The reading spends time talking about an exorbitant city and generic city. It tries to give a definition and details established from different essays. The reading suggests that city is invisible when it is exorbitant. The word ‘invisible’ conveys that a whole city cannot be represented visually – “image of the city”. As the book tells us, the relationship with us and image completely changes when talking about an exorbitant city; the city teaches more about the image than the image does about that city. It also mentions that since the historical, cultural changes and events in the city are

Continue reading[Reading Response: Ackbar Abbas]

He Yifu Abbas argues that “the generic city” is ‘superficial’, lack of history and can produce a new identity every Monday morning. From my point of view, his argument is indeed inspiring, yet illogical in some sense. Every city has its own history, it could be a long one, like Beijing or Xi’an, or it could be a short one, like Shanghai or Shenzhen. Despite the length, the history behind every city is real and meaningful. In Abbas’s argument, cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen could be categorized as generic, because it seems that both cities are, what he calls, superficial.

Continue reading[Reading Response: Ackbar Abbas]

The author examines features of globalization with reference to the Bourne Trilogy. As globalization spreads, national boundaries becomes vague, and many actions/things become cross-border and multinational. Under globalization, film-makers can do storytelling with a world-wide stage. In fact, many thrillers provide demonstration of globalization, how the whole world is connected, with most of them exposing the dark side of globalization, such as cross-border crimes and terrorist attacks. The reason is that the rapid flow of capital, goods, information and people can create many actions beyond the audience’s imagination, adding up to the plot of the films. With many of blockbusters

Continue reading[Reading Response: Sue Harris ]

Using the Bourne Trilogy as an example, the author demonstrates the traits of globalisation, that allows different plots to take place in different places and urban settings. As discussed in the reading, the concept of world is almost collapsed. Boundaries become linear and highly porous. Without the process of globalisation, these films can hardly be produced. Yet, while globalisation gives directors a new opportunity to reimagine the world as one nation, the films expose the flaws and dangers resulted by globalisation, such as cyber-network attack. In particular, the high mobility of people of different nations, crossing borders freely, have resulted

Continue reading[Reading Response: Sue Harris ]

The reading mainly introduces and compares two different terms, generic city, and exorbitant city. Exorbitant city, described as the invisible city in Calvino’s novel, is the city that escapes both power and representations, empire and raconteur. It is the city that is neither graspable nor representable by images or icons. Exorbitant city can change our relationship to images. We cannot fully learn the city from its icons or representations. Instead, the city is so complex in cultural and historical aspects that the city itself becomes unstable, phantasmagoric, and labyrinthine. In contrast, the author also demonstrates the term generic city, which

Continue readingReading Response: Ackbar Abbas

He Yifu I really agree with Abbot’s idea about “disaster film reflecting Japan’s dark and troubled imagination”. It seems to us that Japan makes most of the disaster films in the whole world, and many of them are monster movies like Godzilla. Since Godzilla made its first appearance in 1954, it had stared in over 30 movies. People only keep making movies in one specific genre because of its persistent profit, yet how could one genre be profitable for such a long time is a question deserve asking. For all the countries in the world, only Japanese like monster movies

Continue reading[Reading Response: Carl Abbot]