Venicinema: Understanding Cities Through Film

Venicinema will help expand, strengthen, deepen and consolidate your research interests in architecture, urban planning and social history; whether you’re an undergraduate, PhD candidate, post-doctoral researcher, or an early-years practitioner. It proposes a unique, interdisciplinary approach to understanding cities; you will first study how fiction films have expressed Venice's characteristics, then use the cinematic montage to make your own observational films. The approach, outputs and knowledge are transferrable and applicable to your own city or situation. The results are presented within the framework of your research interests and critiqued by experts in the field. And then there’s the magic…of attending the ‘Floating Cinema’ on the lagoon, walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, working with sound, and projecting or shooting films in precisely the same location as Daniel Craig, Kathryn Hepburn, Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Amitabh Bachchan, Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp once stood and waited for the call to “action”.

Course leader

FRANÇOIS PENZ Emeritus Professor of the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge.

Course aim

USE FILM AS MEDIUM Acquire an understanding of the study of everyday life through the medium of film EXPLORE NEW "CREATIVE GEOGRAPHIES" Experiment with the manipulation of screen time and space to explore cityscapes. LEARN TO ORGANIZE YOUR FILM NARRATIVE Analyze fiction films in order to comprehend how narrative is spatially organized. MAKE A SHORT FILM Use the montage tradition to make a short film in the city symphony tradition, addressing one of the studio themes. engage with the moving image as an aid to reasoning and thinking through urban scenarios. STUDIO THEMES Spatially organised narratives, observational cinema, city symphonies, montage, everyday urban life, spatial ethnography, urban taxonomies, Venice as a 15-minute city, cinema as a form of urban modelling, creative geographies, mapping, climate change, local versus global.