Urban Images in Media & Film: May 2011

Welcome to the course! Here's what we will be doing today...

Class Discussion:

Course information
Background on urbanization, modernity and representation.
Barbara Mennel, "Modernity and the City Film: Berlin," in Cities and Cinema (Routledge: 2008).

In-class screening:

Excerpts from the Lumiére Brothers' short films (1895-1897); King Vidor, The Crowd (1928); Woody Allen, Manhattan (1979)
Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)

For further reading and research:

Lewis Mumford, "What is a City?"
Raymond Williams, excerpts from The Country and the City.
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Chapter 1.
Erik Lyle, "The Hunt's Donuts Story," On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, pp. 81-101 (for a different take on 'visualizing' a city).

Readings for today:

In-class:

For further reading and research:

David Pinder, "Modernist Calls to Order," Visions of the City (Edinburgh University Press: 2005).
Jane Jacobs, "The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety," from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
Le Corbusier, excerpt from The City of Tomorrow.
Constant, "Another City for Another Life," Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).
Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem, "Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism," Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Readings for today:

Mike Davis, "Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow," in eds. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Blackwell: 2001), pp. 33-45.
John Strausbaugh, "Crime Was Weegee's Oyster," New York Times, June 20, 2008.

In-class:

For further reading & research:

Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903).
Barbara Mennel, "The Dark City and Film Noir: Los Angeles," in Cities and Cinema (Routledge: 2008), pp. 46-60.
Mark Shiel, "A Regional Geography of Film Noir: Urban Dystopias On- and Offscreen," in ed. Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton: 2010), pp. 75-103.
Ed. Gyan Prakesh, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton University Press: 2010).

Readings for today:

Steve Macek, “The Cinema of Suburban Paranoia,” in Urban Nightmares (University of Minnesota Press: 2006), pp. 199-255.

In-class:

For further reading and research:

Katherine Simpson, "Media Images of the Urban Landscape: the South Bronx in Film," Centro Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2002): 99-113.
Douglas Muzzio, "'Decent People Shouldn't Live Here': The American City in Cinema," Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 18, No 2 (1996): 189-215.
James A. Clapp, "'Are You Talking to Me?': New York and the Cinema of Urban Alienation," Visual Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2005): 1-18.

Assignments for today:

Murray Forman, “Represent: Race, Space and Place in Rap Music.”
Watch Rashad Shabazz lecture “Rap and the Geographical Imagination.”
Submit a short (2 pg) response paper on Forman's essay. In this response I want you to do the following things: (1) Begin by giving a very brief synopsis of the article (a paragraph or so), (2) Explain Forman's thesis in the most concise terms possible (i.e. the main argument he's making in the essay), and (3) Discuss a couple of the examples he uses to support his thesis...in other words, tell me how he's making his argument. Please give me a print copy of the paper, and feel free to print on the back of old assignments, show flyers, etc.

In class:

For further reading and research:

Essays from the Hip Hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (Routledge: 2004). The file includes: Murray Forman, "Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City: Hip-Hop, Space, and Place"; Davarian L. Baldwin, "Black Empires,White Desires: The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop"; Andy Bennett, "Hip-Hop am Main, Rappin’ on the Tyne: Hip-Hop Culture as a Local Construct in Two European Cities"; Dick Hebdige, "Rap and Hip-Hop: The New York Connection"; David Toop, "Uptown Throwdown."

Readings for today:

Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper, "Pleasantville? : The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies," Urban Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2002): 543-574.
Kenneth T. Jackson, excerpt from Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press: 1985), in The Suburb Reader, edited by Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese (Routledge: 2006), pp. 26-33.
PAPER DUE ON TUESDAY, JUNE 14th (I'm giving you an extra class period to turn it in).

In class:

For further reading and research:

Elizabeth Fraterrigo, “The Answer to Suburbia: Playboy's Urban Lifestyle” Journal of Urban History, Vol. 34 No. 5 (July 2008): 747-774.
In the Suburbs (1957). Short promotion film produced by Redbook Magazine.
Our Home Town: Levittown, PA (1954). Advertising film for the planned communities built by William Levitt & Sons.
An essay on Bill Owens' Suburbia.
"Wes Winship and the Suburbs" (an essay on the Arcade Fire's album, The Suburbs).

Readings for today:

Chris Carlsson, "Vacant Lot Gardeners," Nowtopia, pp. 82-114.
Lynn A. Staeheli, Don Mitchell and Kristina Gibson, "Conflicting Rights to the City in New York’s Community Gardens," GeoJournal, Vol. 58, Nos. 2-3, 197-205.
PAPER DUE TODAY!

In class: