Cortland Rankin – författare

Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York examines the cinematic representation of New York from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, placing the dominant discourse of urban decline in dialogue with marginal perspectives that reimagine the city along alternative paths as a resilient, adaptive, and endlessly inspiring place.Drawing on mainstream, independent, documentary, and experimental films, the book offers a multifaceted account of the power of film to imagine the city’s decline and reimagine its potential. The book analyzes how filmmakers mobilized derelict space and various articulations of “nature” as settings and signifiers that decenter traditional understandings of the city to represent New York alternately as a desolate wasteland, a hostile wilderness, a refuge and playground for outcasts, a home to resilient and resourceful communities, a studio for artistic experimentation, an arcadia conducive to alternative social arrangements, and a complex ecosystem.This book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, media studies, urban cinema, urban studies, and eco-cinema.

Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York examines the cinematic representation of New York from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, placing the dominant discourse of urban decline in dialogue with marginal perspectives that reimagine the city along alternative paths as a resilient, adaptive, and endlessly inspiring place.Drawing on mainstream, independent, documentary, and experimental films, the book offers a multifaceted account of the power of film to imagine the city’s decline and reimagine its potential. The book analyzes how filmmakers mobilized derelict space and various articulations of “nature” as settings and signifiers that decenter traditional understandings of the city to represent New York alternately as a desolate wasteland, a hostile wilderness, a refuge and playground for outcasts, a home to resilient and resourceful communities, a studio for artistic experimentation, an arcadia conducive to alternative social arrangements, and a complex ecosystem.This book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, media studies, urban cinema, urban studies, and eco-cinema.

What do we see when we look at a battlefield? How do we come to understand environments as battlefields in the first place? What happens to our perception of war when we focus on the physical spaces of conflict? Warscapes is the first collection to pursue answers to such questions by considering the relationship between war, environment, and media along three lines: imagined geographies of control that prefigure environments as spaces of war; representations of resistance to occupation and ecocidal violence; and elemental reframings of archives and cultural memories of war. This book offers novel perspectives on historical conflict environments while also examining how hypothetical spaces of conflict are imagined. Deploying theoretical perspectives gleaned from film and media studies, ecocriticism, environmental history, urban studies, and postcolonial/decolonial studies, among others, authors highlight an international spectrum of 21st-century fiction films and television series, documentaries, and video installations that challenge how we look at war.