The Modern City in World Cinema
Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu
The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural divide; cities and gendered, racial, and class divides; urban planning and urban space; film as a particular medium, with specific parameters, in the broader age of media; film as mass entertainment and as revolutionary propaganda.
Introduction: The Modern City in World Cinema
Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu
Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Third Front Trilogy”
Xuesong Shao
The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology of Hong Kong Cinema
Vivian P. Y. Lee
The City in Early Alternative Arab Cinema
Nadia Yaqub
Paris Centrifuge: Cléo de 5 à 7 in Black and White, or: The Ills of Colonialism
Jeff Fort
Fear and Loathing in São Paulo: Slum Metaphysics in the “Coffin Joe” Triptych (1964–2008)
Antonio Barrenechea
Reflections on Afghanistan
Afghanistan: It Wasn’t a War—That’s Why We Lost It
Marcia Pally
Afghanistan, “We Hardly Knew Ye”: Why the Lessons of Vietnam Were Not Learned
David A. Westbrook
Reviews
Ecocritique in the Anthropocene
Garnet Kindervater
The Path Least Traveled: An Alternative to Current Critiques of Neoliberalism
Alexis Carré
Self-Hating Nazis
Gabriel Noah Brahm
