Urban Cinema Studies and the Search for Everyday Environments

Explorations of urban cinema sometimes emphasize the interconnection between cinema and a (sometimes) lifeless modern and post-modern city, opening up possibilities for ecocritical readings. In the introductory essay to Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, for example, Mark Shiel highlights the “curious and telling correlation between the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the city and the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the cinema” (1). The film industry contributes to urban economies around the world “in the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures, and in the cultural geographies of certain cities particularly marked by cinema (from Los Angeles to Paris to Bombay) whose built environment and civic identity are both significantly constituted by film industry and film” (1-2).

Shiel suggests urban cinema’s grounding in the society of the city and the culture of cinema opens it up for interdisciplinary readings connecting film studies with sociology, cultural studies, geography, and urban studies. The book’s goal is to “produce a sociology of the cinema in the sense of a sociology of motion picture production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption, with a specific focus on the role of cinema in the physical, social, cultural, and economic development of cities” (3). Both sociology and film studies gain much from this connection, according to Shiel. Following an Althusserian structural view, Shiel argues Cinema and the City “recognizes the interpenetration of culture [film], society [city], and economics as part of ‘a whole and connected social material process,’ to use Raymond Williams’s terminology” (4). For Shiel, cinema is also “a peculiarly spatial form of culture” (5) in a global (inequitable) context that is historically situated. Instead of approaching cinema and the city from an architectural perspective, this volume explores the connections between the culture of cinema and the society and economics of the city.

Focused exclusively on Indian cinema, Preben Kaarsholm’s edited volume

City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience also illustrates the connections between cinema and the modern city. According to Kaarsholm, “Movies and cinemas have in themselves been central rallying points, symbols, and institutions of modernization, and battlefields for the understanding of, for formulations and appropriations of, the conditions of the new life as against ‘what used to be’” (1). They provide a space in which “modern urban culture and politics” are controlled and decorate the urban landscape with “sight and sound from movie posters, film advertisements, tannoys, radio and tapes of soundtrack music” (1).

Like Shiel, Kaarsholm agrees that modernity and the metropolis are intertwined and interrelated, and that association produces both positive and negative results. As Kaarsholm suggests, “modernities and experiences of the breakdown of the old come to the fore in the plural—as historical conjunctures and life situations which are the outcomes of a single evolutionary logic, but rather as battlefields of contestations between different forces of development and different cultural and political agendas” (5), especially those between European colonial powers with linear and dualist views of progress and an indigenous agenda that strives for a more communal and equitable vision of modernity. Indian cinema reflects this same mixture of Westernized and indigenous cultures, both in films produced for Indian audiences and those directed at an international audience and screening circuit (9). 

With their emphasis on class, race, and cultural politics, Shiel and Kaarsholm highlight issues with potential environmental concerns, including environmental justice and environmental racism. They also begin to connect the economic concerns illustrated by urban cinema with toxic environments and human ecology. The hope is that works like these can also reveal not only the toxic connections between “cultural and political agendas” and the environment, but also demonstrate “the fundamental connections to the environment in our everyday lives” (Price 538).