a journal of cities and culture
William Smith analyzes how the film Showgirls engages with themes of the hyperreal in its portrayal of Las Vegas. The film makes a jarring break from typical representations of the city, peeling back the layers of Las Vegas to reveal its promises to be inaccessible, profit-driven myths.
Noelle Griffis introduces this issue of Student Voices with a discussion of her Fall 2020 course, Cinema and the City, providing context and an overview of her students’ work, as well as links to her course syllabus and assignment. Griffis’s course emphasizes the role that urban development has played in racial and economic inequality in the city and the ways these issues have been depicted—or neglected—on screen.
Sasha Nater explores the television series Broad City to consider the extent to which the show’s main characters might be considered modern-day flaneuses. The show demonstrates the unique struggles millennial women face as they navigate the city, while also offering up potential for women to make their own place in the city by navigating and narrating their everyday experiences amidst the urban environment.
Mediapolis Now is the new podcast channel for our journal, hosting interviews, event recordings and audio essays exploring the junction of cities, culture and media.
In the latest episode of our Voices podcast series, Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson discuss the processes and tensions of academic knowledge production in the fast-changing and interdisciplinary research area of urban media studies.
Igor Krstić discusses the ethics and politics of representing slums in contemporary film, television, and video games, from computer-generated imagery of Victorian London to documentaries about Mumbai.
David Capener reads Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City as a useful conceptual framework for understanding and acting in the archive of everyday life—the production of space by new digital technologies.
Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an elegy to the displacement of minority communities from the gentrifying city. Jacqueline Pinkowitz discusses the film’s images of movement, dislocation, and loss and the legacy of racial inequality in the Bay Area.
Malini Guha discusses filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith’s month-long projection COVID Manifesto. She argues that, unlike methods of surplus accumulation that ensure neoliberal capitalism, the piece gives viewers time to pause, process, and grieve during the pandemic without asking for anything in return.
Steve Macek reviews the PBS documentary Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America and discusses the history of race and mobility in the United States.
Pablo La Parra-Pérez and Ekain Olaizola Lizarralde discuss new research initiatives to construct a historical cartography of the San Sebastian International Film Festival (SIFF). Archival traces of the Barrios y Pueblos project (1977-1985) reveal how it brought film screenings and discussions from luxury downtown venues to working-class neighborhoods and peripheral municipalities.
Television and media scholar Elana Levine interviews Elizabeth Patton on her recent book Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office.
