ancient cities

kind of analysis, film studies are employed as significant
contributions to the knowledge of the urban
world. Paris, Berlin, and New York are among the
most exemplary cinematic cities, cities whose role
stands out from being merely frequent backgrounds
of film action, whose identities have been continuously
molded by cinematic narratives. If Paris has
assumed such a role even before the advent of cinema
as a mass medium, Berlin is probably the first
metropolis to become the sole protagonist, as in
Walter Ruttmann’s Symphonie der Großstadt
(1927), a film wherein the modern rhythm of the
city is captured as a harmonic choreography, producing
mixed feelings of fascination, disquiet, and
uncanniness. Similarly inspired by the urban rhythm,
but with a peculiar attention to the gaze of the camera
itself, at its social and political reflex on the
production of place, is the almost contemporary
Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera
(1929), set in Odessa. With a similar gaze on the
urban as a fascinating, unceasing, harmonic process,
with either critical or empathic, dubious or enchanted
participation, films such as Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or Jacques
Tati’s Playtime are essential to the general understanding
of modernism, urbanization, and their
consequences for the everyday. Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Jean-Luc Godard’s
Alphaville, or John Carpenter’s Escape From New
York represent essential views on possible urban
dystopias and a critique of the urban future.
Screenscapes
If the role that more and more cities have in cinema
is unquestionable, not enough has been stressed
about the symmetrical undergoing process: that is,
that moving images are increasingly becoming a
constitutive element of the urban landscape. It is a
colonization operated by the cinematic realm on
the lived space of the everyday but as well, vice
versa, as production and consumption increasingly
merge in the postmodern condition, and everybody
incessantly contributes, consciously or not, to the
proliferation of images. Such a process is fostering a
relationship with the environment, as well as among
individuals, intensively mediated through moving
images and managed by digital devices. Pictures,
projections, movies multiply in public as well as in
private space: a process rendering the difference
Cinematic Urbanism
141
between the public and private realms a biased and
ineffectual one, redefining, in the meantime, the
concept of public space itself.
The cinematic experience is no longer a sacral
moment, separated from the ordinary and daily
life; rather, it is liberated from the constraints of
dedicated space, extracted from the camera obscura
of theatrical venues or from domestic living rooms
dedicated to television rituals; it pops up in the
urban fabric through all possible surfaces. Parallel
to the exponential evolution of information technologies,
fostering communication tools and practices
to permeate all sectors of human activity, the
representational world of images is gaining a hegemonic
role in the everyday realm of citizens. Carried
both inside and on the external frame of public
transports, broadcast through myriad constantly
smaller, more mobile, and connectible personal
devices, in the personal screens of computers,
cell phones, and consoles, set in the programmable
surfaces of new architectures, images pervasively
inhabit the city: Images build up a parallel metaurbanity,
engendering what is alternatively referred
to as augmented reality.
From this standpoint, the cinematic city is eventually
the result of three intertwined processes,
affecting urbanization at a global scale:
1. The progressive fluidization and mobilization of
human behavior in connection to the increased
mobility of goods, people, and money
2. The overwhelming production of images and
data constituting the dominant form of
production in the urban contemporary
landscape
3. The increasing mediation of interpersonal
relationships through technological devices and
institutional protocols
Such processes engender epistemological spaces
that can be alternatively analyzed as space of flows,
space of exposure, or mediated space. Furthermore,
they represent the three constitutive dimensions of
contemporary public space:
1. The inherently horizontal dimension of
mobility, producing an interpretation of public
space specifically as transport infrastructure,
articulated as a system of roads, squares, open
spaces, airports, and railways