Cinemas and the cities: Spatiality in Taiwanese, Mexican, and Iranian urban films

Cinemas and Cities: Spatiality in Taiwanese, Mexican, and Iranian Urban Films examines a paradigmatic shift of aesthetic norms that occurred in these three cinemas in the 1990s. As Taiwanese cinema gradually turned away from a nostalgic retrospection of the rural past toward a kaleidoscopic montage of the exorbitant Taipei, a similar impulse to construe the delirious capital city also shaped the production of Mexican and Iranian films in the last decade. The impetus to revisit political suppressions in Mexican cinema and the parabolic use of children and rural settings in post-revolution Iranian cinema gave way to the advance of urban films that stress spatial discontinuity and social fragmentation in the capital city. This project inquires what socioeconomic transformations have shaped this similar aesthetic turn that has re-conceptualized the relationship between the cinema and the city. Conceptually, this project also responds to Ella Shohat's call for a "polycentric multicultural" framework of inquiry which suggests interrelatedness between diverse others beyond the binarism of East and West, First vs. Third World.;This research demonstrates that the synchronous shift of attention to the organization of urban space occurred in Taiwanese, Mexican and Iranian cinemas at a time when the waning of one-party rule, economic restructuration, demographic expansion, and drastic urban redevelopment dramatically changed the social cultural geography of their capital city in the 1990s. A collective discontent with social polarity and disillusion toward modernization find expression in a number of Taiwanese, Mexican and Iranian city films which respond with formal strategies that foreground discontinuity and multiplicity as organizing principles. Each chapter explores the reciprocity of cinema and the city from a different angle. Chapter One traces the emergence of city films in the histories of these three cinemas. Chapter Two examines what I call, the "episodic multi-character" narrative, in relation to the rhizomatic nature of Taipei and Mexico City. Chapter Three explores the potential of the "aesthetics of banality" in mediating the urban transformations in Taipei and Tehran. Chapter Four analyzes the cartographical function of the travel narrative fashioned after the spatial practice of street youth in Mexico City and Tehran.