ABSTRACT
I want to begin with this passage from Lefebvre not so much for what it has to say about the city (an issue I will address below) but for how it could just as easily refer to cinema studies’ difficulty in treating cinema as a “mediated” object and, in that sense, as a site, a formation, and property/real estate. It is that conception of cinema or cinematic city (a “contained” sphere of practice) that I want to address before proposing an alternative. This chapter grows out of several conference papers that I was invited to present over 1995-a year celebrated at each of these conferences as the Centennial Anniversary of Cinema. And these were, by no means, the only conferences that hitched their wagons to the year-long commemoration, though I suspect that were someone to pinpoint all of them on a map, that person would find their
concentration greatest around France. Some were relatively small and private affairs, such as a conference at Indiana University called “European Cinema/ European Society-1895-1995.” Others were relatively large and private affairs, such as the annual Society for Cinema Studies conference entitled “One Hundred Years of Cinema-Writing the Histories.” Still another was, in the tradition of the Italian historical film spectacle, an epic project to be set in Rome (and organized heroically by one of Italy’s most well-known film historians).
