New York, more than any other city, has held a special fascination for filmmakers and viewers. In every decade of Hollywood filmmaking, artists of the screen have fixated upon this fascinating place for its tensions and promises, dazzling illumination and fearsome darkness.
The glittering skyscrapers of such films as On the Town have shadowed the characteristic seedy streets in which desperate, passionate stories have played out-as in Scandal Sheet and The Pawnbroker. In other films, the city is a cauldron of bright lights, technology, empire, egotism, fear, hunger, and change--the scenic epitome of America in the modern age.
From Street Scene and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Rosemary's Baby, The Warriors, and 25th Hour, the sixteen essays in this book explore the cinematic representation of New York as a city of experience, as a locus of ideographic characters and spaces, as a city of moves and traps, and as a site of allurement and danger. Contributors consider the work of Woody Allen, Blake Edwards, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregory La Cava, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, Vincente Minnelli, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, and numerous others.
Author(s): Murray Pomerance
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 289
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prelude: To Wake Up in the City That Never Sleeps
Memory All Alone in the Moonlight: City of Experience
“I Love New York!”: Breakfast at Tiffany's
A Day in New York: On the Town and The Clock
Paradise Lost and Found: A Bronx Tale
There's a Place for Us: City of Characters and Spaces
Woody Allen's New York
From Mean Streets to the Gangs of New York: Ethnicity and Urban Space in the Films of Martin Scorsese
Can't Take My Eyes Off of You: Andy Warhol Records/Is New York
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: Hitchcock's New York
Whispering Escapades Out on the D Train: City of Moves and Traps
“When We See the Ocean, We Figure We're Home”: From Ritual to Romance in The Warriors
He Cuts Heads: Spike Lee and the New York Experience
New York Class-Passing Onscreen in the 1930s: Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Midtown Jewish Masculinity in Body and Soul
Stayin' Alive: City of Danger and Adjustment
City of Nightmares: The New York of Sidney Lumet
Urban Irrational: Rosemary's Baby, Polanski, New York
The City That Never Shuts Up: Aural Intrusion in New York Apartment Films
Wretched Refuse: Watching New York Ethnic Slum Films in the Aftermath of 9/11
Night World: New York as a Noir Universe
Works Cited and Consulted
Notes on Contributors
Index
