Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age (review)

Since the Lumiere brothers filmed workers leaving the factory and trains pulling into the station, the cinema has been an essentially urban medium. In the 1920s, German and Russian filmmakers explored their cities' architectural and navigational cross-cutting, while in the United States Charlie Chaplin was entranced by urban modern times and city lights. In the 1950s and 1960s, Parisian Situationists compared the unfolding streetscape to a fictitious movie illuminating the screen. Throughout the 20th century the spectacular realms of cinema, architecture and urbanism went hand-in-hand, three old troopers strolling down the boulevard.

In the first of two memorable essays on film in this collection, Ackbar Abbas explores the Hong Kong that informs the work of Ang Lee and Wong Kar Wai. Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon showcases the film industry in that city by masterfully using contemporary digital technology to produce astonishing cyber—kung fu fight sequences. Wong's In the Mood for Love depicts lovers negotiating the city's crowded corridors, staircases and noodle shops. Both directors occupy what the Italian writer Italo Calvino has called "invisible cities," a term applied by Abbas to describe a Hong Kong whose glaring discrepancies of poverty and wealth recall Calvino's imagined dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. In her essay on Naruse Mikio, Catherine Russell calls that Japanese movie director's work from the 1950s "Too Close to Home" for its confining domestic settings. The female protagonists in these movies found that the conditions of the postwar world imposed a particularly, peculiarly Japanese modernity upon their daily lives. Naruse sensitively captured this era and showed how changing times colored all human relations among his films' representative characters.

For some of the writers in the book, ours is a time of chaos for the city, and for others it is a time of challenge. Saskia Sassen reads the city, long the site of "spatialization of power projects, whether political, religious or economic," as requiring new analyses for a global digital age with its new economic circuits, sub-economies and frontiers. Tasha G. Oren calls for a rethinking of many cultural studies assumptions about locality and territoriality that privilege mass media at the expense of other forces. In the rebuilding of Berlin, and in San Diego's Barrio Logan and community mural-rich Chicano Park, Jennifer Jordan finds sites of collective memory put into architectural and spatialized forms. South African architect Jo Noero closes Global Cities by describing the process by which he designed an appropriate building to house the Museum of Apartheid in Port Elisabeth. Here the recent memories of the brutal and unjust apartheid system are captured, preserved and displayed. May all our cities, buildings and civic representations serve to trap and remove past oppression and confinement, asserting themselves at their urban, urbane best as the historic cradles of freedom, growth, creativity and fulfilment.