STRANGERS (TO) THEMSELVES: CITYSCAPES AND MINDSCAPES IN 1980s EUROPEAN CINEMA

Abstract

Critical discourse on cinematic representations of the postmodern city has focused on dystopian Hollywood epics like Blade Runner, obscuring the very different responses to urban experience in 1980s European cinema. European city films avoided lurid large-scale depictions of entropic, commodified urban environments in favour of smaller-scale psychological and/or symbolic portrayals of individuals grappling with the pressures of history and personal identity. This essay explores the differing refractions of the urban in Roeg’s Bad Timing (GB 1980), Tanner’s In the White City (Portugal/Switzerland 1984) and Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Germany 1987). The legacies of traumatic historical events like World War II and the Cold War lend a specific European dimension to generalised postmodern crises of narrative and individual identity. Individual pathologies are bound up with these larger contexts, and these complex relationships are framed in terms of the subject’s engagement with (or disengagement from) the city. The essay also considers the phobic and romantic visions of female sexuality that structure these films’ urban mindscapes.