Course Description This M.phil seminar looks at the representation of the city in cinema. We will explore the links between urban and cinematic space across a range of thematic, historical and cultural concerns. The imagined city of cinema is born at the intersection of mental, physical and social space. In this imagined city we get access to the fleeting, the ephemeral and the transient that shapes the rhythm and movement of contemporary city life. Through readings on the city and screenings of a range of films from across the world, the course will conceptually and historically journey through the traffic of signs that move between the physical spaces of the city and its cinematic production. Cinema will be situated as an innovative and powerful archive of urban life. Requirements a) Readings and class participation in discussions. This will count for 25% of the final grade b) One presentation in class based on specific readings and films to be submitted as a 10 page short paper. This paper is due the week after your presentation in class. The class presentation and the paper will count for 25 % of the final grade. c) One presentation of at least three curated clips that will go into your final paper. This presentation should have a clear cut argument and a methodological plan based on a sustained engagement with a set of readings and a selection of films. This will count for 20% of the final grade. d) A 12-15 page final written paper based on the last presentation of curated clips. This will count for 30% of the final grade. The final paper is due on the 5th of May 2016. Grade Plan – a + b = 50% or 2 credits and c + d = 50 % or 2 credits. Total Credits includes, a+b+c+d = 4 Note: Both written papers should follow a standard academic format complete with bibliography, citations and footnotes.

Arguably, architecture recorded through the cinematic apparatus provides an intersection between multiple understandings of fetish. The Bradbury Building in cinematic representation is the signifier which denies its signified (the actual building) and therefore creates a fetish in its synecdochic relationship between reality and representation. Jean Baudrillard affirms that this kind of fetish represents a ‘passion for the code’ – an empowerment through acts of abstract manipulation on subjects and objects and a “fundamental articulation of the ideological process” (Baudrillard, 91-101). The multiplicity of understandings on the term ‘fetish’ constitutes a semantic distortion for Baudrillard. The distortion that Baudrillard outlines aptly explains fetish in architecture. The cathedral once acted as a symbolic node of power to evoke the presence of God. In cinema, the Bradbury Building is used to evoke the presence of cinema as a symbolic node of power – the cinematic representation of architecture constitutes the fetish, the actual building denotes nothing. The Bradbury Building is a conduit for ideas of cinema and can thus be referred to as an architectural fetish object as well as cinematic fetish location.

This paper examines how the notion of the archive is reconstructed in the context of a multimedia database for architecture and the city. It investigates the aesthetic and ideological constitution of the archive as a list, the nature of the historical evidence that is rescued from oblivion and transcribed into the conceptual setting of the database and, finally, the database as a storytelling mechanism that allows for multiple narrations. A pilot database comprising primarily Greek newsreels from the 1950s and 1960s acts as the touchstone against which our research questions are raised. The results represent work in progress.

statement Our primary opportunity for visual and auditory experience of utopia/dystopia is through the medium of film, in which architecture plays the primary or " starring " role, a character that makes the utopia/dystopia manifest. In this paper, film utopia/dystopias is examined and their architectural characteristics assessed to understand how architecture and design brings to life the utopian/dystopian world in cinema. Topic Utopian/Dystopian Design Scope The design and creation of utopian communities such as New Harmony, Indiana, and of utopias never realized, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, rest on the belief that architecture has an important role to play in shaping human behavior for the betterment of those who inhabit it. The carefully considered architecture of such communities can result in places where justice, fairness, freedom, privacy, spirituality, harmony, and happiness can be attained. A parallel argument would be that carefully designed architecture can also contribute to the creation of dystopia: places where anxiety, fear, oppression, alienation, surveillance, spiritual suppression, disharmony, and the crushing power of the state or the corporation are the result. Readers can " experience " such dystopias in the books of George Orwell in 1984, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, our primary opportunity for visual and auditory experiences of planned or designed utopias/dystopias is through film, in which the architecture actually plays a part, a character, to manifest the utopia/dystopia. This experience is particularly evident in the case of several films were utopia and dystopia are depicted simultaneously in the same film, and how their depiction is made possible through architecture and design. Juhani Pallasmaa describes the use of architecture in film and the structure of film itself as " amplifiers " to transport the viewer into utopian or dystopian experiences: " Cinematic architecture evokes and sustains specific mental states; the architecture of film is an architecture of terror, anguish, suspense, boredom, alienation, melancholy, happiness or ecstasy, depending on the essence of the particular cinematic narrative and the director's intention. Space and architectural imagery are the amplifiers of specific emotions. " 1 This paper examines film utopias/dystopias and 1 Juhani Pallasmaa,The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2001), p. 7.

From our forthcoming special issue, Geospatial Memory (Media Theory Media Theory 2/1), Matthew Flintham describes the immersive, location-based urban experiences as well as the uncanny and unexpected psychological responses of users of geolocative media. Abstract This paper will describe BATTERCTRAX, an experimental geolocative media project undertaken during 2014. It examines the possibility that cinematic media (in this case audio from films) can be repurposed within an immersive, mobile heritage guide. The paper will describe the project in broad terms but will focus on certain unexpected and unusual perceptual effects generated during the test phase of the project. BATTERCTRAX began as an adjunct to a larger academic initiative called Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface and Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge, a collaboration between Liverpool, Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and English Heritage. Amongst many outcomes, Cine-matic Geographies built a comprehensive database of films shot in the London district of Battersea, which created ways to mobilise historic moving images for the analysis of social and material change in cities. As a tangential outcome of this project, BATTERCTRAX was a mobile phone app that played audio content from feature films, documentaries and TV shows at the places where they were originally recorded. The user would walk through clusters of GPS-enabled ge-ofences in the test zone of Battersea Park, triggering a succession of historic cinematic sounds from across the 20 century. However, by anchoring fictional audio content to the places of their origin, BATTERCTRAX appeared to create a sense of dissonance between sensory stimulants, destabilising a sense of perceptual cohesion in the user. These novel effects lead the researchers to speculate that such technology could not only be used to construct highly immersive, location based urban experiences, but that it could also trigger psychoactive effects in ways that media developers and users had not anticipated. This paper will propose that geolocative media has the ability to tap into unexplored realms of " collective " cultural memory, but can also elicit unexpected psychological and perceptual responses.

"Parallel Cities is the title of a research project in which film is a central instrument to identify and analyse architectural problems. Film and video are traditionally considered tools for representation and are usually used in the realm of architecture in ways similar to presentation models, perspective renderings and architectural photography. There are however other tools that might be even more important within the architectural process, those which drive reflection about space and architectural problem solving: sketches, conceptual models, photography documenting process. All of these tools are crucial to the architects’ design process. One of the fundamental purposes of this research project is to promote the use of film and video as design tools. Other research fields, such as anthropology, use film and video as a research instrument. In anthropology, ethnographic film is a research tool which had a far reaching impact in contemporary documentary cinema. In architecture, film was used as a research instrument in William Whyte’s “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” (1980), which has served as the main source for the development of our project. We propose to observe the social interaction that occurs in recently modified public spaces – such as Largo do Intendente in Lisbon – bringing forth new patterns of occupation, as well other architectural problems that are still open. Thus, video becomes an instrument that allows the architectural project to be continually questioned and redesigned, and it extends the span of the architectural project into its built and occupied existence."