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.
9.1Robert Gardner, aged 58, in Varanasi in 1984, during the shooting of
Forest of Bliss
(1986).
9.2
Rivers of Sand (1974). Left, the beating of women by men is part of Hamar tradition, ‘so how can it be bad’?, asks Omali Inda. Right, according to Gardner, ‘Men are also afflicted, through their own tyranny, with wasted energies, idle spirits and self-doubt’.
9.3
Deep Hearts
(1981). Left, a young man prepares for the geerewol ceremony; right, a young woman selects her favourite from amongst the line of male dancers.
9.4
Dead Birds (1964). Left, a Dani man injured by an enemy arrow; right, a warrior holding a feather head-dress looks over the battleground.
9.5
Forest of Bliss
(1986), material metaphors. Feral dogs eating carrion left, evoke Cerberus, the guardian of the Underworld in Greek mythology, while the wood transported upriver for the cremation pyres, right, suggests the presence of death.
9.6
Forest of Bliss
(1986), subjects as metaphors. Left, the holy Ragul Pandit performs prayers at dawn; right, Dom Raja, the Untouchable cremation businessman, a character of ‘utter balefulness’.
9.7
Forest of Bliss
(1986), metaphors of transition to the ‘far shore’. Left, while a cremation takes place in the far distance, an empty wooden barge stands offshore, as if waiting to carry the soul of the deceased across the river. Right, in the final shot, a rowing boat disappears into the mist to the sound of grating rowlocks.