ACADEMIA Letters

Using Film Images to Understand Our Cities

Taher Abdel-Ghani, Modern Sciences and Arts University

Introduction
The level of complexity concerning the relationship between the most important cultural forms
in the modern era, cinema, and the most important aspect of social organization in the 21st
century, the city, is indeed an endless loop since both fields pay respect and correspondence
to each other. Since the early days of representation of Paris through the lens of the Lumiere
Brothers all the way to the inception of dynamic metropolitan images of Hong Kong in John
Woo’s pictures, cinema has always been captivated by the idiosyncratic cityscapes, where
human conditions make up the socio-spatial dynamism of the city. Cinema has turned cities
into visual spectacles composed of symbolic signs and images that led to an increasingly
“cinematized” society.
As an architect/urban planner, researcher, and cinephile, I started exploring this cultural
blend during my Master’s studies where I just grabbed my small video camera and went on
documenting every feature of what surrounds me. Whether it may be abstract or concrete,
there is no doubt that the mise-en-scène aspects altered some of the personal perceptions I
held regarding modern society, with all its ingredients, as well as my spatial existence within
its boundaries. One of the [many] reasons I’m writing this article is to spotlight our current
understanding of the city we’re dwelling within. Is it actually what we think it is? Who are the
people we’re dealing with? What are these features we keep bumping into every day? How can
we step outside the daily routine loop for a while and wander around for no specific reason?
Is it just for the sake of observation? How can we analyze the films we watch regarding urban
representation? Are the images represented authentically? Are they a bit overrated? Or too
dramatic? And the list of questions just keeps going on and on.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Taher Abdel-Ghani, taherabdelghani@hotmail.com

Citation: Abdel-Ghani, T. (2021). Using Film Images to Understand Our Cities. Academia Letters, Article
2510. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2510.

1
 This article is divided into two parts: the first part will explore cinema as a socio-spatial in-
fluence and its impact on our perceptions, and the second part will go deeper into the method-
ological techniques of understanding cities through cinematic images, i.e. a theory I call
“Cine-Spatial Representation”.

From Visuality to the Lens

Although his book, America, was mostly concerned with his voyage to American Southwest
deserts, Jean Baudrillard’s description of crowded cities unfolded visual snapshots of cinema’s
influential role in creating a gazed society, highly fascinated by moving images, calling them
“a system of luxury prefabrication, a brilliant synthesis of the stereotypes of life and love”.
This is one of several points at which theories concerning cinematic images collided with
the physical settings of the city, where our senses, when utilized, allow us to discover more
about ourselves and our vivid reflections upon a vast empty space rendered with a transitory
landscape. The new ruins - the postmodern city - have rendered a series of speculative images
that have isolated individuals’ participation within the city’s transformation processes leaving
them as mere observers. Hence, the new ruins are the modern forms of advanced capitalism.
Being within a metropolitan context, i.e. the rapid changes of images, the stark discontinuity
of normal gazes, and the emergence of a series notion of unexpectedness, all create emotional
imbalance and disturbance.

Film: A Socio-Spatial Influence

In almost every book addressing the relationship between cinema and the city, two movies
usually pop up within the authors’ minds, ’Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis’ (1927) by Wal-
ter Ruttmann, and ’Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Both films elevated
our senses and excitement of modernity and the city, alongside the feeling of being within a
fast-paced abstract chaotic spatial thrill-ride independent of any plot or characters. Further-
more, these two films have engaged narrative space with cinematic images to create a new
form of spatial avant-garde, where reality is manifested into a modernistic type of spectacle
laying basic grounds for urban cinema to evolve. The camera in both pictures is referred to
as the third person, the flâneur, the contemporary city stroller who happened to be a critical
subject of several authors considering the importance of his/her/its existence within the built
settings.
The flâneur in David Clarke’s book The Cinematic City (1997) is spotlighted as moder-
nity’s newly-born that combined the potential of both the camera - which documented the

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Taher Abdel-Ghani, taherabdelghani@hotmail.com

Citation: Abdel-Ghani, T. (2021). Using Film Images to Understand Our Cities. Academia Letters, Article
2510. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2510.

2
labyrinth nature of urban experiences and the editor - who structured these experiences into
a harmonious narrative manner. In this sense, a theory suggests that cinematic representation
was born within the audience’s perceptions in association with certain aesthetic significance,
an approach that developed itself along the historical timeline of the film industry. A couple
of examples would be, the Hollywood sign would refer to the glamorous show business that
glitters the city of Los Angeles, and Wall Street symbolizing the accumulation of capitalism
and power casting their shadows over New York.

Cine-Spatial Representation
Cinema embodies the role of the observer, a medium that exposes a variety of realities to a
wide range of the public immersing them into a fragmented time and space. Whole images,
still and dynamic, are mentally reconstructed to unfold the city’s hidden aspects; ones that can-
not be fully comprehended due to their distant indirect affiliation without mental perceptions.
Their position within space reinforces within them a spatial characteristic that transcends their
shallow exterior image, transforming them into a dominant symbolic feature subjugating the
existing scenery. The film is a medium that reinforces such characteristics through the visual
portrayal of urban space, where space becomes foregrounded to a degree that it renders the
structural level of the film.
The term ’cine-spatial’ best describes such portrayal; it is mainly the theoretical frame-
work that bounds the exterior dimensions of narrative space, where its projection on screen
conveys a new level of spatial representation, thus ’cine-spatial representation’. To best com-
prehend the term, the following 3-part section illustrates the inner ingredients depicting: 1)
Narrative space, 2) Image representation, and 3) Representational space.

Narrative Space
Stephen Heath first coined the term narrative space in his book ’Questions of Cinema’ (1981),
describing it as the viewers’ perspective of movement throughout the story. His main conclu-
sion was that events occurring in a movie create ’space of reality’ where spectators observe,
interpret, and move within.
On a counter level, Mark Cooper attempts to fill some of the theoretical holes in Heath’s
speculation putting forward the idea that narrative space is associated with what is not shown
directly on screen, what is talked about and referred to, and not just what appears inside the
frame. A simple justification would be the dissimilar frames in each scene taken, thus different
vantage points.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Taher Abdel-Ghani, taherabdelghani@hotmail.com

Citation: Abdel-Ghani, T. (2021). Using Film Images to Understand Our Cities. Academia Letters, Article
2510. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2510.

3
Image Representation
Images are composed of elements held together unconsciously, and are manipulated in order to
appeal to the wider audience and correspond to universal codes, languages, and values. Thus,
what we are dealing with here is a two-aspect process: the composition and the structure of
an image, and the technique with which this image is produced eventually affecting public
opinion.
Ludwig Wittgenstein argues in his book ’Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ (1921) that the
elements of a picture are representatives of objects, and an image’s pictorial form is the main
spine that determines its level of resemblance with reality. In other words, the structure of a
picture is identical with the structure of the fact.
Charles Sanders Peirce, known as the father of pragmatism, claims that an image is a com-
position of signs that represent specific objects in reality, where such relationship is usually
interpreted and comprehended by observers. Signs consist of three inter-related elements: a
sign - the signifier, an object - anything that is being signified, and an interpretant - the un-
derstanding that we have of the sign-object relationship. Therefore, an interpretation of a sign
generates new meaning to the sign; one that is discovered by the observer as a result of formal
experiences.
The second part of this process is the methods and techniques used to transmit visually
stimulating images to the public, thus controlling individuals’ biological perspectives. An
article entitled ’Mediated Images’ (2004) by Sue Chapman asserts that media attempts to daily
reproduce visually appealing images to illuminate larger-than-life representations of reality.
Media uses signs and symbols recognized in our daily lives, fits them within a socio-norm
framework and channels them to our subconscious producing certain judgmental meanings,
e.g. stereotypes.

Representational Space
Urban theorists Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja had a common feature; the third space, i.e.
the social field. The place where all aspects of spatiality exists, i.e. abstract & concrete, sub-
jectivity & objectivity, and real & imagined. Lefebvre’s 1974 fugue-like piece ’The Produc-
tion of Space’ illustrates space as a reservoir of mental and social activities that are considered
to be re-representations of reality, i.e. symbols, signs, and thoughts and discourses of text and
literature.
According to Lefebvre’s theory, social relations are projected upon space creating a spatial
existential framework - they are caught in a continuous loop of production and reproduction.
Representational space contain no characters of cohesiveness or consistency, in addition to

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Taher Abdel-Ghani, taherabdelghani@hotmail.com

Citation: Abdel-Ghani, T. (2021). Using Film Images to Understand Our Cities. Academia Letters, Article
2510. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2510.

4
being spaces for the emergence of bottom-up ideals and social movements.
In conclusion, film proposes symbolic spatial aspects whose images – composed of metaphor-
ical signs and symbols –– are observed and interpreted by the public, and, in response, com-
pose new meaning and typologies. The elements of the film have a direct connection with the
‘flâneurie’ characters, stretching to off-screen elements, e.g. background narration; ones that
set the basic parameters for the notion of symbolic representation of reality.

Academia Letters, August 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Taher Abdel-Ghani, taherabdelghani@hotmail.com

Citation: Abdel-Ghani, T. (2021). Using Film Images to Understand Our Cities. Academia Letters, Article
2510. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2510.