Can you learn about cities and places through movies? The answer is of course, yes! Not only can you learn about new places, but some movies even let you experience the past, present and future of those places through the way they are depicted on screen. As the characters move and develop on screen, we get to see glimpses of how a city morphed into the way it is and where it could go. However, in some classics, like ‘Manhattan (1979)’, ‘Lost in translation (2003)’ and ‘In the mood for love (2000)’, the city itself becomes a character. You get to see the place in a different light, the emotions it has, its charm, and its ugliness. You feel like you have been there and experienced it yourself. As you may have guessed, I love both movies and cities equally, but what I love more is, cities as characters.
In this series, ‘through the lens’ I want to talk about how urbanism and architecture is perceived in cinema and how such representations examine cultural foundations. As Nezar AlSayyad wrote in ‘Cinematic Urbanism’, city and cinema have always been inextricably intertwined. The identities of places help narrative construction in films, and conversely, films serve as a lens through which these identities can be examined. Some films not only help construct an imagery of the place but also construct images of the world and society, thus blurring the lines between reel and real.
To begin this series, I want to explore two such movies where the cities portrayed characters that reflected society like a mirror held to itself. The two movies – ‘Parasite (2019)’, directed by by Bong Joon-ho and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (2005), directed by Danny Boyle, shows Seoul and Mumbai, respectively, as distinct characters to create iconography of power, culture and senses. In both the movies, the story is narrated through urban imagery that’s distinctive of the architecture and character of the place, almost as if they are the main protagonists of the movie. Through the visual imagery of the places, the movies talk about complex topics of inequality, poverty and class divide.
The movie Parasite draws upon fatalism, the impossibility to escape one’s predetermined fate but teases the viewer by giving them a false hope that they can, if they try. Throughout the movie, the main characters, the Kim family, hopelessly tries to get out of their poverty-stricken and unfortunate circumstances by climbing up the ladder in society towards a good and decent life. But they are stuck in their fate, perfectly represented through the architecture allegory of the semi-basement in which they live. These semi-basements or ‘banjihas’ as they are called in South Korea, represents the extreme inequality that exist in Asian societies. As they hope to change their fate, by infiltrating into the wealthy mansion of the Park family, they constantly climb up the stairs leading up to it, only to be back where they started. Thus the worlds of Seoul, collides showing the two faces of the city – one, of the haves and the other, of the have-nots.
One of the biggest urban planning issues in Seoul is the lack of affordable housing and the growing inequality that leads to a polarisation of classes and spaces (see New York Times article, ‘For Seoul’s Poor, Class Strife in Parasite’). As the middle class dissipates, more and more people such as the Kims are pushed into banjihas – saturated, small, dark and confined spaces. This polarisation of classes is expressed through the architecture of the city, as the stark contrast that is shown between the wealthiest districts like Gangnam and the poorest like Guryong slum (see article, ‘The Slum Next Door to Gangnam Exposes South Korea’s Wealth Gap’ in Bloomberg city lab). This is shown repeatedly through the use of ‘stairs’ in this case, as they provide important transitions between the two extremes of spaces and relationships. The various shots of stairs in the movie, in the neighborhood leading to the mansion, the stairs inside the house to the basement and above, the stairs of the Kim’s banjiha – they make the viewer feel the excitement and the agony, as they climb ‘high’ and ‘low’ only to realise their inescapable identities. In the scenes, towards the end of the movie, the Kims walk up with excitement, but run down endlessly in the pouring rain, only to find at the end of the stairs, their house drowned in water.
Similarly, in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, similar architectural imagery is used to touch upon topics of inequality and disparity. “Bombay has turned into Mumbai”, announces one of the protagonists, Jamal Malik as the film begins. The movie captures the city and its transformation into two worlds – from the diminishing significance of the old city filled with complex local history that is Bombay, into a neo-liberal, cosmopolitan and homogenous city, that is Mumbai. The movie constructs Bombay and Mumbai as two distinct characters – two urban paradigms that produce different social conditions. This clash is expressed through the use of the city’s architectural palimpsest, the redevelopment of the colonial histories to homogenous suburbanisation and marginalisation.
The spatial manifestation of this class divide can be seen in the contrasting urban/ architectural spaces are shown – between Dharavi and Lake Castle. While Dharavi shows the vernacular and organic settlement of Bombay, Lake Castle represents the neo-liberal transformation into Mumbai and finally Victoria Terminus, the train station which serves as a contestation between the two (BAWEJA, V. (2015). Architecture and Urbanism in "Slumdog Millionaire": From Bombay to Mumbai) The films shows how the city’s complex history is being re-written through massive privatised urban renewal and reinvention of landmarks. We see the spatialisation of class difference, as registered through urban fragmentation. As Vandana Baweja rightly points out, through the life trajectories of the three main characters Jamal, Latika and Salim, the film fictionalises the transformation of Bombay to Mumbai through urban renewal almost as an annihilation of the city’s identity.
Drawing parallels between the two movies, we can see how class divide and inequality is manifested in space. The rise of neo-liberal urban policies has led to privatisation of infrastructure, unaffordable housing, and marginalisation of the poor, leading to extreme stratification of the city. The two worlds are confined to their own realities, with various architectural imageries such as “the glass wall”, the “iron bars”, or the “stairs” acting as sharp and transparent, not to mention visually brilliant, class dividers. Another key aspect, or the lack there of, is the more recognizable and typical shots of the public spaces that is commonly associated with both the cities. Both films purposefully omit the waterfront, be it the Marine drive or the Han riverfront, showing how class dictates access to public space in a city. The main characters in the films are never depicted enjoying a beautiful stroll in Cheonggyecheon, Seoul or watching sunsets in Mumbai’s Marine drive, almost as if these spaces do not belong to them.
Just as how the urban history of Bombay/Mumbai drives Slumdog Millionaire’s narrative and the architectural imagery of Seoul drives Parasite’s, we see the mutually dependent relationships between urbanism and their cinematic constructs. Both films construct and critique an urban historical narrative of the city through socio-spatial transformations. Thus, cities in cinema are not just a representative of space but a powerful analytical tool for urban discourse, if done well.
Do you also have a ‘city as a character’ in a movie that you have watched?