Welcome to fear city : crime film, crisis, and the urban imagination / Nathan Holmes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holmes, Nathan, 1977- author.

Series:

SUNY series, horizons of cinema

The SUNY series, horizons of cinema

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cities and towns in motion pictures.

City and town life in motion pictures.

Crime films--United States--History and criticism.

Crime films.

United States--Social life and customs--20th century.

United States.

Manners and customs.

United States--In motion pictures.

Motion pictures.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 232 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018]

Summary:

Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life--in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture. Nathan Holmes is a New York-based scholar and teacher, with a PhD in film and media studies from the University of Chicago.

Contents:

Introduction: Crime film and the messy city

Parking garage, apartment, disco, skyscraper: Alan J. Pakula's banal modernity

Everyone here is a cop: urban spectatorship in the super cop cycle

Detroit 9000 and Hollywood's Midwest

Bystander effects: Death wish and the Taking of Pelham one two three

Conclusion: The lure of the city.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438471211

1438471211

OCLC:

1010544720