Motion Pictures and the Image of the City

If you’ve ever had a special attachment to a film, and also an attachment to the city it was shot in, Xiaofei Haos book will give you a fresh eye on how the city is expressed in the film by the filmmaker. From the perspective of social science, each face of the city in a film comes from a choice – shown only on the basis of the filmmakers’ selection criteria. In this process, the film becomes the cognitive map of that city. The interweaving of the city space and film language will be elaborated first from the perspective of urban studies. Then some viewpoints of tourism studies will be provided to explore the relation between the image of the city in the film and in reality. Two films about the city Taipei are looked at as case studies: A One and a Two (Yi Yi, Director Edward Yang, 2000) and Au Revoir Taipei (Director Arvin Chen, 2010).
Contents

• Lynch’s image system
  
• The language of film
  
• A One and a Two: Nostalgia uponDiaspora
  
• Au Revoir Taipei: Tourist view on the space of empathy
  
• City, Film and Destination: Comparative analysis 
  

Target groups

• Researchers and students of Urban Studies, Tourism Studies, Culture Sociology and Film Studies 
  
• Filmmakers 
  

The Author

Ph.D Xiaofei Hao is a Lecturer at the Department of Event Management, School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University, China. Her research interests include film language interpretation, film tourism, and visual culture.