Urban aesthetics: City, cinema and myth. From Walter Benjamin to 'Metropolis' (Spanish text, Fritz Lang, Germany)

In this study we confront the urban question from a philosophical perspective, combining every kind of material that is the focus of interpretation from a common interest. Our point of view is basically critical. We will try to clarify the 'mythical' shadow that falls on the modern city, and frustrates its promises of emancipation. To do this we tackle the problem with a multidisciplinary approach. Cultural philosophy overlaps urban sociology, urban history, urban anthropology and film studies at the same time and literary, artistic and cinematographic texts. If theoretical materials serve as an empirical compass to orientate our reflections, literary texts and, especially, cinematic ones, help us to corroborate more abstract hypotheses.; The study is divided into three parts, clearly differentiated by their approach and content. The first, Space, City, Cinema, poses the generic question about the city and, specifically, regarding cities as a problematic habitat; we articulate this problem from contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics, sociology and cinema theory: cinema as the most truly urban art. In the second part, Walter Benjamin, towards the Urban Experience , we focus on the figure of this heterodox philosopher. His thoughts on what he called the crowded city is our main focus of investigation, particularly, his elaborations on the urban experience that this raises. In the last part of the study, the most complex and extensive, titled Symbolic Anatomy of the City, put into practice 'hermeneutically' the theoretic keys as elaborated in the earlier parts. This last part is subdivided into two large sections: the first one, centering on the city and ancient myth, and the second, on the modern city and its modern myth. The book's last section consists of an exhaustive study of Metropolis, Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou's film; perfect paradigm of the modern mythic city which frustrates the urban impulse, the urban that is in itself the genuine spatial expression of modern democratic principles.