Dialogues between images and sounds in the urban imaginary. Barcelona's rhythms

Abstract

Our study explores the sounds of the city in its relationship with the movies in the intention of observing how an imaginary of the city of Barcelona has been built and deconstructed through contemporary cinema. Seen as a whole it provides a plural, polyphonic and heterogeneous vision of Barcelona’s city. Relying on an audiovisual corpus of extremely diverse objectives, durations, cinematographic genres and modes of communication such as video-clips, fictional movies, official films of the Olympic Games and several documentaries, we will try to show that the sounds with which the city has been associated, taken as a whole, have played a fundamental role in the configuration of a complex imaginary of the city of Barcelona, thereby contributing to reveal its multiversal character. In its dialogue with images, sound establishes, contradicts and reinforces intertextual threads between various productions, making a trace in a collective memory that contributes to performative reinterpretation.