Author: eglenn

Ezra Haber Glenn is a lecturer in urban planning in MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the editor of UrbanFilm.
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Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

A world premiere is always an exciting thing, and all the more so when it’s a midnight horror screening at the Sundance Film Festival. You can read my review of the throwback psychological-horror thriller Censor on The Arts Fuse.

Censor deftly explores the interplay of censorship, free expression, public morality, violence, sexism, insanity, human nature, and even the line between truth and beauty in art. (One key insight worth pondering: the more absurd and over-the-top the gore is, the more obviously fantastical it must be — and thus, paradoxically, the more acceptable.)

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Thankfully, Bailey-Bond’s touchstone here is empathy, not prurient sadism. As we witness the effects of a toxic blend of images on Enid’s psyche as she confronts the world’s horror, we fear for her, but we feel for her as well. Most impressively, the director — one in a growing cohort of women directors intent on saving the horror genre from gratuitous sadism and its past gorification of misogyny — reminds us of what we should truly fear: the scariest thought imaginable is not to be the victim of a monster, but rather to become a monster oneself. (In this respect, Censor can actually be considered a direct descendant of a deeper horror tradition: tales of Dracula, the werewolf legend, and most pre-Walking Dead zombies were all terrifying not for what they might do to us, but for what they might make us do.)

This one is a bit of a departure from our normal “city in film” fare, but it was also a real scream — quite literally — with a lot to say about the interplay of media and society. Read the full review here.

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Celebrating Black Lives on Screen

In honor of Black History month, my February column in Planning Magazine highlights a number of recent films that celebrate Black lives, with an emphasis on stories of Black joy.

With these [more diverse] voices comes a much more complex range of characters, emotions, lives, settings, perspectives, and stories for the cinema, extending far beyond the pat narratives of the past — which even when sympathetic, all too often cast Black lives as being limited to the subjects of oppression, especially in the urban context.

As Imani Perry, professor of African American studies at Princeton University, wrote in the article “Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not” last summer: “The injustice is inescapable. So yes, I want the world to recognize our suffering. But I do not want pity from a single soul. Sin and shame are found in neither my body nor my identity. Blackness is an immense and defiant joy.”

This profound yet simple notion is spreading and reframing the way mainstream film captures the experience of being Black in America…. With special attention to stories that explore the interaction of people, places, and planning, here are a few that planners can add to their streaming queue, this month and always.

See Planning Magazine for the full article.

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On Rick Prelinger’s “Lost Landscapes…”

I’ve just finished a really fun feature in Experience magazine on Rick Perlinger’s “Lost Landscapes…” films.

Far more than just a movie screening or local history talk, the event is an alchemical spectacle, in which old images — traces of light, etched on scraps of celluloid ages ago — are re-awakened to recall our urban past….

Thanks so much to my editors at Experience, Joanna Wiess and Erick Trickey, as well as Rick Perlinger for spending time with me to talk about his work, as well as Sharon Harlan at Northeastern, who added some thoughtful comments to the piece. (Click here for the article.) Enjoy!

ps: Be sure to notice the 1918-era pandemic masks on the guys in the streets in the short video illustration….!

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Wiseman’s “City Hall” Filmerick

Here’s another filmerick for your enjoyment. (You’ll note that this one, on Fred Wiseman’s latest documentary, City Hall, is a lot shorter than the film itself.)


City Hall (Fred Wiseman, 2020)

As the five hour mark he was nearing
Wiseman must have expected some jeering.
   It’s far beyond copious,
   A real magnum opius:
It’s as long as a Zoning Board hearing.

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Mayors on Film

For my latest column in Planning Magazine, I discussed a number of recent mayors on the big (and small) screen, including thoughts on Fred Wiseman’s City Hall, David Osit’s Mayor, and the latest NBC sitcom starring Ted Danson, Mr. Mayor.

And, of course, I couldn’t resist including a shout-out to the unforgettable Mayor of Amity Island from Jaws, portrayed by Murray Hamilton…

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