Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities traces recurring debates
about what constitutes film's political potential and argues that the
relation between film and urban space has been crucial to these debates
and their historical transformations. The book demonstrates that in the
attempt to follow certain prescriptions - shooting on location,
disrupting normalizing time, experimenting with memory, interlinking the
spaces of screen and cinema - films invariably use the relation between
film and urban space as a kind of laboratory, testing anew received
prescriptions but invariably encountering new opportunities and new
limits. A wide range of key films, from Dziga Vertov's 1928 Man with a
Movie Camera to Jia Zhangke's 2008 24 City, are discussed in depth,
each offering an argument for how the encounter between specific
manifestations of modern urban space and politically engaged film
strategies has served to challenge the status quo and stimulate critical
thinking.