Abstract
Jean-Luc Godard once said that all great movies are successful for the wrong reasons. Something similar might be said of Pratt and San Juan’s Film and Urban Space. This is a book that attempts to reorientate the literature on the cinematic city away from its dominant, longstanding concern with films as texts (through which we learn something of the urban hopes and fears of the societies that produce them) towards a greater sensitivity to their contexts (about which we still know too little). Across four core chapters, location shooting, movement (common to the street and the medium), memory and the relations between the screen and public space are broached, with an eye towards the ‘critical possibilities’ of film and urban space. While the book offers interesting, often incisive perspectives on the spatial contexts of cinema, it is arguably in its discussions of particular films that it remains at its most beguiling.
The authors favour ‘films that claim, implicitly or explicitly, political effectiveness’ (p. 181), a point to be returned to below. Most of the chapters include an exegesis of three or four films, self-consciously drawn from a selection spanning different genres, periods, national cinemas, social contexts and so on. Thus, location shooting covers Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Rome, Open City (1945) and Moebius (1996). Such a strategy avoids being drawn too closely into the orbit of any particular film, explicitly allowing for reflection on the broader themes elucidated by the selection of films tackled. The final full-length chapter departs from this model, presenting more local empirical detail alongside a variegated discussion of a range of wider trends and trajectories.
The overall effect the book delivers amounts to a lively, committed engagement that nonetheless contains certain blind-spots. The (to my mind undeniable) political effectiveness of Hollywood cinema is not what the authors would want ‘political effectiveness’ to mean, which is one way of pointing up the somewhat constricted feel to the conception of the relations between politics and aesthetics the book maintains. And while one can’t do everything, certain lacunae (for example, Eisenstein, Debord) mark decidedly conspicuous absences.
Film is an art form that, perhaps more than most, possesses contradictory qualities: it is eminently capable of working ideologically (to reinforce alienation, for instance), as well as offering glimpses of an unalienated existence. There is something of a conflation of these aspects that would have benefitted from a clearer manifesto statement. Otherwise, one cannot help but feel that film is being held up against a pre-existing conception of politics, even as the political possibilities of film are ostensibly on the agenda. Perhaps this conception of ‘possibilities’ is ultimately more problematic than the ‘critical’ insistence (which does itself tend to devalue certain aesthetic forms). Possibilities and impossibilities imply a given actualization, downplaying the virtual potentialities of film and the city. It is the latter that shine through whenever particular films are lovingly engaged, as they often are here – and it is this feature that provides the book with its most compelling moments of intensity.