Main entry:

AlSayyad, Nezar, author.

Title & Author:

Cinematic urbanism : a history of the modern from reel to real / Nezar AlSayyad.

Publication:

New York ; London : Routledge, [2006]

Description:

xiii, 256 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-248) and index.
Introduction: the cinematic city and the quest for the modern -- Industrial modernity : the flâneur and the tramp in the early twentieth century city -- Urbanizing modernity : the traditional cinematic small town -- Orwellian modernity : utopia/dystopia and the city of the future past -- Cynical modernity, or the modernity of cynicism -- From postmodern condition to cinematic city -- Voyeuristic modernity : the lens, the screen and the city -- The modernity of the sophisticate and the misfit : the city through different eyes -- An alternative modernity : race, ethnicity and the urban experience -- Exurban postmodernity : utopia, simulacra and hyper-reality.

Summary:

Cinematic Urbanism presents an urban history of modernity and postmodernity through the lens of cinema while arguing that urbanism cannot be understood outside the space of the celluloid city. Nezar AlSayyad traces the dissolution of the boundary between real and reel through time and space via a series of films that represent different modernities. He contrasts the "rational" European city of early twentieth-century industrial modernity as portrayed by Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (1927) with its American counterpart in Modern Times (1936). He illustrates the different forms of small town life and an urbanizing modernity across the Atlantic as exemplified by Cinema Paradiso (1989) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Using Metropolis (1927) and Brazil (1985), he shows how utopian ideals harbour within them their dystopian realities, while Jacques Tati's nostalgia for tradition in Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) reveals a cynical modernity and a rebelling against its idealism.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents
Table of contents
Publisher description
Table of contents only
Publisher description

ISBN:

9780415700481 (hbk.)
0415700485 (hbk.)
9780415700498 (pbk.)
0415700493 (pbk.)
(ebk)
9780203413036
0203413032

Subject:

Cities and towns in motion pictures.
City and town life in motion pictures.
Villes au cinéma.
Vie urbaine au cinéma.
Stadt
Stadtleben
Film.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 246628
Call No.: BIB 176213
Status: Available