Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. While scholarship on NYC cinema has charted the development and decay of the city as represented on screen through the 1970s, the ruins and riches of the city have been a favorite canvas for directors like Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Noah Baumbach, among others, to reflect the psychological crises of their main characters. Watered down in these discussions and depictions is the history of the place itself, reducing cinematic New York City into a passive aesthetic background sans historical and political valences, especially from the 1980s to the present.

This panel anchors the critical discussion of cinematic New York City to spatial film historiography as proposed by scholar Priya Jaikumar, foregrounding how real and filmic spaces inform each other. Jaikumar’s work, Where Histories Reside: India as a Filmed Space, demonstrates the institutional and visual regimes that frame, scale, and map India as a filmed space. Our panel aims to broaden the scope of Jaikumar’s methodology and prompts a more thorough engagement between Jaikumar’s spatial historiography and the “spatial turn” in contemporary cinema studies, while marshalling the malleability of contemporary New York City imagery as approached by Hollywood, Independent, and Transnational filmmakers. Understanding Jaikumar’s work as a necessary intervention in thinking about history, space, and cinema, this panel invites papers that take a closer look at the background–– filmic and filmed New York City––in relation to political ideologies, state policies, economies of desire, and migration. Given New York City’s prominence as a location for a variety of filmmaking practices, the focal nodes of this panel would be film and place, film and space, and film and built environment, by examining American independent, Hollywood, and transnational films. 

Please submit a title (120 characters), an abstract (2500 characters), and a short bio (500 characters) to aryaprakash030@gmail.com by August 10, 2026, 11:59 PM. 

Dr. Arya Rani (Grinnell College)
Dr. Scott Krzych (Colorado College)