| The dissertation examines the ways in which cultural discourses of simultaneous adulation and condemnation of the metropolis shaped cinematic visions of New York in the 1930s and the 1940s. The dissertation studies these discourses in the links between urban transformations, socio-economic and political crises, and changes in the cinematic spatial tropes of the New York City skyline, the slum, and the street. The study uncovers and contests the material grounds of New York imaginaries in the 1930s and the 1940s, drawing upon and critiquing the urban theories of Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau, and the cinematic city literature of Siegfried Kracauer, Edward Dimendberg, and Giuliana Bruno. The thesis argues that the alternating endorsements and critiques of the machine age city in films of the 1920s are replaced in films of the 1930s and the 1940s by a fused trope of agitated urban modernity articulated against the framing crises of the Great Depression and World War Two, and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. |
