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This article argues for a concept of the transnational archive, which offers the potential to activate movingimage artifacts across a wider historical and geographical scope than the national film historiographies. Following Stoler’s description of archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety, we suggest approaching archives as registers of struggle, confusion, discrepancy, and rupture. As such, the transnational archive holds a plethora of artifacts that may challenge the intact paradigms of former colonialist and imperialist states. We tackle this potential via Ottoman film heritage, focusing on recently discovered footage of Adana, filmed by missionary filmmakers Mulsant and Chevalier in 1909. We take these cinematic images of ruins and rubble as signs of ruination, extending Stoler’s concept to the destruction of cultural heritage for epistemic erasure, as an ongoing phenomenon even after the dissolution of the imperialist or colonialist state.

This book offers a rich exploration of the cinematic aesthetics that filmmakers devised to reflect the corporeal and affective experience of walking in the city.

This book offers a rich exploration of the cinematic aesthetics that filmmakers devised to reflect the corporeal and affective experience of walking in the city. Winner of the 2023 Best Book Award from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA).

In this introductory chapter, the ambulant protagonist of Paris qui dort (1923) provides a starting point to discuss the interrelationship between cinema and city via the figure of the pedestrian. Following a brief analysis of the film, this chapter formulates the concept of cinematic pedestrianism based on three key notions. Henri Lefebvre's contention that space is ideologically and materially produced enables a critical reading of the politics underlying urban and cinematic spaces. Michel de Certeau's 'pedestrian acts' points to the political potentials of walking, while Jacques Rancière's theory of aesthetics illuminates how walking in the city and its cinematic articulations can disrupt the dominant construction of space. The chapter concludes by outlining the itinerary of the book.

This chapter focuses on the function of pedestrianism as a key component of Soviet Montage aesthetics, specifically coming to the fore in the film theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. The key function attributed by Vertov to the act of walking in film production is emphasized in his montage theory and his magnum opus Man with a Movie Camera. Contextualizing the images of walking in this film within the director's theoretical writings, this chapter provides an in-depth study of how Vertov envisioned the camera operators (kinoks) as ambulant observers and archivers of everyday life. Imagining cinematographic labour as such, Vertov positioned the filmmaker as one worker among many that built Soviet society.

This chapter analyses the philosophy of movement that informed the scientific studies of human locomotion in the nineteenth century, before the rise of the Lumière cinématographe. It contextualizes the use of the photographic method and wearable media to extend the scientific understanding of walking. Through a comparative analysis of Eadweard Muybridge's and Étienne-Jules Marey's studies, it explores the visual aesthetics that resulted from the ever-growing obsession with capturing movement in its continuous flow. The oeuvre of these two influential names in the history of moving images is thus crucial to an examination of the nascent visual aesthetics of temporality and spatiality in the representation of human stride, which eventually contributed to the visual vocabulary of cinematic pedestrianism.

This chapter explores the conceptions of the city and everyday life in the writings of filmmakers from Fascist-era and post-Fascist Italy. Going out on the street with a camera to observe everyday life in its uninterrupted flow and to shoot without intervention was a recurrent urge voiced by many filmmakers. Taking inspiration from Zavattini's concept of pedinamento, I analyse cinematographic images of pedestrian acts in three films-Roma, Città Aperta (Rome, Open City), Germania Anno Zero (Germany, Year Zero), and Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves)-which I have selected for comparison in order to explore the transformation of the social and political background, and its effect on the aesthetics of the city and the cinematic image of walking.

Moving the focus to the insurgent social movements of May '68, this chapter investigates how walking, wandering, or marching changed its on-screen meaning in the French Nouvelle Vague. Arguing against the male-dominant historiography of this period, it analyses the articulation of dissent through walking in Agnès Varda's filmography. Through the analysis of three films-Cleo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962), Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985), and Les plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008)-the chapter explores feminist aesthetics and cinematic pedestrianism as a dissentient tactic. The chapter argues that the cinematic pedestrianism of women protagonists in these films embodies the feminist intersectional repertoire of activism, such as walking and marching in the city, to challenge gendered and heteronormative constructions of space.

This chapter investigates flânerie as a filmmaking practice undertaken by Lumière cinématographe operators in the late nineteenth century. It first explores the socio-historical context that led to flânerie being vilified as aimless and unproductive movement in the face of an industrialist ethics that envisioned rationalization of production through maximum integration of the human body into automation. Shifting its focus to the conceptualizations of flânerie in artistic and social discourse, it analyses flânerie-inspired cinematic aesthetics through an in-depth study of city scenes in Lumière filmography. It proposes three aesthetic components of early cinematic aesthetics of walking, inspired by flânerie: the gaze as a wandering eye, the drift as porous framing, and crowds as the paradox of detached belonging.

In the nineteenth century, women did not enjoy the same freedom as men to flâner in the city. By the turn of the century, however, the ethics that prescribed women's movement, visibility, and behaviour in public spaces were strongly challenged as women were increasingly integrated into the urban workforce. This sociological phenomenon transformed both public space and the cinematic aesthetics that reflected that space. This chapter analyses the feminist pedestrian acts in Lois Weber's Shoes (1916), a powerful representation of underpaid female labour and the insecure economic and social conditions of working-class women. It contextualizes Weber's activist filmmaking as an aesthetic practice in a Rancièrian sense through representation of precarious women's pedestrianism in the city.