History Proseminar: The City in Film

Catalog description

NEW YORK in the 1970s: What is a city? How might cinema enable us to understand its social dynamics, sanctioned and habitual, but also deviant and/or riotous? And how does cinema itself figure into this landscape? Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer, we will pay attention to the interplay between the disciplined activity of the workplace, what Kracauer describes at one point as “the prison of the home where intimacy has become a deadening routine” and the more open-ended, promiscuous encounters and rebellious assemblies that can take shape in the street. We will begin by viewing a wide range of examples from film history, but we will conclude by looking more specifically at the restructuring of New York City propelled by fiscal crises and moral panics in the second half of the twentieth century. We will focus in on films that address the spaces created by state-sponsored “urban renewal” projects. We will also examine films that explore what Gilles Deleuze describes as the “any spaces whatever,” the “deserted and inhabited…waste ground” created in cities in the course of their demolition and reconstruction, spaces that are no longer recognizable and where habitual action is no longer possible. How do people survive and sustain one another as they maneuver those kinds of spaces? What kinds of social activity get purged? What new kinds of activity find shelter there? How does cinema represent, interpret and sometimes even anchor them? What is cinema?