The attractions of the cinematic city

Abstract

This essay places the bright lights of the cinematic city at the centre of a series of explorations. Commencing with the lure of the city for characters within fiction film, I then proceed to map the growing fascination of the cinematic city for scholars from many disciplines. What does the study of the cinematic city offer to scholars in the period of cinema's declining significance as a mass urban entertainment? I explore the contours of the cinema/city canon and what I characterize as a crossdisciplinary ‘city discourse’. How does this discourse function within the academy, and how should we understand the continuing scholarly romance with the figure of the flâneur? What does the cinematic city do in contemporary scholarship? Are its attractions specific to cinema, or could they carried by television – and to what extent are the attractions of the cinematic city a symptom of broader transformations in the study of the moving image?

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