Course Description

This course examines how buildings, cities, and landscapes are represented in film. It investigates how film influences and constructs the built environment and shapes the perception of space and vice versa – how the built environment is experienced and perceived through moving images. A twentieth-century phenomenon, the modern metropolis is the site of the most radical experiments of architects and planners. It is an active subject in the imagination and actions of its diverse inhabitants for which buildings are the background of human action and interaction. The film has a close relationship with the cities and their architecture. How does architecture use its structure, form, enclosure, floor plans, materials, and lighting to produce effects and backgrounds in moving images? How does (built) space provoke emotions and influence everyday lives? Likewise, how does the film use space, architecture, and landscape to situate its characters and create dramatic action and emotions?  In other words, how does it produce narratives, reinforce visual storytelling, and produce iconic images that shape collective memories? Focusing on early avant-garde films and notable films depicting post-war modern cities and spaces across continents (Europe, North America, Asia)  with particular focus on Western filmmaking and film theory, this course will analyze and consider various genres, from avant-garde early XX century movies to video-art and popular genres such as drama, noir thriller, sci-fi dystopian fantasy, and documentaries. Based on the assemblage technique, this course is non-linear and non-chronological. It offers a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspective on how films showcase the relentless forces behind city-making urban transformations:  capital flows, people, ideologies, and imageries. It explores how movies produce and reproduce the city’s image, their effect on the built environment, and how they impact everyday experiences and perceptions of space.  It explores the two-way relationship of architects and film-makers, notable architectures as set and background for filmic masterpieces;  and different scales of the relationship of moving image and space: the interior; the building, the city, the landscape, 

Through in-class analyses and discussions of film excerpts, film sets, seminal texts on photography, film studies, cultural theory, architecture, art, and aesthetics, the course aims to deepen the understanding of how architecture, film, and moving images influence each other, how they reveal social relations and construct narratives of modernity. Class readings include film studies, urban studies, global and cultural studies, architectural and design history, and, theory.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Examine how film represents the built environment, cities, landscapes, urban-scapes and, architecture at all scales, to develop a deeper critical understanding of the relationships between modernization, industrialization and the people’s perceptions and experiences.
2. Cultivate comparative cross-cultural perspectives on the development of urban visions and how they reveal social and inter-personal relations.
3. Develop a critique of their urban environment and appreciate the multi-layered processes at work in a city so as to more fully participate as citizens in global, regional and local communities.
4. Demonstrate creative, collaborative, and communication skills.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)