The American City in Crime Films

2025 Cities and towns in motion pictures

Author : Andrew J. Baranauskas
Release : 2025
Genre : Cities and towns in motion pictures
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 851/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The American City in Crime Films by : Andrew J. Baranauskas

Download or read book The American City in Crime Films written by Andrew J. Baranauskas. This book was released on 2025. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Analysing crime movies set in Detroit, Miami, Boston, Las Vegas, and Gotham City, this book examines the role that American cities play as characters in crime films. Furthering our awareness of how popular media shapes public understanding of crime and justice in American cities, this book contributes to scholarship in popular criminology by providing insight into the development of criminological theory in cinematic representations of crime and urban space. Each chapter focuses on a different city, starting with an overview of the social, economic, and political history of the city and proceeding to discuss the cinematic depiction of crime and justice in the city. At the heart of each chapter is a discussion of themes that are common across films set in each city. For each theme, the book makes connections to the criminological theory discussed in that chapter and concludes by focusing on real-world implications that stem from the social construction of urban crime in crime films. Bridging the gap between criminology and media studies, The American City in Crime Films will appeal to students of criminology and media studies, and urban sociology/criminology"--

Welcome to Fear City

2018-09-26 History

Author : Nathan Holmes
Release : 2018-09-26
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 211/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Welcome to Fear City by : Nathan Holmes

Download or read book Welcome to Fear City written by Nathan Holmes. This book was released on 2018-09-26. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. 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 lifein 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. Rejecting the easy abstractions and postmodern playfulness of noir and neo-noir criticism, Holmes places 1970s crime films, as he says, in relation to the urban context that was their location, setting, and subject. He does this brilliantly, convincingly, and uniquely. David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

The American City in the Cinema

2017-07-28 Performing Arts

Author : James A. Clapp
Release : 2017-07-28
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 063/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The American City in the Cinema by : James A. Clapp

Download or read book The American City in the Cinema written by James A. Clapp. This book was released on 2017-07-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American city and the American movie industry grew up together in the early decades of the twentieth century, making film an ideal medium through which to better understand urban life. Exploiting the increasing popularity of large metropolitan cities and urban lifestyle, movies chronicled the city and the stories it generated. In this volume, urbanist James A. Clapp explores the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema within the dimensions of time and space.A variety of themes and actualizations have been repeated throughout the history of the cinema, including the roles of immigrants, women, small towns, family farms, and suburbia; and urban childhoods, family values, violent crime, politics, and dystopic futures. Clapp examines the different ways in which the city has been characterized as well as how it has been portrayed as a character itself.Some of the films discussed include Metropolis, King Kong, West Side Story, It's a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, Rebel without a Cause, American Graffiti, Blade Runner, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, LA Confidential, Sunrise, Crash, American History X, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Deer Hunter, and many more. This work will be enjoyed by urban specialists, moviegoers, and those interested in American, cultural, and film studies.

Crime Films

2002-08-15 Performing Arts

Author : Thomas Leitch
Release : 2002-08-15
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 710/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Crime Films by : Thomas Leitch

Download or read book Crime Films written by Thomas Leitch. This book was released on 2002-08-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.

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