Signs of the city in American realistic cinema

Abstract

The big city and the metropolitan phenomenon, as well as the cinema emerged and/or spread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The perception and the representation of big cities as part of culture –in literature, photography, painting, and also in movies– have always held a certain tension between the apology of life close to nature and the fascination that cities cause. In addition to that, the arts in general have always shown a certain pleasure in romantically presenting the city associated to some pessimism and uneasiness. In this essay, we intend to show how the cinema, particularly the North-American realistic cinema, incorporates the points of view of each epoch in order to present the big cities' different faces, from its beginning all the way through the big studios up to the great “auteurs” of American “nouvelle vague”.