Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York

Cortland Rankin is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University, USA. His research interests include the relationship between film and postindustrial American urbanism as well as war cinema and media, particularly as it concerns film and television of the Korean War.

“Decline and Reimagination is a creative exploration of an impressively long filmography, drawing the kinds of connections between disparate films united only by geography that embody the best of the ‘spatial turn’ of film studies. Rankin’s work would be a welcome read for any scholar interested in post-industrial New York and its intersections with any film form.”Robert Gordon Joseph, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television “Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York is a fine work of scholarship that does a real service to those interested in the relationship between film and urban space. It deals with classic Hollywood movies and rarely seen works of experimental cinema with equal levels of care, attention, and enthusiasm, and conveys a real respect and affection for the city and all its inhabitants. It is a book that has given me a richer understanding of the varying ways one can look at the city and the importance of fighting for more just, empathetic, and inclusive ways of doing so.”Michael D. Dwyer, International Journal of Communication“Rankin excels at positioning these parallel narratives of decline and reimagination in conversation with each other. Frontier and urban-cowboy narratives are coupled with filmic accounts of resilient communities; tales of urban wilderness as a loss of control over civilization are countered with movies that collapse the wilderness/civilization dialectic to view the city as its own ecological site; and abandoned sites are depicted as both criminogenic loci and places of refuge. This work will surely interest scholars working in cinema and media studies, cultural geography, and urban studies.”Sophia Abbey, The Velvet Light Trap

• Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. Broken Windows, Broken People: The City in Decline as Wasteland, 2. It’s a Jungle Out There: The City in Decline as Wilderness, 3. At Home and at Play: Reimagining the Social Uses of Derelict Spaces, 4. From Studio to Street: Derelict Spaces and the Artistic Reimagination of the City, 5. Greening the City: Reimagining the Nature of New York, Epilogue: Legacies of Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York, Filmography, Index