Space and being in contemporary French cinema

By James S. Williams

This book brings together for the first time five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting and significant working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Whatever their chosen habitats or shifting terrains, each of these highly distinctive auteurs has developed unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profound investment in the geophysical world.

The book proposes that we 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’.

Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume opens up new areas of critical enquiry in the expanding interdisciplinary field of space studies. It will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working not only in film studies and film philosophy, but also in French/Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, gender and cultural studies.

Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http://bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102225

Book preview

Space and being in contemporary French cinema

Space and being in contemporary French cinema

James S. Williams

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively

by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © James S. Williams 2013

The right of James S. Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface: Making space

1.  Space, cinema, being

2.  Topographies of being: space, sensation, and spectatorship in the films of Bruno Dumont

3.  Requiem for a city: the symbolics of space in the cinema of Robert Guédiguian

4.  Heading nowhere: framing space and social exclusion in the films of Laurent Cantet

5.  Re-siting the Republic: Abdellatif Kechiche and the politics of reappropriation and renewal

6.  Beyond the Other: grafting space and human relations in the trans-cinema of Claire Denis

7.  In lieu of a conclusion

Bibliography

Select Filmography

Index

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first Kim Walker and Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press for commissioning this book and their excellent advice, flexibility and efficiency at all stages; Lindsay Murray for her scrupulous copy editing and Alan Rutter for his fine work on the index; the staff at the Iconothèque de la Cinémathèque française (specifically Sandra Laupa) and at BFI Stills (in particular Dave McCall) for their wonderful aid and expertise; and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway London for awarding me a generous period of leave to complete the project. Earlier versions of Chapters 4, 5, 6 were published in French Studies 65:1 (2011), the International Journal of Francophone Studies 14:3 (2011), and The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (I.B. Tauris, 2013), ed. Marjorie Vecchio, respectively. I would like to thank the publishers for granting permission to reproduce this material. I would like also to express my gratitude to Professor Phil Powrie for inviting me to take part in a panel on Maghrebi-French film at the ‘Bicultural Literature’ conference at the Institut Français in London in December 2010. I am grateful to Professor Alfred Thomas, Professor Daniela Berghahn and Dr Henrik Gustafsson for their valuable comments and suggestions at different stages of the project. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Catherine Grant for proving once again she is the best reader of film and the best friend anyone could wish for; and Dr Jason Gittens for his love, encouragement and support throughout. This book is dedicated to him.

Preface: Making space

The world is large, but in us it is as deep as the sea.

(R. M. Rilke)

I’ve travelled around in the cinema. By that I mean simply that I’ve seen different kinds of film in very different types of cinema, and each has been a distinctive experience. I confess I’ve happily dozed off in the cosy, historic splendour of Le Ranelagh in Paris during a Duras retrospective, cranked my neck at the strange angle of the screen at the Renoir in London trying to figure out Haneke’s The White Ribbon, shuddered in the chaste, minimalist void of MoMA in New York while contemplating Godard’s Hélas pour moi, gasped for air in the tight, hushed row of a small film theatre in Shibuya showing the latest Kitano, and gazed awestruck at Tati’s Play Time in the vast, ornate surroundings of the Castro Theater in San Francisco, complete with Mighty Wurlitzer. I could go on. The essential point is that my different experiences of cinema are also real, existential states, and that when I reflect on particular films I remember indelibly where I first saw them and the material circumstances of viewing them. This sense of place is all part of the cinematic experience for me. Indeed, cinema is very specifically, and above all, the concrete, existential experience of space that connects the public, cinematographic cocoon, the worlds projected on to the screen (Bazin’s ‘window on the world’), and the individual realms of sensory and mental perception. Beyond the plot-lines and anfractuosities of narrative, what excites me, even in the reduced horizons of today’s ersatz, luxury cushioned, sofa cinemas, is a feeling of being in relation to the world.

Sharing space with others in the public intimacy of cinema is always an experience of spatial freedom. One of the formative critical works for me on cinema is by Roland Barthes – not the Barthes of structuralist semiology, but the later, more autobiographical Barthes of ‘En sortant du cinéma’ (‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’). This is a short but beautiful article from 1975 on the personal pleasures of urban film viewing and the cinema auditorium as a sensorium linking together inside and outside. Barthes writes of being fascinated twice over – first by the image (there must be verisimilitude), then by its surroundings – and of having two bodies: one narcissistic that gazes into the engulfing mirror, the other perverse like that of an impulsive, ‘scrupulous fetishist’ who is both in the story and ‘elsewhere’ because alert to all that exceeds the image. The ‘darkened cube’ of the auditorium is presented as a shared, anonymous and populated space of physical idleness and availability that offers not just the sense of a ‘diffused eroticism’ – the collective, obscure mass of other distracted bodies (‘our erotic body’) – but also the composite joy, whatever the value of the actual film, of the shining, dancing cone of projected light that ‘pierces the dark’, the showering and spraying of light and colour, and the soundtrack that acquires its own ‘grain’ and forcefully enters the eardrums in a complete sensurround experience of material vibration. It is as if Barthes, for whom the filmic image constitutes in strictly Lacanian terms a lure (i.e. a passage between Imaginary and Symbolic, and between the drives and the contractual regulation of sexuality), were attempting to direct the filmic experience away from the dream and towards the space of fantasy because it remains concomitant to ‘my’ consciousness of reality. Barthes sums up his state of cinematographic ‘hypnosis’ as a ‘slightly disengaged imaginary’ at an ‘amorous distance’. To each his/her own, one might say. And that is precisely the point, for what Barthes is suggesting here, in what strikes initially as an oxymoron, is a ‘possible jouissance of discretion’ specific to cinema. In other words, cinema is a space of freedom because it offers the pleasure of choice. How we partake of the multiple erotic possibilities of the viewing experience is left to our discretion.

Inspired by Barthes’s vivid and affirmative account of cinematic bliss, or what he calls his ‘situation de cinéma’, I have tried throughout all my work on French film to address a basic question: how to testify adequately to the personal, unique and liberating experience of cinematic space? Watching a particular film – especially, but not exclusively, in the classic format of a large, public auditorium – is always a real and, to varying degrees, immersive experience in real time at multiple levels (intellectual, cognitive, sensory). It can create new moods, thoughts, feelings and sensations. How, therefore, can one do critical justice to such a rich and immediate experience of human perception and consciousness – the sense of being together in a larger world than our own – within the fixed space of the printed page and the bounds of an academic study? Close textual analysis, frame by frame, sound by sound, can certainly convey some of the lived experience of space in narrative cinema which comprises the external worlds relayed, the fictional worlds created, the filtered mindspaces of the characters, and the multi-spaces of spectatorial reception (visual, auditory, haptic). Yet the question remains how to develop a multi-levelled approach sufficiently supple and capacious to register in close-up the shifting plays of cinematic form and consciousness – when interior space slips into external space, subjective into objective, inner into outer, and back again – while at the same time taking into full account the film’s wider, cultural frame, i.e. its more socially, historically and politically defined landscapes.

A second related question is how to be open and receptive not just to different kinds of spatial practice in cinema, but also to different forms of theoretical thinking and writing about space. I am thinking here of the broad sweep of critical approaches, from the cultural and socio-political to the aesthetic, philosophical, formalist, sociological, anthropological, cognitive, and interpretative, and many more. This question assumes even greater weight within French film studies, especially as it has developed since the 1970s in the UK with its core empirical tradition of socio-political criticism linked to history and cultural studies that has evolved alongside the more psychoanalytically derived theory of Screen. This branch of the discipline has charted some of the momentous advances in recent French cinema relating to space and spatial politics, notably in films by beurs (i.e. French-born citizens of Maghrebi descent) who have sought to reveal the postcolonial realities of contemporary France (youth unemployment and violence in the banlieue, State control and racism, housing and immigration policies, etc.). The opening up of new critical spaces which foreground marginalised ethnicities, subjectivities and sexualities directly reflects the profound changes that have taken place in post-war French society.

In view of the long tradition of spatial symbolics and politics within French cinema that stretches back to the first commercial film screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895, when public films of workers leaving Louis’s factory in Lyons (Sortie d’usine) were juxtaposed with intimate scenes and fictions of bourgeois family life such as Repas de bébé, how is one to encompass in a study of contemporary French film both the urgent social, cultural and political questions and complexities of spatial difference, identity and place, and the more general aesthetic and phenomenological issues of human subjectivity, being and perception, form and space? In other words, how are we to avoid making space ‘work’ solely in terms of mapping and redefining social identity, and thereby open up the simultaneous possibility of an aesthetics of cinematic space? How, in short, to make room for space and keep it moving, fluid and relational, beyond fixed theoretical and ideological frames and boundaries, as process rather than as concept – in a word, as ‘live’ space? Such questions constitute the particular challenge of this book on space and being in contemporary French cinema. Following Barthes’s jouissance of discretion and the existential freedom of space in cinema just adumbrated, I can choose at my own discretion not only the primary filmmakers but also the appropriate field and approach, or combination of fields and approaches, for my analysis.

Space and being in contemporary French cinema brings together five very different directors who have established themselves over the last fifteen to twenty years as among the most adventurous and significant practitioners of space working in French cinema today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. Critically celebrated at home and internationally, these highly individual (and in some cases controversial) filmmakers operate firmly within the auteur tradition, however commercial and popular their films may actually prove, and their work falls squarely within both the general field of narrative fiction and the recognisable bounds of realism, even as they extend and redefine it. With the notable exceptions of Cantet and Denis, none has yet been the subject of a full-length study in either French or English.¹ The fact that they are often categorised under certain film historical and critical labels – local and regional filmmaking (Dumont and Guédiguian), the return to realism in French cinema during the 1990s (Dumont, Guédiguian, Cantet), beur cinema (Kechiche), or the current ‘new French extremism’ and cinéma du corps (Dumont, Denis) – is of minor importance.² For crucially they all engage resolutely with the here and now, and with clearly defined characters in different locales, habitats and landscapes both within and outside the borders of the Hexagon.

The book is structured around the guiding principle of setting critical areas and fields in productive tension and dialogue, and exploring them in tandem and non-hierarchically. It positions the reader as a co-traveller entering very different types of habitat and terrain and floating freely through the different force- and sense-fields of cinema as well as the emerging constellations of film theory. Yet this is not to enter the vacuum of some ‘pure’, timeless, conceptual space. Cinematic space is always operating within different configurations of the time-space continuum, and framing space is always making meaning at a specific moment in time. In fact, what provides this volume with a point of gravity is its strong focus on the ethico-aesthetic theme of our relationship to the external world at this particular historical juncture. For cinematic space, in its myriad forms and manifestations, helps us to think acutely about the geophysical world and to consider how it is framed ideologically by – and in – representation. How long, if at all, can space be left intact and free from (and indifferent to) the ratiocinations and anxious machinations of both subjectivity and, at the secondary level of the spectator, the interpretative impulse? I am not positing here a pristine, immaculate world – any world on screen is naturally a construction, and there can be no unmediated transparency of vision. However, how the world is conceived and framed, or reframed and deframed via mobile framing to the point of becoming ‘unframed’, is a crucial question that relates to our direct experience and perception of the outside. Although not perhaps as immediately identifiable for their work on the frame and framing as other contemporary directors working in French cinema, such as Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman, each of my chosen filmmakers has developed distinctive visual and framing strategies that reflect a deep and fundamental investment in the construction of cinematic spaces related to the real world. In what follows I hope to determine to what extent film can project the world anew, loosened from standard cinematic and cultural moorings and thus available as a possible source of new perceptions, affectivities and subjectivities. Indeed, I will privilege and celebrate those works that are fully cognizant of the aesthetic and ideological processes at stake and strive to convey both the recalcitrant materiality of the external world and our shared sense of being and mutual otherness. The measure of a film’s success will be precisely the extent to which it addresses and embraces the world as unsolvable mystery.

Space and being in contemporary French cinema is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 presents a survey of different fields of enquiry orbiting around the notion of cinematic space: from the practice and theory of screenspace to the place of space in modern French thought, the idea of the ‘space of the cinematic subject’, and the centrality of space and spatial identity within the French cinematic tradition. This necessary background to the book’s main contexts and subtexts is completed by a general outline of the primary spatial themes of the five filmmakers and a summary of the chapters to follow. Chapters 2 to 6 are designed as a non-linear, non-diachronic series of case-studies with detailed textual readings of selected films by each filmmaker. Crossing different theoretical fields and resolutely eschewing an overarching chronological scheme, I seek to encounter space at its most literal and physical as well as figurative and theoretical. This requires proceeding first heuristically in order to trace the individual topographies and establish the particular rhetorical strategies and spatial dynamics set in motion. Although close textual analysis will provide a necessary launching pad for my discussions, it will continually project outwards towards the wider implications of the issues raised and pursue thematic and theoretical links with other cinemas and cultures. Resisting any temptation to synthesise the multiple cinematic and critical approaches explored, the short last chapter entitled ‘In lieu of a conclusion’ will suggest possible future spaces of critical enquiry in the expanding theoretical field of space in contemporary French cinema, where the possibilities for travel, at the frontiers of the discipline, remain literally endless.

Select filmographies of the five directors are included at the end of the book following the bibliography. Finally, when citing material I shall refer to the original films, texts and screenplays, and all translations from the original French are my own unless otherwise stated.

Notes

1   See Lebtahi and Roussel-Gillet 2005 in the case of Cantet, Beugnet 2004 and Mayne 2005 in the case of Denis. I will concentrate on Denis’s more recent works not covered in the two monographs, specifically L’Intrus (2004), 35 Rhums (2008), and White Material (2010).

2   Dumont’s films have been celebrated for their social-realist trappings and linked to the return to realism in the 1990s, because they deal with rural poverty, factory life, union relations, hospitals, medical institutions, the police service, disillusioned youth and racism. Indeed, for some the films mount a sociological critique of soulless suburban life and media images and pursue in various ways a discourse of alterity and outsiderhood that exposes the inhuman fear and hatred of the perceived foreigner. Yet Dumont’s work has also been received as part of the new extremism in French cinema on account of its frank and graphic, not to say brutal, depictions of sex and human violence (see Palmer 2011: 57–93). At the same time Dumont has been hailed as an exponent of the new genre of the ‘cinéma du Nord’ that includes, for example, Érick Zonca who made the highly influential La Vie rêvée des anges/The Dreamlife of Angels (1998).

1

Space, cinema, being

Space, vast space, is the friend of being.

(G. Bachelard)

Space is to place as eternity is to time

(J. Joubert)

Space in cinema

The great American film critic Manny Farber memorably declared space to be the most dramatic stylistic entity in the visual arts – from Giotto to Kenneth Noland, from Intolerance to Week-end (Farber 1998: 3). 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 (ibid.). Yet putting aside for a moment the particular spatial demands of character and plot, what exactly is cinematic space? It appears an impossibly vast realm, encompassing both mechanically reproduced external space and the artistic means of representing it. Mise-en-scène, or the composition and articulation of cinematic space, covers potentially everything in the staging of a shot, from the disposition of the actors to the arrangement of the décor and props, the placement of cameras, lighting, and the use of different lenses and film stock. The always magical process whereby real physical space (the setting) is reborn as fictional, two-dimensional cinematic space generates a panorama of spatial forms defined by differences in size, depth, design, angle, proximity, density, colour, contrast and proportion. In his seminal 1982 study of sentiment and affect in the cinema, which examines in detail the emotional implications of different effects and processes, Charles Affron presented a rich typology of screenspaces and spatial codes, from deep space and camera movement to spatial locus, focal length, the formal act of framing, photographic portraiture imposing stasis, protracted shots, and so on (see Affron 1982). Such an array of spatial techniques can assert the integrity of aesthetic space and cause it to expand and reverberate, whether, for example, in the manipulation of focal distance (the movement, say, from extreme close-up to far long-shot, and its reverse) or by means of devices such as superimposition, which can bring different spaces and realities together and allow them mutually to coalesce in temporary osmosis. This has led another critic, Stephen Heath, to refer to space as the ‘superior unity’ that ties a film to its spectator. He highlights the specificity and contingency of places and bodies in narrative cinema and its binding mechanisms such as the 180º rule (Heath 1981: 40).

Cinema is, of course, simultaneously an art of space and of time. A moving body occupies space, yet these spaces are not fixed moments but acts of duration, or space-in-time, recorded and projected in the classic celluloid format at a speed of twenty-four frames per second. The moving body thus succeeds in ‘being’ (spatial) and ‘becoming’ (temporal) by expressing duration, with time and space collapsing together to form a moving present. Or, put another way, place functions as the common denominator of movement (across) and duration (within). For this reason, space is intrinsically linked to time in cinema, and their combined effect as coterminous forces has given rise to some of French cinema’s most original achievements, from the extensive investigations in space-time by Jean Cocteau, for whom temporal perspectives obeyed the same relative rules as those of space, to the modernist deployment of space and time by Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman (to name just a few). One thinks in particular of Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), a pioneering experiment in female flânerie and ‘real time’, as well as of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s dazzling exploration of the virtual possibilities of time and parallel worlds in La Double vie de Véronique/The Double Life of Veronique (1991). The expansion and unification of cinematic space in and through time are central to our experience of film’s spatial dynamics.

I wish to acknowledge from the outset that cinema, in its physical latitude and plastic extension, offers a unique sensation of spatial freedom on a level at once perceptual, intellectual and affective. For a permanent sense of movement is created by the mobile, material process of passing through multiple planes and spatial axes (left to right, top to bottom, across the frame, etc.), which are also different temporalities. Moreover, cinema is a medium that allows us exceptionally to shift back and forth between subjective and objective worlds, such that internal, mental moments can become external, and vice versa. The potential for such interspaces appears limitless. Indeed, the arrangement of subjective and objective point-of-view shots and reverse-field shots in montage opens up the possibility of constantly moving between different levels of reality and consciousness, or ‘virtual’ states of being. The formal dialectics of inside and outside, of intimate proximity and distant isolation, of the private and impersonal, is often intensified by the changing status of represented physical space as either outside and exposed, or inside and enclosed. Further, configurations of subjective and objective points of view do not always require a strictly subjective shot, because the exclusive close focus on one character moving through screenspace can itself often function as an implied subjective point of view. Such privileged experiential movement, provoking at times an exhilarating, even subversive, illusion of unboundedness, naturally carries certain limits, as, for instance, when continuous space suddenly becomes discontinuous through editing, or when the apparent promise of spectatorial identification and unstoppable access into a character’s subjective space is peremptorily thwarted by the film’s withdrawal into another type of objective space and the threat of opacity is renewed (for instance, the spatially disruptive use of flashbacks which thrust past moments within a diegetical present).

To take the particular case of framing: there is always a structural tension between the profilmic field (the ‘real’ space being photographed) and the cinematic space of the frame which serves as a marker of spatial difference between what is included (and therefore intrinsic) and what is omitted (extrinsic). Yet it is precisely because frame selection can convey point of view as well as metaphorical meaning that framing can become an expressive tool of cinematic narration rather than merely a receptacle for the reproduction of reality. The creative potential of such a resource has inspired Des O’Rawe to propose a poetics of the frame, ranging from the ‘indiscernible’ (as in the ‘frameless framing’ of mainstream cinema) to the figurative, aleatory and reflexive. O’Rawe contrasts the austere, minimalist framing of Michelangelo Antonioni, who crafts an evasive, detached and seemingly autonomous frame to signify emptiness and alienation, with more expressionistic styles of framing where the effects of infinite regress in mise en abyme (for instance, the ‘virtual space’ created by mirrors drawing our attention to perpetually extended depth) can be compounded by framing to create a kind of ‘double framing’, or encadrement en abyme (see O’Rawe 2011).

However, space is not only what we glimpse within the immediate, provisional frame, whether fixed or mobile, but also what lies outside it. Off-screen space (or ‘blind space’) exists in the diegesis but is not visible in the frame, thus producing a distinction between onstage and offstage. For the filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli, the continually restless hors-champ, whereby what is inside an image can leave it and what is outside can enter it, gestures always towards the world of the imaginary. It is, according to Comolli, what makes cinema such an original invention compared with other art forms. This conjunction of two separate yet interconnected spaces imposes itself even in the current era of digital imagery because, as Comolli notes, it cannot simply be ‘recycled’ (Gorce 1994: 34–5). Within this formal dramatics of space, place resides on multiple spatio-temporal registers, whether its own distinct world which exceeds the film frame, or a world furnished for our immersed view, or a sphere in tension between the two. It is not just that cinematic space is always in potential expansion: the ‘transspatial’ zone of the hors-champ is a flux that can threaten our ability to locate the image and ourselves in relation to it (we shall consider the implications of this shortly).

So far I have confined myself largely to visual space, yet filmic space covers a range of sensory fields that are equally integral to its coherency. As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener have recently emphasised, sound is a pre-eminently spatial phenomenon in the cinema and constitutes a ‘third dimension’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 137). It, too, can move between interior and exterior, as between the diegetic and the non-diegetic (voice-over commentary, musical underscoring, etc.), to create what Robynn Stilwell has proposed very suggestively as a ‘fantastical gap’ (Stilwell 2007: 187). This is part of a larger gap formalised by Michel Chion between the visualised zone of on-screen sound (that is, sound whose source appears in the image and belongs to the reality represented therein) and the ‘acousmatic’ zones of off-screen sound where the source is hidden or invisible, whether temporarily or not.¹ These general distinctions still remain valid despite the many recent advances in multi-track sound which now constitutes a quasi-autonomous ‘superfield’ (Chion 1990). The result is a fluid set of inner and outer sonic and auditory spaces, making hearing a multidimensional, acoustic space (what Mary Ann Doane has called the ‘sonorous envelope provided by the theatrical space’ (Doane 1985: 171)). Increasing the volume of sound, as in audio close-ups, or rendering sound ‘interior’ through the use of voice-over, creates new volumes of space and new levels of consciousness and affect within the film. This takes us into Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenal world of embodied perception and existential space (see Merleau-Ponty 1945), one of the key points of reference for Laura U. Marks’s influential theory of filmic touch and ‘haptic vision’. Marks argues that the material experience of touch, taste and smell in cinema may be a new vehicle of knowledge, beauty and even ethics since proximal senses operate as a membrane between the sensible and the thinkable (see Marks 2000 and 2002). In the same vein, in Cinema and Sensation (2007), a study of the physical nature of film and the viewing experience in contemporary French film, Martine Beugnet suggests that to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture is to participate in sensual perception and a form of spectatorship alive to the sensory qualities and textures of the moving image. Again, we are dealing with the movement between inside and outside space, for certain films construct haptic modes of vision that destabilise our common apprehension of the relationship between the subjective body and the objective world (see Beugnet 2007: 63–124).

Of course, as Deborah Thomas reminds us in a very different discussion of film spectatorship in classic Hollywood cinema, the viewer is positioned at the boundary produced by the screen (or by the extended virtual screen) and thus, ultimately, always spatially excluded from the film’s narrative world. Even within subjective point-of-view shots, a sense of differentiation pertains and an imaginary space is formed between ‘us’ and the characters, though without this necessarily forcing us to relinquish access to their visual field (Thomas 2001: 114). Hence, just as the characters can inhabit an ‘ontological borderland between diegetic and non-diegetic spaces’, so, too, the viewer exists neither wholly within, nor completely outside, the narrative world (ibid.: 113–14). Taken together, however, the multiple fields of cinematic space I have enumerated constitute a living, breathing, contrapuntal process of drives, rhythms and counter-rhythms: of waves and surges, booms and retreats, cycles and repetitions, echoes and velocities, detours and divagations, exits and re-entries. The immersive and transformational nature of this multi-levelled spectatorial experience of cinematic space has been well captured by Daniel Yacavone in his developing theory of ‘film worlds’, which recognises both the symbolic and cognitive nature of films and their worlds, and their experiential, affective immediacy and presence (Yacavone 2008: 105). Drawing in particular on Mikel Dufrenne’s The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), Yacavone conceives of film worlds as intercinematic ‘object-experiences’ with a particular internal coherence intuited by the viewer (ibid.: 101), the essential duality of which may be described in terms of the polarities of external/internal, objective/subjective, representational/expressive, ontological/phenomenological (ibid.: 105). Yacavone endorses Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the intersubjective field of perception and action, citing him thus: ‘in the perception of another, I find myself in relation with another myself, who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am, in relation to the same being that I am’ (Yacavone 2006: 92–3).² By its very nature film has the potential to dramatise the dynamic field of perception as the ‘commingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its co-existence with others’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 59). Yacavone argues persuasively that ‘by putting us into imaginative contact with lives, situations and forms of being-in-the-world other than our own, representational works of art can cultivate empathetic understanding, a recognition of the shared ground of being’ (Yacavone 2006: 93).

The intersubjective ‘live’ spaces formed between a film in process, its real (or implied) viewer, and its real (or implied) author, are necessarily shifting, contingent and constructed. For cinema is always experienced in a specific place at a particular time, and the creation of new worlds of meaning and affectivities within the work is matched by what takes place during the actual viewing encounter (what Roland Barthes called the personal ‘situation de cinéma’) which comprises desires, projections and fantasies relating even to the material set-up of the auditorium.³ In fact, the screen is transformed into what Dudley Andrew terms, with particular reference to André Bazin, a concrete ‘threshold’ through which the viewer passes on the way to visual experience. In the classic model of public film-viewing there are always two projections: one ‘filtered’ by the author-filmmaker, the other ‘filled’ by the spectator who projects him/herself towards the screen, thus taking the film into unforeseen networks (see Andrew 2010: 79–90). Cinema is literally a ‘project’ taking place inside the threshold of the screen which disrupts the film’s framing, understood in general thematic terms as the ‘design of its emplotment’, or the way ‘a view, a situation, a story, or an argument is framed when pertinent elements are taken together as a set, so that the position and function of all elements mutually determine one another in relation to the world’ (ibid.: 91). The porous screen becomes ‘the unstable meeting place on which are projected fragments of unlimited worlds from both directions’ (ibid.). As such, the screen overrides the ‘grip’ of the frame – what André Bazin, who prized the plenitude of the photographed real world, regarded as the hostile agent of spatial difference and exclusion, and what 1970s’ framing theory, focused on the materiality of film, sought to demystify and expose as the fixed ideological framing of perception.⁴

The composite viewing experience of cinematic space as material form, and the drama of how we orient ourselves in relation to reproduced sound and the projected moving image, set in motion different kinds of perception and subjectivity that are always in transition. Moreover, in its infinite variety and transformability, filmic space enables us to conceive of new forms of relations with the world and draws us into new kinds of sensory and existential zone, including that of free-floating memory. As Isabelle McNeill eloquently writes: ‘Cinema, with its capacity for instability and errancy, offers a potential flânerie in which the viewer can be conducted into a past not his or her own’ (McNeill 2010a: 45). I want to suggest in what follows, where I aim to give critical space to all forms of cinematic space and spatial enquiry, that the formation of new spatial thresholds generates, in turn, potential new sites and possibilities for understanding human relations and existence. Indeed, I will argue that the extensibility of cinematic space reveals new aesthetic dimensions of being, and that cinema is truly cinema only when it fully exploits its spatial potential and takes us to new and unguessed spaces, at once formal, imaginary and real.

Space in modern French thought

Up to now I have used the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ as virtually interchangeable. Yet the distinction between the two has been a central concern of much recent French thought. It is vital for any extended discussion of modern French cinema to acknowledge fully the evolution in thinking about space, the influence of which extends far beyond the simple theorising of cinematic space in linguistic terms (for example, André Gardies’s assertion that filmic space requires a decoding of place as the ‘text of space’, with place serving as the texte/parole of a langue constituted by space (see Gardies 1993)). In his landmark 1974 work, The Production of Space, the Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre revealed how the body creates a lived space that is both corporeal in function and inherently subjective. Social space for Lefebvre incorporates a body’s everyday actions, as well as how a body sees and is shaped by the natural world. Overriding Henri Bergson’s warnings expressed in Time and Free Will (1889) about the dangerous temptations of spatialising thought, Lefebvre reasserts the spatialised body. Indeed, all Lefebvre’s major work, including his groundbreaking, three volume Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1961, 1981), pursues a unitary theory of space, or ‘spatiology’, involving a rapprochement between physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space), and social space (the space of human action, conflict and ‘sensory phenomena’, or l’espace vécu). Invoking a ‘spatial architectonics’, Lefebvre argues that social space, at once dialectical and historical, is also ‘productive’ and performative with particular material effects because it is experienced first as a ‘spatial economy’. He formulates an active, operational, instrumental space: new social relationships call for new spaces, and vice versa, because spatial practices ‘secrete’ social space. In short, space which can be ‘heard’ and ‘felt’ and ‘enacted’ through physical gestures and movements involves our very sense of being in the world. It is to be contrasted with abstract space which denies the generalisation of what Lefebvre calls ‘differential space’ celebrating particularity, both bodily and experiential.⁵ Such thinking will lead Lefebvre eventually to the utopian idea that cities should release repression and become arenas of intense sensual and sexual pleasure and excitement.⁶

Lefebvre’s work has inspired an entire corpus of French thought devoted to redefining ‘space’ and ‘place’ and their relation to being. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), Michel de Certeau argues that space is always a frequented, ‘practised’ place, that is, an intersection of moving bodies and an animation of places by the motion of a moving body. De Certeau champions ‘space’ actuated by the ensemble of movements within it as the medium through which change is possible – as opposed to ‘place’ which is ‘an indication of stability’ and thus the antithesis of change and possibility. Hence, a place is like a street geometrically defined by urban planning, but transformed into a space by walkers. In a key chapter of de Certeau’s book entitled ‘Walking in the City’, a practical knowledge of the city is shown to transform and cross spaces, create new metonymical (rather than metaphorical) links, and convey a mobile geography of looks and glances. For de Certeau, the term ‘space narrative’ means both the narrative that traverses and organises places, and the place that is constituted by the writing of that narrative. If spatial transformation is mediated via memory, by contrast place is antagonistic to time and appears autonomous of the practices that create it. The multiplicity of knowledges in the city acquired through the experience of daily life and alterity (to frequent space is precisely ‘to go over to the Other’) is an instance of what de Certeau calls ‘heterology’, and his work represents an attempt to ‘circle around’ being without reducing it to the categories of thought. This bold intellectual move has encouraged in turn new developments within anthropology and ethnography, notably Marc Augé’s highly influential anthropological study of the ‘non-places’ (‘non-lieux’) of ‘supermodernity’ which differentiates ‘places’ – relational, historical, concerned with identity, and creative of social life – from ‘non-places’, i.e. those areas of transit such as airports, supermarkets and motels which do not connect to human history because designed to be passed through and thus discourage organic social life (they are usually measured in units of time).⁷

The influential, far-reaching theories of Lefebvre and de Certeau, presented here in the most schematic terms precisely for reasons of space, have served as the basis for much recent postmodern debate on space and place and their relationship to time, in particular the work of Michel Foucault who, we recall, approached structuralism as a synchronic spatialisation of signifying systems without that necessitating a denial of time. Foucault asserted that space was being treated in political/ philosophical theory as ‘the dead, the undialectical, the immobile’, and that the spatial was seen as a frozen dialectic and the realm of stasis, that is, as a negation of historicity, of the fluidity of identity, and of the very possibility of politics. In an important article published in 1984 entitled ‘Of other spaces: heterotopias’ (originally a lecture from 1967), Foucault proposed ‘heterotopias’, or ‘counter-sites’ (‘contre-emplacements’), as ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’. For Foucault, these are real spaces functioning as ‘different kinds of effectively enacted utopias’ in which real sites are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (see Foucault 1984).⁸ Examples include marginal spaces where deviants are located (psychiatric hospitals, prisons), spaces of juxtaposed spaces (cinemas, gardens), sacred spaces (cemeteries), spaces of transitory time (festivals, fairgrounds), and spaces of illusion that critique quotidian space (e.g. brothels). Foucault is proposing here a new kind of ‘space-play’ capable of generating