The great American film critic Manny Farber memorably declared space to be the most dramatic stylistic entity in the visual arts. He posited three primary types of space in fiction cinema: the field of the screen, the psychological space of the actor, and the area of experience and geography that the film covers. This book brings together five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guediguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. It proposes that people think about cinematographic space in its many different forms simultaneously (screenspace, landscape, narrative space, soundscape, spectatorial space). Through a series of close and original readings of selected films, it posits a new 'space of the cinematic subject'. Dumont's attraction to real settings and locality suggests a commitment to realism. New forms and surfaces of spectatorship provoke new sensations and engender new kinds of perception, as well as new ways of understanding and feeling space. The book interrogates Guediguian's obsessive portrayal of one particular city, Marseilles. Entering into the spaces of work and non-work in Cantet's films, it asks what constitutes space and place within the contemporary field of social relations. The book also engages with cultural space as the site of social integration and metissage in the work of Kechiche, his dialogues with diasporic communities and highly contested urban locales. Denis's film work contains continually shifting points of passage between inside and outside, objective and subjective, in the restless flux.
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In the decade from 2008–2018, television networks and streaming services were noticeably captivated by the stories of real and fictitious nurses set in historical hospitals – some iconic, some forgotten, and others only imagined or fleeting in their existence. Although these historical medical dramas featured large ensemble casts of hospital staff and patients, their leading characters and protagonists were all women who worked as nurses in the eras concentrated between the 1860s and the 1920s. These hospital-based series have contributed to the public historical consciousness and literacy by disseminating both a multi-dimensional experience of space, time, and people in the past, but also by facilitating an emotional connection to the human condition of those who lived, worked, and struggled in familiar ways through unfamiliar circumstances. Despite the ‘Netflix effect’ that aimed at illuminating lesser-known regional or national locations and events, television series from the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Spain, and Australia still offered familiar depictions of historical nurses across time and place. The tensions between tradition and progress, religion and science, nurses and doctors, women and men serve to drive dramatic television storylines, but often, they also serve the audience’s nostalgic desire to imagine a shared past as it might have been. By engaging with theoretical and empirical studies of gender, nostalgia, and the historical representation of nurses, this chapter illuminates how creators and audiences have collaboratively reimagined the past as a transnational social commentary for the present.
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Part I: Early modern professions and disease
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Part II: Pioneers, heroes, and villains
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Part III: Dissecting the body
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Part 11: ‘And when you touched my naked body … your fingertips running along my flesh … this was abuse, not science’
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Part IV: ‘Treating’ the mind
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The life of mise-en-scène
Visual style and British film criticism, 1946–78
This book explores the role of mise-en-scene in melodrama criticism, and considers what happened to detailed criticism as major theoretical movements emerged in the 1970s. Mise-en-scene, and other ways of conceiving visual style, has been central to so many important debates that the writing examined in the book shaped the field in enduring ways. The book provides a cross-section of the British culture and its attitudes to film. It also considers a range of important contexts, from material conditions of film viewing (and therefore criticism) to the cultural and political shifts of 1956. The book further investigates the frequently asserted connection between literary criticism and the approaches developed in Movie. It identifies the range of different approaches to interpreting mise-en-scene advanced in Movie, drawing out sections on action, camera movement and placing, connections between different parts of the film, and a range of further debates. 'Tales of Sound and Fury' is an extraordinary article, and Elsaesser's appreciation of the plastic and expressive qualities of domestic melodrama and the broader melodramatic tradition is exemplary. In the early 1970s, writing on melodrama provided some of the richest expressions of mise-en-scene criticism. The book embodies a number of approaches which were to undermine the emergent interest in the interpretation of the film style. Melodrama criticism is a crucial focus for shifts in film criticism and theory, and for this history.
In the full-length treatment of the child in Spanish cinema, this book explores the ways that the cinematic child comes to represent 'prosthetic memory'. The cinematic children in the book retain traces of their mechanical origins: thus they are dolls, ventriloquists' dummies, cyborgs or automata. Moreover, by developing the monstrous undertones evoked by these mechanical traces (cinema such as 'Frankensteinian dream'), these films, in different ways, return repeatedly to a central motif. The central motif is the child's confrontation with a monster and, derivatively, the theme of the monstrous child. Through their obsessive recreation over time, the themes of the child and the monster and the monstrous child come to stand in metonymically for the confrontation of the self with the horrors of Spain's recent past. The book focuses on the cine religioso (religious cinema), in particular, Marcelino, pan y vino. The children of cine religioso appear like automata, programmed to love unconditionally an absent mother. The book then examines the Marisol's films from the 1960s and the way she was groomed by her creators to respond and engineer the economic and cultural changes of the consumerist Spain of the 1960s. It further deals with Victor Erice's El espiritu de la colmena and works through cinematic memories of this film in later works such as El laberinto del fauno, El orfanato and El espinazo del diablo. The films are seen to gesture towards the imaginary creation of a missing child.