Global London on screen

Visitors, cosmopolitans and migratory cinematic visions of a superdiverse city

Keith B. Wagner, Roland-François Lack, Keith B. Wagner, Roland-François Lack

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781526157560
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526157553
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Global London on screen presents a mélange of films by directors from the Global South and North, portraying everyday life to the more fantastical, odious, or extraordinary in terms of circumstances as captured cinematically in this superdiverse city. This book portrays a segment of such superdiversity by historicising and theorising various cinematic reproductions of London by filmmakers coming to this megacity from abroad. As visitors, cosmopolitans, or even migrant filmmakers, their treatment of London's zonal locations as both foreign and familiar is fascinating; their narratives and visualisations of London's spatial and architectural uniqueness is given a sojourners' touch; while other foreign filmmakers showcase and sometimes problematise London's socio-cultural globality and locality as both British and a city open (and sometimes closed off) to the world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• In memoriam: Roland-François Lack
• Introduction: Global London on screen: visitors, cosmopolitans and migratory cinematic visions of a superdiverse city
• 1 ‘God is everywhere!’: engineering the immigrant landscape of Emeric Pressburger’s Miracle in Soho
• 2 Dropping out: interiority, claustrophobia and decadence in cosmopolitan London cinema of the 1960s and 1970s
• 3 On location in 1970s London: an interview with Gavrik Losey
• 4 Outside in: Twilight City and the birth of global London
• 5 ‘Where I come from, we eat places like this for breakfast’: Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired a Contract Killer as transnational representation of local London
• 6 Bollywood’s London: the moral-political undertow of London’s Hindi cinema presence
• 7 Brazucas on screen: the Brazilian diaspora in London as depicted in Henrique Goldman’s Jean Charles
• 8 A critical analysis of the Nollywood film Osuofia in London
• 9 Poetics of double erasure: British East/South-East Asian cinema and Lilting
• 10 Global Hollywood and the London set piece
• 11 Performative liveness in Lost in London: cinematic streaming and the digital happening in globalising London
• 12 Borders and cosmopolitanism in the global city: London River
• 13 Utopia as a cosmopolitan method in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
• Epilogue: The rise of sourdough bread: The Street, gentrification and Brexit
• Index