Download or read book Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film and the Urban Imagination, 1970--1975 written by Nathan Holmes and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation considers the construction of space and place in a cycle of contemporary-set urban crime films of the early 1970s, exploring how cinema and the city interacted with each other in the context of ongoing urban crisis and decline. Moving between formal analysis and cultural history, this study places location-shot American crime films of this era in the context of a national consciousness that questioned the suitability of the city as both an architectural and social form. Focusing on motifs of investigation and pursuit, I show how the generic production of movement, encounter, and observation on streets, through abandoned buildings and lots, and on roadways is inflected by popular discourses of urban anxiety. In applying emerging visual techniques and cinematographic styles to urban places, however, crime films also connected the city to new energies, producing new ways of understanding the changing urban form. As the declining centrality of American cities led to the promulgation of urbanity as a lifestyle choice, crime films introduced ways of seeing that both sustained fears and limned urban horizons.