ABSTRACT

This chapter traces accounts of urban segregation and the constitution of ghettos in the industrial West as a framework for marginal film production. It illustrates how ghetto aesthetics in cinema share in larger cultural practices of recycling – the birth of hip hop, fashion, graffiti, urban murals – that have led to an infrastructure based on a continuum of semi-legal, illegal, and criminal activity of self-fashioned recirculating of goods and refashioning of images. These kinds of representations can be traced from mid-twentieth-century Italian neorealism,

via the African-American Blaxploitation boom of the late 1960s and the politically inflected, Afrocentric, independent, art-house cinema, to Spike Lee’s independent cinema and the mainstreaming of “the ghetto film,” the birth of which the US saw with John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991). The mainstream success of this genre, which paralleled the transnational crossover success of black hip hop music, led to an increased production within the US and a transnationalization of a formulaic genre expressed in such films as Brazilian Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002) and South African Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (2005). These mainstreamed, high production-value, ghetto films appropriate and fashion a ghetto style and generic narrative formula that are detached from any political analysis of urban reality offered by urban studies and the lived experience of ghettos, barrios, and ethnic neighborhoods. Beyond this contemporary transnational and national appropriation that exploits fantasies of poverty for action-filled stories, however, ghettocentric representations by and about marginalized immigrants and other minority communities – be it French-Africans, Afro-British, or TurkishGermans – have emerged from around the world.