This course aims to provide students with an understanding of key movements, moments and critical debates in European cinema studies, particularly around the relationship between cinema and the city. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of cinema and the city have been inextricably linked on a number of levels. The rise of cinema occurred simultaneously with increasing urbanization and industrialization, and early cinema production and exhibition was largely urban. Thematically, the cinema has, since its inception, been constantly fascinated with the representation of the distinctive spaces, lifestyles, and human conditions of the European city (e.g. the Lumière brothers’ Paris of 1895). Formally, the cinema has long had a distinctive ability to capture and express the spatial complexity, diversity, and social dynamism of the city through mise-en-scène, location filming, lighting, cinematography, and editing. In parallel, European thinkers from Walter Benjamin – confronted by the shocking novelties of modernity, mass society, manufacture, and mechanical reproduction – to Jean Baudrillard and Bourdieu–have recognized and observed the correlation between the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the city and the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the cinema. Industrially, cinema has long played an important role in the cultural economies of cities all over the world. The city space became a genre in German street dramas (German Expressionism -1920s; New German Cinema of the 70s and 80s and the depiction of pre-and post-reunification Berlin) and in the Italian cinema of the street Italian Neorealism (1940s and 1950s), which also opened the road to women. The city also plays a major role in the French New Wave of the early 1960s, banlieue cinema and The New Wave of the 1990s. Finally, we look at how in more contemporary European cinema, cities and cinemas continue to be linked, as complex and independent categories, each in dialogue with the other, in emerging political and cultural economics, legitimating or challenging dominant ideologies and reflecting/refracting emerging crises.