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Starring New York
Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s
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Book Presentation:
• Draws on a series of classic films—Mean Streets, Annie Hall, Death Wish, and others—to provide an urban history of a legendary city
• Analyzes the city's role in a variety of cinematic genres: blaxsploitation, comedy, crime, and musical
• Features over thirty illustrations from the era's epochal films
• Considers the city's geography and its connection to other spaces around the globe
Starring New York considers twenty-one films in detail, and more generally discusses many others, that were shot on location and released between 1968 and 1981. Corkin looks at their complex relationship to the fortunes of New York City during that era, probing the multiple connections among film, history, and geography. This period was a volatile moment in the history of the city as it went from the hopefulness of the Lindsay years (1966 to 1973) to financial default in 1975, under the leadership of Abe Beame to its reemergence as a center of international finance in the 1980s, under the leadership of Edward I. Koch (1978 to 1989). These changing regimes and fortunes form the backdrop for films that picture New York's racial and ethnic populations, its decaying districts, its violent street-life, and its emerging gentrification by the later years of the decade.
The films, directed by an emerging generation of filmmakers influenced both by the Italian neo-realists and the French auteurs, sought a higher realism than that offered in conventional Hollywood productions. Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, Woody Allen, and John Schlesinger, all of whom became noted by a general audience during this period, capture the excitement and volatility of the period. More broadly, Starring New York proposes that this concentration of popular films that picture the city in transition provide viewers with a means to begin reorienting their view of New York's space, their significance, and their relation to other places of the globe.
About the Author:
Stanley Corkin, Professor of English, University of Cincinnati Stanley Corkin is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Film, Literature, and Culture and Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and US History .
Press Reviews:
"an absorbing and clear-sighted examination of a decade often seen in hazy terms." - Richard Martin, Journal of American Studies
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> From the same author:
Connecting the Wire (2017)
Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore
Subject: One Film > The Wire (TV Series)
Cowboys as Cold Warriors (2004)
The Western and U.S. History
> On a related topic:
Seeing Symphonically (2022)
Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York
by Erica Stein
Subject: Genre > Experimental
Fear City Cinema (2022)
The Dark Side of New York in Film, 1965–1995
Turner Classic Movies Cinematic Cities (2019)
New York: The Big Apple on the Big Screen
Scenes in the City (2003)
Film Visions of Manhattan Before 9/11
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