Category: Films
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Life in Pruitt-Igoe
16th of March, 1972 at 3.00pm precisely. That is when Charles Jencks proclaimed ‘the death of modenism’, as the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis was razed to the ground. Many commentators of architecture and city living in general claimed it was the representative ‘end’ of the Cities of the Future which…
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Avatar: Latour’s NEW favourite film
I recently watched Avatar again for the first time since the cinema. Perhaps it was the 3D extravaganza or maybe the nose-pinchingly obvious imperialist overtones, but I seemed to miss the first time round that one of the main proponents of the film is the intertwining of the human and…
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Conceptualising Fictional Cities
Technology is reproducing cities very rapidly. Or shall I say producing cities? Not artificial cities, but experiential cities that are pure hyper-reality, a simulacrum space par excellence (to mesh Baurdiallardian and Deleuzian language). Reproducing cities is as easy as driving a car with a camera mounted on top and putting the…
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Battlestar Gallactica: A review
Having just finished watching the entire four series of Battlestar Gallactica, rather modestly, the conclusion of the show evoked a wide range of thoughts, emotions, arguments and queries about the nature of society, religion, philosophy and morality. So where to begin? Not much to deal with is there? First things…
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Is ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Latour’s favourite film?
In reading Bruno Latour’s work over the years, one of the overt messages that comes through, and one of his lasting legacies, is the importance he gives to non-humans in society. The actant-networks that constitute the body politic are spun by the constant processes and actions of nonhumans, just as…
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Visualising Cities: Part 4 – Ecstacity
During the course of navigating the gargantuan library of literature and visual material on urban life, finding a book which encapsulates the complexity of the urban condition succinctly and concisely is much like searching for some sort of knitting implement in some sort of stack. This is in part due…
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Visualising Cities: Part 3 – “…starring, Sydney as Nowhere in Particular…”
Carrying on my series of visualising cities (see Part 1 and Part 2), I wanted to focus on one of my specialist cities…. No doubt you have all seen the Matrix films, and no doubt you would have recognised the fact that it was Sydney in the background, playing the…
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Visualising Cities: Part 2
Having described how I think that the image of a city in film can be an interesting and alternative way of capturing its complexity in a previous blog entry, I wanted to elaborate this idea after some interesting comments, most notably from my brother (cheap plug coming up), who hosts…
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Visualising Cities: Part 1
Cities are portrayed in films and television programs in differing ways, with the more acute filmmakers, casting the city as another character in the film – in some cases giving the city a narrative or human characteristics (Frank Miller’s Sin City immediately springs to mind). This, while making good story…
taCity 