Cine-scapes ignites new ways of seeing, thinking and debating the nature of architecture and urban spaces.Drawing on the author's extensive knowledge it: offers insight into architecture and urban debates through the eyes of a practitioner working in the fields of film and architectural design emphasizes how filmic/cinematic tendencies take place or find their way into urban practices can be used as a tool for educators, students and practitioners in architecture and urban design to communicate and discuss design issues with regard to contemporary architecture and cities

This book is the first of its kind to bring basic notions of contemporary physics to bear on African cine-scapes. In this book, renowned African cinema scholar Kenneth W. Harrow presents unique new ways to think about space and time in film, with a specific focus on African and African diasporic cinema. Through a series of case studies, he explores how cinema creates and represents time and space and, more specifically, how a cinema centered in African landscapes and figures accomplishes this. He reflects on the issues and problems posed by scientists when faced with the basic questions of what space and time are and their solutions or conclusions, giving both film studies and African studies scholars access to new ways to formulate their thinking about African cine-scapes. Working beyond the limits of a framework based in a postcolonial and cultural understanding of time and space, Harrow demonstrates how a scientific understanding of time and space can open up new approaches to African cinema and cinema in general. A unique, interdisciplinary book that encourages brand new ways to approach cinematic texts and, specifically, African cine-scapes.

Digital Space and Embodiment in Contemporary Cinema examines how contemporary cinema has represented and engaged with the experience of simultaneously inhabiting digital and material spaces (i.e. "composite spaces") in the context of the growing ubiquitousness of digital media and culture. Bringing together a range of key cinematic texts, the book examines how these films represent "composite space" by depicting—often subtly and without explicit reference to technology—what it feels like to live in a world of ubiquitous digital media. The book explores composite spaces through the striking use of elements like colour, symbolic graphics, and music and covers topics like: music as mediator between levels of experience/perception in visionary films such as Sucker Punch (2011) and Spring Breakers (2012); digital colour as an interface in films including Under the Skin (2013); the integration of digital graphical elements drawn from game spaces into material spaces in films such as Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010) and Nerve (2016); and films that take place on a computer screen including 2020’s widely discussed, Zoom-produced pandemic horror film Host. Through the close analysis of these films, the book offers fresh perspectives on conceptual issues of embodiment, digital agency, and subjectivity. This book is a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in the fields of film studies, digital aesthetics and film theory, digital culture, and digital media.

This book traces the developments in African films that were made from the 1990s to the present within the evolving frame of what came to be called ‘World Cinema’ and, eventually, ‘Global Cinema.’ Kenneth W. Harrow explores how, from the time video and then digital technologies were introduced in the 1990s, and then again, when streaming platforms assumed major roles in producing and distributing film between the 2010s and 2020s, African cinema underwent enormous changes. He highlights how the introduction of the continent’s first successful commercial cinema, Nollywood, shifted the focus from engagé films, with social or political messages, to entertainment movies, but also auteur cinema. Harrow explores how this transformation liberated African filmmakers and resulted in an incredible, enduring flow of creative, inventive, and thoughtful filmmaking. This book presents a number of those critical films that mark that trajectory, projecting a new sense of African film spaces and temporalities, while also highlighting how African films continue to find independent pathways. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African cinema and world cinema, as well as researchers specifically examining African cinemas and their relationship to globalization.

'Paris in the Cinema' offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, the volume introduces, challenges and extends ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, ranging from particular districts such as Saint-Germain-des-Pres and les banlieues (the suburbs) in French cinema, to iconic figures such as the detective Maigret and the lovers, and from locations such as the hotel, the building site and the Eiffel Tower to filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory.

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

Perspective as Logic offers an architectural examination of the filmic screen as an ontologically unique element in the discipline’s repertoire. The book determines the screen’s conditions of possibility by critically asking not what a screen means, but how it can mean anything of architectural significance. Based on this shift of enquiry towards the question of meaning, it introduces Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in an unprecedented way to architecture—since they exemplify an analogous shift of perspective towards the question of the subject and the question of being accordingly. The book begins by positing perspective projection as being a logical mapping of space instead of a matter of sight (Alberti & Lacan). Secondly, it discusses the very nature of architecture’s view and relation to the topological notion of outside between immediacy and mediation (Diller and Scofidio, The Slow House). It examines the limitation of pictorial illusion and the productive negativity in the suspension of architecture’s signified equivalent to language’s production of undecidable propositions (Eisenman & Badiou). In addition, the book outlines the difference between the point of view and the vanishing point by introducing two different conceptions of infinity (Michael Webb, Temple Island). Finally, a series of design experiments playfully shows how the screen exemplifies architecture’s self-reflexive capacity where material and immaterial components are part of the spatial conception to which they refer and produce. This book will be particularly appealing to scholars of architectural theory, especially those interested in the domains of philosophy, psychoanalysis and the linguistic turn of architecture.

This book focuses on literature and cinema in English or French by authors and directors not working in their native language. Artists with hybrid identities have become a defining phenomenon of contemporary reality following the increased mobility between civilisations during the postcolonial period and the waves of emigration to the West. Cinema and prose fiction remain the most popular sources of cultural consumption, not least owing to the adaptability of both to the new electronic media. This volume considers cultural products in English and French in which the explicitly multi-focal representation of authors' experiences of their native languages/cultures makes itself conspicuous. The essays explore work by the peripheral and those without a country, while problematising what might be meant by the widely used but not always well-defined term ‘bicultural’. The first section looks at films by such well-known filmmakers working in France as Bouchareb, Kechiche, Legzouli and Dridi, as well as the animated feature Persepolis. Here the focus is on the representation of human experience in spatial terms, exploring the appropriation of territory cohabited by ‘local’ people, newcomers and their children, haunted by the cultural memories of distant places. The second part is devoted to multicultural authors whose ‘native’ language was English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Spanish (Beckett, Herzen, Voyeikova, Triolet, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kristof, Dorfman), and their creative engagement with difference. A study of the emergence of multilingual writing in Montaigne and an autobiographical essay by Elleke Boehmer on growing up surrounded by English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Zulu frame the volume's chapters. The collection relishes the freedom provided by liberation from the confines of one language and culture and the delight in creative multilingualism. This book will be of significant interest to those studying the subject of biculturalism, as well as the fields of comparative literature and cinema.

This book proposes new methodological tools and approaches in order to tease out and elicit the different facets of urban fragmentation through the medium of cinema and the moving image, as a contribution to our understanding of cities and their topographies. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to the literature in the growing field of cartographic cinema and urban cinematics, by charting the many trajectories and points of contact between film and its topographical context. Under the influence of new technologies, the opening and the availability of previously unexplored archives but also the contribution of new scholars with novel approaches in addition to new work by experienced academics, Cinematic Urban Geographies demonstrates how we can reread the cinematic past with a view to construct the urban present and anticipate its future.

Over the past decade, Ethiopian films have come to dominate the screening schedules of the many cinemas in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa, as well as other urban centers. Despite undergoing an unprecedented surge in production and popularity in Ethiopia and in the diaspora, this phenomenon has been broadly overlooked by African film and media scholars and Ethiopianists alike. This collection of essays and interviews on cinema in Ethiopia represents the first work of its kind and establishes a broad foundation for furthering research on this topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic and bringing together contributions from both Ethiopian and international scholars, the collection offers new and alternative narratives for the development of screen media in Africa. The book’s relevance reaches far beyond its specific locale of Ethiopia as contributions focus on a broad range of topics—such as commercial and genre films, diaspora filmmaking, and the role of women in the film industry—while simultaneously discussing multiple forms of screen media, from satellite TV to “video films.” Bringing both historical and contemporary moments of cinema in Ethiopia into the critical frame offers alternative considerations for the already radically changing critical paradigm surrounding the understandings of African cinema.