Gerald Sussman, a professor in Portland State’s Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, recently inherited a course that was developed about 10 years ago.
The class, titled “The City in Film,” was created by a group of faculty in urban studies who were also particularly interested in film.
After being taught for a few years and then dropped, Sussman decided to pick it back up a couple of years ago, and it is now on its way to becoming a permanent class.
“The concept of the course is mainly about urban representations in popular cinema,” Sussman said.
For the class, he focuses primarily on films from the 1980s to the present, because he wants students to see representations of cities as they are today, not as they were back in the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s.
“Cities have changed a lot,” Sussman said.
Even within the 1980s-and-later timeframe, some city dynamics have really changed. Sussman brought up the Tom Hanks film You’ve Got Mail. It was based mainly around the then-new technology of email, and its first introduction into public communication—today, almost every film set in a big city features prevalent use of cell phones.
Sussman also said that he tries to incorporate many international cities in the films he selects for the course.
“I use films from Brazil, France, Turkey and other countries to try to get a comparative sense of cities,” Sussman said. “And to have conversations around built environments and the social interaction within those environments.”
The class also discusses specific problems that are pertinent to those cities and countries.
The class meets once a week and watches a film each meeting. They then discuss the film, as well as an assigned piece of literature. Sussman splits each week into a different theme, and within each theme there are three movies, one of which the class watches together.
There are several themes of the class: Cities of charm and mystique, urban dystopia and suburban utopia, lost community and postwar adjustments to modernity are just a few. Students are required to write five reviews following a specific format over the course of the term.
At the end of the term, each student chooses another theme to focus on in a term paper. After choosing a theme, each student watches one of the other assigned films and writes a paper that develops a central argument portrayed in the film cluster.
The course is a University Studies junior cluster course in the Community Studies category. Sussman said he enjoys seeing the wide variety of disciplines represented in the course, and that it’s always an interesting array of students.
“I think there are many dimensions to studying cities as we do in this department. One of the dimensions of cities that we tend to under-study is the realm of culture, the culture of the city, and it’s very important to know what sort of cultural institutions that cities have,” Sussman said.
Portland is a great example of what can be good about a city because it has so many cultural facilities, he added.
“[The] culture of the city is very important,” Sussman said. “And therefore a course within urban studies that focuses so largely on culture really broadens the education of students about understanding what cities are made of.”