The Production of Space in the Franchise City Film.

This article examines the production of space (Lefebvre) in the franchise Cities of Love in the context of the history of the city film, from the street film through the city symphony, the genre-inflected city (noir and sci fi), nouvelle vague films, the global city film, the transnational ghetto film to the franchise city film. Unlike the early city film, which not only emphasized the surface aspects of modernity but also offered a critique of modernity, the franchise city film adopts the rhetoric of globalization (simultaneity, coincidence, and multiplicity) without providing a similar critique of postmodernity and globalization. It denies the real effects of globalization (e.g., the increasing significance of “any-space-whatever” [Deleuze] in global cities such as Paris and New York) and insists on the embeddedness of stories in two of the world’s global cities that are defined precisely by their exposure to various processes of disembedding and to the transnational attenuation of local space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]