Cinema was invented for this very reason: because our century needed a language that could make everything immediately visible.
Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing, 1988
Launched on TV on August 1st, 1981, MTV was destined to change forever the way people experience music, and videos themselves. After the launch of the new TV channel, music could rely on a captivating new medium: the music video. Music videos quickly became a shared cultural product among young people, capable of driving fashion and shaping trends. Naturally, music videos also began to influence the aesthetics of other art forms, including photography, TV series, and cinema.
In the past 45 years, a number of directors have come to cinema by way of other cinematic forms: David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry all served their formative experience in the music video, testing durations, registers and visual solutions that they would later bring to the feature films. On the other hand, many established filmmakers frequently return to the forms of the video clip, short films, or TV series, as in the case of David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and Sofia Coppola.
In the exploration of different cinematic media over the past 45 years, the city plays a prominent role: its buildings serve as a meaningful backdrop, its urban spaces convey emotion and plot details, and its distinct areas – the center, the neighborhoods, and the suburbs – often highlight the unspoken nuances of the story. In every case, the city – whether real, imagined, or futuristic – acts as a true character in its own right.
The eighth issue of ADHJ: The Journal of Architectural Design and History, titled Heritage Cities on Screen: Urban Imageries in Movies, Music Videos and TV Series, explores the representation of the city on screen, examining how its various elements and spaces are depicted across film, television, and music videos.
The timeframe spans from the launch of MTV in 1981 to the present day. Defining this period aims to foster discussion on contemporary audiovisual production and how it shapes the way we design, experience, and perceive urban spaces today. In so doing, the ambition is to deeply explore how moving images act as a parallel language that shapes our understanding, and even memory, of urban spaces and cultural heritage.
We invite authors to investigate the presence and use of the urban image in the broadest sense: from auteur cinema and mainstream television series to underground music videos. To maintain a focus on narrative media, documentaries are excluded.
To contribute to this issue, we invite groundbreaking investigations and reflections about the themes revolving around (but not limited to) the following fields:
• Real buildings and urban spaces used as backdrops, and their impact on contemporary architectural and urban debates;
• The representation of different city areas across cinema, television series, and music videos, and how they shape our phenomenological experience of urban space;
• Cinematic narratives as documentation of urban transformation: evidence of buildings, places, or spatial practices that have evolved or been lost over time;
• Real buildings and urban locations used to portray imaginary or futuristic worlds;
• Filmmaking composition and techniques as an imaginary for architectural language and genesis of form;
• Film commissions, location incentives and place branding: the city that offers its heritage as a set and, in doing so, determines what counts as heritage at all.