UCLA

Due to the shift in production practices and the availability of lighter camera equipment in the mid-1960s, filmmakers began to cinematically explore Los Angeles (LA) many environments. Utilizing the city's diverse neighborhoods, unique architectural styles, and geographical topography, their films created imaginary spaces that sought to specifically represent LA, but also reflected post-war American urban restructuring processes in general. European filmmakers John Boorman, Jacques Demy, Agn�s Varda, and Michelangelo Antonioni seemed to be especially perceptive regarding the specificity of the spaces they encountered in Los Angeles, and their films illustrate ambivalent feelings toward the built environment feelings that seem to run parallel to cultural and theoretical investigations taking place in the academy. Aided by the founding of the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning, a new wave of scholars and theorists utilized Los Angeles in their writing as the most important case study for the postmodern megalopolis. Like Boorman, Demy, Varda, and Antonioni, neither of the leaders of this theoretical interest in Los Angeles Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Reyner Banham, and Edward Soja were native Californians. Thus, the films in question need to be considered within the broader framework of a developing critical spatial awareness characterized by the re-evaluation of lived environment and built space, which was shaped by an outsider's perspective.

The main concern of this dissertation is to establish a connection between artistic depictions of space and the socio-cultural analysis of spatial realities, landscape and lived environment, the sublime and the everyday. The concept of the sublime landscape constitutes the theoretical framework for my analysis of cityscapes. While the sublime as both theoretical and aesthetic concept serves as the lynchpin of this project, I do not provide a definitive genealogy of the sublime. Rather I situate Boorman's Point Blank (1967), Demy's Model Shop (1969), Varda's Lions Love (1969), and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) as engaging with tropes that can be found in theorizations of the sublime landscape, while speaking to an entirely different spatial experience-one that is entirely postmodern.