Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization

Amid deepening socio-ecological crises, urban realities are changing fundamentally. Cinema, a medium historically intertwined with the city, has likewise undergone a profound transformation in its modes of representation and visual culture since the late 1980s. Today, filmmakers, photographers, and radical artists investigate the distant landscapes and territories of extended urbanization in all their complexity. Films like Behemoth (Zhao Liang, 2015), Homo Urbanus (Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, 2010), and Leviathan (Véréna Paravel, 2012) exemplify this practice. But how do cinema and the representation of the city mutually shape each other? This book stages an encounter between filmmaking and the built environment, as well as film theory and the theory of planetary urbanization by deploying the notion of the urban sensorium as a conceptual lens. It foregrounds the multifaceted sensory experiences of urban life within and beyond the city, and its representation in cinema.

With a foreword by Neil Brenner and contributions by Nitin Bathla, Silvia Cipelletti, Markus Lähteenmäki, Klearjos E. Papanicolaou, Äsel Kadyrkhanova, Mosè Cometta, Jacqueline Maurer, Sofie Stilling, Søren Nielsen, Hans Teerds, Fred Truniger, Emil Hvelplund Kristiansen, Anne Romme, Lorenzo Tripodi, Adam Jasper, Junia Cambraia Mortimer, Roberto Luís Monte-Mór, Rosa Barba, Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, Christian Schmid, Ana Vaz, Hira Nabi, Chrystel Oloukoï, Louise Lemoine and Ila Bêka