Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
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. Even with this wide range of topics and their themes, there are many more to be explored, herein and elsewhere, so complex and rich are the relations of the urban to the cinematic.