While the study of the cinematic city is well established, the televisual city has been generally disregarded. The cinema has been seen as the medium of urban modernity – but what of television? This talk will explore relationships between television and the city, the characteristics of the televisual city, and the aesthetic hierarchies of screen media. Examples will be drawn mainly from the London produced by British television, tracking Britain’s difficult engagement with modernity and the end of empire through to the C21st transformations in what is understood as television.
Charlotte Brunsdon’s books include Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore (2018), London in Cinema (2007), The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera (2000) and Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes (1997). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick.
The Screen Cultures public lecture series aims to generate conversations about how screens — of all types — shape our understanding of, and interactions with, the world. Internationally recognized experts deliver the lectures. Like screens themselves, the Screen Cultures public lecture series is for everyone.