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The article analyzes the contemporary city symphony in the avant-garde films "Side/Walk/Shuttle," by Ernie Gehr and "Time Lines," by Runa Islam from the perspective of media archeology and cinéma trouvéve or readymade cinema. The origin of the term based on the idea of panoramic perception is discussed. It compares the elevator and cable car perspectives depicted in the films. The films are described as emphasizing the logic of panoramic view in modern data collection trends.

The article discusses a particular genre of films which the author terms as city symphony because the films along with providing entertainment also provide a view of the cities they were filmed in. Topics include the city symphony of films like "Ghostbusters", "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City", and "Octobre à Paris", and the reasons why these films qualified to be city symphonies.

The article discusses the archival logic at work in the Querschnitt montage that informed the city symphonies and other forms of visual culture in Germany in the late 1920s. It notes that the term "Querschnitt", best known for its use in cross-sectional films, tended to designate the examination of the relations between simultaneous phenomena rather than the cause-and-effect association between contiguous events. The resonance of the term "Querschnitt" in Weimar visual culture is indicated.

This paper situates the recent Cuban filmSuite Habana(Pérez, 2003) in relation to the city symphony film tradition. I argue that Pérez's preoccupation with the question of individual self-realization within a socialist society constitutes an elaboration of García Espinosa's main theoretical contribution to the aesthetics and politics debate. That Pérez turns to the tradition of the city symphony film – the first film genre to systematically treat the nature of labor and leisure in capitalist modernity – underscores the film's engagement with another premise of García Espinosa's manifesto – namely, that authentically socialist art cannot exist unless work and leisure are reorganized. InSuite Habana, the questions of work, leisure, and technology come together in the film's style and narrative, but this time with a difference from the first city symphony films. If the early city symphony films tried to mimic for the spectator the sensorial experience of capitalist modernity,Suite Habanagoes after the experience of an alternative modernity – one in which work, leisure, and technology have been configured along the lines of García Espinosa's utopian vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses eight ways in which the styles of avant-garde and documentary films are similar through an exploration of topics such as political influence in motion pictures, film societies, and nature films. It examines ways in which experiments in photography by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey influenced filmmaking, discusses the role that city symphonies played in the development of documentary films, and reports on the history of the Art in Cinema Film Society and the Cinema 16 film society. Other topics include the synchronization of sound and filming, the symposium of filmmakers influenced by director Robert Flaherty, and the inclusion of personal themes in films.

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements - replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones - the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannan na hEireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalism's cultural flattening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]