The theme of the talk is to present the role of the audiovisual (Cinema, TV) in the mystification of the city and the suburbia throughout the twentieth century as well as its inability to renew models once those have proven too rigid and inadequate to the social changes that have transformed our way of living and working.

In just a few years, in the transition from the twenties to the thirties of the last century, cinema went from showing the big city from fascination to portraying it as a Moloch who devoured souls. For cinema, the city was an extraordinary setting for conflicts of all kinds: misunderstood geniuses, frustrated ambitions, identities in crisis, insatiable appetites, criminal subsoils, attics of achievers and, everywhere, accidents building biographies. The plans to clear its insane and unbreathable centers had to wait until the end of the Second World War and by then it was television that built the myth of American suburbia, through sitcoms and advertisements with cloned homes that years later would portray Bill Owens in his famous photo book Suburbia (1973).

By then, however, the desire to leave these places and their regulated perfection (inhabited by Anglo-Saxon whites in fiction) had become unbearable for many. In the sixties experiments around autonomous communities, far from urban centers and harmonized with nature multiplied, inspired by thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller and their ideas about nomadic, communal and self-managed habitats.

The ideas of Fourier and his Phalansteries, or Thoreau and his refuges, were recovered in diverse projects in places far away and not so far from cities, while megacities such as those devised by Constaninos A Doxiadis proliferated.

Both utopias and dystopias were recorded in numerous cinematic fables, but mainly in science fiction.

Series and films have certainly been lazy in offering a realistic view of other possible communities, beyond the grotesque parable (Themroc 1973) or the unattainable idealization (Avatar, 2009). Between them, the hyperboles of the world that we already know (Eduardo manostijeras, The Truman Show) have abounded but not so much the reflection of a world that is already being built between the city and nature, in forms of organization that also transcend the traditional family and exercising jobs that escape the routines of the last century. Who will dare to reflect this?

This talk is completed with a screening.

Organiza: Espacio Réflex