Slums on Screen
Despite the rise of the ‘cinematic city’ as an acknowledged paradigm in film and urban studies, ‘cinematic slums’ have remained severely under-researched, even though near to one billion people – almost one third of the global urban population – call slums their home. Accordingly, the author asks how this hard and unyielding way of life was depicted on screen; how have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world’s most miserable habitats? Combining approaches from the social sciences and the humanities, the book provides an interdisciplinary perspective while outlining a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, Elendsviertel, gecekondu, barrios populares or chawls of our diverse ‘planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film and media culture. From Jacob Riis’s How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of slum representations of different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predecessors. It focuses thereby particularly on the way filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes of representation to convey life in our ‘planet of slums’.