Cinema on the Urban Margin: Visions from Europe and Latin America

The urban periphery became a focus for the silver screen in the nineties, coming to signify all societal woes: youth delinquence, drugs and violence. A serious examination of the importance of suburbia in film is long overdue. This study assesses the different treatments of the suburbs in different filmmaking regions, paying particular attention to: Italian cinema: 1960s Pier Paulo Pasolini, and more recent trend of neo neo realisme; French cinema: 1980s le cinema beur and 1990s cinema de banlieue; Spanish and German cinematic contributions to the genre, and Latin American cinema: revival of representation of the urban marginality.

Key issues highlighted include: the mapping of the city - social, gendered and racial, the direct contrast between the disoprdered periphery and the 'civilised' city-centre, and the function of the urban periphery to exclude the underclasses from the centres of wealth and power. In most of the films featured, violence is seen as the only answer to this segregation, but the author singles out the exceptions to this rule.