engleski

The Transition from Urban to Apocalyptic Spatiality in American Film

The idea of spatiality is one of the important paradigms in both American literature and film. From its very beginning, the American film has balanced between the ideas of depicting serene rural communities and dynamic, frightening urban landscapes. Two films from the late twenties – The Crowd and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - epitomize the transition from rural to urban setting, exploring the rise of industrialization and gradual urban development. Echoing the ongoing political crisis, films from the forties and fifties have explored the idea of radical psychological states in modern metropolis, investigating the landscape of the mind, as opposed to action-oriented heroes of mainstream American films. The state of paranoia, induced by the nuclear threat in the world, is vividly described in classics of film noir – The Lady from Shanghai and Kiss Me Deadly, with their embedded apocalyptic subtext, where cities are seen as zones of both aggressive urban expansion but also as potential zones of nuclear annihilation. The Incredible Shrinking Man, a classic of science-fiction genre, goes even further in exploring the idea of technology creating radical spatiality. These ideas are susceptible to many theoretical frameworks, as exemplified by Lefebvre, Foucault, and especially Soja, who devotes much of his work to exploring urban spatiality, especially in his analysis of Los Angeles.

spatiality ; urban landscape ; metropolis ; science fiction ; technology

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