Recognizing the City on Screen: City Mindscape, City Selection, and City Recognition

Abstract

This article proposes a framework for understanding how spectators recognize cities in films by theorizing the relationship between city mindscape, city selection, and city recognition. Building on Kevin Lynch’s notion of the “image of the city” and research on cognitive mapping, the article distinguishes experience-based “city images” from media-based “city illusions,” and unifies them as a “city mindscape” – the composite mental landscape through which viewers perceive and remember urban space. On the production side, it introduces “city selection” to describe how filmmakers’ sample, weight, and arrange urban elements through seven layers: spatial and temporal sampling, semantic choice, kinetic orchestration, photometric and chromatic design, sound, and editing. City recognition is defined as the moment when these organized selections align with viewers’ prior mindscapes, generating a sense of urban identity that depends less on cartographic fidelity than on rhythmic, textural, and narrative plausibility. Methodologically, the article combines theory-driven modeling with close scene analysis. A case study of Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) demonstrates how nocturnal lighting schemes, textures, recurrent spatial anchors, and a characteristic sonic rhythm render the city recognizable even in the absence of explicit landmarks or expository dialogue. The study proposes a portable analytic kit for decomposing cinematic cities into manipulable modules and tracing how films both reflect and reshape public understandings of urban space. It concludes by arguing that city recognition can serve as an interpretive key for analyzing narrative space, while also warning against the stabilization of clichéd urban imaginaries.