CFP: Cinematicity: City and Cinema after Deleuze

CFP: Cinematicity: City and Cinema after Deleuze

Organizers: David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, Richard G. Smith

This session focuses on the ‘co-production’ of filmic and urban space. That term, as it features in the conference theme, relates to knowledge – proposing that ‘new encounters are disrupting conceptions of where knowledge resides.’ Engaging Deleuze’s discussions of cinema, this session questions the framing of co-production in terms of dwelling. The reciprocal presupposition of cinema and city would seem, rather, to embody a sense of becoming. Thus, Deleuze’s conceptions of the cinemas of the movement-image and time-image recall Lewis Mumford’s claim that, ‘In the city, time becomes visible.’ How does cinema think the city, and vice-versa, to generate new, transformative senses of cinematicity? Contributions exploring the connections between cinematic and urban space are invited, potentially including work on early cinema and living pictures; considerations of specific cities, films or genres; conceptions of city and cinema as spiritual automata; and a multiplicity of other creative conceptualizations of cinematicity.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words by 14th February to: 

Stephen Vilaseca’s Barcelonan Okupas [new book just published]

Barcelonan Okupas: Squatter Power! is the first book to combine close-readings of the representations of Spanish squatters known as okupas with the study of everyday life, built environment, and city planning in Barcelona. Stephen Vilaseca broadens the scope of Spanish cultural studies by integrating into it notions of embodied cognition and affect that respond to the city before and against the fixed relations of capitalism. Social transformation, as demonstrated by the okupas, is possible when city and art interrelate, not through capital or the urbanization of consciousness, but through bodily thought. The okupas reconfigure the way thoughts, words, images and bodily responses are linked by evoking and communicating the idea of free exchange and openness through art (poetry, music, performance art, the plastic arts, graffiti, urban art and cinema); and by acting out and rehearsing these ideas in the practice of squatting. The okupas challenge society to differentiate the images and representations instituted by state domination or capitalist exploitation from the subversive potential of imagination. The okupas unify theory and practice, word and body, in pursuit of a positive, social vision that might serve humanity and lead the way out of the current problems caused by capitalism.

[Click here to listen to a podcast interview with Stephen Vilaseca]

[Click here to go to the book’s Amazon page]

005 – Los Angeles and Hollywood – Kooistra reads the Urban Sexual Economy through Films Novels and the Courts – Urban Cultural Studies Podcasts

UCS 005 Kooistra on Prostitution in Hollywood/Los Angeles: Films, Novels and the Courts Kooistra (13 August 2013)  Conversational interview inspired by scholar AnneMarie Kooistra’s article “The Harlot City?: Prostitution in Hollywood, 1920-1940,” forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (1.1, 2013). Drawing on the titular nickname introduced by Carey McWilliams in 1927, topics range from specific films, novels and the famed ‘Love-Mart’ case of alleged ‘Hollywood madam’ Olive Clark Day to the theories of geographers Mike Davis/Edward Soja and historian Sharon Ullman–in exploration of the city’s modern urban sexual economy.