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The Apartment Complex
Urban Living and Global Screen Cultures
Edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik
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Book Presentation:
From the bachelor pad that Jack Lemmon's C. C. Baxter loans out to his superiors in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) to the crumbling tenement in a dystopian Taipei in Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole (1998), the apartment in films and television series is often more than just a setting: it can motivate or shape the narrative in key ways. Such works belong to a critical genre identified by Pamela Robertson Wojcik as the apartment plot, which comprises specific thematic, visual, and narrative conventions that explore modern urbanism's various forms and possibilities. In The Apartment Complex a diverse group of international scholars discuss the apartment plot in a global context, examining films made both within and beyond the Hollywood studios. The contributors consider the apartment plot's intersections with film noir, horror, comedy, and the musical, addressing how different national or historical contexts modify the apartment plot and how the genre's framework allows us to rethink the work of auteurs and identify productive connections and tensions between otherwise disparate texts.
Contributors. Steven Cohan, Michael DeAngelis, Veronica Fitzpatrick, Annamarie Jagose, Paula J. Massood, Joe McElhaney, Merrill Schleier, Lee Wallace, Pamela Robertson Wojcik
About the Author:
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, also published by Duke University Press.
Press Reviews:
"[The Apartment Complex is] a concise, remarkably wide-ranging book on an unusual topic. ... Stark and satisfying. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers."―W. W. Dixon, Choice
"The Apartment Complex builds upon the premise of Wojcik’s earlier book that wedded cinema studies to urban studies. . . Its strength lies in how the individual essayists apply Wojcik’s thesis— developed for post–World War II American films— to the more recent output of international films and television."―Carrie Rickey, Film Quarterly
"Wojcik has produced a book unrestricted by the limits of genre, history, nation, or industry figure, and illuminates important visual and thematic connections between films in global screen culture."―Anna Maria Sapountzi, Open Screens
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
> From the same author:
The Routledge Companion to American Film History (2025)
Dir. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood
Subject: History of Cinema
Gidget (2022)
Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise
The Apartment Plot (2010)
Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975
Subject: Sociology
Soundtrack Available (2001)
Essays on Film and Popular Music
Dir. Arthur Knight and Pamela Robertson Wojcik
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