Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli have provided a useful addition to the growing body of literature on the intersection of "the city" and cinema in their From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema. In the case of this book, however, what we have is not "the city" or even a city, but the numerous cities that have served as settings and locations for some of the most interesting European films of recent years.

While the authors provide a thorough overview of the discourses on the urban and the postmodern from which their work draws, the book's most striking feature is not its deployment of contemporary critical theory but rather its critical, intelligent cinephilia. Mazierska and Rascaroli maintain a tone of learned enthusiasm across the book, which treats a number of interesting and out of the way films. Quite often the book marks the first time that these films have been written about seriously for an English-speaking audience. (Most readers, after finishing the book, will have compiled a list of new "to see" films.) The concentration on lesser-known works is an attractive feature of the book, given that so much film criticism tends to focus solely and safely on films about which there already exists a large body of scholarship. Instead, Mazierska and Rascaroli are often pioneers in their meditations on work by such directors as Pavel Lungin and Mario Martone, among others.

The book is organized in three major sections. The first section treats films set in western European city centers (notably the Madrid of Pedro Almodóvar and the Marseilles of Claire Denis). The second section analyzes a number of films [End Page 129] set in what the authors call Postcommunist Europe, focusing on films made in Warsaw, Berlin, and Moscow. The third is a case study that surveys recent British urban filmmaking. Across the three sections the authors deploy a consistent method: a syncretist approach of theoretically inflected close readings that are situated inside specific urban historical contexts. In addition to the interest of the extended analyses of the individual films that constitute the core of each chapter, each chapter begins with an overview of major (and some minor) films made in and about the respective cities. These overviews usefully suggest possible areas of inquiry for future researchers who may be inspired by From Moscow to Madrid.

Mazierska and Rascaroli are to be congratulated for arguing for the implicit importance of location in European cinema. Many of the films they analyze have not yet been discussed specifically from the perspective of these films' embeddedness in distinct urban histories. This book's major contribution is, thus, its clever and convincing demonstration of the centrality of physical location to these films' meanings. The book also demonstrates how the films' (and perhaps implicitly, all films') various uses of urban locations are often the key to understanding their ideological, national, and historical discourses.

The authors take considerable care in their analyses of less-familiar filmmakers such as Polish director Juliusz Machulski, whose films participate in the fascinating redefinition (both physical and discursive) of postcommunist Warsaw. But they also aim their sights at more familiar mainstream fare. Their welcome and very stringent (though never sneering) criticisms of the artificial and misleading use of London in films like Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998) and Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999) suggest that their refreshing approach is useful beyond the horizon of arthouse cinema. The analyses of these last films form a part of the book's last section, "Case Study: Great Britain." Here the authors analyze several films, all produced since the 1980s, all set in cities across mainland Britain: London, Edinburgh, Swansea, and Blackpool. Such a move allows them to speculate about the nature of urban filmmaking in a single historical period and a single national context (though films and authors demonstrate the nation to...