ABSTRACT
The Introduction provides an overview of the key concepts that organize the book and focuses on early film to illuminate the mutual influence of cities and cinema. Early twentieth-century cinema and cities embodied modernity, which included speed, and thus necessitated the development of new cognitive skills for viewers. Cinema influenced the façades of cities with modernist movies houses. Early city films developed urban tropes, such as the street, the skyline, and the bar. The street symbolized both desire and danger, embodied by the figure of the prostitute. The Introduction explains the terms that organize the book’s timeline and undergird the chapter outline: from modernity to postmodernity and from national cinema to globalization. Finally, the Introduction outlines methodological considerations from the centrality of space as an analytic category in urban studies to twenty-first-century approaches that emphasize geographical information systems on the one hand and the haptic, kinetic, and kinesthetic experiences of cities and cinema on the other.
