Cinematic Urbanism

Cinematic urbanism reflects the increasing interdependence of the processes of image and spatial production in the general frame of the symbolic economy. It is an emerging field of study captur-ing—in the relation among movement, image, and the city—one essential aspect of modernity, as well as epitomizing the present shift toward any possible postmodernity. There are more ways to understand this term in the current critical discourse, which represent, however, different vantage points from which to observe general processes affecting the urban world. In the main view, cinematic urbanism is a way to analyze the urban environment through the cinematic sphere and to assess how films contribute to the formation of the urban identity. It also can be seen as a way to explore the “imaginary” of emotional geographies, as if to travel toward an urban world plastered with images. From another perspective, cinematic urbanism can be understood as a way to look at the structural transformation of the urban [Page 140]environment endorsed by the pervasiveness of cinematic devices in the information age, analyzing how moving images are increasingly populating spaces and surfaces of contemporary cities and how urban design is increasingly turning into a logistics of perception.

The etymology of the word cinematic is in the Greek verb kinein, to move. The essence of the cinematic urbanism is indeed in such relations as movement/image and space/velocity. In this sense, if the premodern urban condition has been one characterized by settlement, intimacy, and a sense of belonging to place and community, modernity has represented a shift toward mobility, crossing, anonymity, and otherness. Modern city, from being the walled, defended site of staying, becomes an attractor of flows, a node in a dynamic system of trajectories, characterized by complex codification of access procedures and sensorial overstimu-lation. Far before the invention of cinema, it has been the experience of traveling, the view from the train passing through, to modify the perception of landscape and the relation with places. It prefigures annihilation of distance and time compression, along with dominance of the visual perception as the ultimate urban experience. Perhaps the first to clearly capture this passage was Charles Baudelaire, singing the “transitory, the fleeting and the contingent” of urban life, praising the experience of the anonymity in the crowd, picturing the urban café as the screen through which to look at the spectacle of the city. In the same era, Georges-Eugène Baron Haussmann was opening up—through demolition—the visual domination of the urban space as an essential means of managing power. Since then, modernity and visuality have been concepts developing parallel with one another.

“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movements of the hand, hardly more than a sign,” said Paul Valéry, quoted by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; the view of Benjamin is probably the most influential in anticipating the figures of a cinematic urbanism, with his monumental project about Parisian passages, its theorization of the flânerie as a lens to capture modernity, and its capacity to preview the effects of cinema in changing the perceived space of citizens. “The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen,” states Benjamin in the same piece.

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