While urban films often reinforce spatial stereotypes, they can also produce a resistant reading that helps transgress spatial boundaries, especially in in urban contexts where spatial inequalities and urban divisions are stark. This book reveals the nature of urban film's influence through the lens and space of Johannesburg.

Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs.

Exploration, intertwined with home-seeking, has always defined America. Corbin argues that films about significant cultural landscapes in America evoke a sense of travel for their viewers. These virtual travel experiences from the mid-1970s through the 1990s built a societal map of "popular multiculturalism" through a movie-going experience.

Media depictions of community are enormously influential on wider popular opinion about how people would like to live. In this study, Stephen Rowley examines depictions of ideal communities in Hollywood films and television and explores the implications of attempts to build real-world counterparts to such imagined places. He focuses on the ideals of small towns and suburbs featured during and shortly after World War II, tracking how these were an inspiration for post-World War II suburban development.

The 1950s saw perhaps the largest number of American films set on and around the US-Mexico border of any period of the twentieth century. Many of these films engaged with Cold War politics as they explored the relationship between the US and Mexico through ideas of romance, revolution, and regulation. With an analysis of Cold War era films including Border Incident, Where Danger Lives, and Touch of Evil, Stephanie Fuller illustrates how cinema across genres developed an understanding of what the US-Mexico border meant within the American cultural imaginary and the ways in which it worked to...

The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter provides a new map of twentieth-century human-animal relations by exploring how the zoo, that modern apparatus for presenting living animals to human audiences, has itself been represented across a diverse range of moving image media.

Cinema and the moving image contribute to viewers' understanding of cities and their topographies in a variety of ways. The contributors chart the many trajectories and points of contact between cinema and its topographical context and show that filmic studies are rooted in the sites of production.

In examining the relationship between the spectacular, iconic and vibrant New York of the musical and the off-screen history and geography of the real city--this book explores how the city shaped the genre and equally how the genre shaped representations of the city. Shearer argues that while the musical was for many years a prime vehicle for the idealization of urban density, the transformation New York underwent after World War II constituted a major challenge to its representation. Including analysis of 42nd Street, Swing Time, Cover Girl, On the Town, The...

Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs.

This collection explores the emergence of new spatialities and subjectivities in Brazilian films produced from the 1990s onwards, a period that became known as the retomada, but especially in the cinema of the new millennium.