Paris as Cinematic Space

2013 ◽  
pp. 204-240
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Paul Haacke

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of “high” and “low.”


2019 ◽  
pp. 106-116
Author(s):  
David MacDougall

This chapter addresses the problem of portraying space in the cinema and the position the film viewer imagines himself or herself to occupy when watching a film. Beginning with the rendering of depth in early films, the author argues that this was never the important question; rather it was the question of how the viewer related to sensations of being included or excluded by the images on the screen. The sense of exclusion was partly resolved through editing techniques such as the shot/counter-shot technique that incorporated the viewer into the action and also by employing deep focus and proximity to close objects, as in the films of Orson Welles. Equally important were narratives that involved the viewer through identification with the characters, as well as the culturally-constructed ‘cinema of familiarity’ of genre films and the work of certain filmmakers such as Ozu. Although none of the methods employed fully succeeded in overcoming the problem of cinematic space, the author argues that at least in nonfiction cinema filmmakers can limit it by being more open about their own intentions and the limitations of the medium.


Author(s):  
Alena Strohmaier

This chapter examines how cinema challenges and inverts traditional spaces of social upheavals, such as streets and squares, in their capacity to be spaces of knowledge and solidarity, in conceptualizing them as enhanced media-sensible spaces. Through a close reading of Mohamed Diab’s feature film Clash (2016), I foreground the idea of the truck as a cinematic space predicated on its ability to accommodate movement, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. This allows for a discussion of cinematic spaces of the so-called ‘Arab street’, created by both mise en scène and cinematography that go against the more prevalent images of street fights and mass demonstrations as seen in documentaries about the popular upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region since 2009.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-78
Author(s):  
Florentina C. Andreescu
Keyword(s):  

This article reads Kid as Little Man’s connection to chora, the primordial maternal space where language is experienced as a phenomenon akin to birdsongs and animals’ howls, through which Little Man is inscribed into the world’s wild rhythms of movement and sound, and explores how this connection distorts the cinematic space.


Author(s):  
Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Cinema and the city are historically interrelated. The rise of cinema followed on the heels of urbanization and industrialization, and early cinema production and exhibition was largely urban. Moreover, the city has proved to be a rich and diverse cinematic setting and subject. Early cinema recorded scenes of urban life in actuality, melodrama, and City Symphonies. Gangster films, German expressionism, and Film Noir rendered an urban underworld; the musical and romantic comedy produced a more utopian view of the city; and art cinema rendered the everyday reality of urban life. Recent films imagine dystopic post-urban settings and, alternately, megacities populated by superheroes. The relationship between the cinema and the city can be examined in numerous ways. In part, cinema provides an urban archive or memory bank that reflects changes in the urban landscape. At the same time, cinema serves to produce the city, both literally—in the way that film production shapes Los Angeles, Mumbai, Rome, Hong Kong, and other centers of production—and also by producing an imaginary urbanism through the construction of both fantasy urban spaces and ideas and ideals of the city. Theorists suggest that there is an inherent urbanism to cinema. Kracauer 1997 (cited under General Overviews) claims the city, and especially the street, as exemplary and essential cinematic space, attuned to the experience of contingency, flow, and indeterminacy linked to modernity. Hansen 1999 (also cited under General Overviews) suggests that cinema worked as a kind of vernacular modernism to articulate and mediate the experience of modernity—and especially urbanization. More recently, attention to theories of space and urbanism across the academy have generated broad interest in cinematic urbanism. Much of this work brings film scholars into conversation with urban planners, geographers, and architects. Of course neither cinema nor the city is singular. Thus work on the city and film must attend to multiple global cities at different historical periods and, furthermore, consider that cinema produces multiple versions of even a single city, such as New York, as different narratives, genres, studios, directors, and individual films will each produce a different city. Some books and articles tangentially examine films set in cities. This article will include only those texts that have the urban sphere as a primary focus of their investigation.


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