The authors accomplish an immense feat when giving form to the feeling of incongruence that grips one as they walk through the locations these essays discuss … [this book] gives one the language to understand one’s place in the socio-spatial world.
Film Matters
The forging of cinema within the crucible of urban modernity has been well established by scholars, but what happens to this connection as both cities and filmmaking transform in the post-industrial era? This collection brings long overdue focus to the decades following World War II, demonstrating how the deep interrelation between cinema and the city is sustained in the way movies are made, where they’re shown, and the we see on screen.
- Nathan Holmes, Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies, Purchase College, SUNY,
This collection offers an expansive bird’s-eye view as well as street-level scrutiny of the post-classical cinematic cityscape, providing compelling, clear-sighted assessment of the mutually regenerative exchange between American cities and the U.S. film industry since the 1960s. Drawing on cultural geography, spatiality theory, and production and exhibition histories, (T)hese cogent, accessible essays map cinema’s urban imaginaries and the cities and conditions out of which they are conjured, ranging from the postindustrial urban decline of American New Wave cinema to the gentrified “creative city” of recent indie film, from the outer borough to the indieplex, and from Nixon to Trump.
- Maria San Filippo, Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies, Goucher College, USA,
This vital collection provides a broad interrogation of how American film, through its representational and industrial practices, has been deeply involved in the re-making of urban space.
- Michael D. Dwyer, Associate Professor of Media and Communication, Arcadia University, USA,
As expected, New York and Los Angeles play a key role in investigating the postindustrial American city; the perceptive analyses of the spatial imagination and real spaces of postindustrial San Francisco, Boston, Oakland, and Detroit expand the book’s scope and its importance to urban film studies.
- Christian Long, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Australia,
A welcome addition to the literature on film and urbanism. Attends to the way different cities and genres imagine the urban and negotiate the unequal realities of postindustrial America.
- Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, USA,
Smartly conceived and elegantly organized, this collection illuminates the many ways that the rise of the post-industrial city has left its transformative mark on the past half century of American cinema.
- Derek Nystrom, Associate Professor of English, McGill University, Canada,