Footnote #51 - Cinema and the City

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this consideration of the many relationships that cinema can have with - and to - the city. Building on their recent episode on Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007), Chris and Alex reflect on those scholars who have placed cinema in dialogue with issues related to space, urban design, and sociology, and who ask questions about how a city is represented onscreen, how its spaces are organised and mapped, and the stakes of re-animating a ‘real’ space to transform an otherwise authentic and accessible locale. Topics include how cities can and do become different through their rendition via animation and fantasy; cinephilic cinema cultures that unfold within urban spaces; filmmaking as a form of tourism and the spectacle of the touristic gaze; and the fictionalising of real cities to create an imagined and imaginary place.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

• Brunsdon, Charlotte. 2006. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City Since 1945. London: BFI Publishing.

• Clarke, David B. 1997. The Cinematic City. London and New York: Routledge.

• Highmore, Ben. 2013. “Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes.” Cultural Politics 9, no. 3: 323–336.

• Hirsch, Pam, and Chris O’Rourke, eds. 2017. London on Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Napper, Lawrence. 2009. “There’s No Place Like London: London Musicals and the Traffic in Souls.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 6, no. 2: 220–231.

• Shearer, Martha. 2016. New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. 2001. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

• Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. 2003. Screening the City. London & New York: Verso.

• Shiel, Mark. 2012. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles. London: Reaktion Books.

• Young, Jingan. 2022. Soho on Screen - Cinematic Spaces of Bohemia and Cosmopolitanism, 1948-1963. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.