ABSTRACT
In this essay I explore the ways in which certain practitioners of European art cinema interrogated the branding of cities by government and big business in the three decades after World War II. I focus on the representation of Rome by Roberto Rossellini in the late 1940s and of Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci in the early 1970s, with an emphasis on what I see as their shared modernist skepticism of the branding of the city as an easily consumable visual object and their rejection of its governmental or capitalist signifi cations in favor of an exploration of its enigmatic form and texture, and its physical, social, and existential crisis.
