ABSTRACT
Looking back to the European city from the heart of America, Baudrillard (1988: 56) writes of the ‘feeling you get when you step out of an Italian or a Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had come out of the paintings and not the other way around.’ In precisely the same way, he notes, The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies’ (ibid.) . He adds, crucially: To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards towards the city’ (ibid.); a conceptualization of the cityscape as screenscape . Yet despite the immediately perceptible cinematic qualities that cities frequently seem to possess, and despite the uncredited role played by the city in so many films, relatively little theoretical attention has been directed towards understanding the relationship between urban and cinematic space (cf. Aitken and Zonn, 1994; Clarke, 1994). Indeed, whilst the histories of film and the city are imbricated to such an extent that it is unthinkable that the cinema could have developed without the city, and whilst the city has been unmistakably shaped by the cinematic form, neither film nor urban studies has paid the warranted attention to their connection.
