ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the changing role of cities in American and European cinema to Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn’s book. It focuses on the narrative conventions which filmmakers use in order to examine the intertextual and multi-vocal representations that constitute their versions of urban reality. By the 1940s, German directors had been trained in the German Expressionist tradition of the 1920s and were ready to show what they could accomplish with low-key lighting, a few dark alleys, and rain-slick streets; the dark and brooding urban dramas were later dubbed “Film Noir.” Postwar Italian neorealism films demonstrated to American directors that real urban scenes could be just as conducive to the creation of an atmosphere of lonely uneasiness as the stage set had been. The chapter also shows the ways in which new color and lighting technologies have been used to reproduce, redefine, modify, and occasionally reverse the image of the city as created in Film Noir.
