Date: 22 Jan, 2010
Time: 2:00pm-4:00pm
Venue: Lecture room, Shenzhen Planning Bureau

“Our contemporary life as it is would be completely different if the 20th
century had happened without the cinema […] the moving image
changed our way of thinking, moving around and seeing things”

—–by Wim Wenders

Echoing the Urbanism\Architecture Film Festival, the ‘09 SZHKB will invite Dr. Francois Penz, who is an expert both on architecture and moving pictures to give a lecture on the evolving genre of the City Symphonies – learning from the filmic spaces of the past in order to better anticipate the present but also the future.

In the 1920s, City Symphonies changed the way we perceive cities – they
metaphorised the emergence of the modern metropolis by eliciting crucial
links on the screen – City Symphonies gave space to the urban space,
allowed the city to play and come forward, becoming both character and
subject and provided us with the perceptual equipment to grasp the
complexity of the urban phenomena.

While the golden age of the City Symphonies was the 1920s and 1930s, they
are still being made today and the genre has permeated the world of music
videos, art work, fictions as well as documentaries, as if every new City
Symphony was reinventing the genre.

The lecture will provide an understanding of City Symphonies by tracing their
historical evolution and highlight their value and relevance to contemporary
arts & cultures as well as urban design practices.

François Penz

Dr François Penz, an architect by training, teaches in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at the University of Cambridge where he is a Reader in Architecture and the Moving Image. He co-founded Cambridge University Moving Image Studio and more recently the Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualization and Communication where he runs the PhD programme. He also contributes to the interdisciplinary University wide MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures. François is currently the Principal Investigator of a two-year research grant, Narrascape – Urban Environment as Narrative System in the
UK and China. He is a fellow of Darwin College and a founder of Screenspace.