Visions of the City Business & Technology Program Fall 2019 Semester - London

This module will investigate the relationship between cinema and the city as a vital and dynamic association that stretches back from the earliest days of film to contemporary times. The first section will provide students with a detailed understanding of the main critical debates surrounding modernism in the representation of the modern metropolis, focusing on filmmaking in Germany and USSR between 1924-1933. It will reveal cinema's dual and contradictory role in offering "Distraction" to urban mass audiences as well as providing spectators with an aesthetic experience of modernity and the city. The second part takes up certain themes identified in modernism and maps them onto cinematic genres through the later 20th and 21st century cinema through a series of cine-urban case studies.