards my field of study. Much less
common now is the incredulous contempt of thirty years ago, and it is more
usual to be informed that my interlocutor, too, teaches ‘some film’. Rather
than, as perhaps I should be, rejoicing at the increased recognition of the
validity of cinema as an object of study, I often feel a flicker of irritation
when I discover that the film in question is taught through an unquestioned
ascription of authorship to the director, or that a 1940s British war film is
shown so that students ‘can see what it was like’, as if films give direct
access to the real. What price debates about film language, authorship or
realism now? In a peculiar manner, the increased presence of film within
the academy sometimes seems to mimic the disregard for the discipline that
its absence signified years ago. However, I hope I can recognize that it is
not for film scholars to police the boundaries of the discipline, but instead
to demonstrate how much richer film is when understood through attention
to its complexities as an aesthetic and industrial medium. Still, I have some
hesitation in expressing my first set of conclusions, which I proffer not as a
fundamentalist return to ‘proper’ film studies, but as a reminder that critical
concepts such as genre and national cinema, and indeed realism and
representation, which have a long and sophisticated history within cinema
studies, help us to understand that ‘city’ films have other contexts, other
structuring forces, and should not simply be reduced to a singular and
expressive relation to either a particular city, or ‘city-ness’ in general.
Most particularly, though, there is the question of how meaning is made
in film. Lighting, camera movement, mise-en-scene and editing are

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
224
 among the expressive repertoires of filmmaking, and it is through their
interplay that we as an audience are moved and involved in the film-world.
To analyze and describe precisely how these elements work in any
particular film is one of the specialist skills of film studies, and is not the
same as recounting what happens, or what is depicted. A long tracking
shot produces a different kind of cinematic space to that made through

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editing, and this difference will inflect responses to what may well be the
same referential space (such as a city). The specification of this difference,
however, is a matter of critical discussion: it cannot be predicted or
deduced theoretically in advance, and nor can interpretation be
guaranteed. The extraordinary quality of the medium is that we can seem
simply to see, understand and feel. To use film illustratively is sometimes
to fall prey to the seductive obviousness of cinematic meaning. Because
films narrate through showing, commentary can sometimes remain caught
at the level of describing what happens, or repeating dialogue, rather than
analyzing how this showing, this transparency of meaning, is achieved.
In 1968, via Romulus Films and Columbia Studios, Oliver comes to the
particular city of nineteenth-century London, built in Shepperton and
imagined by (minimally) Charles Dickens, Lionel Bart, John Box and
Carol Reed. While he is there, certain events befall him. At the beginning
of this essay I argued that it is the mode of Oliver’s arrival in the city that
gives us an understanding of what the city is. The shots which frame the
boy’s head and shoulders, as he gazes open-mouthed at what newly
surrounds him, intimate the splendour and magnificence of this
metropolis. As Lawrence Napper has demonstrated, this particular city is a
‘1960s’ Victorian city, in which the global trade in commodities of the
British Empire takes precedence over human relationships. Napper relates
Oliver’s London synchronically to other London-set 1960s musicals such
as My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) and diachronically to the later film
35 Napper, ‘“There’s no place like London of Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007).35 The interest of his essay,
London”’, pp. 220–31. See also
for my purposes, is that it addresses a genre, the musical, which does not
Peter Evans’s discussion of Oliver!
as musical in his Carol Reed
fit the cinema/city paradigm, and does so in relation to an urban setting,
(Manchester: Manchester London, which has proved, with certain notable exceptions (usually
University Press, 2005), pp. 160–68.
associated with particular performers), mainly inhospitable to the genre.
Oliver arrives generically (born from under a cabbage leaf) into a musical
city. Minutes after his arrival in Covent Garden, a huge cast is assembled
singing and dancing routines derived from their individual employment in
the market (fishmongers, butchers, milkmaids) to welcome him to the city
and invite him to ‘Consider yourself a friend’ (figure 6). This is a vision of
overwhelming plenty and community – qualities that characterize the world
of the cinema musical rather than Dickensian London. This song-and-dance
routine performs the migrant’s dreams of the opportunities of the city, and
the viewer/migrant is invited to participate through the use of song structure,
repetition and chorus. Nevertheless, it is still recognizably London, with its
rigid class distinctions and warren-like microgeographies of the slum, even
though its Technicolor Panavision (the first Dickens film to be made in
colour) contravenes the dominant place image of a city in which it is usually

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Fig. 6. The exhuberant, welcoming
city: the ‘Consider yourself’ number
from Oliver !

greyly raining. Ian Christie has demonstrated how the film’s designer, John
Box, referred to the earlier Londons of John Bryan (designer for the 1948
David Lean Oliver Twist) and the illustrator Gustave Doré, consciously
negotiating smoke-blackened Dickensian London with the generic
36 John Box, quoted in Ian Christie, demands to be ‘cheerful and bright’.36 And if one of the key legitimating
The Art of Film: John Box and
arguments for the field of cinema/city studies, that the imagined city of film
Production Design (London:
Wallflower, 2009), p. 95.
contributes to the experience and understanding of real cities, is correct,
then bright, colourful, musical Londons such as this, repeatedly broadcast
on British television over the festive season, must be considered part of
cinematic London. I chose to discuss the musical Oliver! in this essay,
rather than the 1948 black-and-white David Lean Oliver Twist, because
musicals are recalcitrant in relation to the cinema/city/modernity paradigm.
Whilst this paradigm has been enormously generative, its hegemony, and
that of its associated city discourse, is in danger of erasing the plurality of
cinema/city relationships. There are more cinematic cities than the cinema/
city/modernity paradigm imagines, and Oliver!’s London is one of them.
It may be that the increase in scholarly attention to the cinema/city nexus
is one aspect of a substantial refiguring of the fields within which cinema is
studied. The city paradigm, for reasons I have outlined, is very compelling
in a ‘national cinema’ context, for the creaking of this paradigm, and the
various necessary attempts to think through what postnational and
transnational cinema might be, as well as give due recognition to the
continuing international dimensions of film finance, do make the city a
very attractive focus. We can here also note, for example, the work of
37 Michael Curtin, ‘Media capitals: Michael Curtin who has used the city as an organizing principle to ground
cultural geography of global TV’, in a study of postnational television industries.37 It is also exceptionally
Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (eds),
Television After TV (Durham, NC:
attractive in what could be called ‘languages and cultures’ contexts, where,
Duke University Press, 2004). for example, Rome, Istanbul or Mexico City can become the focus of
38 Indicatively, Catherine Fowler and sophisticated interdisciplinary work. If the cinematic city is one focus for
Gillian Helfield (eds), Representing
the Rural (Detroit, IL: Wayne State
the study of film in the twenty-first century, it finds interesting counterparts
University Press, 2006); Martin in two other growth areas, the study of cinematic landscapes and that of
Lefebvre, Landscape and Cinema festivals and their role in the circulation of films.38 There is a
(London: Routledge, 2006); Bill
Nicholls, ‘Discovering form,
complementarity in the way each topic provides space for thinking cinema
inferring meaning: new cinemas as both national and postnational, as well as demanding the consideration
and the film festival circuit’, Film of film within broader image flows and histories. In these exciting moves
Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3 (1994),
pp. 16–30.
between national and disciplinary boundaries, however, I want to argue for

Screen 53:3 Autumn 2012 . Charlotte Brunsdon . The attractions of the cinematic city
226
 the importance of the particular, the historical and the specific in relation to
films, cities and disciplines. Oliver!’s London has a series of cinematic
genealogies which include other Dickens adaptations, other London-set
1960s musicals, other Columbia productions and other Carol Reed films
(in which both cities and children are markedly present). As for cinematic
Londons more generally, Oliver! is an example of the complexity of the

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encounter with the Victorian period in its imperial heyday for any
39 See Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Screen subsequent imagining of this city.39 It is attention to these specific
Londons’, Journal of British Cinema
inheritances, rather than the city-ness in general of the flâneur, which will
and Television, vol. 6, no. 2
(2009), pp. 165–77.
enable the alluring field of the cinematic city to realize its promises.
Finally, I must address another aspect of the context in which I write, one
which concerns the future of higher education and humanities scholarship
in Britain in relation to the shifting global hegemony of the early twenty-
first century. It will not have escaped readers’ notice that the cinematic city
with which I have been concerned is mainly that of the ‘old world’, and it
may be that the teaching of cinema in state-funded institutions of higher
education will soon become something remembered from the old century. I
am writing in the first term of Britain’s coalition government, elected in
2009. This government has already announced that it will, in effect, stop
funding the teaching of the Humanities through a state teaching grant, and
has increased the tuition fees in England and Wales. It is not yet clear how
these changes will affect the numbers and types of students, courses,
lecturers, departments and universities. It might prove very fancy indeed to
have been fussing about just how and where on the humanities curriculum
cinema should appear. At the same time, the requirement to attract students
in more market-led regimes may, paradoxically, lead to an increase in film
being used to pep-up the more traditional subjects. And here I find myself
wanting to argue, after all those years of pressing for film to be taken
seriously as an art form, that it is important to remember that film is an
industry; and that this combination is what makes it demanding and
rewarding as an object of study. Just like the Hollywood studios in their
vertically integrated heyday, proper attention to the cinema as an object of
study requires attention to production, text and exhibition. Richard Maltby
has recently proposed that there may be ‘limited intellectual value in trying
40 Richard Maltby, ‘How can cinema to maintain the coherence of a medium-specific academic discipline’.40
history matter more?’ Screening the
While I am very sympathetic to his desire for film history to ‘matter more’
Past, 2007, <http://www.latrobe
.edu.au/screeningthepast/22/
outside film studies, in relation to the cinematic city I think there is still a
board-richard-maltby.html> great deal to be gained from attention to the methods of a medium-specific
accessed 12 June 2012.
discipline – especially when directed to the study of particular cinematic
cities. Interdisciplinary scholarship, of the type demanded by complex
topics such as cinematic cities, is a difficult not an easy project, and must
engage with the methods and objects of study of particular disciplines. It is
not just a case of adding moving images to liven things up.

This paper was first presented as a plenary address to the 2010 NECS conference, Urban Mediations, in Istanbul. I am grateful to the
organizers, and particularly Melis Behlil, for inviting me. It was improved by discussion at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
in May 2011.

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