The Expressionist cinema-city: an analysis of urban dystopias produced by the cinema in the first seven decades of the twentieth century

Abstract

In his essay, we are going to define as “City-Cinema”, in order to get a systematic treatment for the utilized vocabulary, the cities idealized by the Cinema in specifically film productions. The emphasis is directed to the Imaginary Cities produced by the futuristic dystopias presented by the Cinema, in order to examine elements from its architecture, spatiality, social organization, and also searching to perceive its articulation with the film plan. The hypothesis is that the imaginary cities always show the fears, angusties, desires, hopes and demands of the society witch have produced the film. In this way, we apply here the methodological posture that considers the Real and the Imaginary not as separated dimensions, but complementary and inserted in a complex unity. The central example examined is the film Metropolis, by Fritz Lang – maximum realization of the futurist dystopias of Expressionism.