MA in Liberal Arts

This Subject Includes

• Course No: HS 241
• Course: MA in Liberal Arts
• Semester: VIII
• Title: Cinema and the City
• Stream: Geography

• Preamble: This course explores the relationship between cinema and the city, both of which are constellations of temporal and spatial elements that are always in movement and experienced by us. The course has four objectives: first, tosee films as representations of the historical transformations in urban space; second, to understand the role of cinema in transforming our experience and understandings of urban time and space; third, to explore how urban spaces shape our experience of cinema as spaces of production, performance, or reception; and fourth, to explore the political possibilities that cinema opens up for rethinking urban space and vice versa.

  Course contents: Cinema and city: urban space, urban time, cinematic space, cinematic time, role of art and technology in everyday life,city lights (1931); Urban dystopias: modern capitalism, class structures, segregation, industrialization, metropolis (1927), blade runner (1982); Urban alienation: metropolis and mental life, cities and rationality, modern times (1936); Cities and strangers: urban encounters, desires, stranger-intimacies, chungking expires (1994); Urban utopias: modernist architecture, bureaucracy, modern planning, everyday life, playtime(1967); Urban poverty: urban poor, desires, cinema and slums, i don’t want to sleep alone(2006), dharavi (1992); Cinema in city: history of cinemas, multiplexes, cinema industry, religion and cinema, social and material lives of films.

  Texts/References:

  1.R.Sennett, Classic Essays On the Culture of Cities,Prentice-Hall. New Jersey, 1969.

  2.G. Pratt and R. M. San Juan, Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities,Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK, 2014

  3.B. Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria,Duke University Press, Durham, 2008.

  4.A. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance,Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 1997.