Global Paris: Topographies and Dwelling Spaces

This chapter explores the film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967) and discusses how its staging of the spatial dynamics of the modernized post-war Paris lays a foundation for the analysis of topographical space and dwelling space. It establishes the concept of “network narrative,” which, when subjected to particular modes of reconfiguration, tells a series of migrant narratives that bring the past and present together through encounters and collisions. The network narrative, as rendered in its modernist, art cinema form, gives rise to an exorbitant experience of the global city. This exorbitance becomes a way of grasping the kinds of relationships between the imperial past and the global present as they emerge through distinctly topographical means.

The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures

This chapter offers a wider applicability for the methods of reading for city space by positioning the journey narrative of the cinematic city as integral to the larger story of migrancy and the city. Narratives of migration have always been a feature of cinematic cities, as materialized through the depiction of the journey from the country to the city in films such as Sunrise (1927) or Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927). Since one of the key tropes of migrancy is mobility, narratives of arrivals and departures are just as significant for the purposes of analysis as those set within the space of the city. As such, movement both away and toward urban spaces can be theorized as part of the cinematic story of the migrant in the city.

Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places

This chapter situates the film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) within a wider historical continuum of “migrant London” cinema, while examining the longevity of social realist modes of storytelling and its “global turn.” It presents a departure from an interpretation of Dirty Pretty Things as a film that allegorizes the conditions of global London in order to chart a history of representation of post-imperial migration to the city. Furthermore, the chapter analyzes the concept of the “dirty/pretty” as a bifurcated understanding of city space, one that scholars argue has its origins in a Victorian imaginary of the city but is subsequently re-imagined in the telling of other urban stories.

Introduction

This introductory chapter examines a configuration that brings together globalization, urban space and the cinema, taking a series of contemporary films set in London and Paris as primary case studies. What these films have in common are migrant mobilities of various types, ranging from asylum seekers and clandestine migrants, to the first generation of settled migrants as well as economic migrants. The chapter focuses on mobilities that reveal the contradictions of the globalizing process while also contesting a view of city space in these films as non-places. The analysis of these films also exhibits early scholarly trends on the cinematic city and its central preoccupation with European modernity, the city, and the cinema.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter considers the film London River (2009), which tells a specifically London-based story that addresses racialized forms of strife under the banner of “The War on Terror,” but also evokes traces of other cities and other histories. London River provides a comparative lens for thinking about the migratory history of Paris in relation to the racialized sentiments and subsequent politics affiliated with the city of London. The combination of the two results in an altered presentation of both “village” and “inhospitable” London and longstanding London imaginaries become global in their scope. The chapter ultimately develops parallel interrogations of what constitutes the “global” in the global cinematic city and “the world” in critical accounts of world cinema.