Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016

In light of Deleuze’s conception of cinema as an autonomous thinking machine – a ‘spiritual automaton’ in which moving images are substituted for human thought – the article presents the cinema as a pre-eminent thinker of the city. It contextualizes a range of scholarship committed to exploring the potential of Deleuze’s thought in relation to the ‘cinematic city’ – precipitating a Deleuzian encounter with a process that we have chosen to call cinematicity: the automatic thinking of the city by the cinema. In the course of their remarkable co-evolution, cinema’s unhinging of space– time has projected the unhinging of the space–time of the city, forcing its inhabitants to think otherwise about space, time and the human condition in the machine age. Taking these notions as a point of departure, the contributions to this issue, which variously serve to explicate the connections between city and cinema, are introduced, framed by this sense of cinematicity.

In his two-volume study of the cinema, Deleuze develops a novel conception of film in terms of its relation to the intensive becomings of thought. Great directors, for Deleuze, are those who invent images that stage disruptions to the habits of ordinary perception, forcing us to think and feel differently. It is precisely in terms of the production of a different style of cinematic thinking that we might frame encounters with the films of director Ozu Yasujiro¯ , who I argue inaugurates a cinema in which contemplation replaces the primacy and certainties of action. Following Deleuze’s ([1968] 2004) rethinking of ‘contemplation’ as immanent event rather than subjective transcendence, I explore how Ozu’s cinema generates transformative modes of thinking the city, uncoupling urban spaces from the requirements of dramatic action such that they become expressive sites of indeterminate signs and affects. By dramatizing these immanent thresholds of affective and spatial becomings, I argue Ozu’s contemplative cinema directs us towards new possible openings of thought to a politics of the virtual.

Although truly singular artworks emerging from distinct creative universes, Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum (2008) and Jia Zhangke’s Shanghai World Expo film Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010) disclose common ethico-aesthetic features and artistic principles. Adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage allows us to perceive how these outstanding farrago projects, with their rough and broken edges, share homologous ‘abstract diagrams’; which become responsible for introducing discordant mental relations into China’s processual cityscapes. Viewing both works as state-sanctioned vehicles of Chinese ‘modernity’, I explore how Wang and Jia’s affective repurposing of urban detritus or salvaged cinematic material allows their sensational artworks to emit signals that subtly decompose the ‘main melodies’ associated with China’s embrace of modernization. Drawing on a hybrid model of Deleuze’s image regimes from Cinema 1 (2005a) and Cinema 2 (2005b) further permits us to perceive how these macropolitical ‘monuments’ critique the very narratives of progress that their commissioners charge them with celebrating.

In Cinéma 2: l’image-temps (1985), Gilles Deleuze remarks that Jean Renoir’s pioneering use of deep space makes manifest a cracked crystal of time that structures the director’s oeuvre. Deleuze states that within Renoir’s crystal, characters constantly negotiate a tension between the ‘dead roles’ of the past and the possibility for the creation of a genuinely new future. Deleuze’s analysis, although insightful, suggests that Renoir’s mise-en-scène articulates the cracked crystal’s temporal properties regardless of the narrative setting. Drawing on Renoir’s photography of Paris in La Chienne (1931), this article demonstrates the import of setting, specifically urban topography, towards Renoir’s dialectic of imprisonment and escape. In La Chienne, formal tensions between Renoir’s mise-en-scène of the theatre and Paris foreground the city’s role as an active catalyst of the characters’ individual trajectories in a world where social identity remains crucially unfixed. Central to this analysis is the motif of the frame, which is appropriated in conjunction with deep space and off-screen space in the city in order to emphasize the impossibility of confining urban narrative to the rigid confines of the proscenium arches that bookend the protagonist’s drama. This article ultimately argues that Renoir’s crystalline image is not only the product of camera techniques and characterization, but also of the mutually affective relationship between urban physical and social space.

In the 1950s and 1960s, western metropolises were undergoing major changes in their structure, some of the biggest caused by adapting urban infrastructure to the new society based on individual mobility and progress. This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the city by focusing on a category of independent cinema that most directly relates to its everyday urban environment. Working with Deleuze’s taxonomic approach of interrogating filmic images regarding the concepts they produce, the co-production of filmic and urban space in 1960s New York underground cinema is analysed through a close reading of Peter Emanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence, a study of the bohemian Greenwich Village milieu and its social types. The production of the urban experience through the filmic form of the balade is the main focus. In asking how the movements of a drifting protagonist produce a spatiality that relates to constitutive societal conflicts, this article argues that the filmic images contribute to the way its viewers perceive their urban environment, in that they generate new concepts, not only on cinema but also on the city.

In 2011, Chantal Akerman and Nicole Brenez engaged in a series of conversations, published as an extensive transcript entitled ‘Chantal Akerman: The pajama interview’. Essentially this transcript is a uniquely personal and in-depth enquiry into the film-maker’s life, thus marking a possible starting point from which to analyse Akerman’s Hotel Monterey (1972) and News from Home (1976). Both films were shot in 1970s New York, almost entirely by cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and are ideal for contrasting such Deleuzian concepts as the ‘any-space-whatever’, space(s) of transience/transition and milieux (the hotel: its lobby, floors, corridors, etc.; public transportation: subways, overground lines, cabs, the ferry; etc.). In both films, Akerman’s timing and framing of shots – above all the reduction to an extended opsign (Hotel Monterey) – creates autonomous, material realities and spaces for the spectator to contemplate in a cinema of the seer par excellence.

In this article I mobilize Deleuze to explore transformative relationships between filmic and urban space in Secret Cinema’s pop-up screening of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). Secret Cinema is a company that turns urban sites into dramatized versions of the films they screen, and this unusual practice of exhibition raises fascinating questions about how film texts and urban sites come into contact. In particular, I respond to two crucial questions that are provoked by Secret Cinema’s ‘immersive’ screening of The Third Man. First, I consider the impact this kind of filmic experience has on ways of seeing the urban, drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the any-space-whatever. Second, I take up Deleuze’s ideas about the out-of-field and its differing functions within the movement-image and the time-image to address how Secret Cinema’s dramatized site of spectatorship reciprocally transforms the meaning of film text and urban space. By addressing these two questions, and with comparative reference to early cinema’s practices of exhibition, I develop a nuanced reading of Secret Cinema’s screening as a co-production of filmic and urban space.

This article presents a dialogue on the disappearing gardens of Fez and the garden as a concept as they both relate to a film in the making: GARDENSOFFEZ. We approach the garden as an ‘other space’, one that fosters different worlds, and wonder how these can relate. Our thinking passes through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, allowing us to move from spaces to worlds in affective terms, to Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, where worlds can come together, slip into one another, to create new worlds. By, on the one side, looking at the actual situation of Rajae, the main character in the film, interacting with the gardens, and on the other side the virtual gardens of Jorge Luis Borges, we seek for how these newly emerging worlds can be seen as comprehensively material, being both actual and virtual at the same time.