Saint Etienne, France

8-9 November 2018

Argument

Cinema, an art of the masses yet also a very bourgeois art form, was born in the wake of industrialisation in the late nineteenth century. The representation of the city has already been the object of numerous studies in various relevant fields but that of the industrial city seems more of an uncharted territory. Yet, since its early days, cinema has presented the city like the place of the machine, technology and factory work as in Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon, Louis Lumière, 1895; Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927 or Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin, 1936, to name but a few examples. It is therefore hardly surprising that the industrial city is widely represented on screen.

Whatever the period, culture and genre considered (documentary and fiction such as social realism, western, science-fiction, steampunk uchronia, etc.) cinema has always looked at these urban territories with aesthetic, spatial, social and political intents. The questions raised are thus diverse and encourage a multidisciplinary approach. That is why scholars from film studies but also researchers from other fields of expertise who are interested in cinema (cultural studies, urban studies, architecture, urbanism, sociology, history, arts, musicology, linguistics, etc.) are welcome to submit a paper on the topic.

The theme of the conference, “Screening the Industrial City”, offers topics for discussion that may include but are not limited to:

1/ Temporality and spatiality

the expanding city (industrialisation, mill/company towns, boom towns, industrial cities); the declining city (deindustrialisation, post-industrial cities, ghost towns); the places and/or non-places of the industrial city (real, rebuilt or imaginary cities used as locations: architecture, urban design, etc.).

2/ Directors associated with industrial cities or territories

Terence Davies and Liverpool, Shane Meadows and Nottingham, Ben Affleck and Charlestown, the Dardenne brothers and Seraing, Robert Guédiguian and l’Estaque, Ken Loach and the industrial North, etc.

3/ Topoi

tradition/modernity, bustle/stasis, circularity/sinuosity, surface/subterranean-ness, fluxes/aesthetics of emptiness, disintegration and the poetics of ruins, etc.

4/ Sounds, music and words

original soundtracks, sound tracks and effects, dialogues, composers, the presence of instruments and/or musicians and/or records in films, etc.

5/ Living in the industrial city

 daily life (place attachment, solitude or lack of privacy, dilapidation/slums or housing shortage, the city of exile as the unheimlich/uncanny); the impact of housing on the habits/habitus of working-class people and their feeling about the evolution/transformation of that type of urbanism.

6/ Politics and city/urban policies

cinema as the witness of regeneration campaigns; the debates around industrial heritage (museumisation, gentrification, social cleansing); the industrial city as the circulation of fluxes vs the post-industrial city as the growing fixity of social boundaries (security and increasing privatisation of former public spaces, gated communities, CCTV); cinema as memory of/nostalgia for the industrial city to go against a form of material and symbolical deprivation, to resist an official memory?

Proposals (300 words with a short biography indicating your current position, affiliation and research interests) to anne.lise.marin.lamellet@univ- st-etienne.fr and georges-henry.laffont@st-etienne.archi.fr

should be sent by 31 January 2018.

Notification will be sent by April 2018. The conference will be held in Saint Etienne, France, on the 8th and 9th of November 2018. A selection of papers will be published.

Keynote speaker

Thierry Paquot, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Urbanism (Paris Est) and a philosopher, author of many books about the city, architecture, urbanisation and film. Co-editor of La ville au cinéma. Encyclopédie, Cahiers du cinéma, 2005.

Scientific Committee

• Jean-François Baillon (Université de Bordeaux) Isabelle Cases (Université de Perpignan Via Domitia)
• Andrea Grunert (Université de Bochum)
• Georges-Henry Laffont (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint Etienne)
• Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet (Université de Saint Etienne)
• Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poitiers)
• Stéphanie Schwerter (Université de Valenciennes)
• Nicolas Tixier (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble)
• Vincent Veschambre (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Lyon)

Organising Committee

• Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet (CIEREC),
• Georges-Henry Laffont (IMU-EVS, Transformations)

Indicative bibliography

Alsayyad Nezar, Cinematic Urbanism: a History of the Modern from Reel to Real, Routledge, 2006.

Althabe Gérard/Comolli Jean-Louis, Regards sur la ville, Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1994. Barillet Julie et al., La Ville au cinéma, Artois Presses Université, 2005.

Bobrowski Thomas, Architecture, urbanisme et cinéma ou la ville mise en scène : Critique architecturale et urbaine par le cinéma de fiction, Omniscriptum, 2014.

Brunsdon Charlotte, London in Cinema, British Film Institute, 2007.

Feigelson Kristian/ Creton Laurent (dir.), Villes cinématographiques : Ciné-lieux, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2007.

Jousse Thierry/Paquot Thierry, La ville au cinéma. Encyclopédie, Cahiers du cinéma, 2005. Koeck Richard/Roberts Les (eds.), The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Mennel Barbara, Cities and Cinema: Critical Introductions to Urbanism and the City, Routledge, 2008.

Mongin Olivier, La Ville des flux, Fayard, 2013.

Neumann Dietrich, Film Architecture: from Metropolis to Blade Runner, Prestel, 1999. Paquot Thierry, Désastres urbains : les villes meurent aussi, Paris, La Découverte, 2015. Prakash Gyan, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, Princeton University Press, 2010.