IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

This paper examines the imagined global cities of Los Angeles and Paris as cinematic cartographies for mobility. Two films from 1993, Falling Down and Mi Vida Loca screen Los Angeles in the context of urban and social upheaval following the 1992 police beating of Rodney King and the ensuing riots. Both films explore the socially and economically confining lived metropolis and the hazards of mobility. Ovarian Psychos (2017), screens Los Angeles and its subjects at a very different conjuncture, but tells a similar story of mobility as both empowerment and risk. Similarly, two films that take Paris and its suburbs as their subject, La Heine (1995) and Les Miserables (2019) offer startling similar narratives about police violence in immigrant suburbs. Taken together these films help us understand the relationship between memory and place, as well as the continuity of the built environment in shaping human action and interaction. The films map social action in the city from different points of view, constructing cartographic memory narratives of immigration dislocation, immobility, mobility, and situated agency. They suggest that storytelling – cinematic and otherwise – can be considered alongside urban design, architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and mobility justice as determine forces in how livability and mobility are facilitated in global cities.