Cinematic New York as Intercultural Space: A Filmgeographic Perspective on Staging Intercultural Encounters in Feature Films

Keywords: Intercultural Encounter, Film Geography, Diversity, Living with Differences
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40

Abstract

Cinema imagines cities often as places where people from various cultural backgrounds come together and constantly negotiate their cultural differences in the context of everyday encounters. The paper examines how US-American feature films stage and convey intercultural encounters, drawing on the example of New York City. Initially, it addresses questions on the cinematic construction of intercultural encounters on a theoretical level. The paper explores the question in how far movies approach the interactive in-between of the encountering characters by certain means and sketches a proposal for a theoretical framework (Intercultural Space) that combines theoretical approaches to geographies of encounter, interculturality and boundary crossings. A comparative analysis of various feature films leads to six dimensions of intercultural spaces that are carried out within the presentation: Intercultural spaces of (1) differentiating labelling, (2) irritating communication, (3) multidimensional discrimination, (4) restrictive boundary drawing, (5) impossible boundary crossing and (6) enabling boundary commuting. As polysemous staging strategies, those spaces provide insight into how feature films depict everyday intercultural encounters in an urban context. The paper concludes that New York City is imagined as a place in which intercultural encounters are consciously reflected as an intercultural coexistence, engendering a cinematic geography of difference.