Space in Film Research Papers (original) (raw)

[co-authored with Carl Burgchardt] This essay analyzes Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), an adaptation of Betty Smith’s bestselling novel of the same title (published two years earlier). The central visual elements in this film are thresholds or openings, such as windows, doorways, and stairways, which together comprise a liminal space whose crossings serve as the literal inscriptions of Kazan’s dialectical project. These are sites of indeterminacy, where personal transitions and economic transactions take place. Significantly, the film’s most intense moments of emotional harmony and discord occur in front of (or through) these in-between thresholds, where softness gives way to hardness (and vice versa). The alternating pattern of harmony, contrasted with interpersonal conflict, constitutes what the authors call the ‘emotional dialectics’ of the film. Transitions from dreamy contentment to harsh realization or an awareness of the hard truth of a situation occur rapidly in these liminal spaces. Building on the work of theorists such as André Bazin, Jean Mitry, and Dudley Andrew, the essay concludes that A Tree Grow in Brooklyn not only targets the relational chasms to be crossed by its main characters but also builds a bridge between the producers of the past (including director Kazan) and viewers of the present, contemporary audiences who are asked to peer through a cinematic ‘window’ and partake in a view of the warmth and intimacy to be found in an immigrant family’s life.

- by and +1
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- Film Studies, Adaptation, Film History, Dialectic

Co-authored with André Gaudreault

- by Philippe Gauthier
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- Film Studies, Film Theory, Early Cinema, Film History

Un estudio sobre la arquitectura en tres directores cinematográficos: Orson Welles, Jacques Tati y Wim Wenders, incidiendo en dos películas de cada director. Seguido de un artículo sobre las relaciones entre el espacio arquitectónico y el... more

- by Jorge Gorostiza
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- Orson Welles, Cinema and Architecture, Space in Film, Jacques Tati

Questo saggio esplora il legame tra il cinema di Rohrwacher e l'uso dello spazio, inteso come territorio, luogo simbolico e spazio cinematografico. L'analisi dei movimenti delle protagoniste all'interno e attraverso luoghi specifici suggerisce un uso dello spazio non solo come ambiente narrativo, ma come luogo figurato in cui queste women-to-be si trovano dislocate, arricchendo il repertorio cinematografico sulla condizione adolescenziale con nuove riflessioni. Alice Rohrwacher usa lo spazio non solo come elemento della mise-en-scène o come cornice narrativa, ma lo trasforma in un dispositivo attraverso il quale le protagoniste negoziano il loro essere in divenire.

- by Ilaria Puliti
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- Space in Film, Contemporary Italian Cinema, Alice Rohrwacher

The research started by asking the question: "How is the meaning and memory of home communicated through the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky?" The meaning this question was seeking entailed elements such as architectural experience, perception, memories and dreams, and the research thus enquired film's mechanisms for rendering legible such ineffable concepts, with a foucs on the two particular case studies of Tarkovsky and Bergman.
Building upon claims that film has the ability to communicate direct experiences of lived space, the thesis peruses theoretical intersecting findings that encircle the research quest: architecture and film, phenomenology, as well as other adjacent fields. The aim is to draw creative splices that outline an original view on the architectural experience of home, as read throughout the work and life of these two artists. Therefore, among the main outputs of the thesis was to rewrite the biographies of Bergman and Tarkovsky based on their spatial element, a recreated life-writing in which place gains a central role of life journeys and choices. From these reconsidered biographies, new understandings about home, dwelling and place attachment are drawn.
The methodological aim of the study is to propose an architectural phenomenography (literally a writing of phenomena), a redefined view on architectural phenomenology that uses autobiographical film as a research tool to allow explorations on the concept of home. The established routes of phenomenological inquiry make use of linguistic material in order to read and write descriptions and in such a manner to reach the essence of phenomena. By replacing the majority of the linguistic research data with audiovisual material provided by the films, the novelty of the present approach lies in considering moving images as portent of inscribed phenomenological descriptions, legible through film viewing. The essential factors for selecting Bergman and Tarkovsky as the case-study filmmakers was the strength of their works to communicate the space of home in its lived form. Due to this peculiar quality, the present study looked at these works attempting to trace a method of writing spatial experience on the imponderable surface of film. Throughout the thesis, this method was termed as architectural phenomenography, and it was defined as a communicative medium through which, once spatial experiences have been written on film, they silently await a proper deciphering.
This study therefore strives to answer the silent call of these experiential moving images and to disclose them as categories of architectural experiences.

- by Ruxandra (Kyriazopoulos) Berinde
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- Human Geography, Film Studies, Space and Place, Phenomenography

CHINESE FANTEPIAN (COUNTERESPIONAGE OR ANTI-SPY) FILM ON the Trail (Genzong zhuiji, Lu Jue, 1963) opens with a crowd flowing through the border gate from British colonial Hong Kong to Shenzhen, an outpost in southern China, on a foggy morning. The sequence that follows uses these two locations-the old, corrupt colony and the young, independent nation-to contrast capitalism and socialism with evocative audiovisual style. On the British colonial side, the guards appear arrogant, ignoring the people in need, and the atmosphere is chaotic and gloomy. On the Chinese side, the ambiance suddenly becomes vivacious and optimistic: We see a giant board bearing the slogan "Long Live the Great Unity of the People of the World" and a close-up of the national flag, while upbeat extradiegetic music accompanies a disembodied female voice on a loudspeaker that welcomes visitors arriving to celebrate the National Day. A change in musical tone, however, soon implies that a menace lurks underneath this seemingly peaceful fac ßade: Explosives are discovered during a border inspection. Police officers must foil the sabotage plan of secret agents from Hong Kong targeting the power supply of nearby Guangzhou (Canton). This opening sequence poses an urgent question that drives the entire film: How can the saboteurs be stopped? It also dramatizes the regional (Guangzhou and Hong Kong), national (state security), and transnational (Cold War geopolitics) dimensions of Chinese fantepian.

- by Ling Zhang
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- Geopolitics, Cold War and Culture, Mainland Chinese Film, Intelligence and Espionage
- by Johannes Pause
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- Film Studies, Dreams, Hollywood, Immersion

The goal of this paper is to present a multimodal framework for analysing a particular dimension of space in moving images, namely, narrativised space. In particular, this paper unravels how the framework offers effective methods for addressing empirical questions which have been extensively debated in recent decades in the studies of moving images such as transmediality and narrative complexity. To achieve this end, I first provide a specific definition of the dimension of narrativised space and move on to discuss what essential properties of narrativised space might support viewers' meaning interpretation paths. This leads to a more finegrained categorisation of features which function so as to lead the viewers' navigational routes within and across different narrative levels and event spaces. Through applying the framework to analysing Brian De Palma's war film Redacted (2007) and Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2003), this paper will show the analytical strength of the proposed methods and the potential of the framework for addressing corpus-based empirical questions with regard to puzzle films and transmedial comparison.

This paper revisits a particular area of concern in computer generated (CG) visual effects, namely, the problem of the space in dynamic, multiple panels created by digital processes. The paper critiques recent statements made on narrative understanding, positing equivalences between a viewer's navigation across dynamic frames in CG images and human-computer interactions, as well as claims of narrative complexity in films using dynamic frames. This paper will argue that it is necessary to approach the meaning construction of cinematic space by distinguishing analytical levels of materiality from their discursive meaning, because the visual effect created by the manipulation of a dynamic spatial layout does not necessarily burden the viewer's linear path for constructing coherent spatial meaning.

- by Chiao-I Tseng
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- Semiotics, Film Studies, Visual Semiotics, Systemic Functional Linguistics

General agreement exists today that David Wark Griffith, while not the “inventor” of crosscutting, is nevertheless a key figure in its development. But what does that mean exactly? Or, more precisely: how does one establish a list of Griffith’s concrete contributions to the development of the technique? The goal of this article is to present a new theoretical framework for evaluating the evolution of various parameters of crosscutting during cinema’s transitional era. This framework results from the combination of our hypothesis concerning actorial and narratorial cuts with a new theory on the articulations of spatial language. This new theoretical tool allows us to detect variations in the presence of an underlying narrator as the agent responsible for filmic enunciations and to establish, in the end, a typology of cuts connecting the shots in a crosscutting sequence.

- by Philippe Gauthier
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- Film Studies, Film Theory, Early Cinema, Film History
- by Ivo Blom
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- Intermediality, Comparative History, Painting, Italian Cinema

Dominic and Cymene marvel at the rise of transplanetary anthropology on this week’s podcast, as well as outer space films (and sexed up goblins). Then (16:08) we welcome the University of Virginia’s celestial Lisa Messeri to the conversation. A lively chat about her research with exoplanetary scientists follows. Lisa reminds us of the extraterrestrial roots of much climate science and explains why she thinks we now need to “un-earth” the Anthropocene. We talk through the connections between our terran conditions of environmental precarity and our renewed interest in other planets. We compare news coverage of the Standing Rock clearance and the Trappist-1 exoplanets and discuss why the latter seemed to get so much more press. We talk geos vs. bios in the imagination of outer space, Elon Musk and the New Space community, what it means for a planet to be habitable, and how the logic of settler colonialism infiltrates the idea of space frontiers. Lisa shares her hot takes on The Martian, why she thinks we’re seeing so many outer space movies right now, and why the future of humanity obviously depends on Matt Damon. We close on her book, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke UP, 2016) and why she thinks place-making is so important in the human engagement with outer space. Why do planets have to be round? Who was the star surprise guest at Lisa’s dissertation defense? Listen on and find out! PS Shouts out to Abby Spinak and the Rice Space Institute for making Lisa’s visit to Rice possible!

- by Cymene Howe and +1
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- Environmental Science, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Space and Place

Objectives: Converging architecture with cinema and cognition has proved to be a practical approach to scrutinizing architectural elements’ significant contribution to engineering science. In this research, a behavioral analysis has been... more

- by Hamidreza Sakhaei
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- Space in Film, Cognitive Spaces

The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), You, the Living (Du levande, 2007), and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron, 2014). The Swedish director depicts the human condition afflicted by the loss of its humanity through a personal style that he calls “the complex image,” a tableau aesthetic that instigates social criticism, and is dependent upon long shots, immobility, unchanging shot scale, and layered compositions. The author establishes a connection between artistic and social space and scrutinizes the challenges that this “complexity” poses for the film viewer from an intermedial perspective in which cinema enters into a dialogue with two other art forms: painting and theatre. Four specific issues are discussed: (1) the intertwining of reality and artificiality as a “hyperreality;” (2) the visual compositions which are simultaneously self-contained and entirely open, highlighting a tension between volume and surface; (3) the opposition between stasis and movement, conveying a meaningful social contrast and the characters’ angst; (4) the pictoriality of the image.

- by Fátima Chinita and +1
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- Space in Film, Film Studies, Roy Andersson, Complex Images

Still Life (2006) is a realistic genre film by Jia Zhangke, a leading independent film director in China. The film takes two-lane structure, telling the story of two outsiders from Shanxi finding their missing families in the Three Gorges. On the searching journey of the two protagonists, the audiences witness the intricate weave of people, things, and objects in the context of Three Gorge demolition and the life trajectory of people at different classes facing the rapidly changing social reality. A featured environmental backdrop in the film, the image of ruins is profoundly animated to showcase the tension of life through its inherent authenticity and compelling forces. Jia successfully captures the forming process from a lively town into silent ruins, presenting the tangling of ruins and bodies in multiple dimensions. This paper examines the cinematography of expressing the life and space in Still Life, unpacking the multi-layer implications of the image of ruins in the film.

- by Xuan Xue
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- Mainland Chinese Film, Space in Film

Abstract: In the last years, film and media studies are more and more discovering or rather appropriating ideas from art history and art theory, in particular iconology. This has led to great attention for the work of Aby Warburg and... more

- by Ivo Blom
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- Intermediality, Film Analysis, Comparative History, Painting