Brendan Kredell

This chapter begins with a discussion of the influence of Little Italy's history on Scorsese's work, before turning to establish the theoretical foundation for considering his relationship to and representation of urban space. From there, the author consider four of the director's films such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, After Hours, and Gangs of New York. Chronologically, these films represent a diverse cross section of the director's career, but thematically all are linked in a shared engagement with the city spaces of New York. In offering close readings of the roles of boundary and transgression in these films, the author aims to highlight the important ways in which Scorsese's films focus attention on cinema's engagement with the urban, and helps to think about the ways in which the cinema, as a storytelling medium, helps to produce new understandings of urban space.

With the increasing importance of film and screen media industries to Toronto’s post-industrial economy, the city has encouraged culture-led redevelopment as a potential engine of economic growth. This article charts a trajectory of heightened instrumentalism within the city’s municipal cultural policy since the 1970s, employing a close reading of key policy texts to argue that this embrace of culture on economic terms has enabled policymakers to redefine culture so as to facilitate increased direct governmental support for film and screen media. In the second part of this article, I specifically consider TIFF Bell Lightbox, the new permanent home of the Toronto International Film Festival. Through an analysis of Bell Lightbox, I demonstrate how the rhetoric of economic growth has permeated cultural discourse to the extent that the value of cultural organizations is now largely a function of their economic impact for the city.

This paper explores the implications of urban gentrification in the 1990s and 2000s on the development of the American indie cinema. I argue that these implications have been far ranging, such that we are able to speak of a ‘cinema of gentrification’ during this time period. Using Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer (2009) as representative examples, I show how the films of this cinema developed a vexed relationship with the city and with urban life. In particular, I contend, we can productively read Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) through the prism of gentrification. Following from Michel de Certeau, Neil Smith and others, I argue that Anderson's representation of the city in Tenenbaums marks a break within the history of city cinema, as it denies the social and cultural logics of urban identity by instead reducing city space to mere location.

Among the thirty seven people shot by police in 2014, it is Laquan McDonald’s death that has catalyzed public reaction; thanks to the existence of video documentation, we can see what happened with our own eyes. This seemingly simple observation belies a much more complex set of issues regarding the relationship between policing and media in the contemporary moment. With this roundtable, we seek to investigate those in some greater detail.

As the thirty-fifth Toronto International Film Festival draws to a close this weekend, the star amongst stars towered forty-two stories over the festival-goers beneath it, plebes and Palme D’Or winners alike. This was the year that the long-planned, much talked-about Bell Lightbox finally opened, the new year-round home to TIFF.

Lecture at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis on November 13, 2013.

My research explores how the contemporary American film industry has adopted new strategies of production, distribution, and exhibition in order to exploit emerging urban niche audiences more effectively, at the same time that cities have embraced media industries as an engine for development in a post-industrial economy. By situating my study within a particularly urban context, I argue for a reception-oriented reading of film history that foregrounds the complex dynamics of race, class, and gender at work within cities, and that privileges the geographies of consumption that result from situating cinema within urban space.
With this talk, I will primarily explore one facet of that research: the relationship between urban gentrification and American independent cinema in the post-industrial era. Despite considerable scholarship on both topics, relatively little attention has been paid to the cinema’s place within the important cultural changes wrought upon cities by large-scale gentrification. Here, I will argue for a reading of American indie cinema that specifically situates it within fin-de-millennium “creative class” discourse and what geographer Neil Smith described as the “revanchist” impulse of urban gentrification. I contend that we can better understand the evolution of the specialty film industry by considering it within the context of ongoing change within American cities during the post-industrial era.

Host and moderator of panel discussion on the state of city-focused documentary media at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on March 6, 2013.

How do we socially understand urban media and how has the contemporary political landscape impacted documentary filmmaking? This program is organized by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The first panel features Gordon Quinn and Allan Siegel, moderated by Mark Shiel. A second panel features Michelle Citron and Steve James, moderated by B. Ruby Rich. A final roundtable discussion, with all panelists and moderators, is moderated by Brendan Kredell.