"Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City" is a valuable introduction to one of the most influential of film movements. Exploring the roots and causes of neorealism, particularly the effects of the Second World War, as well as its politics and style, Mark Shiel examines the portrayal of the city and the legacy left by filmmakers such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. Films studied include "Rome, Open City" (1945), "Paisan" (1946), "The Bicycle Thief" (1948), and "Umberto D." (1952).

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the worldwide mass protest movements of 1968-against war, imperialism, racism, poverty, misogyny, and homophobia-the exciting anthology Architectures of Revolt explores the degree to which the real events of political revolt in the urban landscape in 1968 drove change in the attitudes and practices of filmmakers and architects alike. In and around 1968, as activists and filmmakers took to the streets, commandeering public space, buildings, and media attention, they sought to re-make the urban landscape as an expression of utopian longing or as a dystopian critique of the established order. In Architectures of Revolt, the editor and contributors chronicle city-specific case studies from Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The films discussed range from avant-garde and agitprop shorts to mainstream narrative feature films. All of them share a focus on the city and, often, particular streets and buildings as places of political contestation and sometimes violence, which the medium of cinema was uniquely equipped to capture. Contributors include: Stephen Barber, Stanley Corkin, Jesse Lerner, Jon Lewis, Gaetana Marrone, Jennifer Stob, Andrew Webber, and the editor.

The city has long been an important location for film-makers. Visually compelling and always "modern," it is the perfect metaphor for man's place in the contemporary world.
In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse range of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and paradigmatic urban experience in Europe and North America since the early twentieth century. Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, Prague and Warsaw--sites of dramatic upheaval in the 1920s-1930s, and again in the 1970s-1980s--feature strongly in the first part of the book. In the cinematic representation of these cities, modernist experimentation combined with social and political change to produce such memorable films as "The Man with the Movie Camera," " Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City," " Berlin Alexanderplatz" and, more recently, the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jan svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. The different but comparable space of the North American city since World War Two provides the primary focus for the second part of the book. Here, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto provide the settings for an investigation of the relationship between cinema and race, and cinema and postmodern global capitalism, in a comprehensive range of films from "Point Blank," " Medium Cool," " Network "and" Annie Hall "in the 1960s and 1970s, to "Boyz N the Hood," " Falling Down," " Pulp Fiction," " Safe]," " Crash "and" The End of Violence" in the 1990s.
Throughout the book, the cinema's artistic encounter with the city always intersects with a social and political engagement in which urgent issues of class, race, sexuality, the environment, liberty, capital, and totalitarianism are everywhere at stake.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the worldwide mass protest movements of 1968-against war, imperialism, racism, poverty, misogyny, and homophobia-the exciting anthology Architectures of Revolt explores the degree to which the real events of political revolt in the urban landscape in 1968 drove change in the attitudes and practices of filmmakers and architects alike. In and around 1968, as activists and filmmakers took to the streets, commandeering public space, buildings, and media attention, they sought to re-make the urban landscape as an expression of utopian longing or as a dystopian critique of the established order. In Architectures of Revolt, the editor and contributors chronicle city-specific case studies from Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The films discussed range from avant-garde and agitprop shorts to mainstream narrative feature films. All of them share a focus on the city and, often, particular streets and buildings as places of political contestation and sometimes violence, which the medium of cinema was uniquely equipped to capture. Contributors include: Stephen Barber, Stanley Corkin, Jesse Lerner, Jon Lewis, Gaetana Marrone, Jennifer Stob, Andrew Webber, and the editor.