Filmurbia

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction. Filmurbia: Cinema and the Suburbs

   • David Forrest, Graeme Harper, Jonathan Rayner

   Pages 1-10

3. Suburban Realisms

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11

      PDF

   2. ‘Society Stinks’: Suburban Alienation and Violence in the Early Films of Penelope Spheeris

      • John Taylor

      Pages 13-28

   3. Dis-Locations: Mapping the Banlieue

      • Julia Dobson

      Pages 29-48

   4. Mike Leigh and the Poetics of English Suburbia

      • David Forrest

      Pages 49-61

4. Suburban Nations

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 63-63

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   2. Estate of the Nation: Social Housing as Cultural Verisimilitude in British Social Realism

      • Clive James Nwonka

      Pages 65-78

   3. The Gritty Urban: The Australian Beach as City Periphery in Cinema

      • Elizabeth Ellison

      Pages 79-94

   4. The Suburban Plots of David Bezmozgis’ Films

      • Tom Ue

      Pages 95-110

5. Slumurbia and Social Order

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 111-111

      PDF

   2. The Living Landscape of Jakarta in Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Documentary Triptych

      • Annelies van Noortwijk, Vincent Ros

      Pages 113-129

   3. System within the Suburb: Dharavi and Class Depiction in Bollywood

      • Sony Jalarajan Raj, Rohini Sreekumar

      Pages 131-147

   4. Outskirts of Reason: The Dream in Días de papel and Chircales

      • Albert Elduque

      Pages 149-168

6. Suburban Genres

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 169-169

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   2. Margins versus Centre: Cinematic Tensions and Conflict between the Suburbs and Paris

      • Janina Schupp

      Pages 171-189

   3. The Suburban Australian Gothic in Lake Mungo and Beautiful

      • Jonathan Rayner

      Pages 191-205

   4. Claiming the Suburbs: Children and the Children’s Film Foundation in Post-War British Cinema

      • Matthew Kerry

      Pages 207-221

7. Suburban Imaginaries

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 223-223

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   2. Sides of the Moon: Detroit and the Cinema of Proximity

      • Graeme Harper

      Pages 225-237

In this book, scholars from across the world explore the appearance, portrayal and significance of the suburb on film. By the mid-20th Century, supported by changes in transportation, suburbs became the primary location of entire national populations and films about the suburbs began to concertedly reflect those suburbs’ significance as well as their increasingly lively cultures! Suburbia very soon became filmurbia, as films of the suburbs and those made in the suburbs reflected both the positive and the negative aspects of burgeoning suburban life. Film-makers explored the existences of new suburbanites, their interests, their newly emerging neighbourhood practices, their foibles, their fantasies and their hopes. Whether depicting love, ambition, commerce, family, home or horror, whether traveling to or living in suburban spaces, whether exhibiting beauty, brazenness or brutality, the films of suburbia capture human life in all its diverse guises.

• Suburbia
• documentary
• national cinema
• Suburban Cinema
• cinema
• film
• space

• The School of English, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

  David Forrest, Jonathan Rayner

• Honors College, Oakland University, Rochester, USA

  Graeme Harper

David Forrest is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield. His research interests are centred on British realist cinema and television drama, with a particular emphases in issues of class, region and nationhood. He is the author of Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics (2013). 


Graeme Harper is formerly a Director of Research and now Dean. Based in the USA, he was a panellist at Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2003-2014 and at the European Commission, prior to that.  A former Commonwealth Scholar in Creative Writing, he is an award-winning fiction writer.


Jonathan Rayner is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield, School of English. His research interests and publications span Australasian cinema, auteur studies, genre cinema and the interplay of landscapes and moving images. With Julia Dobson, he is co-director of the Sheffield Centre for Research in Film (SCRIF).

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