Film In Focus
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Heidi Julavits

By Peter Bowen

Heidi Julavits is the author of three novels, The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards and most recently The Uses of Enchantment. She is a founding co-editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her travel pieces have appeared in the New York Times and Travel + Culture, among other places.

We asked Heidi to pick her five favorite films about cities.

1
Rosemary's Baby
New York geography, to me, is all about interiors — especially apartments, tiny spaces that represent a unique psychological world you can enter with a key. It's like stepping inside someone's head. I especially love how the bright, airy apartment in Rosemary's Baby becomes so toxic and terrifying. The plot could be described as the psychic make-over of a space.
2
Saturday Night Fever
This movie is all about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (you thought it was about disco). The Verrazano Bridge looms like a mountain range over Bay Ridge and over Saturday Night Fever. It represents escape from New York (via Staten Island) and the possibility of real or figurative death, and works as a central image to reinforce the movie's (and, you could argue, the borough's) defining tension.
3
Spirited Away
OK, so nowhere is it specified that Spirited Away takes place in Kyoto. Having lived for four months in Kyoto, however, I felt that Spirited Away, with its bath houses and its focus on ritual that can, with one wrong move, give way to a spooky scatological deluge, really captured the experience of living in a swift and modern city that is so haunted, and excellently so, by its ancient past.
4
Vertigo

San Francisco has always depressed me, and felt very stealthily sinister to me, and Vertigo aptly captures the implicit dank menace of that city, better than the actual city does.
5
Band of Outsiders

If I were a Parisian hack criminal, or just a Parisian tourist, I hope I'd make time to kick back in a café, do a little dancing, and smoke a lot of purely recreational cigarettes while looking greasily fabulous.