Film and the financial city

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the last few years among film-makers in tackling themes and stories related to the world of global finance, finding aesthetic means to depict the forces of contemporary capital has proven exacting. One route to understanding how the moving image makes sense of the current state of finance capital is to look at the way that specific financial hubs – significant banking cities that act as nodal points in the global economy in hosting major financial institutions and in initiating financial transactions – are registered on film. In this paper, I address the difficulties of constituting a financial aesthetic generally before looking at how the financial city plays a key role in allowing European film-makers working across very different modes to find a material architectural representation for the abstract exchanges of contemporary finance capital. I discuss Isaac Julien’s gallery film, PLAYTIME (2014) that features the financial hubs of the City of London, Reykjavik and Dubai, and also recent films set in Frankfurt, the financial centre of the Eurozone and Germany’s leading financial hub, The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler 2010) and the documentary, Master of the Universe (Marc Bauder 2013).