ABSTRACT
Bernard Rose's 1992 horror movie Candyman can be read as a meditation on contemporary perceptions of the city. The film is punctuated by aerial shots of Chicago's townscapes: the circulation of traffic on freeways, barrack-like housing, monumental but silent amphitheatres. If the city stages dark space in bright space, cinema projects a bright light in a dark space. The two together by looking at some of the ways in which the city has been represented in cinema is not wholly arbitrary or tangential. The investigators immersed themselves in this dangerous labyrinth, they articulated the novel experience of the modern city, and in so doing identified it as both problem and possibility. The radiant spaces of modernism, from the first Panopticon to the Ville Radieuse, should be seen as calculated not on the final triumph of light over dark but precisely on the insistent presence of the one in the other.
