Documenting Cityscapes

Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

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by Iván Villarmea Álvarez

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > Documentary

Keywords

documentary, city, urban

Publishing date

2015

Publisher

Wallflower Press

Collection

Nonfictions

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 240 pages
6 ½ x 9 ¾ inches (16.5 x 25 cm)

ISBN

978-0-231-17452-7

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Book Presentation:
While film studies has traditionally treated the presence of the city in film as an urban text operating inside of a cinematic one, this approach has recently evolved into the study of cinema as a technology of place. From this perspective, Documenting Cityscapes explores the way the city has been depicted by nonfiction filmmakers since the late 1970s, paying particular attention to three aesthetic tendencies: documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits, and metafilmic strategies.

Through the formal analysis of fifteen works from six different countries, this volume investigates how the rise of subjectivity has helped to develop a kind of gaze that is closer to citizens than to the institutions and corporations responsible for recent major transformations. Documenting Cityscapes therefore reveals the extent to which cinema has become an agent of urban change, in which certain films not only challenge the most controversial policies of late capitalism but also are able to produce spatiality themselves.

About the Author:
Iván Villarmea Álvarez is a film critic and researcher who specializes in the representation of the city in film. He coedits the online film journal A Cuarta Parede and is the coeditor of the volume Jugar con la memoria. El cine Portugués en el siglo XXI.

See the publisher website: Wallflower Press