ABSTRACT
Cinematic representations of the night-time of cities are often subject to what might be called the “atmospheric temptation.” The stylization which so often marks treatments of the night can be seen to endow the night with a unity which transcends and conceals social and political heterogeneity. Through an examination of several films released in 2019–2020, in which night-time labor in cities is central, this article shows how the atmospheric dimensions of the night may both obscure and illuminate the social differences which are at the core of these narratives. The high number of recent films which foreground the night in their titles and settings is emblematic, the chapter suggests, of a new reflexivity concerning the night. This same reflexivity has made the nighttime of cities the focus of new governance models, the terrain of new kinds of cultural activities and an object of economic investment. A new disciplinary field called “night studies” has brought scholars in several fields into dialogue concerned with understanding the night as an esthetic, political, and identitarian terrain. Amidst this new recognition of the night, films such as the ones analyzed here stand as important reminders of the danger, precarity and marginality which confront those who work in the urban night.
