Reflections and Prospections

During the final presentations of our Cinematic City course, everything seemed to be rounding up – or did it really? Beyond the actual locations and the films used to exemplify them, a broad series of themes was tackled, as diverse as: the physical and the virtual gaze, spatiality and movement, genre film in the context of Dutch cinema (and the appropriation of Hollywood tropes), myths and iconography, development and flow of urbanity, the production and distribution of visual material etc. And that does not even begin to describe the countless relations that we saw between fiction films, documentaries, newsreels and “home-made” videos. We saw comparative analyses between similar scenes, even from quite dissimilar films, thus adding to the constant flux which is not yet immediately quantifiable and which, ideally, may be called the virtual life of a site. The place which simultaneously is and is not there. The simultaneously narrative and descriptive, objective and subjective, denoted and connoted basis of the heterotopia of our surroundings.

Panoptics, Surveillance and Concrete Abstraction: Modesty Blaise Beyond the Glitz

The panoramic view that we get from the Havengebouw in Modesty Blaise, directed by Joseph Losey in 1966, does not spectacularize the city, but rather the actions that take place inside it, by playing with notions of surveillance. In this case, the acts of seeing and being seen are in focus, and this is done through the relationship created through the shot between the cinematic apparatus, the viewer, the characters, the narrative and the city, which I will all describe in detail further on.

The chicken or the egg: the tourist or the monument?

The Havengebouw – the tallest building in Amsterdam for a short while – appears in two scenes of the spy thriller comedy Modesty Blaise, from 1966, directed by Joseph Losey.