Filming coexistence: movies, city and sociability

Abstract

There is an old German dictation that has been repeated since Middle Ages, staduluft macht frei, the air from city releases. It registers the popular perception of amazing things that can happen in the city, differently from other places, and that are resulting from the contact with “the other”. This other one can be a close one, an equivalent person, or someone different, distant. There is an ambiguity here that will permeate the German sociological discussion at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth century: community versus society opposition and the different ways of sociability that are engendered in each one of these human groups. Thus the coexistence is inquired by stiffness or fluidity of bounds that individuals and groups establish among them, delineating bridges and walls – physical and/or symbolic ones – that join and separate them in the urban space. Far from resume this discussion, I propose here a tour to some films that somehow deals with these questions. (To be continued in PDF)