Film and Financial Space

This chapter looks at how space has been figured in what is sometimes perceived as the placeless circulation of globalized finance capital. In Emma Charles’s After the Bell (2009) and Isaac Julien’s installation Playtime (2014), set in the City of London, Iceland, and Dubai, questions of labour, race, and class are set against the abstract movements of finance, themes also picked up in the Frankfurt am Main drama, The City Below (Hochhäusler, 2010). These films depict how the materiality of the architectural image stands in for the immaterial economic forces that both structure and are structured by urban centres of financial power.