Cine-Memories in the Branded City: Home Movies’ Archives and Urban Aesthetics Between Critique and Re-Familiarisation

This chapter investigates the emergence of city's everyday images produced by its past dwellers in contemporary media-urban visual landscapes through the case of amateur footage. The first two paragraphs analyse the visual stylisation and aesthetic defamiliarisation involved in contemporary city-branding phenomena, focusing in particular on the role of user-generated images and memory in urban aesthetics to show the current analytical relevance of a particular filmic object such as home movies. The third paragraph reviews some previous studies that have highlighted the critical potential of the “archive city”, theorising it as a dispositif for visualising the chrono-topical, multiple, open and reworkable dimension of the city and its images. The last part starts from these premises but focuses on the specific spectatorial dynamics of recognition and emotional adherence generated by these cine-memories and by the archive’s ability to reveal not only multiplicity and difference, but also similarities and repetitions between films and between films and viewers. The aim of this analysis is to show the particular affective closeness to the past that here emerges, proposing that, in today’s branded and digitally mediated cities, the amateur archive city can become a place of, medially performed, re-familiarisation of user-dwellers with a (lost) city, forcing us to reconsider the critical potential of these particular images from the past, taking into account the sense of authenticity and longing they evoke.