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233 pages

English

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A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

François Penz is an architect and a teacher in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at the University of Cambridge.

Andong Lu is a research associate at the University of Cambridge.

Introduction – François Penz and Andong Lu

Part I: City symphonies: Montaged urban cinematic landscapes

Chapter 1: Ciné-City strolls: Imagery, form, language and meaning of the city film – Helmut Weihsmann

Chapter 2: I am here, or, the art of getting lost: Patrick Keiller and the new city symphony – Patrik Sjöberg

Chapter 3: Get out of the car: A commentary – Thom Andersen

Part II: Cinematic urban archaeology

Chapter 4: Aids to objectivity? Photography, film and the new ‘science’ of urbanism – Nicholas Bullock

Chapter 5: Which role for the cinema in a working-class city: The case of Saint-Etienne – Roger Odin

Chapter 6: A film of two cities: Sean Connery’s Edinburgh – Murray Grigor

Chapter 7: Film as re-imaging the modern space – Mark Lewis

Part III: Geographies of the urban cinematic landscape

Chapter 8: Mobility and global complexity in the work of Van der Keuken – Hing Tsang

Chapter 9: From maps of ‘progress’ to crime maps (and back again?): The plasticity of the aerial shot in Mexican urban film – Celia Dunne

Chapter 10: Night on Earth, urban wayfinding and everyday life – Andrew Otway

Part IV: The cinematic in the urban

Chapter 11: Sleepwalking from New York to Miami – Alison Butler

Chapter 12: Film in our midst: City as cinematic archive – Rachel Moore

Chapter 13: Parkour vision – Layla Curtis

Part V: Cinematic urban design practice

Chapter 14: Urban anagram: A bio-political reflection on cinema and city life – Maria Hellström Reimer

Chapter 15: Reconsidering cinematic mapping: Halfway between collected subjectivity and projective mapping – Marc Boumeester

Chapter 16: Mapping urban space: Moving image as a research tool – Wowo Ding

Chapter 17: The moving image of the city: Expressive space/inhabitation/narrativity: Intensive studio workshop on 'Continuity of Action in Space' – Maureen Thomas

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Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	01 janvier 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505794
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Urban Cinematics
Urban Cinematics
Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image
Edited by Fran ois Penz and Andong Lu
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Macmillan Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-428-5
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Introduction: What is Urban Cinematics?
Fran ois Penz and Andong Lu
PART I: City Symphonies: Montaged Urban Cinematic Landscapes
Chapter 1: Cin -City Strolls: Imagery, Form, Language and Meaning of the City Film
Helmut Weihsmann
Chapter 2 I Am Here, or, The Art of Getting Lost: Patrick Keiller and the New City Symphony
Patrik Sj berg
Chapter 3: Get Out of the Car: A Commentary
Thom Andersen
PART II: Cinematic Urban Archaeology
Chapter 4 Aids to Objectivity? Photography, Film and the New Science of Urbanism
Nicholas Bullock
Chapter 5 Which Role for the Cinema in a Working-class City: The Case of Saint-Etienne
Roger Odin
Chapter 6 A Film of Two Cities: Sean Connery s Edinburgh
Murray Grigor
Chapter 7 Film as Re-imaging the Modern Space
Mark Lewis
PART III: Geographies of the Urban Cinematic Landscape
Chapter 8 Mobility and Global Complexity in the Work of Van der Keuken
Hing Tsang
Chapter 9 From Maps of Progress to Crime Maps (and back again?): The Plasticity of the Aerial Shot in Mexican Urban Film
Celia Dunne
Chapter 10 Night on Earth, Urban Wayfinding and Everyday Life
Andrew Otway
PART IV: The Cinematic in the Urban
Chapter 11 Sleepwalking from New York to Miami
Alison Butler
Chapter 12 Film in our Midst: City as Cinematic Archive
Janet Harbord and Rachel Moore
Chapter 13 Parkour Vision
Layla Curtis
PART V: Cinematic Urban Design Practice
Chapter 14 Urban Anagram: A Bio-political Reflection on Cinema and City Life
Maria Hellstr m Reimer
Chapter 15 Reconsidering Cinematic Mapping: Halfway Between Collected Subjectivity and Projective Mapping
Marc Boumeester
Chapter 16 Mapping Urban Space: Moving Image as a Research Tool
Wowo Ding
Chapter 17 The Moving Image of the City: Expressive Space/Inhabitation/Narrativity: Intensive studio workshop on Continuity of Action in space
Maureen Thomas
Contributors
Index
Introduction: What is Urban Cinematics?
Fran ois Penz and Andong Lu
Our contemporary life as it is would be completely different if the 20th century had happened without the cinema - our habits, the way we look, what we do, what we think, would be different - our contemporary life now in the early 21st century is completely formed by the fact that the 20th century was the century of the moving image - the moving image changed our way of thinking, moving around and seeing things.
Wim Wenders (2003)
U rban Cinematics stems out of a conference as part of a two-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant entitled Narrascape, an international research network on Urban Narrative Environment in the UK and China - a collaboration between the Department of Architecture in Cambridge and the School of Architecture at Nanjing University.
At a time when 50% of the world population lives in cities, 90% in the UK, there is an increasing number of city-related research programmes. But the particularity of our own research programme has been the belief that cinema and the moving image could provide us with the perceptual equipment to grasp the complexity of urban phenomena in line with Wim Wenders poignant remark. Although it is a relatively recent academic discipline, there is a wealth of research in the area of cinema and the city. It has become well established and is respected academically, in architecture and design-related disciplines but also in film studies, cultural studies, visual anthropology, urban geography, literature, philosophy, language studies, art history, cognitive psychology, and no doubt is gaining ground in other fields too. 1
However, the challenge here is for all those disciplines to find enough common ground to have a constructive and innovative dialogue. What this volume is attempting is not simply to create a framework whereby we juxtapose a range of disciplines where a dialogue takes place from the relative safety of everybody s field, without much venturing outside one s own discipline; that would be a multidisciplinary approach where the whole remains the sum of the parts . What this book is proposing is an inter-disciplinary and transformational approach where a new field emerges through the integration of more than one discipline. New possibilities emerge as new partners and new strands of knowledge partake in the discussion. And yet the dialogue is not necessarily easy in such a context as noted by James Hay:
To study the cinematic would involve considering the place(s) of film practices within an environment and their relation to other ways of organizing this environment, of organizing social relations into an environment. To consider cinema and cinema studies in this way would certainly be inter-disciplinary but would not assume that working across disciplines of knowledge and intellectual traditions is easy [ ]. (Hay 1997: 212)
Indeed, it is challenging to venture outside one s own domain but potentially particularly rewarding for disciplines pertaining to film studies to apply their knowledge outside the box , to the urban environment.
What concerns me therefore is the tendency to see film practices [ ] as a discrete set of relations producing a cinematic subject rather than understanding film as practiced among different social sites [ ] To shift strategies in this way would involve not only decentring film as an object of study but also focusing instead on how film practice occurs from and through particular sites - of re-emphasizing the site of film practice as a spatial issue or problematic. (Hay 1997: 212)
Hay proposes to re-discover, re-evaluate the film medium - the cinematic - at the place where it takes place, where it is being shot and constructed, the urban environment. And this is precisely what these chapters set out to do.
While an approach to studying cities must build on hard facts as the necessary backbone to any serious investigation, we believe that cinema provides complementary evidence of the soft side of the city as coined by Raban (1974: 2): The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture . In other words, learning from the filmic spaces of the past may offer a more holistic approach to the understanding of cities in order to better anticipate the present, but also the future 2 .
The Narrascape research project adopted a practice-based research approach using the moving image as proof of concept, staging a series of workshops both in the UK and China. This is a methodology that our research group, the Digital Studio for Research in Design, Communication and Visualization, has used for well over a decade. Our movie-making experiments test hypothesis steeped in the history and theory of the relationship between cinema, architecture and the city, and aim to inform the current debate on the use of digital moving images in architectural and urban design issues.
Of course, the practice of filming the city is as old as cinema itself with the very first images of Place des Cordeliers in Lyon screened to a fee-paying audience by the Lumi re brothers on 28 December 1895. To this day the city has been a long-lasting fascination for film-makers. Nanni Moretti, driving through Rome on his Vespa ( Caro Diario , 1993), contemplates the idea of making a film of just of houses, panning shots of houses, Garbatella 1927, Olympic Village 1960 . Indeed, buildings are an attractive sitting target for the roving camera, a natural d cor waiting to be captured. And yet cinematographicity , a term coined by Bois (1989: 113) in his analysis of Eisenstein s style, involves a series of heart-searching decisions from the moment the camera is switched on and trained onto a street or a building: From The Strike on, Eisenstein had to find practical answers to the problem of how to film a building, how to transform it, from a passive setting of the action, into a major agent of the plot . This concern is echoed by contemporary documentary film-maker Raymond Depardon, 3 commissioned by La Fondation Cartier in Paris to film and exhibit twelve world cities: the problem is: what do I film, who am I and how do I film? We have to go back to the foundation of cinema as did Murnau and Flaherty: observe and listen .
But the act of filming the city is rewarding both for the film-maker and the urban environment. Indeed, through the framing process and the subsequent screening, even the most anonymous and banal city location will be transformed from an unconsciously recorded space - or naive space - to a consciously recorded space that becomes an expressive space. Le cin ma est avant tout un r v lateur in puisable de passages nouveaux [Cinema is primarily an endless revelatory medium of novel passages], noted Elie Faure (1934: 6). On the screen crystallizes a new dispersive system bringing together different strands, themes, scales, part cities, part human bodies. The moving image has the ability to reveal a new spatial and narrative structure, to challenge the tradition