Introduction: Projecting the Urban

Richard Koeck and Les Roberts

Problematizing the urban

Of the celebrated ‘coincidences’ that the birth of cinema shared with other
emerging modernist projects, such as psychoanalysis, nationalism, consum-
erism, and imperialism (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 100), cinema’s emergence
as a quintessentially urban set of practices has ensured that the city and the
moving image have, from the very outset, remained inseparable constitu-
ents of the modern urban imaginary. The fascination and spectacle of the
moving image experienced by early cinema audiences drew its strength and
affective potency from the technological, perceptual and spatial transforma-
tions that were shaping rapid processes of urbanization in large parts of the
industrialized world at the turn of the twentieth century.
While it is undoubtedly the representational spaces of the montage-based
‘city symphony’ that have played the most prominent role in forging the
aesthetic and formal convergence of the filmic and the urban in early moving
image cultures, a reappraisal of actuality film shot in urban environments – for
example, ‘phantom rides’ filmed from moving vehicles such as trams and
trains – has demonstrated the capacity of film to prompt renewed critical
engagements with the lived experiential spaces that have defined the eve-
ryday landscapes of cities. As writers and filmmakers such as Patrick Keiller
(2003, 2004) have noted, the topographic nature of early actuality material
has furnished a largely untapped urban archive by which to navigate the cine-
spatial geographies of historical urban landscapes. As such, and as increas-
ingly acknowledged across a number of academic disciplines, geographies of
film can inform new historiographical perspectives on architecture, space and
the urban imaginary, and advance new critical insights into the geo-historical
formation of urban modernity.
In this regard, AlSayyad’s aim ‘to make the urban a fundamental part of
cinematic discourse and to raise film to its proper status as an analytical tool
of urban discourse’ (2006: 4) represents a timely response to the limitations
posed by much of the extant research on film and urban space insofar as

1
R. Koeck et al. (eds.), The City and the Moving Image
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010
2 Introduction

this can be said to overlook (or inhibit) critical observance of the spatially
embedded geographies of film, as well as, more crucially, the inter-, multi-,
and transdisciplinary contextual framings shaping current debates on the
city and the moving image.
Picking up this thread, Edward Dimendberg, in his insightful study of
American film noir and urban space, comments:

Few commentators … travel to the extracinematic precincts of geogra-

phy, city planning, architectural theory, and urban and cultural history …
Treating the city as expression of some underlying myth, theme, or vision
has tended to stifle the study of spatiality in film noir as a historical
content as significant as its more commonly studied formal and narrative
features.
(2004: 9, emphasis in original)

Drawing productively on the work of spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre,

Dimendberg and others highlight the importance of spatiality as a point of
critical departure in the study of the city and the moving image, reinforcing
the central contention (one that runs throughout the present volume) of
the need to situate – epistemologically, spatially, dialectically – the textual
and representational geographies of film within the ‘material and symbolic’
(Highmore 2005) fabric of historicized urban spaces. Problematizing the
spatial – that is, ‘mapping’ the social and cultural processes by which ideas,
perceptions and lived experiences of urban space are made manifest ‘across
different cultural and social contexts ranging from the actual city to its
representations’ (Dimendberg 2004: 108) – is thus acknowledged as both a
prerequisite to and analytical focus of recent and emerging studies into the
dynamic and multifaceted relationship between the filmic and the urban.
In rushing to foreground the spatial attributes of urban cinematics, however,
it is necessary at this juncture to qualify the above assertion that the architec-
tures of the moving image are in some way analogous to those of the city per
se. In an interview with Karen Lury, the geographer Doreen Massey (Lury and
Massey, 1999) observes how discussions of place and space in relation to film
typically presuppose, by default, links between cinematic space and that of the
city, particularly in relation to questions of mobility and transit (see, for exam-
ple, Bruno, 1993; 1997; 2002; Clarke, 1997; Friedberg 1993; Harvey, 1990). The
well-established figure of the flâneur, for instance, represents an embodiment
of the quintessentially mobile, spectacular gaze of the urban (invariably male)
voyeur which would find its obvious parallel with the emerging technology
of cinema: a medium which rendered accessible hitherto un-navigable spaces
of desire, mobility and urban spectacle. Yet, as Massey notes with reference to
Bruno’s discussion of early cinematic spaces of flânerie in Western cities,

It is not just city spaces which were ‘of transit’ or even transitory. Empirically,
one might (perhaps should) point to that other set of mobilities – the
 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 3

massive mobilities of imperialism and colonialism – which were under-

way – beyond, way beyond, the little worlds of flânerie – at the same period
of history. Other ‘spaces’ too were mobile.
(Massey in Lury and Massey, 1999: 231)

For Massey, this tendency to restrict discussions of space, place and film to
geographies of the city runs the risk of essentializing ‘the urban’ to the detri-
ment of a broader field of enquiry: ‘the relation between film and spatiality
in general’ (ibid.). Moreover, in terms of mobility, the urban flâneur has
arguably left less of a mark on the geographic and cinematic imagination
of the modern era than those forms of convergent mobility which, since
the early days of film, have cemented the ontological foundations of the
‘voyager-voyeur’ (McQuire, 1999: 144). As such, ‘[i]t is not the pedestrian
flâneur who is emblematic of modernity but rather the train passenger, car
driver and jet plane passenger’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 252).
In probing the relationship between the city and the moving image,
therefore, the question of movement and mobility – and, by extension, that
of time and ‘rhythmicity’ (Wunderlich, 2008) – reinforces the essentially
dynamic, affective and ‘emotional’ (Bruno, 2002) properties of urban space.
Less a fixed or static representational form (exemplified by the Cartesian
projections of architects, cartographers and city planners), film, in the
words of Walter Benjamin, ‘burst this prison world asunder’ (in Cresswell
and Dixon, 2002: 5), and inaugurated radically new perceptions and experi-
ences of urban environments. ‘Calmly and adventurously’ travelling (ibid.)
among these new spaces of representation, early film audiences were thus
confronted with a spatial and visual phenomenology analogous to that
which characterized the ‘perceptual paradigm’ (Kirby, 1997: 2) – described
by Schivelbusch as ‘panoramic perception’ (1986) – instilled by the expan-
sion of the railways in the nineteenth century.
But the question of mobility in relation to the urban also prompts further
areas of consideration that are briefly worth exploring here. The note of
caution which Massey raises with regard to the valorization of the urban in
discussions of film and spatiality provides a valuable reminder of the consti-
tutively relational properties that have informed the social, cultural and his-
torical development of specific urban environments (see also Massey, 2005).
This in turn prompts reflection as to how – or indeed where – we might draw
the boundaries (structural, cognitive, geographic) that define ‘the urban’
and, by corollary, its representation in film. The ‘massive mobilities’ of colo-
nialism and imperialism which Massey refers to, for example, highlight the
extent to which the panoptic spatialities of what Shohat and Stam (1994:
104) describe as ‘the I/Eye of empire’ – architecturally embodied in the
urban fabric of cities such as London, Liverpool or Paris – were instrumental
in ‘turning the colonies into spectacle for the metropole’s voyeuristic gaze’
(ibid.). By way of illustration, the geographic ‘heart’ of Joseph Conrad’s
novella Heart of Darkness is as much London (or, more accurately, the Thames
4 Introduction

Estuary from where the narrator Marlow’s tale unfolds) as it is the Belgian
Congo. Examining a selection of early actuality films of London, Maurizio
Cinquegrani’s chapter in this volume shows how early films supported the
imperial message by focusing on London’s monumental and ceremonial
spaces in which the spectacle of an ‘exotic other’ – colonial subjects and
themes drawn from the far flung corners of the British Empire – was ideologi-
cally inscribed at the heart of the urban experience. ‘Projecting the urban’ in
this context thus entails the mediation of relations of power reinforcing the
spatial, cultural and geographic domination of the metropolitan centre over
the ‘peripheral’ landscapes of the other (an observation which applies with
equal validity within as well as beyond national boundaries: in the UK, for
example, the dominance of London and the South East over the otherwise
peripheral regions of ‘the North’ remains a perennial cause of contention).

Spectacular urbanism: Space and visuality

As a phenomenon and modernist spectacle – or ‘illuminating virtuality’

as Lefebvre puts it (2003: 16) – it is instructive to regard ‘the urban’ not so
much as a coherent object or ‘accomplished reality’ (ibid.), but rather as a
central problematic that articulates some of the key socio-spatial contradic-
tions that have continued to emerge as the spatialization of modernity and
the urbanization and cinematization of everyday life gather pace. According
to Lefebvre, ‘the urban phenomenon is made manifest as movement … The
centrality and the dialectical contradiction it implies exclude closure, that
is to say immobility … The urban is defined as a place where conflicts are
expressed’ (2003: 174–5, emphasis added).
Conceived in terms of a dialectical field: a dynamic assemblage of rela-
tional structures and spatio-temporal formations that elude the straightfor-
ward ‘fixity’ or ‘capture’ of representational forms; the urban engenders a
problematic that calls into question the conceptual efficacy of ‘the city’ as a
geographic entity (as distinct from the lived spaces, collective histories and
localized structures of feeling that make up specific cities: i.e. as unique urban
agglomerations of people and place). For a collection entitled The City and the
Moving Image this may appear a slightly curious point of reflection. However,
in problematizing the object of study, and drawing attention to the spatial
complexities framing the representational modalities that govern the rela-
tionship between the virtual and material, our aim is to foreground the criti-
cal mapping of this relationship, and to point towards new theoretical and
methodological frameworks of cine-spatial enquiry in an urban context.
As Ian Robinson in this volume contends: ‘The problem is that we do not
know how to represent the urban’. Put another way, we do not know how
to orchestrate the at times dissonant spatial formations which, taken collec-
tively, inform and structure our everyday understandings, experiences and
perceptions of the urban. Barthes’s observation that it is not so important
 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 5

to multiply the surveys or the functional studies of the city, ‘but to multiply
the readings of the city’ (1997: 171) provides a critical acknowledgement of
the limited value of technocratic modes of urban representation, pointing
to the need to develop a more ‘fuzzy’ and multi-layered semiotics of space,
place and urban memory. One of the principal foci of discussion and debate
that The City and the Moving Image is designed to stimulate, therefore, is the
capacity of moving image practices – in all their diversity and singularity –
to articulate or ‘project’ a politics, poetics and aesthetics of the urban.
The proliferation of virtualized spaces of representation that have increas-
ingly come to define the phantasmagoric landscapes of postmodern cities –
whether, for example, in the form of digital screens and image-façades
that now dominate many urban cityscapes (Koeck, 2010); the marketing
and consumption of cities as sites of film and television-induced tourism
(see Roberts’s chapter in this volume; Beeton, 2005); or the ‘centrifugal’
(Dimendberg, 2004) siphoning of lived spaces of everyday urban practice to
an ever more expansive mediatized realm of corporate spectacle – paints an
altogether more challenging picture of the way the moving image and the
material structures of urban space are finding (or at least seeking) further
convergence.
In this regard, in terms of a cultural politics of urban space, Lefebvre’s dis-
missal of visual imagery such as photography and cinema as ‘incriminated
media’ would appear to have some currency. This contention is premised
on Lefebvre’s critique of what he calls the ‘illusion of transparency’ in which
space is assumed to be open, luminous and intelligible; an assumption
informed by the privileging of the visual and optic over other senses:

Where there is error or illusion the image is more likely to secrete it and
reinforce it than to reveal it. No matter how ‘beautiful’ they may be, such
images belong to an incriminated ‘medium’ … images fragment; they are
themselves fragments of space.
(1991: 96–7)

For Lefebvre, then, filmic representations of urban spaces are potentially

problematic insofar as they compound rather than expose the ‘illusion of
transparency’ and the spatial contradictions it otherwise conceals. From
this standpoint, images fragment space and contribute towards the increas-
ing abstraction and spectacularization of society, a critical approach similar
to that advanced by groups such as the Situationists, most notably in Guy
Debord’s seminal polemic The Society of the Spectacle (1992 [1967]).
Rather than reading this as a dismissal of film per se (where the valoriza-
tion of lived space negates any possibility of a critical geography of film and
urbanism), it is more instructive to look upon this critique in terms of its
capacity to incite and problematize further the explicit nature of the rela-
tionship between the city and the moving image, as well as to explore the
6 Introduction

potential for an anti-spectacular aesthetic of the city in film: a strategy which,

as argued above, demands a process of re-engagement with the constitutive
and material spatialities from which these and other forms of urban projec-
tion are abstracted.

Navigating the spatial turn

To recap then: one of the defining characteristics that is shaping current

theoretical directions in research on cities and the moving image is a more
rigorous engagement with ideas of space and place. The much discussed
‘spatial turn’ (Döring and Thielmann, 2008; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006;
Warf and Arias, 2009) that has exerted a dominant sway over social science
and humanities research over the last two decades has brought with it an
increased awareness of the socially constructed attributes of space, and
the open and dynamic nature of spatiality as a constitutive element in the
formation of, for example, structures of identity, place, embodiment, rela-
tionality and mobility, as well as everyday patterns of social and cultural
practice. As we discuss below, the spatial turn has been met by an equally
decisive ‘cultural turn’ in spatial disciplines such as geography and architec-
ture. Scholars from both of these disciplines are recognizing the role popular
visual culture such as film can play in critical analyses of the relationships
between virtual and material spaces, a trend that has also left its mark on
film and cultural studies research more generally.1
Given the diverse and multidisciplinary nature of perspectives in which a
‘turn to space’ is increasingly evident, as a generic marker of a shift towards
questions of spatiality in film and cultural studies research, precisely what is
meant by this putative ‘spatial turn’ is becoming increasingly difficult to reli-
ably gauge. Part of this disorientation may be attributed to the rich appeal that
spatial, mapping and geographical metaphors offer the would-be critical or
hermeneutical ‘navigator’ of cultural texts and practices. There has, therefore,
arisen an urgent need to re-engage more closely with the material and empir-
ical spatial practices underpinning the cultural production of textualities and
representational forms (in both urban and non-urban environments). The
emergence of studies drawing on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and
digital mapping technologies, for example, is but one indicator of a turn to
space in which film scholars are venturing beyond exclusively textual modes
of critical enquiry towards more empirically focused analyses of film, space
and the urban imaginary, particularly in relation to historical geographies of
film (Allen, 2006; Hallam and Roberts, 2009; Klenotic, 2008).
Ruminating on the temporal bias in philosophical discourses of moder-
nity, Foucault suggests that ‘[s]pace was treated as the dead, the fixed, the
undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity,
life, dialectic … If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was
hostile to time’ (1980: 70). Indeed, applying this formula to the work of
 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 7

contemporary radical theorists such as Ernesto Laclau (1990; cf. Massey,

1993), it can be seen that this deep and lingering suspicion towards the
spatial is still very much in evidence.
By contrast, for others writing from a Marxist background, space has
proved far from marginal or theoretically suspect. Drawing on the work of
Lefevbre and others, critics such as Harvey (1990), Jameson (1991; 1992;
2009) and Soja (1989; 1996) and have all sought to emphasize the crucial
importance of space in contemporary analyses of postmodernity, globaliza-
tion, and what Jameson refers to as multinational, or late capitalism. Space,
for these writers, represents a key factor in the epochal distinction between
the modern and the postmodern.
While an effective means of demarcating a cognitive, historical or episte-
mological shift in relation to contemporary forms of cultural practice, the
idea of a ‘spatial turn’, at this juncture at least, has arguably become too
sprawling and imprecise. The unproblematized and ubiquitous deployment
of tropes of ‘mapping’, for example, or a reliance on somewhat vague refer-
ences to space and place in much cultural criticism, may perhaps be read
as indicators of a creeping rhetoric of space which downplays the situated
nature of everyday spatial cultures. In order to outline the practical and
conceptual parameters by which questions of spatiality in film might thus
be rendered more clearly navigable (or sustainable), there is, we are suggest-
ing, a need to draw out and refine further the specificities and coalescent
features by which to chart (or excavate) an intellectual topography of the
city and the moving image.
This could of course take shape in a number of ways, as, indeed, work
developed by many of the scholars cited in this Introduction has cogently
demonstrated. In this volume we have sought to represent a selection of
thematic approaches that take as their focus aspects of the architectural
and geographical specificities underpinning the relationship between film
and urban landscapes, both historical and contemporary. We will outline
these in further detail shortly. Before doing so, we will explore more closely
debates in architectural theory and urbanism where cinema and the moving
image have come to exert an increasingly pervasive influence in terms of
both shaping understandings and perceptions of cities, as well as, in a more
material way, shaping the design and aesthetics of the physical urban fabric
of (post)modern urban landscapes.

Visualizing the urban in early film

While a considerable amount of critical scrutiny has been dedicated to the

architectural significance of film in recent years (Albrecht, 2000 [1986];
Clarke, 1997; Neumann, 1996; Thomas and Penz, 1997), conversely, there
is also evidence of a growing interest in the filmic properties of architecture
and urban environments (see, for instance, AlSayyad, 2006; Koeck, 2008b;
8 Introduction

Pallasmaa, 2001). This latter trend in research on the city and the moving
image prompts the development of new areas of consideration as to the ways
film and moving image practices have historically informed our understand-
ing of architecture and cities. In this regard, the subtitle of this volume –
Urban Projections – is intended to convey the range of interpretations and
critical perspectives that are shaping the complex bi-directional relationship
between material and immaterial structures of the urban imaginary.
Going back to the early years of moving images in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century – a time when cinematic apparatuses recorded
only images without sound – film making was a light and mobile practice
that was more often than not carried out in the bustling streets and land-
scapes of the metropolis. This scopic affinity between medium and place
can perhaps be explained by the fact that the emerging modern city seemed
to naturally complement the ability of the cinematic apparatus to capture
the city’s defining characteristics: its architectural forms, movements, illu-
minations, as well as, of course, its people. Moreover, the urban landscape
provided a readily available resource for filmmakers to work with; a factor
that is often overlooked in the well-established canon of work and critical
orthodoxies surrounding the relationship of the city and the moving image.
Nevertheless, film, arguably better than any other medium, seemed to be
able to engage with the city’s physical disposition – its simultaneity, tempo-
rality and ephemerality – in ways that had hitherto been only imagined.
This symbiotic relationship between two emerging phenomena of
modernity – the city and film – manifested itself not only in terms of captur-
ing the spaces in ‘transition’ (Webber and Wilson, 2008), but also in the form
of screenings to an urban audience. Internationally such early projections
of urban life were made possible by entrepreneurs and early film pioneers
such as the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany, the Lumière Company in
France, the Mitchell & Kenyon company in England, and Thomas Edison
in the US to name but a few. The pioneering endeavours of these and other
early luminaries gradually turned film from being a ‘scientific curiosity’ and
fairground attraction to being a ‘seventh art’ that would eventually trans-
form the appearance, geography, and socio-spatial organization of cities (in
the form of, for example, nickelodeons, leisure parks, film theatres and such
like) (Canudo, 1988a [1911]: 67; 1988b [1923]: 291). Thanks to the seminal
texts by scholars such as Christie (1994), Musser (1990), Toulmin (2006)
and the edited volumes by Elsaesser and Barker (1989), Kessler, Lenk and
Loiperdinger (KINtop, 1992–2006), Kessler and Verhoeff (2007) and many
others, we continue to gain a detailed understanding of how early film
activities, such as production, distribution and exhibition, have operated
within – and shaped – modern cities.
In this context it is worth noting that, compared to modern, Dolby-
Surround-optimized cinema complexes of today, early theatrical screenings
were characterized by a far more active engagement of the audience with
 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 9

the images projected on screen. It is perhaps only at special screenings of

long-forgotten archive or amateur footage (of which our research group
has organized many over the last few years in relation to the UK city of
Liverpool) that an almost dialogic connection between the audience and
the projected film can be observed. Particularly noteworthy in this regard
are screenings of film footage that make use of original locations (either in
the form of the location that is seen on the screen or the location of the
theatrical event where the footage is re-screened), which is one of a series
of ‘cine-spatial strategies’ that found application in recent years (Koeck,
2008a). Such practices of participatory and collective re-enactment restore
a sense of authenticity and ‘aura’ which not only offers a visual connection
with the history of the city, but also an embodied experience of lost spatial
practices that provides a unique window into places of the past.
While the screening of archive footage in the ways described above con-
tributes to a shared experience of the event, it also raises questions about
the collective nature, and as such the physical presence, of the city itself.
The aforementioned dialogic relation between people and place serves as
a poignant reminder of how much this alliance has become absent in con-
temporary everyday practices that are, by comparison, characterized by ever
more passive modes of socio-spatial consumption. Archive film screenings
and similar events create an embodied space of memory in which forgotten
practices, affects and experiences of the past can – albeit as mediated forms
of what MacCannell (1976) terms ‘staged authenticity’ – be recreated and
thus re-embodied as a collective space of representation and urban spectacle.
Moreover, such forms of cine-spatial urban engagement highlight the extent
to which, as Highmore notes, ‘our real experiences of cities are “caught” in
networks of dense metaphorical meanings’ (2005: 5) in which symbolic,
affective and material experiences of the city play equally important roles in
constructions (or indeed reconstructions) of the collective urban imaginary.

Design in projected spaces: Architecture in film

A few years after Ricciotto Canudo (1911), Louis Delluc (1920) voiced a
demand for film being regarded as an autonomous art form that comes
to terms with its very own means of design (e.g. light, decor, rhythm). He
introduced the term photogénie, which Jean Epstein relates to the theory of
a fourth dimension – the medium’s ability to manipulate space and time. It
could be argued that it is this concept of photogénie – essentially a charac-
teristic that sets film apart from other arts – that creates the terms in which
filmmakers are able to use architecture and urban environments in such a
way that they ‘are enhanced by filmic reproduction’ (Epstein, 1924: 314).
Commenting on the same phenomenon, Patrick Keiller notes that the
‘newness of spaces of the cinema is a product, not of set-building, but of
cinematography’ (2002: 37). He draws attention to the ‘new, virtual world
10 Introduction

of cinema’, which in its early years was, in terms of the subject matters and
portrayed locations, full of extraordinary experiences (ibid.). This observa-
tion finds application also from the perspective of a viewer of early archive
footage today. When viewing film footage of urban landscapes, such as
those by the Lumière Brothers or Mitchell and Kenyon, the medium of film
creates a spatial depth that is different to that of other forms of visual repre-
sentation. The framing of the location, the lack of colour, the richness of the
picture contrast, the movement of the shutter, and, not least, the unedited
nature of the footage render real spaces in a new light that is specific to the
magical and photogenic properties of early film.
Although the first three decades of the twentieth century are often
regarded as the Golden Age of the visionary architect and planner, even the
designs of the avant-garde of architectural modernity – such as Adolf Loos,
Ludwig Hilberseimer, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius – proved
to be simply unbuildable in a politically charged and economically devastat-
ing climate. During the same period the film industry, on the other hand,
often employed directors and designers who were architecturally trained
and able to create imagined architectures and urban environments that not
only benefited from the lack of constraints which modernist urban designers
were otherwise confronted with, but which were also remarkable in terms
of the increasing precision that characterized the work of this new breed
of film professional. The German film industry in particular, before being
caught in financial and political turmoil and the subsequent dispersal of
personnel and expertise to Britain and the US and elsewhere, is recognized
as being one of the fertile grounds for innovations in production standards
and trick photography, employing miniature models, double exposures and
mirror techniques (see, for instance, the Schüfftan technique).
Today, it seems that a generation of students and scholars has emerged
who, profiting from and inspired by the often high quality of set design of
this early modern period, set out to offer a new method of reading films: one
that moves towards seeing film not only as a genre-dependent text, but also
as a rich map of socio-cultural, political, economic and, of course, architec-
tural discourses. This is supported by a number of encyclopaedic literatures
dedicated to the specificity of urban location portrayed in film within a glo-
bal context, such as Die Stadt im Kino (Vogt, 2001), Celluloid Skyline (Sanders,
2001), La Ville au Cinéma (Jousse and Paquot, 2005) and City ⫹ Cinema
(Griffiths and Chudoba, 2007). In fact, as in the case of the latter publica-
tion, a series of scholars rising with increasing frequency from architectural
schools have begun to specialize in the analysis of projected architecture and
places found, most prominently, in feature films, but also in documentaries,
city symphonies and computer games (Thomas and Penz, 1997), which they
regard as a rich source for the contextualization of what Helmut Weihsmann
poetically refers to as the Architektur des filmischen Raums (1995: 25): the
architecture of filmic space.
 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 11

Following Donald Albrecht’s (1986) and Helmut Weihsmann’s (1988) pio-

neering publications on modern set-design, considerable research has gone
into films of the 1920s and 1930s which, since they are cultural products
of that particular age, are full of detailed references to modern architectural
debates. From the point of view of design, the aim of such a historical per-
spective is to furnish knowledge of the ways in which certain architectural
forms have been used in film, and thus to contextualize these design prac-
tices so as to serve an instrumental role with respect to present architectural
thinking. Yet, it is not just the formal merits of architectural objects found
in film that warrant scholarly investigation. Projected cities can share with
real cities a sense of place in – as in the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film of
the same name – an almost infinite matrix of space and time; one that goes
well beyond the Weimar years, or, in the words of Dietrich Neumann, ‘from
Metropolis to Blade Runner’ (1996).

Projected cities: Filmic functions of architecture and cities

Recent publications in film and urban cultural studies, such as Mennel’s

Cities in Cinema (2008) offer a pedagogical model of, in essence, ‘how to
read a city’ through film (2008: 15). Yet, the ‘representation’ of architecture
in film – which, as discussed above, often finds application in a modern
context – is not the only form of critical engagement with moving imagery
that is relevant for architecture and urban design practices. Moving towards
what could be termed narrative functions, it is evident that the term ‘urban
projections’ can be readily applied to describe a series of postmodern archi-
tectural and urban design phenomena. While many studies have estab-
lished that film can reflect a postmodern architectural condition, in which
the ‘real’ city is conceived as inseparable from, or a product of ‘reel’ urban
projections – the virtual and material converging in a parallel space of ‘cin-
ematic urbanism’ (AlSayyad, 2006) – it could, by contrast, be argued that the
postmodern condition in an architectural context is essentially filmic (see
also, Barber, 2002: 156). This is expressed in two ways, both of which have
a physical, yet in design terms vastly different implication.
First, as Guy Debord notes in Society of the Spectacle (1992 [1967]) and later
in his Comment on the Society of the Spectacle (1990), we live as spectators in
an unreal society in which the individual is reduced to a passive consumer
of, among other things, the commodified spectacle of urban space. This
unreality is supported by an acute sense of social, spatial and economic
instability of urban centres which, in a visual context, and through the use
of light advertisement and illuminated façades, has had a profound impact
on our perception of architecture. While the beginning of this phenomenon
is rooted in the electrification and commercialization of urban space – and
as such, as Neumann (2002) illustrates, an ‘architecture of the night’ –
increasingly powerful LED technology and daylight projectors lead to the
12 Introduction

shaping of city façades by the means of light and moving imagery that
transforms cityscapes without the requisite availability of natural illumina-
tion. In fact, the operation of electric advertisements in city centres is only
limited, if at all, by the opening hours of retail shops or the calculated time-
margin necessary for the efficient functioning of profit-driven and increas-
ingly privatized consumerscapes of postmodern cities.
Yet, perhaps the future is not as bleak as these developments might oth-
erwise portend. The cinematization of urban space has ushered in an era of
optimized, responsive, and interactive façades. The electronic pixilation of
urban environments (Seitinger, Perry and Mitchell, 2009), for example, not
only offers new opportunities for more sophisticated cinematic experiences
of urban space (with the proviso that in most instances this means the
inevitable provision of more sophisticated methods of stimulating would-be
consumers), but also provides hitherto unrealized and unexploited narrative
possibilities for cities.
Second, the architectural practices of Juhani Pallasma, Bernhard Tschumi,
Rem Koolhaas, Coop Himmelblau, Jean Nouvel and others have begun to
see architecture as part of the creation of experiential, cognitive and in some
instances even ‘existential spaces’ (Pallasmaa, 2001) which strongly relate to
film and/or the principles of film language. In the same way that directors
such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei
Tarkovsky or Stanley Kubrick have demonstrated that spaces in cinema are
more than just passive backdrops – playing host to a narrational, place-defining
function – so have architects and designers begun to construct spaces along a
Corbusian promenade architectural or as part of a system in which architecture
becomes akin to a cinematic, story-telling apparatus. In spaces and build-
ings, such as the Parc de la Villette in Paris or the Case da Musica in Porto,
architectural space arguably becomes animated and consequently activated
through the movement of the human body through space. The nature of
such film-like spaces is explained through, and theoretically underpinned by,
well-known film theories by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, whose mon-
tage approach to film making seems able to be appropriated to the non-linear
multiplicity of experiences offered by many postmodern cities.

Projecting the future

While the architectural examples cited above have done much to rational-
ize the product of urban design by drawing on innovations from film theory
and practice, what is arguably lacking is an epistemologically consistent
rationale as to the ways in which insights learned from film can be applied
to the processual and pedagogic modalities of architectural and urban design.
Since entering the digital age, moving images have seen a transition from
being an aesthetic mode of spatial expression (architecture and geography
as narrative forms of cinematic representation), to a spatially expressive and
 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts 13

site-specific consumer practice (in the form of, for example, handheld
devices and mobile screens): developments that will radically transform
the spatial and perceptual dynamics of everyday urban environments. The
introduction of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and GIS technologies –
virtual spaces placed literally in the palms of our hands – will generate a
wealth of new time-based spatial and geographic data for which, at present,
there remain inadequate methodological resources to incorporate within
existing structures of knowledge production relating to the city and the
moving image. The ability, for instance, to record people’s physical move-
ment through urban landscapes, as with navigable interactive environments
in the virtual world (Thomas and Penz, 2003), while a boon to state and cor-
porate bureaucracies who are embracing the panoptic potential of the creep-
ing surveillance society, also provides unparalleled opportunities to map
these movements within broader, multidisciplinary contextual frameworks
(historical, social, economic, demographic, etc.); bringing specific forms of
spatio-temporal mobility and urban-architectural engagement into critical
dialogue with information drawn from a range of data sets. ‘[M]ultiply[ing]
the readings of the city’, to again quote Barthes (1997: 171), the new and
rapidly evolving relationship between the city and the moving image is
yielding further insights into the ways people engage with architecture and
everyday urban spaces.
These and other digital innovations bring a renewed focus on experimen-
tal and practice-based applications in architectural design, in which digital
moving images are instrumental in understanding the processes that shape
existing as well as newly designed urban spaces. Indeed, it is far from coin-
cidental that leading schools of architecture in the UK and elsewhere have
begun to offer practical workshops, research units, and degree programmes
that use film as a critical tool in the analysis and design of architecture and
urban spaces. In more than one sense, this interdisciplinary spirit echoes
that which characterized early film making and architectural practices
around the 1920s; a time when new technologies and the cross-fertilization
of ideas changed the way we perceive the built environment. In keeping
with this spirit, The City And The Moving Image is intended to appeal to archi-
tects, planners, geographers, as well as scholars and practitioners in film and
urban cultural studies who are embracing the potential of time-based media
as a way to respond to an increasingly visual-centric and rapidly changing
postmodern urban culture.
The structure of the book falls into four main thematic areas which are
designed to focus critical attention on issues relating to (1) space, place and
identity; (2) landscape, memory and absence; (3) cartography and mapping;
and (4) architecture and urban narrativity. Short introductions featuring a
summary of the chapters relating to each theme are provided at the begin-
ning of each section. Although these thematic groupings address specific
areas of scholarly analysis in relation to cities and the moving image,
14 Introduction

the broader theoretical and analytical concerns we have outlined in this

Introduction provide a common thread which runs throughout the volume
as a whole, giving shape to a more nuanced and multifaceted understand-
ing of the different ways in which film and moving image cultures can be
shown to project the urban.

Notes
1. See for example: Aitken and Zonn, 1994; AlSayyad, 2006; Bruno, 2002; Brunsdon,
2007; Caquard and Taylor, 2009; Conley, 2007; Cresswell and Dixon, 2002;
Dimendberg, 2004; Everett and Goodbody, 2005; Fish, 2007; Hallam, 2007; Keiller,
2002; 2003; 2007; Koeck, 2009; Konstantarakos, 2000; Lefebvre, 2006; Lukinbeal
and Zonn, 2004; Marcus and Neumann, 2007; Porter and Dixon, 2007; Roberts
2005; 2010a; 2010b; Roberts and Koeck, 2007; Rohdie, 2001; Shiel and Fitzmaurice,
2001; 2003; Sorlin, 2005.

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