Searching for the City: Cinema and the Critique of Urban Space in the Films of Keiller, Cohen, and Steinmetz and Chanan

Abstract

In this chapter 1 am interested in exploring how the city is invoked in cinema by means of its absence. I examine three films which in different ways study the city — its spaces, lived experiences and representations — by looking at examples of its social, cultural and physical decline, disappearance and general absence. In their critiques of this lost sense of the city, Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), Jem Cohen’s Chain (2004) and George Steinmetz and Michael Chanan’s Detroit, Ruin of a City (2006) call attention to the disappearance of particular urban forms and particular ways of living, including the disempowerment of local governance, economic disinvestment and physical abandonment of space, a loss of local identity and the sprawling growth of non-place, as well as changes in the affective relations of everyday life to urban space. In different ways, these recent films draw attention to a perceived crisis of urbanity. In different spatial and temporal contexts, and through the use of various narrative forms and formal techniques, each of these films raises the potential spectre that ‘the city’ as a form of dwelling and mode of sociality, is no longer to be found.