Slums on Screen

Front matter

a) P: pia ra 4% fez iy S A

WORLD CINEMA ano THE PLANET OF SLUMS

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Conclusion

Bibliography Index viii

Figures

6.1

6.2

‘Five Cents a Spot’: overcrowded rooms and slum-dwellers ‘caught off guard’

In Gangs of New York a Steadicam assumes the POV of the film’s main character and enters into Riis’s ‘Bandit’s Roost’

The first slide of the magic lantern ‘slum show’ Slum Life in Our Great Cities

A navigable 360-degree panorama of “The Arori Household’ in Kibera, Nairobi

Mapping the Parisian ‘slum belt’ in La Zone: au pays des chiffonniers

Looking down on one of Stepney’s inhabitants in Housing Problems

Lagos Wide & Close as an interactive web documentary

A long shot setting Jaibo amidst Mexico City’s ‘any-spaces-whatever’ in Los Olvidados

Pedro and Jaibo are framed behind a cross in a depth of field shot in Los Olvidados

Medellin seen from Rodrigo’s perspective, before he commits suicide in Rodrigo D: no futuro

Oumarou Ganda presents us his neighbourhood Treichville at the beginning of Moi, un noir

Interview with the teacher Yolanda whose real name is Yolanda in De Cierta Manera

Recycling life on a giant garbage dump into painterly images in Dodes’ka-den

‘House for hanging”: a deterritorialised shack and a now homeless patchwork family in Dom za vesanje

51 55 58 64 74

80 87

FIGURES Vil

6.3 Magic realism: Chagall’s surrealist motif of the levitating bride

referenced in Dom za vešanje 154 7-1 Stolen consumer goods interconnect the inhabitants of Manila’s

Quiapo in Tirador 175 7-2 The recurring motif of the half-closed door in Ossos 180 7.3. Unbearably long but chiaroscuro-lit still life of a dying world in

No Quarto da Vanda 182 7-4 De-centred framing of Vanda and Ventura against the

background of their new social housing blocks in Juventude em

Marcha 184 8.1 ‘Flashes from the Slums’: Rocket ‘shoots’ a picture during the

fast-edited opening sequence of Cidade de Deus 211 8.2 and 8.3 Cinematic city of god: classical low-angle framing of

cangaceiros and a wide angle crane shot of the village-like Cidade

de Deus 214 8.4 Painting in time: dissolves layer shots upon shots to condense

time and the drug trade’s transformation from the traditional

exchange of goods to a capitalist venture 217 8.5 Street kids with guns and cameras in the climax of Cidade de Deus 220 9.1 Q&A that introduces the stars and films of Bombay Cinema and

the aesthetic principle of genre blending in S/umdog Millionaire 238 9.2 Glocal melodrama: world time and local time, being-too-late and

being-on-time 245 9.3 Skins as leitmotif: untouchability, second skins and sensing

through touching 249 9.4and 9.5 Maximum City of screens: doordarshan, the city’s

electronic skin and its spectators or citizens 251

Acknowledgements his book is based on a doctoral thesis that was written at the University

of Mannheim where, back in 2009, I embarked on what seems in retrospect like an enormous journey across ‘the planet of slums’ through the history of the moving image. Its foundations in globalisation studies is due to the University of Mannheim’s interdisciplinary graduate school ‘Formations of the Global: Welterfahrungen, Weltentwitirfe, Weltoffentlichkeiten’, which provided the institutional framework as well as the financial support for my doctoral research. For this reason I first wish to thank my PhD supervisors, Ulfried Reichardt and Thomas Wagenbaur, for believing in me and in this project, as well as for their generous support and encouragement throughout the years. As I was moving from Mannheim to Reading and substantially revising the thesis for a publication at Edinburgh University Press, a number of other ideas and influences have been feeding into the final version as it stands today. My sincere appreciations go therefore to friends, teachers, colleagues and institutions across Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere for their help along the way to finishing this book: the University of Mannheim’s American Studies Department, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) as well as the University of Reading’s Film, Theatre and Television Department for allowing me to continuously work, teach and research on cinema; Mark Schmitt for the countless conversations, emails and discussions about films, slums and theories, but especially, and most importantly, for the hours he spent proofreading this book; Lucia Nagib for her fantastic job as a Postdoc supervisor and for her enlightening ideas on the concept of world cinema; Thomas Elsaesser for his guest lectures in Mannheim and Reading, as well as for giving me the opportunity to translate his inspiring essay on realism in world cinema; Eleftheria Thanouli for being kind enough to review my chapter on fave/as and for her guest lecture on post-classical cinema in Mannheim; Gillian Leslie, Emma Rees, Richard Strachan and the rest of the

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iX team at Edinburgh University Press, along with Verity Shaw, for producing, designing and editing this book in such a professional way; the students of my undergraduate seminar ‘World Cinema and the Topos of the Slum’ for being so enthusiastic about this topic; Wiebe Nauta and Bernike Pasveer for their interest in my doctoral research and their invitation to Maastricht; Luca Caminati, Alexander Schlutz, Stephan Turowski, Eric C. Hendriks and Ian Banks for their editing work, constructive criticism and useful ideas. Finally, and above all, I wish to thank my wife Petra. Not only was she uncomplaining and understanding throughout those years, but she also contributed significantly to this book in numerous ways. It is dedicated to our lovely son Roman.

Reading, August 2015

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Introduction

E= since the term ‘slum’ emerged in Victorian England to describe overcrowded neighbourhoods overflowing with impoverished migrants, images and stories about the appalling living, housing or social conditions in such city areas have constantly returned to haunt us. Yet, slums, often perceived as the world’s most miserable habitats, have not only been a historically recurring, but also a transnational concern for filmmakers. One could even say that we are today in possession of a ‘global archive’ of moving images that depict life in the slums of various cities across the planet. Filmmakers with different concerns north as well as south of the equator produced a vast amount of audiovisual material about the slums of New York, London or Paris in the early twentieth century, while today the focus is on Lagos, Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai. Considering that by the turn of the millennium near to one billion people called slums their home — a number which suggests that it is not an exaggeration to describe our planet in Mike Davis’ words as a Planet of Slums (2007) — and taking into account that filmmakers have repeatedly tried to engage with what in different geo-cultural regions is labelled as shantytown, Elendsviertel (German), gecekondu (Turkey), favela (Brazil), chawl (India), or bidonville (Francophone Africa), a study of how life on our ‘planet of slums’ has been depicted on screen is long overdue.

Accordingly then, the major research question driving this book is how life in our ‘planet of slums’ has been represented on screen. More precisely, it is driven by the question of how the present relates to the past, of how the various films and media practices that imagine how life in the slums is today, relate to their historical predecessors. This is a question that has evolved with the observation that media history has frequently overlapped with social history since the time of Charles Dickens. However, as slums have now become a phenomenon of (mega)cities that are predominantly located in the global South rather than in London, New York or Paris, one is almost obliged to address this question beyond its historical dimensions, that is, widen its scope according to its global, or rather, globalising dimensions. This book therefore reconstructs two such globalising developments and tries to weave them together: firstly, accelerated urbanisation and the concomitant rise of a ‘planet of slums’, and secondly, the expansion of a transnationally interconnected film culture — a research field that is by now associated with the term ‘world cinema’. In reconstructing these two developments, this book looks at the globalisation of slums from a cultural perspective and approaches the globalisation of film culture through focusing on a topic that today is not only a growing concern for urban planners, humanitarian organisations and politicians but also for a variety of filmmakers across the world.

‘THE GENTLEST OF PREDATIONS’?

For a study that is concerned with actual film examples, it seems natural to focus primarily on what kind of styles, forms or aesthetics filmmakers were deploying to convey what life is like in our ‘planet of slums’. However, with regard to this topic it is equally important to address questions that lie beyond notions of aesthetics, form or style, because the very existence of slums is in most cases already tied to various interrelated (local, national or larger) political nexuses, power relations or social histories. Unsurprisingly therefore, audiovisual depictions of life in the slums were indeed often discussed in relation to political or ethical issues, rather than just as a purely aesthetic kind of problem or topic. In fact, filmmakers who disseminated images and stories from the world’s most impoverished places were often either lauded or criticised for their (lack of) ethical responsibility as image- and story-makers. In other words, when it comes to this topic one cannot isolate aesthetics from political and ethical concerns; instead one needs to consider them as indissolubly entangled.

In the broader field of cultural studies — through which film studies emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s — entanglements between the arts, media and politics have been widely and thoroughly discussed. Feminist, Foucault-inspired and neo-Marxist approaches emerged to enable a critical examination of class, race and gender representations, together with how ‘the poor’, the ‘working class’, or the ‘underclass’ were depicted in popular film and TV. Indeed, critics (whether influenced by such critical strands in the academic world or not) repeatedly pointed particularly to the problematic ‘politics of representation’ in films that narrate stories from the slums, often highlighting that they need to be considered as instances of ‘slumming’, or, by extension, of ‘poverty tourism’ or ‘social voyeurism’. Most vehemently, this kind of criticism was recently directed towards two extraordinarily popular films that have been viewed by millions: the eight-time Academy Award winner Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), infamously criticised for being a form of ‘poverty porn’, and the Brazilian cult film Cidade de Deus (City of God; Fernando Meirelles, 2002), accused for its ‘cosmetics of hunger’ (see Chapters 8 and 9).

To quote what is possibly the most symptomatic example for this kind of criticism, dating back to the 1970s, Susan Sontag attacked the far less popular genre of social documentary photography along similar lines in her essay collection On Photography thus:

Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them . . . Gazing on other people’s reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class interests as if its perspective is universal . . . Photography conceived as social documentation was an instrument of that essentially middle-class attitude, both zealous and merely tolerant, both curious and indifferent, called humanism — which found slums the most enthralling of decors. (1977: 55—60)

For Sontag the supposedly humanist documentation of social misery through the distanced gaze of the camera, what she calls ‘the gentlest of predations’, equals a form of voyeurism that is often described as ‘slumming’. She assumes that an outsider, a non-slum-dweller with a middle-class background, necessarily always has a touristic (or voyeuristic) attitude towards the supposed spectacle of social misery. Additionally, she contends that the photographer is always unavoidably detached and distanced and thus not empathically involved with the subject he or she depicts, because of his/her higher social background. Yet, Sontag’s critique not only attacks the medium’s ‘customary users’, but, implicitly, also the medium itself. Her critique questions whether photography is the appropriate medium with which to convey issues like urban poverty. For her, it seems, visual media ultimately turn slums into nothing more than ‘enthralling decors’.

In the mid-nineteenth century, however, graphic illustrations of slum-dwellers were criticised for their lack of decent illustrative evidence, or in other words, for lacking in documentary realism, rather than for being examples of social voyeurism (see Chapter 2). In fact, ever since the time of Charles Dickens, not only literary but also audiovisual representations of life in the slums have almost inextricably been linked to historically shifting notions of realism and the documentary mode of representation; and at least since the establishment of a more serious film criticism in specialised journals, critics have repeatedly either rejected or praised films about ‘the poor’,

‘the marginalised’ or ‘the dispossessed’ for their (social) voyeurism or their (documentary) realism. Yet, where exactly should one draw the line between voyeurism and realism or, for that matter, between ethically responsible filmmaking and a voyeuristic exploitation of social misery?

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

It goes without saying that it is crucial to critically scrutinise the ethical and political implications of the way filmmakers approached slums, slum-dwellers or slum life on screen. However, drawing binary distinctions between ethical and unethical ways of representing sensitive topics like urban poverty is, in my opinion, a rather arbitrary matter, since such critical postures often tend to simplify more complex phenomena. The most general perspective that I apply in this book can therefore be defined as the acknowledgment of complexity, or, better put, the acknowledgement of ‘global complexity’ (Urry 2002), as a given, and to treat a set of carefully selected examples accordingly. So instead of trying to apply a meta-narrative, a grand theory or any other kind of encompassing or comprehensive approach, I will attempt to historicise a set of examples from different historical periods and geo-cultural regions, with the aim of providing a perspective on ‘world cinema’s planet of slums’ that is neither theoretically nor we/tanschaulich one-sided or predetermined.

For this reason, but also because the topic of slum representations is one that is tightly connected to both social and cultural globalisation processes, I have taken the book’s guiding approach from what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat call in their groundbreaking Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media a ‘polycentric’, rather than a Eurocentric or nation-state based, ‘vision on the world’, which, they suggest, globalises multiculturalism in a more ‘relational and radical’ way (1994: 48). Shohat and Stam introduced the term ‘polycentric multiculturalism’ to provide what was then a much needed alternative approach to the study of an increasingly globalising, and therefore also increasingly multicultural, media landscape with all its asymmetrical power relations, diverse cultural traditions and historical burdens (of colonialism and racism in particular). They published Unthinking Eurocentrism at an important time — the beginning of the 1990s — when post-structuralist and post-colonial criticisms of representing ‘other’ cultures in Western literary, pictorial and also cinematic traditions (led by the likes of Stuart Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha or Edward W. Said) reached a peak in academic debates across universities in the Western world. Considering the historical significance of its publication, Shohat and Stam suggested the term ‘polycentrism’ less to describe a (technocratic, de-politicised, neutral) vision on the world, but rather to introduce a genuinely politicised principle that enables one to study, at least hypothetically, globalising media cultures in a genuinely non-Eurocentric way.

Apart from its deliberate rejection of a specific European tradition of looking at other, non-Western cultures, a polycentric vision on the world also obliges one to think radically differently, that is, to use many (Greek: polys) rather than binary analytical perspectives — one of the most problematic principles of the European thinking tradition, as post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers taught us. And apart from its original political purpose as an alternative to the use of arbitrary binarisms, polycentrism is also, in my opinion, a particularly useful concept for the study of complex global phenomena, such as world cinema and cityward migration, in a dynamic or relational way. It can, on the one hand, provide a perspective on world cinema that acknowledges it as a dynamic, globalising phenomenon with many, rather than few, cultural centres. On the other hand, it can also serve as a less static vision on a social world in perennial movement, since vast migration streams from the global countryside to the world’s now manifold urban centres continuously (re-)shape what is often conceived in more static terms as a world divided into developed, developing and underdeveloped regions. Most importantly, the notion of polycentrism compels one to not only think in terms of interrelated centres or networks on a global scale but, perhaps even more challenging, in terms of perennial exchanges between the local and the global.

A polycentric approach can therefore also be used as a method to redress older notions of ‘world cinema’ (see also Chapter 1), particularly to provide, in a study like this one, geo-regional diversity by considering non-Western films that have been previously neglected. By applying polycentrism in this way, not only as a perspective but also as an inclusive approach to world cinema, I aim to offer one among, admittedly, many other possible ways of approaching an increasingly important topic in world cinema, but not so much in the sense of a global survey. In fact, in my opinion, the notion of polycentrism vehemently contradicts the notion of a ‘global survey’, particularly since it emphatically fails to provide a comprehensive, all-encompassing perspective, which a ‘survey’ ultimately promises to provide. This is a point that is also emphasised by the editors of the recent volume Theorizing World Cinema. Building on Shohat and Stam they argue for a ‘polycentric approach to world cinema’ which aims at avoiding the light touch of ‘surveys’ or overviews that convey a ‘world in a nutshell’ by compressing whole countries and even continents in a few chapters, in order to fulfill the ultimately impossible task of defining uniform modes of address, distribution and reception across thousands of the most varied and contrasting outputs. (Nagib, Perriam, and Dudrah 2012: xxii)

If we consider that a country like India, for example, today produces more than one thousand feature films a year, creating a survey-like global overview of ‘world cinema’s planet of slums’ is indeed going to be an impossible task. Rather than generalising about how slums have been represented in specific local, national or even continental film cultures in order to convey the world in a nutshell — for instance by providing individual chapters on Indian, Brazilian, South African or on East European, Southeast Asian or North American film traditions — this book attempts to avoid such totalising accounts, which always have a tendency to create static viewpoints of the world by narrowing down on arbitrarily demarcated (local, national or regional) film cultures. Instead, by applying a polycentric approach — an approach that is genuinely relational (or indeed, transnational), rather than only hypothetically comprehensive — I hope to attain a more dynamic picture of the ‘world cinema’s planet of slums’, a picture that nevertheless outlines some significant tendencies beyond the historically, locally or film-specific.

Yet, how exactly ought a ‘polycentric approach to world cinema’ proceed and what kind of methodology should one apply? Shohat and Stam have in fact given an answer to this question. They contend that the prefix ‘poly’ in polycentrism (from the Greek polýs, transalated as ‘many’) does not simply ‘refer to a finite list of centers of power but rather introduces a systematic principle of differentiation, relationality, and linkage’ (1994: 48; emphasis added). So, for Shohat and Stam polycentrism is not merely a politicised ‘vision of the world’ (and, by extension, of world cinema). They also suggest that it is also a ‘systematic principle’ which does not simply imply to set many (polýs) cases next to each other, but which introduces a specific way of thinking in terms of relations, links and interconnections. For the study of world cinema — and, by extension, of ‘world cinema’s planet of slums’ — these principles could be defined as follows: differentiating (or close reading), to outline the socio-historically, culturally and film-specific of a set of carefully selected case examples; tracing linkages between these examples, that is, across both geographical borders and historical periods; comparing them, in order to outline significant differences and similarities between these stand-alone, but nevertheless interconnected cases.

MAJOR ARGUMENTS AND AIMS

Before outlining the structure of this book and the rationale for the selection of its main case studies in more detail, I would first like to briefly summarise four major arguments that provide the foundations of this study and to which I will return not only in Chapter 1, but repeatedly throughout the book. Firstly, life in the slums is one of the historically most recurring topics of world cinema, particularly because media and social histories have frequently overlapped and intertwined when slums were at stake. But even though it is closely related to another prominent and frequently discussed academic topic that describes such a mutual relationship bwetween on and off screen spaces, the ‘cinematic city’ (see Chapter 1) the ‘cinematic slum’ has virtually been ignored by film scholars to date. To speculate on the reasons for disregarding slums as a valuable film studies-related research topic is beyond the scope of this work but, based on the research presented in this book, we can state that slums and cinema share a history of mutually etangled relations. Even before the ‘birth of cinema’, social history and media histories frequently overlapped. This alone should justify approaching the topic from a perspective that interrogates ‘world cinema’ not only as a geographical but also as a historical entity, which is why this book will investigate examples of ‘slums on screen’ from as far back as 1890. However, because the ‘planet of slums’ is too diverse (in both its historical and topographic appearances), there is, in my opinion, no finite way of defining slums in a generalising way as a specific category of ‘urban space’, since, to take just one example, a Victorian inner-city slum is a totally different kind of urban space than a favela on the outskirts of a contemporary Brazilian megacity. Accordingly, I claim that one has to resist the temptation to narrowly define what one might call ‘the slum film’ or ‘the cinematic slum’ a priori as a specific kind of cinematic space or generic category. Equally, I argue, one needs to resist the temptation to define cinematic spaces in general solemnly as ‘representational’ ones. It is therefore important to address the relations between the social sciences (which have been studying the conditions in slums since the times of Friedrich Engels) and film studies, as well as the many possible relations between pro-filmic and filmic spaces. It is also crucial that we look at and consider relations between social or lived spaces (which slums, in the most general sense, ultimately are) and representational spaces on screen, in order to approach ‘world cinema’s planet of slums’ in as differentiated a way as possible.

Secondly, even though they have been contested and often ambivalently defined categories in film theory and criticism, this book re-evaluates the repeated historical emergences, specific formulations as well as the various definitions of documentary and realist modes of representation in cinema, because they have historically been of pivotal importance to filmmakers addressing life in the slums on screen. While there are historically a vast number of examples that cannot be described in a conventional sense as either ‘documentary’ or ‘realist’ — and this specifically pertains to popular films like Cidade de Deus and Slumdog Millionaire — these two representational modes have been significant since the emergence of both urban slums and cinematic screens, and for several reasons. Documentary modes of representation were already in the late nineteenth century employed to support calls for social reforms with visual evidence of ‘how the poor live’. The stylistic features and filmmaking practices of what we today associate with cinematic realism developed a few decades later, that is, during the interwar period. However, realism also developed in cross-fertilisation with documentary practices and became (particularly with the profound impact of Italian neorealism on filmmakers in the developing world) a preferred style of filmmakers who would tell us stories about poverty-stricken characters at the fringes of cities. That these modes of representation are the most significant ones when it comes to this subject has also to do with the fact that many filmmakers, as well as film critics, perceive(d) realism as an ethical and therefore appropriate way to tackle social themes such as life in the slums. Similarly, documentary images have, since the nineteenth century, been understood by social reformers as useful tools, because they provided the much-needed visual evidence that could convince a middle-class public about the urgent need for social reforms. They were also understood as appropriate tools for semi-sociological studies, surveys and investigations about urban poverty and later as the crucial mode of representation to communicate socio-politically relevant topics to audiences. While there is obviously a vast amount of literature on both documentary and neorealism, this book primarily draws on some of its classical definitions, as provided by for instance André Bazin or Bill Nichols.

The third argument relates to questions about film (and media) historiography and can be summarised as follows: documentary and realism are modes that return cyclically in different forms throughout film history; they have repeatedly been modified by filmmakers in response to historically changing screen-spectator relations so that the way slums have been approached has equally gone through various permutations. Understood in this sense, one cannot regard realism as a long extinct historical film movement, nor documentary as a narrowly defined genre. Both should rather be considered as malleable modes of representation that are intrinsically linked to the technological basis of audiovisual recording media. They have therefore cyclically (re)appeared, disappeared and reappeared in different forms throughout film history. In other words, these modes have for various reasons repeatedly been recovered, but at the same time often been significantly modified in response to changing screen-spectator relations. This argument is drawn from Foucault-inspired approaches to film and media history, and especially from the ‘New Film History’ school which, since the 1980s, has repeatedly emphasised that specific re/presentational strategies — for example frontal staging (“breaking the fourth wall’) or the use of (uncut) long takes — cyclically (re)appear, disappear and re-appear in a non-teleological manner throughout film history. It also draws on the notion of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000) and on an intermedial understanding of film history, that is, it draws on the insight that cinema is best conceived as part of an interrelated network of different media that are influencing, shaping and transforming each other. According to this understanding of (the history of) cinema one can think of filmmaking as a creative media practice that continuously responds to, re-deploys or attempts to reform older practices in response to changing media technologies, environments and viewing habits. This is a way of looking at cinema which ultimately also casts light on how certain historically recurring topics, such as life in the urban slums, have continuously been revisited and refashioned by filmmakers throughout the decades.

The fourth major argument relates to the binary opposition between the global and the local and entails a rather geographical dimension: it asserts that documentary and realism constitute key modes in world cinema, since they were often employed by socially committed or politically engaged film movements which sometimes had a global impact. However, since slums are in each case a distinctly local topic, these global currents have often been modified in response to specific local contexts. In other words, this study approaches films that convey life in the slums as products of a perpetual push-pull between local conditions and broader film historical developments. Through referring to and extending on recent scholarship — presented in such volumes as Global Neorealism: Transnational History of a Film Style (Giovacchini and Sklar 2012) or The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s Internatonal Movement (Druick and Wiliams 2014) — this book traces the international impact, or transnational ‘travels’, of specific styles, movements, waves or currents that have all been related to the development of documentary and/or realism: the British Documentary Movement since the 1930s, Italian neorealism since the 1940s, cinéma vérité since the 1960s, various Latin American film movements, often subsumed under the term “Third Cinema’, since the 1960s and 1970s, and most recently the Danish Dogma 95 movement since the mid-1ggos. Since the living, housing or social conditions in the world’s slums are not only socio-political, but also distinctly local topics, these globally travelling currents have not simply been adapted, but often significantly modified according to a specific local context, as, for instance, in the case of Italian neorealism, which has been re-appropriated across the globe in sometimes completely different ways (see Chapter 4). This last argument draws from new approaches to world cinema as a polycentric phenomenon — as proposed in the above-mentioned volume Theorizing World Cinema. Yet, it also draws from the notion that filmmakers who operate in realist or documentary modes might reach for a global audience, but mostly claim to reproduce representations of a particular place and its people.

According to a ‘polycentric approach to world cinema’ and derived from the major arguments presented above, the central aims of the book can be summarised as follows:

IOo SLUMS ON SCREEN e to discuss the relations between social/urban and cinematic spaces and resist the lure of providing an a priori definition of the ‘cinematic slum’;

e toensure geo-regional diversity and a non-Eurocentric perspective by integrating non-Western films and/or cinematic cities that have previously been neglected;

e to derive prevalent aesthetic strategies of representing slums through close readings of representative examples;

* to contextualise and historicise, that is, to work out how socio-historical and/ or media- and film-historical dynamics impact on the chosen examples;

e to compare, in order to trace historical/transnational relations and linkages on a genuinely polycentric world cinema map;