The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920-1980

Film offers a powerful witness to the historical effects of segregation. Twentieth-century American urban policy favored “white flight” to the suburbs while confining other racial and ethnic groups in urban cores. Mainstream cinema, in turn, perpetuated racial stereotypes that justified this confinement. Amy Murphy revisits this history via six independent films, each mapping a distinct urban geography at a particular moment in the century. Murphy’s analysis reveals that certain veins of postwar independent filmmaking grew out of specific policy failures of the American city. With increased access to media production, such filmmakers created new cinemas from within the segregated city that expanded avenues for self-representation. Informed and insightful, The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920–1980 examines how often-raw independent films pioneered cinematic exploration of identities impacted by space and time, and by geography and history.