Fun City Cinema

I haven’t read a proper coffee table book in a while, so recently I dusted off Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It (Abrams) by Jason Bailey, which I’d received as a gift last year. It’s a physically imposing book (3.85 pounds!) guiding us decade by decade through the history of New York and the history of movies, which in Bailey’s telling is very much one symbiotic history.

As part of the fascinating story of filmmaking in New York, Bailey picks ten films that in some way symbolize the decades in which they were made, beginning with The Jazz Singer—a 1927 musical with an Al Jolson performance in blackface—and culminating with Frances Ha—a 2012 comedic drama starring the inimitable Greta Gerwig as a struggling dancer.

The Vox film critic (and transplanted New Yorker) Alissa Wilkinson has this to say: “Fun City Cinema is my favorite sort of film book. Jason Bailey takes us on a tour through not just New York cinema, but the city that gave birth to it and the fantastic, absurd, glorious ways in which New York’s history is, all on its own, stranger than fiction. New York owes much to the cinema, and the cinema owes much back, and Fun City Cinema is a wild and gorgeous ride through that brilliant relationship.”

So far I’ve made it through King Kong and the Great Depression. Next up, the films made to reflect a world forever marked by World War II.