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.
2.1Left,
Buffalo Dance
, featuring Sioux Indians, shot in the Edison studio, September 1894; right, opium smokers in the French colony of Annam (today central Vietnam) filmed by Gabriel Veyre in late 1898 or early 1899.
2.2
Delhi, Great Capital of India (1909). In four minutes, a narrative is economically deployed: above, an establishing overview before passing to the procession in the street; middle, a distant shot of the inner court of the mosque gives way to a midshot of the faithful performing ablutions; below, the faithful are seen praying before they finally leave in a classical closure shot.
2.3
Simba, King of the Beasts (1928), directed by Martin and Osa Johnson. The jocose intertitle on the left immediately precedes the image on the right, which shows a young Samburu of northern Kenya.
2.4
Grass – A Nation's Battle for Life (1925). The story of Bakhtiari migration is built around the headman Haidar Kahn and his son Lufta, left; but during the epic journey itself, right, they are glimpsed only rarely.
2.5
In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914). Left, Motana watches Naida depart after he has given her a token of his love; right, later, Motana's party arrives in style for the wedding feast, with the Thunderbird in the prow of one of three highly decorated canoes.
2.6
Nanook of the North (1922) retained certain features of the travelogue, but offered an unprecedented intimacy with the subjects. Left, Nanook is amused by a gramophone at the trade store; right, Nyla, Nanook's screen wife and Flaherty's real life lover, builds an igloo.