Cinema and the City WNY 302

Instructor: Liza Johnson ‘92

This multidisciplinary video production course brings together cinema, geography, and architectural and urban studies, taking New York City as a case study. What cultural narratives are told about the city, and how does cinema use the city in the service of the stories it tells?

The course will explore treatments of the city in their historical context, focusing on three periods. The first section will focus on discourses of alienation and corruption as they played out in the New York noirs of the 1940’s and 1950’s. In the second section of the course we will look at the ways that these same mean streets were rendered in relation to the social and political geography of the1960’s and 1970’s. The third section of the course will consider how stories are told in the highly policed and mediatized public space of the post-Guiliani and post-9/11 era.

Production assignments will ask students to respond to issues raised by the screenings and readings, and to use the built environment towards making their own moving images. Screenings will include from The Naked City, Asphalt Jungle, Chelsea Girls, The Panic in Needle Park, The Wiz, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Panic Room, The 25th Hour, and many others. Lab sessions will offer instructions in narrative filmmaking technique and in the technologies of shooting and editing.

Requirements: three short papers, three videos.