Narrating the City

Description

Analysing a variety of international films and, ultimately, placing them in dialogue with video art, photographic narratives and emerging digital image-based technologies, the contributions explore the expanding range of ‘mediated’ narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. Each chapter presents an interesting critical approach to the diversity of topics with clear explanation of the contextual framework and methodology, and a consistent depth of analysis. 

In the three sections of the book, authors underline the continual role of film and media in creating moving image narratives of the city, identifying how it creates cinematic – and ever more frequently digital – topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture, re-presenting familiar cities, modes of seeing, cultures and social questions in unfamiliar ways. This filmic emphasis is placed into dialogue with a more diverse range of related visual media, which illustrates the overlaps between them and reveals how moving image technologies create unique visual topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture. 

In making this shift from the filmic to the new age of digital image making and alternative modes of image consumption, the book not only reveals new techniques of representation, mediation and the augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers; its emphasis on ‘narrative’ offers insights into critical societal issues. These include cultural identity, diversity, memory and spatial politics, as they are both informed by and represented in various media.

The focus for the book is on how films can produce mediation of urban life and culture by connecting the notions of identity, diversity and memory. Both the subject and the approach are gaining in popularity in recent years. This book's main feature is its dual perspective, involving both practical and theoretical stances – and it is this approach that makes it a particularly relevant and original contribution.

Primary readership will be academics, scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students and practitioners interested in architecture and media in general, film, moving images, urban studies in particular. Also of relevance to sociologists and those interested in cultural theory.   The inclusion of chapters on urban photography and art installations may also be of interest to students and designers in these areas.

Foreword       

François Penz

 

Introduction: Narrative Topographies of City and Urban Culture in Moving Images in the Age of Digitalization

Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, T. Nihan Hacıömeroğlu and Lisa Landrum

 

Part I: Identity in Mediated Realms

1. Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking Awry

Louis D’Arcy-Reed

 

2. Materiality and the Maternal: Spatial Politics and Agency of the Cinematic Apartment in Japanese Horror Films

Shana Sanusi

 

3. Tehran Has No Soul!

Tania Ahmadi

 

4. The Unconscious and the City: A Neuropsychoanalytic Exploration of Cinematic Space

Susannah Gent

 

5. A Vision of Complexity: From Meaning and Form to Pattern and Code

Loukia Tsafoulia and Severino Alfonso

 

 Part II: Narrated Diversity of Filmic Urban Culture

6. Architecture of Constructed Situation: Understanding the Perception of Urban Space through Media

Katarina Andjelkovic

 

7. Polyphonic Asia: Contemporary City Symphonies of Singapore and Seoul

Simone Shu-Yeng Chung

 

8. Cinema and the Walled City

Gül Kaçmaz Erk

 

9. Architectures of the Suspended Moment

Jean Boyd

 

Part III: Narrated Memories of Mediated Urban Life

10. The City Is a Changing Medium: Imagining New York and Los Angeles in Doug Aitken’s Work

Gracia Ramírez

 

11. Loss in Space: Deconstructing Urban Rephotography

Michael Schofield

 

12. Filming Chinese Settlement in Malaysia: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Settings

Wang Changsong

 

13. Bringing People Together Now: Wong Kar-Wai and Hong Kong

Kimberly Connerton

 

14. Multimedia Architectures: Case Study – Herakleion, a History of a City

Giorgos Papakonstantinou

 

Afterword

Neo-formalism and the Architectural Lessons of Film

Graham Cairns

 

Index

 

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Architecture
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Sociology
• Representation
• General officer
• History of film
• General
• Urban
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789382730
• Langue: English

Extrait

Narrating the City
Narrating the City
Mediated Representations of Architecture, Urban Forms and Social Life
E DITED BY
Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, Türkan Nihan Hacıömeroğlu and Lisa Landrum
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 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 photograph: Michael C. Coldwell
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 9781789382716
ePDF ISBN 9781789382723
ePub ISBN 9781789382730
Part of the Mediated Cities series. Edited by Graham Cairns.
ISSN 2058-9409
Printed and bound by Severn Press, UK.
To find out about all our publications, please visit
www.intellectbooks.com
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Foreword
François Penz
Introduction: Narrative Topographies of City and Urban Culture in Moving Images in the Age of Digitalization
Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, Türkan Nihan Hacıömeroğlu and Lisa Landrum
PART I: Identity in Mediated Realms
1. Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking Awry
  Louis D’Arcy-Reed
2. Materiality and the Maternal: Spatial Politics and Agency of the Cinematic Apartment in Japanese Horror Films
  Shana Sanusi
3. Tehran Has No Soul!
  Tania Ahmadi
4. The Unconscious and the City: A Neuropsychoanalytic Exploration of Cinematic Space
  Susannah Gent
5. A Vision of Complexity: From Meaning and Form to Pattern and Code
  Loukia Tsafoulia and Severino Alfonso
PART II: Narrated Diversity of Filmic Urban Culture
6. Architecture of Constructed Situation: Understanding the Perception of Urban Space through Media
  Katarina Andjelkovic
7. Polyphonic Asia: Contemporary City Symphonies of Singapore and Seoul
  Simone Shu-Yeng Chung
8. Cinema and the Walled City
  Gül Kaçmaz Erk
9. Architectures of the Suspended Moment
  Jean Boyd
PART III: Narrated Memories of Mediated Urban Life
10. The City Is a Changing Medium: Imagining New York and Los Angeles in Doug Aitken’s Work
  Gracia Ramírez
11. Loss in Space: Deconstructing Urban Rephotography
  Michael Schofield
12. Filming Chinese Settlement in Malaysia: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Settings
  Wang Changsong
13. Bringing People Together Now: Wong Kar-Wai and Hong Kong
  Kimberly Connerton
14. Multimedia Architectures: Case Study – Heraklion, a History of a City
  Giorgos Papakonstantinou
Afterword: Neo-formalism and the Architectural Lessons of Film
  Graham Cairns
Authors’ Biographies
Foreword
François Penz
Ever since the Lumière brothers trained their camera on La Place des Cordeliers in Lyon in 1895, cinema has shaped our collective urban imagination. For 125 years, film has relentlessly recorded large swathes of cities and urban spaces the world over. Filmmakers have observed, expressed, characterized, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of city streets and urban locations. All chapters in this book data-mine this formidable reservoir of knowledge and experience folded away and preserved in film. Cinema not only provides us with an accelerated education in complex situations but also has fundamentally transformed how we look at the world. Cinema metaphorized modernism and cities became more comprehensible. Cinema taught us how to look and interpret. The camera revealed, imagined and built what we could not ordinarily conceive; it overcame our natural blindness to our everyday life and environment. It created new geographies and new visions – it made us see the world differently; it liberated us.
However, it took quite some time for architects to theorize the relationship with cinema as it started only in the 1970s and 1980s with practitioners such as Bernard Tschumi and Jean Nouvel producing buildings directly influenced by cinematic montage. This direct translation from film to buildings has gradually subsided with time and was replaced, in the 1990s, by increasingly historical and theoretical work on the respective influence between cinema and architecture. And it was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the first scholarly explorations of cinema and cities started to emerge. This book is the latest offering in a distinguished line of cinematic urban studies. It is an opportunity to focus on the narrative element that provides the perceptual tools to grasp complex urban phenomena by specifying some key relations between perceptions, emotions and acts, which connect to fundamental ways of experiencing the world.
Central to this book is the wide range of disciplines represented. We are here exploring the boundaries of a field that is forever (re)defining itself – the broad study of cinema and the city is constantly shifting – under the influence of new technologies but also the opening and the availability of new archives. It requires an interdisciplinary approach to explore the turbulence at the boundaries of disciplines seeking similar answers but from very different perspectives. This book also proposes a wide international perspective and as such it allows for a greater level of understanding and engagement among different cultures. The focus on narrative cinema opens up the path to an innovative reflection on the complexity of the urban environment. This book affords a palimpsest of stories that create spatial trajectories for the reader to find their itineraries, to travel to different places and cultures, past, present and future.
December 2019
Introduction: Narrative Topographies of City and Urban Culture in Moving Images in the Age of Digitalization
Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, Türkan Nihan Hacıömeroğlu and Lisa Landrum

Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.
– Roland Barthes, Narrative Theory 1
Narrative communication – in spoken, written, visual and mixed-media forms – is as old as civilization. Since the invention of the moving image in the late nineteenth century, film has become one of the main tools of constructing and construing narrative. The filmic medium was born when urban environments and social life were undergoing rapid changes. Correspondingly, the city became a primary subject and object of filmic medium. As the spirit of the era changed over the next century, the mediation of the city evolved from analogue to digital. This evolution has accelerated in the twenty-first century with the proliferation of image-making tools, affecting how we see the city and construct our understanding of urban culture. The moving image has become a medium that not only represents society but also directs it, influencing the way people experience daily life. The age of digitalization and computation transforms not merely the way images are produced, but also their essence. The filmic medium’s transmutation via digital media opens alternative modes of seeing, experiencing and representing the city and urban life.
The city hosts endless narratives of its inhabitants within its dense settlement. Each mediation of the city created by its intricate relationship with moving images generates countless new narratives. And each narrative reconstructs the city through its relationship with mediated mediums. Architect-filmmaker James Sanders defines this relationship as a quest: ‘searching a complex web of linkages – physical, emotional, imaginative – between urban environments and those who inhabit them’. 2 The city becomes a narrator as well as a part of the narrative, representing the life within.
This book examines the overlapping notions of narrative, representation, moving image, city, architecture and digital media in both theory and practice. It reveals how film and related visual media offer insights on the city as a constructed object through images. It brings together filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers and media journalists who critically reinterpret and create narratives of the city. Analysing a variety of international films and visual media in dialogue with emerging digital image technologies, authors explore the expanding range of ‘mediated’ narratives in contemporary urban culture. They identify how the narrative of the city creates cinematic – and ever more frequently digital – topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture, re-presenting familiar cities, modes of seeing, cultures, social and identity questions in unfamiliar ways.
This filmic emphasis is placed into dialogue with a more diverse range of related visual media. It illustrates the overlaps between them and reveals how moving image technologies of all hues create unique visual topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture.
In charting this expansion from the filmic to the new age of digital image making and alternative modes of image consumption, the book reveals new techniques of representation, mediation and the augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers. It also offers insights into critical societal issues through its emphasis on ‘narrative’ and spatial politics, as they are informed by and represented in various media. This book underlines the continued importance of filmic representations of the city and its narratives and identifies that traces of these representations are evident in a wide range of contemporary visual technol