Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City Circa 1968

Drawing connections between urban and architecture studies and cinema studies, the selections in this uneven but often insightful collection of academic essays look at the cinematic portrayal of nine cities in relation to the political protests of 1968. Gaetana Marrone writes about the portrayal of Milan in 1960s films such as Rocco and His Brothers and Teorema with fluency and flair, revealing how filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini used the northern industrial center to critique post-WWII Italy’s “economic miracle.” Stephen Barber also does fine work looking at how two 1969 titles, Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses, captured Tokyo’s urban landscape after a period of “wide-ranging architectural expansion” and during a period of “outbreaks of irrepressible violence” between student activists and police. Unfortunately, there is also some unclear writing, often resulting from an overreliance on ill-defined jargon: Jennifer Stob, in her opening essay on Paris, refers to détournement multiple times before defining this term from the radical situationist movement. Editor Shiel’s introduction also tends toward the obscure, but he redeems himself with a deeply researched essay about Los Angeles. Though at times hard going, this collection will yield some enriching gems of scholarship to the serious film scholar. (July)