City-Image in Iranian and French New Wave of Cinema: A Comparative Study

It seems that from the beginning of urbanization and formation of cities, reviewing the conditions of cities and trying to improve the living conditions in them also have been taken into consideration. Even the most famous scientists and philosophers of the history also had to pay special attention to the city. In this way, their tools will be manuscript, plan, sketch, etc. As the same time, artists have tried to think about living in cities and urban spaces, and they have reflected such issues on their works. Cinema, from the beginning up to now, has always had been tied with city. Although the most important European and American cities have had an unbreakable relationship with movies as “Location” or “Subject” of the narration, but academic interdisciplinary studies including both cinema and urban studies could rarely be found. Firstly, this paper concerns about addressing the relationship between city and cinema. However, understanding the mental image of city in citizens’ mind has always been one of the most important issues for urban experts. It seems that cinema and its special capability in presenting concrete images of cities and urban issues has been neglected by them. A range of different resources such as analytical books, articles, novels, poems etc have been used by urban researchers, but cinema as the most important art-industry-media of the last century has not been considered academically. The second goal is a comparative study between city-images found in a group of Iranian and French films, commonly known as New Wave of Cinema. In the first part of this paper, the studying relationship between city and cinema demonstrates that cinema as a global and amusing “Art-Industry-Media” has an effective role in representation of several phenomena. In the meantime, city as the most complex social phenomenon of the last century and the context for the life of more than half of the population of the planet soon found his place in cinema and city-image became one of the most visible and attractive aspects of Mise-en-scene. So it seems that a review of movies of different countries can help urban planners to understand the conditions of cities and urbanization, this time from the perspective of an important concrete visual resource, namely “Cinema”. In conclusion, structural content analysis using semiotics method illustrates that Iranian and French New Wave films represent “city” in drastically different ways. City in French new wave cinema is a context for flaneuristic activities, where the sense of liberation and freedom, happiness, safety and beauty, as well as accidental encountering, diversity prevails, and it is an alternative for traditional family ties. In contrast, city in Iranian new wave cinema becomes the location of vengeance and failure of urban heroes; a non-uniform city full of physical and social conflicts, with a modern shell but traditional heart, in transition from human scale to superhuman and even to a frightening scale with no hopeful vision for the future.