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A reprint of the article which appeared in the Spring-Summer 2012 issue is presented in which the author offers a film criticism of "25th Hour" directed by Spike Lee. He mentions the role of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in the film, the themes of race relations and cultural pluralism, and discusses New York City as a character.

This article shows how specific groups are politicizing Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver to counter gentrification and urban renewal in New York City. Using current cultural references, I argue that the visual snapshot of New York's past that is captured on film is what has become Taxi Driver's most romanticized feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New York neighbourhoods had been prominent settings in studio-era Hollywood musicals, where street-dance sequences would be used to express the close social ties of such communities. However, as the postwar period progressed, ‘blighted’ urban neighbourhoods would become the site of both vigorous public debate and dramatic physical transformation in the form of ‘urban renewal’. This meant that the musical's established modes of urban representation were being challenged by the impact of New York's postwar transformation and the increasing prominence of urban decline in public discourse. This essay both situates West Side Story in traditions of urban representation, particularly street dances, in Hollywood musicals and examines the film as a story of the West Side. I argue that the film is important and distinctive because it exists at an intersection of postwar crises affecting both the film industry and American cities. I combine textual analysis with production history and urban history to argue that the film's tensions between style and subject were an effect of its urban context, especially the impact of urban renewal in New York. I focus in particular on the film's Prologue, a lengthy balletic street dance sequence shot on location in a New York urban renewal area. I suggest that in its explicit attention to contemporary urban issues, West Side Story brings to the surface assumptions about cities that had structured earlier musicals and indicates the representational challenges the genre was facing in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1953 Henri Verneuil made L'Ennemi public n°1, a parody of the gangster film, located in New York, and with Fernandel as the star. This little-known film played on the incongruity of the star from the French Midi in the Big Apple, and on the contrast between two stereotypes, that of the Frenchman and of the gangster. It exemplifies Franco-American relations in the 1950s, focusing particularly on Fernandel's voice in the context of Hollywood's visual universe. This article examines the articulation between a French voice and American images so as to identify the functions of the oral performance of a star such as Fernandel in the post-war context. L'Ennemi public n°1 works on the principle that language is as attractive as New York skyscrapers; it also uses Fernandel's vernacular to reorient the cultural identity of the film; and, by using an old tradition of orality in French cinema, it introduces the spectator of 1953 into two new universes: the universe of mass consumption, and the hybrid global universe of the cinema emerging in the post-war period. En 1953, Henri Verneuil réalise L'Ennemi public n°1, un film de gangsters parodique situé à New York, avec Fernandel dans le rôle principal. Ce film méconnu joue sur l'incongruité de la présence de la star méridionale dans la mégalopole américaine et sur le contraste comique entre le Frenchman et la figure du gangster. Mais il constitue aussi une illustration exemplaire des échanges France/Amérique dans les années 1950, dont la particularité est de mettre en rapport la voix de Fernandel et l'univers visuel de Hollywood. Cet article examine l'articulation entre la voix française et les images américaines, afin d'identifier les fonctions de la performance orale d'une star comme Fernandel dans le contexte spécifique de l'après-guerre. L'Ennemi public n°1 assimile le langage à une attraction comparable aux buildings de New York; il utilise également la parole vernaculaire de Fernandel pour réorienter l'identité culturelle du film; et il parvient en utilisant une situation d'oralité ancienne dans le cinéma français à faciliter l'entrée du spectateur de 1953 dans deux univers nouveaux différents : l'univers de la consommation de masse, et l'univers cinématographique hybride et «mondialisé» qui émerge à cette période. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban landscape of New York City is one that is familiar to many, but, through the medium of animation, this familiarity has been consistently challenged. Often metamorphic, and always meticulously constructed, animated imagery encourages reflective thinking. Focusing on the themes of construction, destruction, and interactivity, this article seeks to cast critical light upon the animated double life that New York City has lived through the following moving image texts: Disney's Fantasia 2000 (1999), Patrick Jean's computer-generated short Pixels (2009), and Rockstar Games' open-world blockbuster Grand Theft Auto IV (2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes several films directed by Samuel William "Billy" Wilder, including "Double Indemnity," "The Lost Weekend," and "The Apartment," focusing on how Wilder depicted the urban milieu of the U.S. during the 20th century. It examines how the cities of Los Angeles, California and New York City are reflected in the films as well as how the films' protagonists deal with self-delusions. The influences of Wilder's childhood and early life in major European cities is also covered.

The author discusses skyscrapers, a unique and symbolic feature of the modern city, focusing on New York City. He considers the works of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his circle including photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. The short film entitled "Skyscrapers of New York City, from the North River," produced by the Edison Company in 1903, details the skyline of Lower Manhattan. The Open Shutter project by German photographer Michael Wesely which documents the renovations to the Museum of Modern Art designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi is detailed.

This article examines the repeated appearance of scenes showing the partial or complete destruction of New York City in American cinema of the Cold War. While this theme goes across genres, it has been especially prevalent in science fiction films which are the focus of this study. It begins by showing the particular reasons for this morbid fascination and the history of such imagery in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature and cinema. The paper then analyses the changing presentations of destruction from the 1950s to the 1980s and relates them to the dominant fears and anxieties of each period. It concludes by taking a brief look at the continuation of the theme in the post-Cold War period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1914 to 2006, 396 feature films with titles containing New York placenames were released. This pattern emerged during the silent era, peaked from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, and then dropped off steadily before rebounding in the 1970s. This article discusses the cinematic representation of cities and urban life in the movies and the special place of New York as an "imagined city" and a cultural icon. New York's associations in the popular imagination help explain the frequent occurrence of themes of negativity, violence, nightlife, and grandiosity (royalty or divinity) in these titles. The use of New York placenames in titles creates guideposts in a socio-cognitive map of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces several reports within the issue including one by Lori Maguire on the destruction of New York City in film, another by John Sbardellati on communism in the U.S., and one by Linda Risso on short films made by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).