Confined Cinema. The spatial limitation in non-fiction cinema

Abstract

This article deals with a series of film and video works shot within reduced spatial parameters. It is not a selection of works made during the confinement caused by the current pandemic crisis, but rather non-fiction films, throughout the history of cinema, whose filmmakers have been aware of the importance of creating a specific spatial framework, which allows them to dispense with telling a story or following certain conventions of documentary filmmaking. Here, as in a site-specific artwork, the filmmakers allow themselves to be guided by the conditions presented by the situation to be filmed. Some of these works are ​made by filmmakers such as Frederick Wiseman, Harun Farocki, Marc Isaacs or Victor Kossakovsky, among others, who advocate concreteness and determination and whose restrictive procedures are today the antithesis of the current way of working in cinema, where the enormous facilities offered by digital technology leads to an excess of indecisive shots that contribute little or nothing to the works.