Space and being in contemporary French cinema / James S. Williams.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Williams, James S., 1963- author.

Series:

Manchester Film Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--France.

Motion pictures.

Space in motion pictures.

Perception--In motion pictures.

Perception.

Subjectivity in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 333 pages) : illustrations; digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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 Gu{acute}ediguian, 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. Foregrounding the centrality of space and spatial identity within both the French cinematic tradition and modern French thought, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema 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'. If cinema, it argues, shows us both the process of physical space becoming formal space and the world becoming the world, then to destabilise the cinematic frame is potentially to rediscover the material world afresh. Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume examines our contemporary experience of perception and subjectivity and suggests that cinema extends ethically the parameters of the visual field when it engages directly with space as a multi-dimensional and multi-sensory experience. The book 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.

Contents:

Preface : making space

Space, cinema, being

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

Requiem for a city : the symbolics of space in the cinema of Robert Gu{acute}ediguian

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

Re-siting the republic : Abdellatif Kechiche and the politics of reappropriation and renewal

Beyond the other : grafting space and human relations in the trans-cinema of Claire Denis

In lieu of a conclusion.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references, filmography and index.

Description based on print record.

ISBN:

9781526102225

1526102226

9781526102218

1526102218

OCLC:

981638539