Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

Film studies has traditionally addressed the presence of the city in film as an urban text inside a cinematic text, but this approach has recently evolved into the study of cinema as a technology of place. From this perspective, Documenting Cityscapes explores the way the city has been depicted by non-fiction filmmakers since the late 1970s, paying particular attention to three aesthetic tendencies: documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits and metafilmic strategies. Through formal analysis of fifteen works from six different countries, this volume investigates how the rise of subjectivity has helped to develop a kind of gaze that is closer to citizens than to those institutions and corporations responsible for recent major transformations. Thus, Documenting Cityscapes reveals the extent to which cinema has ultimately become an agent of urban change, where certain films not only challenge the most controversial policies of late-capitalism but also are able to produce spatiality themselves.