Women, Space, and Place: Four Cinematic Pairings
This reading list has grown out of the seminar I teach at USC entitled, “City Cine: Visuality, Media and Urban Experience.” While the seminar itself looks at the broader relationship between cinema and urban experience, this particular reading list is more limited in scope. It pairs eight films with four sets of readings — each examining a different type of ‘space’ women might occupy in the cinema as well as contemporary life.
The first grouping concerns itself with female experience beyond the confines of domesticity, while the second grouping examines the relationship between women and consumer culture. The third and fourth groupings look at representations of the future — assessing the two common cinematic tropes of the female protagonist either ‘saving’ the world from apocalyptic destruction or achieving some type of bodily transcendence through cyborgian liberation.
The readings included here are by no means meant to be exhaustive. Instead they were selected to illustrate the constellation of potential issues that could be further explored in relation to each theme.
I. OUT OF THE HOUSE
Pair the following readings with Roman Holiday (1953), directed by Billy Wilder, and Lost in Translation (2003), directed by Sofia Coppola.
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism
Verso Books
The Eye of Power
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
Pantheon Books
Traces of the Flâneuse: From Roman Holiday to Lost In Translation
Journal of Architectural Education
Wives and Lovers
Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City
Routledge
Ramblers and Cyprians: Mobility, Visuality and the Gendering of Architectural Space
Gender & Architecture
Wiley
The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism
W.W. Norton & Co.
The Metropolis and Mental Life
The Blackwell City Reader
Wiley-Blackwell
II. AT THE SHOW
Pair the following readings with The World (2004), directed by Jia Zhangke, and Black Mirror TV episode “Fifteen Million Merits” (2011), directed by Euros Lyn.
The Ecstasy of Communication
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
Bay Press
Chapter 7
Ways of Seeing
Penguin Books
The World in a Shopping Mall
Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space
Hill and Wang
The Commodity as Spectacle
Society of the Spectacle
Zone Books
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern
University of California Press
Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Duke University Press
Bigness, or the Problem of Large
Artforum
III. IN THE FUTURE
Pair the following readings with Sky Blue (2003), directed by Moon Sang Kim (2003), and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal
Science Fiction Studies
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
Sage Publications
The Environmental Imagination
Harvard University Press
The American Scene
Geographical Review
What Will Happen to Us?
City Sense and City Design
MIT Press
The Ecological Thought
Harvard University Press
Future Traditions of Nature
Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review
IV. TRAVELING THE NOOSPHERE
Pair the following readings with Ghost in the Shell (I or II) (1995), directed by Mamoru Oshii, and Her (2014), directed by Spike Jonze.
Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction
Duke University Press
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Routledge
Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth
Indiana University Press
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Knopf
The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace
MIT Press
Seattle Central Library: Civic Architecture in the Age of Media
Places Journal
You Don’t So Much Watch It as Download It
Film History