The Iconic-Indexical City: Visions of Place in Urban Films

2015 ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Benjamin Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Urban Films

Symbolic Tension in Contemporary Chinese Urban Film: Culture, Space and Community

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 3664-3670
Author(s):  
Jinying Zang
Keyword(s):  
Urban Culture ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Emotional Resonance ◽  
Urban Films ◽  
The City ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Film semiotics is an important theory produced in the modern film period, and urban film closely responds to the process of contemporary Chinese urbanization. Borrowing the theory of film semiotics to analyze Chinese contemporary urban films, it can be found that typical cities have formed a unique symbolic tension, referring to urban culture, and having multiple symbolic elements sets to interpret the new imagination of the city. Urban film and film semiotics should jointly promote the poetic integration of various classes in the city, construct an urban emotional community, and form emotional resonance and spiritual progress.

The spatial stereotype: The representation and reception of urban films in Johannesburg

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (9) ◽  
pp. 2057-2072 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Parker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Use Of Space ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Urban Films ◽  
And Function ◽  
The City

Stereotypes are people or things categorised by general characteristics of the group based on a truth that is widely recognised and function to reduce ideas to a simpler form (Dyer, 1993). Not all stereotypes are pejorative but can be a form of othering of people (Bhabha, 1996) and come about through a friction with difference (Jameson, 1995). In Johannesburg, South Africa, there is a conflation of people and space that results in a form of spatial categorisation or stereotyping. Under the apartheid government the city’s spaces were divided by race and ethnicity and are currently shifting towards divisions of class and inequality deepening the fragmented post-apartheid conditions in the city. These spatial categories have been represented in films of Johannesburg and contribute to the construction of the city’s image but also construct images for particular neighbourhoods. In this paper I examine the use of space in film as a narrative device and explore the reception and understanding of Johannesburg’s spaces by its residents to illustrate the construction and reception of spatial stereotypes. The paper discusses three dominant spatial stereotypes of Johannesburg through key films and the reception of these films through quantitative and qualitative interviews conducted with residents in four locations (Chiawelo; CBD; Fordsburg and Melville) in Johannesburg. Stereotypes have negative consequences and these spatial stereotypes reflect the ‘city of extremes’ (Murray, 2011) but their use indicates a process of navigation and negotiation across differences in space and identity in the fragmented city of Johannesburg.

scholarly journals “In the Dark Places, Getting Burned”: Portrayals of Street Culture in Taiwan Cinema Today

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wicks
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
Street Culture ◽  
Urban Films

Abstract Street culture is represented in two mid-2010 Taiwan films, The Kids (Xiaohai, 2015) and Thanatos, Drunk (Zui sheng meng shi 2015), in such stunning and beautiful ways that this essay sets out to etch each of them not only into the annals of Taiwan’s most memorable urban films ever made, but also position them as essential texts within the emergent field of street culture more broadly. Both movies depict physical and ideological boundaries that separate urban spaces from Taiwanese culture at large, and reveal the extent to which their young protagonists are perceived as “abnormal” even as they use street literacy in sophisticated ways to interact with formal actors (such as school teachers and the police) and informal actors (such as hooligans and petty criminals). These two films arguably present the best vantage point to understand the peripheral status of Taiwan’s urban young people who do not conform to hegemonic norms.

Modeling urban films using a dynamic multimedia fugacity model

Chemosphere ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 87 (9) ◽  
pp. 1024-1031 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan A. Csiszar ◽  
Miriam L. Diamond ◽  
Louis J. Thibodeaux
Keyword(s):  
Fugacity Model ◽  
Urban Films
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