ANTH3641 — Picturing City Life
Modern urban life is a tale of human encounters with industrial scale infrastructures, mega-institutions, and global commercial culture. Movies have pictured the human dramas and future fears of life in expanding megalopolis, suburban, and ex-urban sites. In the 21st century, new stories of urban life are emerging alongside place-making activism at neighborhood scales. Alongside the dark vision of cyberpunk comes the bright future of solarpunk, to show us other worlds are possible. This course examines the role filmmakers and artists play in our experience of the dynamic nature of urban life. We consider the history of city-films from around the world reflecting the social impacts of industrial urban growth and decline. And we examine new grassroots storytelling with digital media depicting community-building through urban farms, urban freeway dismantling, and daylighting urban streams. Students also learn basic techniques of photography, scriptwriting, storyboarding, filming, and editing with the goal of completing their own short digital “place-making film” as a final project.