The New and Old Film course Reflection paper

Name Course Title Date In the words of Rem Koolhaas, the connection between the city and cinematics can be defined as symbiotic since the city represents society. At the same time, society impacts the city to become the source of creating new films. They both influence our understanding of the particular city and the medium of the film, movie in general. Koolhaas showcases how modern cities, with their increasing speed of (in)forming, enlarging, and complications, became a focus of twentieth-century cinema, not just in terms of the topics for most movies but also the vision of urban existence. This essay seeks to investigate this relationship by examining films such as Metropolis and Taxi Diver in terms of how they represent the city not only as architectural structures but as representations of postmodern dystopia. The program, theories of modernism, and typical lectures about the role of space in constructing culture and identity have helped me to understand the concept of a city as a character and how cinema acts upon the urban. This course focused on how directors incorporate the city into the movie, not just as a location but as a component that shapes the story and messages of a film. Metropolis aims to describe the growth of an oppressive and industrialized city as an embodiment of social antagonism and the outcome of movement mechanization. The cinematography and art direction in the film of having clean white high rises for the white-collar workers and the dirty black complex and confusing structures for the worker bees is a good sample of society's polarization. Similarly, Taxi Driver (1976) reveals that the context of the movie is anarchy, and the city itself shows the deterioration inside Travis Bickle's mind. Like Schrader said many times, the light values in the film and the use of light or shadow expand the isolation level and the feeling of the approaching doomsday and the city becoming part of Travis Bickle's disintegration of the mind. What characterizes a city in these films is how places make their claim on characterization as much as individuals do. Both Metropolis and Taxi Driver can be portrayed as classics of cinema, as both movies portray values inherent in great urban environments. Moreover, the lectures on modernism and the impact of urbanization on cinema also exposed how filmmakers in the twentieth century started to employ the city not simply as a background but as the force that affects the psychological and social conditions of characters. Li...