Dr. Robert Hyland

This course is designed to examine how the city has become a site of the popular imaginary.  The mega-city is in many respects a product of 20^th century migratory patterns, but the city has also become an imagined space of ambivalences.  The imagined city in cinema has been constructed as a site of modernity, wealth and culture and conversely a site of inequity, poverty and criminality.  Using a combination of critical theoretical approaches to city studies, and looking at the cinematic imagery of these world class cities, this course is designed to promote critical reflection into how contemporary mythmaking indoctrinates us into ideology and how the city is a composite of imagined communities and territories.  Through a combination of regular lectures, guest speakers, and an intensive trip to Paris, this course will bring multiple perspectives to urban studies.  While this is an upper year course and requires students have familiarity into different methodological approaches to composing critical and analytical papers, there are no specific pre-requisites for this class.

Modernity in urban space.

Looking at the imagery of Tokyo / Paris / London / Berlin / Beijing

This course is designed to look at how the city has become a figure of the popular imagination.  Using a combination of critical theoretical approaches to city studies, and looking at the cinematic imagery of these world class cities, this course is designed to promote critical reflection of how contemporary mythmaking indoctrinates us into ideology.  This course looks at how the cinematic city came about, from four perspectives. Through a combination of regular lectures, guest speakers and field studies, this course will bring multiple  perspectives of looking at the city.

Assessment:

Annotated Bibliography and Essay outline / proposal	10%
Class Participation	20%
Seminar presentations	30%
Final Essay	40%

 

Week 1:  Berlin, 1920

Berlin was one of the first modern metropolises, with a thriving jazz culture, cabarets, and neon lights illuminating the streets.  This took the imagination, and many filmmakers began documenting that modernity.  However, this modernity took on nightmarish proportions in the Fritz Lang silent film Metropolis.

Screening	Berlin! Symphony of a Great City
	Metropolis
Reading	Webber, Andrew. “Symphony of a City: Motion Pictures and Still lives in Weimar Berlin.” Cities in Transition. The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis.Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson Eds. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008.
	Anderson, Benedict. “Introduction” Imagined Communities

 

Week 2:  Tokyo/Osaka:  Japan of the mind

Tokyo:  The image of Tokyo as dichotomous.  In the early days of cinema, Tokyo was presented ambivalently.  While Tokyo was a very early example of what we now consider to be a metropolis, in the western imagination, Tokyo was a city of tranquil pools of water.  Looking at the images of Tokyo in early Japanese films, we will look at how these myths came about. Tokyo today is often seen as a city of lights.  A thoroughly modern space, Post war Tokyo has become an imagined metropolis teeming with millions.  Shinjuku train station alone has 3 million commuters pass through it each and every day.  The city as an urban space has never been displayed quite so well as Tokyo.

Screening	Osaka Elegy / Sisters of the Gion Mizoguchi Kenji
	Stock footage of Tokyo in the 1920s
	Passing Fancy Ozu Yasujiro
	Stray Dog Kurosawa Akira
Reading	Walter Benjamin. “Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
	Buruma, Ian. “Tokyo Boogie Woogie” Inventing Japan. 1853-1964.

 

Week 03:  Essay Proposal and outline due (10%)

Paris,  1950, 1960s.  Paris is as much a part of the French New Wave, as are jump cuts and cigarettes.  This week looks at Paris as an historic site.  Looking at the presentation of Paris as an idealized community of intellectuals and thinkers, this week examines Paris as the intellectual’s imagined community. 

Screening	The 400 blows
	Breathless
	2 or 3 things I know about her
	Midnight in Paris
Readings	Hemmingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast
	Barthes, Image-Music-Text

Mid Term Trip to Paris

 

Week 04: Seminar Presentations Begin: 30 % of final grade

Europe today:  The individual city is losing its character, rather, cities now are displayed in conurbation.  Suburbs are as much a part of the metropolis, and suburbs have equally become a part of the city-scape. 

Screening	Run Lola Run
	The Bourne Identity
Reading	Barber, Stephen. “Introduction” Projected Cities, Cinema and Urban Space

 

Week 05:  Beijing, Shanghai cities of light

Chinese cities are thoroughly modern 21^st century sites.  The 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Expo in Shanghai spearheaded geographical and architectural revolutions within China that converted utilitarian post Cultural revolution slums into glistening towers ushering in the 21^st century. 

Screening	The World, Jia Zhangke
	Beijing Bicycle
	Wang Shau Shuei
Reading	Pollacchi, Erica. “The Sound of the City: Chinese Films of 1990s and Urban Noise

 

Week 06:  London, 1960 to Present.  The millennium wheel was rechristened ‘The London Eye,’ an all seeing orb towering over the heart of the city.  London is also the most surveilled city in the world, with closed caption cameras now outnumbering people.  London has long been a city that catches the gaze and the imagination. 

Screening	Skyfall
	Ill Manors
Reading	Pettit, Chris. “The Tattered Labyrinth. A Selective A- Z of London Cinema.” Cities in Transition. The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis.Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson Eds. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008.

Long Essay Due  (2500 words 40 % of Final Grade)