Overview

Near to one billion people call slums their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our world as a `planet of slums.’ But how has this hard and unyielding way of life been depicted on screen? How have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world’s most miserable habitats? Combining approaches from cultural, globalisation and film studies, Igor Krstic outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our `planet of slums’, exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture. From Jacob Riis’ How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of films from different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predeccesors, demonstrating the way various filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes to convey life in our `planet of slums’.

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9781474406864

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Reviews

This book skilfully provides a detailed and wide-ranging account of slum representation across films drawn from most continents and spanning a timeframe of over one hundred years. Analytically too, the book engages with a range of academic thought from the politics of urbanisation and globalisation to approaches drawn from cultural and film studies...[Slums on Screen] will be of great academic interest to scholars and students of development studies, urban politics, film studies and visual anthropology as well as to avid film fans. -- Shannon Philip, LSE Review of Books Krstic's highly accessible book shines a perceptive light on an area of world cinema that has been surprisingly under-researched for too long in film studies. It offers a refreshing insight into the relationship between the evolution of film practice and slum presentation and representation... This would appeal to both early researchers and scholars who are interested in the growing scholarship of world cinema. -- Tamara Courage, Viewfinder

'Undertaking nothing less than a genealogy of the representation of slums in popular media, harking back to the pre-cinematic era, Krstic has taken on a huge challenge. Cataloguing a large group of thematically connected films, he deftly analyses shifting and recurring currents across time and space in this absorbing and accessible study.' -- Tim O'Farrell, Senses of Cinema

Author Information

Igor Krstic is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Stuttgart and in the Centre for Cultural and General Studies (ZAK) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He has published on national, world and transnational cinema, documentary film and film philosophy. He is the author of Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

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