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This book studies a grouping of films set in New York City between 1965 and 1995, reflecting a town besieged by rampant criminality, social distress and physical decay. "Fear City" is a term the NYPD used to label New York as a frightening environment, incapable of securing the safety of its residents. This book not only deals with the social problems evident in New York during this period, but also provides a study of how independent filmmakers were able to capture unsettling urban imagery, capitalizing on feelings of paranoia and dread. The author explores how the tone of these films reflects upon the anti-urbanism that led to the War on Crime, the mass exodus of working-class people from the city and mass incarceration of young Black men.
Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis. The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life—in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture. “Rejecting the easy abstractions and postmodern playfulness of noir and neo-noir criticism, Holmes places 1970s crime films, as he says, ‘in relation to the urban context that was their location, setting, and subject.’ He does this brilliantly, convincingly, and uniquely.” — David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal
A visual history of 100 years of filmmaking in New York City, featuring exclusive interviews with NYC filmmakers Fun City Cinema gives readers an in-depth look at how the rise, fall, and resurrection of New York City was captured and chronicled in ten iconic Gotham films across ten decades: The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), The Naked City (1948), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Taxi Driver (1976), Wall Street (1987), Kids (1995), 25th Hour (2002), and Frances Ha (2012). A visual history of a great American city in flux, Fun City Cinema reveals how these classic films and legendary filmmakers took their inspiration from New York City’s grittiness and splendor, creating what we can now view as “accidental documentaries” of the city’s modes and moods. In addition to the extensively researched and reported text, the book includes both historical photographs and production materials, as well as still-frames, behind-the-scenes photos, posters, and original interviews with Noah Baumbach, Larry Clark, Greta Gerwig, Walter Hill, Jerry Schatzberg, Martin Scorsese, Susan Seidelman, Oliver Stone, and Jennifer Westfeldt. Extensive "Now Playing" sidebars spotlight a handful of each decade’s additional films of note.
New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.
“Glasby anatomizes horror’s scare tactics with keen, lucid clarity across 34 carefully selected main films—classic and pleasingly obscure. 4 Stars.” —Total Film? Horror movies have never been more critically or commercially successful, but there’s only one metric that matters: are they scary? The Book of Horror focuses on the most frightening films of the post-war era—from Psycho (1960) to It Chapter Two (2019)—examining exactly how they scare us across a series of key categories. Each chapter explores a seminal horror film in depth, charting its scariest moments with infographics and identifying the related works you need to see. Including references to more than one hundred classic and contemporary horror films from around the globe, and striking illustrations from Barney Bodoano, this is a rich and compelling guide to the scariest films ever made. “This is the definitive guide to what properly messes us up.” —SFX Magazine The films: Psycho (1960), The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), Suspiria (1977), Halloween (1978), The Shining (1980), The Entity (1982), Angst (1983), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), Ring (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Others (2001), The Eye (2002), Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Shutter (2004), The Descent (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), The Orphanage (2007), [Rec] (2007), The Strangers (2008), Lake Mungo (2008), Martyrs (2008), The Innkeepers (2011), Banshee Chapter (2013), Oculus (2013), The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2015), Terrified (2017), Hereditary (2018), It Chapter Two (2019)
From the Driller Killer - a victim of the original video nasty' panic - to Bad Lieutenant, Ferrara's films have attracted both controversy for their extreme subject matter and admiration for their fine acting: Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Madonna, Lili Taylor and Willem Dafoe all gave their finest performances under Ferrara's direction. Now Brad Stevens has subjected Ferrara's output to exhaustive analysis and uncovers a tender heart beating beneath the excessive imagery.'
An urban history of the city that never sleeps through classic films such as Shaft, Annie Hall, Death Wish, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver, Starring New York showcases the city's lasting contribution to American cinema during a decade fraught with sociocultural changes.
Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.