Cinematic Space Research Articles

La influencia pictórica en la representación espacial del cine de los orígenes. La relación campo-fuera de campo desde el cine de Georges Méliès

The influence of painting in the cinematographic image has been constant since the apparition of cinema until our days. This influence was, undoubtedly, more evident in early cinema, where the conception of space was absolutely linked with the idea of a painting, limiting the films’ posibilities and making their space limited and static. Although this pictorical heritage, during the first years of cinema, the use of the off-screen was generalized and, inspite of the limited posibilities of this early off-screen, it started to open the limits of the screen, anticipating the unlimited space in modern cinema. Georges Melies was the best example of the idea of the film as a painting, but, also, used the off-screen so often, that he became one of the pioneers in the use of the absent space, anticipating the dinamism of modern cinema.

The ‘cinematic poetry’ of the Thaw

As represented in Soviet cinema from Stalinism to the Thaw, the ability to appreciate and recite poetry was a meaningful characteristic of a positive hero. However, the way this positive characteristic was reflected on the screen shifted drastically. In part, this shift reflected familiar Thaw priorities of emphasizing sincerity and the individual experience in re-presenting the tropes of Stalinism. However, shifts in performance also responded to the long-standing tension in Russian culture between the value and the potential banality of kul'turnost', a tension that had been less prominent in Stalinist culture, even as the Stalinist valorisation of education resulted in its emerging more strongly than ever in post-Stalinist cinema. This article examines three sites of post-Stalinist cinema that illustrate how this tension was negotiated: playful and ironic performance; unpolished but highly expressive poetry; and disjunctures in cinematic space around performed poetry.

Screening dirt: public health movies in colonial Nigeria and rural African spectatorship in the 1930s and 1940s

From the inception of colonial film-making in British West Africa in the early 1930s, dirt and the cinema were closely connected. Numerous educational movies were produced to show Africans the economically, physically and morally degrading consequences of “dirty habits.” By the early 1940s, the Colonial Office had come to realise that, within the cinema spaces created by mobile health units across Africa, intended audiences processed images and messages through their own aesthetic, spiritual, moral, economic and political value systems. These systems exceeded colonial projections and defied assimilation into colonial categories of dirt. This article focuses on the complexity of intended audiences’ responses to the simple ideological formula of colonial health and hygiene films. It argues that the presence of local aesthetic tastes and values in media archives on public health and hygiene in colonial Africa represents a vital space of mediation that must be considered alongside film content and film-makers’ intentions.

The Cinematic Space in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours: A Heterotopian Perspective

The film The Hours directed by Stephen Daldry is based on an experimental novel in which three women from detached places and eras are interlinked by the book Mrs Dalloway. Given that, its sense of simultaneity and spatial heterogeneity is quite obvious. Adopting the notion of Heterotopia proposed by Michel Foucault, the current paper analyzes the juxtaposed construction of space and time in The Hours. It examines how the editing, recurring imagery and coherent motives in The Hours function in order to construct heterotopian space and to shed light upon central themes such as alienation, sexual identity and death. Through these meticulous filmmaking techniques, the film not only transfers the collapse and confluence of time and space from text to the screen, but also retouches its postmodernist aesthetics and social reflectivity, offering a thought-provoking viewing experience for the audience

Reprojecting the City: Urban Space and Dissident Sexualities in Recent Latin American Cinema

Reprojecting the City: Urban Space and Dissident Sexualities in Recent Latin American Cinema

Prikaz nostalgije Hong Konga kao teme u trilogiji Kar-Vaja

Hong Kong is a city which has been amalgamating Eastern and Western cultures, and formed identity of its own multicultural structure. Hong Kong from colonial times until the transition in the 90's, experienced a vicious cycle of capitalist-based economy and the ever increasing economic-social pressure of China. The phenomenon has affected the Hong Kong cinema's reflection of the notion of dual identity and identity confusion in the postcolonial era. This identity confusion showed itself as a deep feeling of nostalgia in the works of Wong Karwai, a member of Hong Kong cinema. In Kar-wai's films, Hong Kong is not just his individual reality but also a portrayal of the country's history. His films present cultural and social transformations to the audience. In Kar-wai's films, Hong Kong is a metaphor of these cultural artifacts, and additionally reflecting the existential anxiety of ambivalence and duality. His focus on themes such as love, deception, loneliness, disidentification and alienation is rising from the tension between Hong Kong, China, Britain, and Japan. Moving from the fact that a cinematic space reflects ideologies, political system and social relationship, this study aims to analyse Wong Kar-wai's trilogy which includes Days of Being Wild (1990) In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) in a sociological perspective to understand the representation of Hong Kong's colonial and diasporic identity - taking a Lefebvre framework which asserts that (social) space is organic, lively, and changeable and it is a social product, into consideration. The study is focused on the daily life of the film characters to understand their relationship with space.

Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space by Brian R. Jacobson

Reviewed by: Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space by Brian R. Jacobson Kenneth Garner (bio) Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space. By Brian R. Jacobson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. 312. $30. In histories of early cinema, the emergence of the studios has been generally associated with the industry's increasing capitalization and its adoption of industrial techniques and forms of organization in the first decade-and-a-half after the Lumière brothers' famous first screening in December 1895. One of the many virtues of Brian Jacobson's Studios Before the System is how it reframes studios both in terms of their architectural precursors and, even more fruitfully, as spaces designed to regulate the environments in which films were shot. Jacobson argues that studios, and studio technologies, were designed to order and re-order the natural world to produce usable images. Studios regulated their environments through architectural design, new technologies such as electric lighting and prismatic glass, and the creative deployment of space. This, Jacobson argues, explains the particular visual and aesthetic qualities that different production companies achieved in their films. Jacobson structures his study through chapters that alternate between American and French film production companies. One problem they all shared was the critical need to control light. Early studios like the Edison [End Page 799] Company's Black Maria, created by W. K. L. Dickson in 1891, or Georges Méliès's glass house in 1897, developed out of such antecedent architectural forms as photographic studios and laboratories. The way that each studio's architecture and technologies sought to regulate the filming environment, however, were markedly different. The Black Maria sought to regulate light both architecturally through its awkward slanted-roof design and by using a deeply recessed black background that Dickson had adopted from Etienne-Jules Marey's photographic experiments. The result was an observational style that limited the action to a single plane and limited the subject matter that could be filmed to single-action shots characteristic of the "cinema of attractions." Méliès, on the other hand, derived the design for his first studio from André Disdéri's rooftop glass-and-iron photography studio. This more open and flexible design allowed Méliès the opportunity to create artificial environments through painted backgrounds and enabled him to develop his famous trick photographic effects like substitution shots, matte inserts, and dissolves. If Dickson's Black Maria produced a highly restricted "framed aesthetic," Méliès' glass house emphasized flexibility, plasticity, and artificiality. If filmmakers used architecture to regulate and control the filmic environment, they also sought out new technologies to reduce their dependence on the unpredictable natural world. Jacobson devotes a part of his third chapter to the development of artificial lighting. It was Biograph's adoption of Cooper-Hewitt's mercury vapor lamps that essentially freed filmmakers from their dependence on natural light, although early critics complained of the consequent harshness of the filmed images; paradoxically, production companies searched for ways to make their artificial lighting more "realistic." As studios became larger and more complex by the early teens, production companies faced new challenges as a result of their need for expanded facilities and new technologies, especially electricity. French film giants Pathé and Gaumont's vast production complexes underscore, for Jacobson, the fragility of modern technology. He describes how Pathé struggled with municipal authorities in Paris over the regulation of celluloid film stock following a massive celluloid explosion in February 1904. Thus, Pathé's efforts to create their own film stock were threatened by the new wave of restrictions and building codes that followed in the explosion's wake. French studios, such as Gaumont's Cité Elgé studio, lacked access to centralized municipal electricity sources and often built their own electrical generators. Yet the creation of major industrial-sized studios ultimately showed that production companies had perfected the architecture and technology needed to successfully control their filmic environments. As Jacobson states, "The systemization of studio production, the industry's technological development, and the industrialization of studio infrastructure all developed together" (p. 158). [End Page 800] Jacobson has written...

The Veil as National Allegory: Cinema, Visual Arts, and the Epistemological Trope of Fabric

This article proposes two hypotheses about the cultural agency of the veil. First, I argue the existence of a repertoire of the functions and effects of the trope of the veil in cinema, in terms of its eroticism, and its roles as an organizer of cinematic space and as an icon of Middle Eastern national identities embodied in their respective national cinemas. Second, I propose that the veil is an epistemological metaphor that defines two opposed paradigms: the Greek and the Semitic. One represents the total unveiling and total exposure of truth, transcendence, and knowledge; the other represents the dialectic of covering/uncovering, in which knowledge is always defined by a positioning towards transcendence and the dialectics of veiling/unveiling are the complex play that leads to knowledge. The veil, therefore, is not only about uncovering, but also about covering in order to know better.

CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF PARTITION OF INDIA

The partition of India in August 1947 marks a watershed in the modern Indian history. The creation of two nations, India and Pakistan, was not only a geographical division but also widened the chasm in the hearts of the people. The objective of the paper is to study the cinematic representations of the experiences associated with the partition of India. The cinematic portrayal of fear generated by the partition violence and the terror accompanying it will also be examined. Films dealing with partition have common themes of displacement of thousands of masses from their homelands, being called refugees in their own homeland and their struggle for survival in refugee colonies. They showcase the trauma of fear, violence, personal pain, loss and uprooting from native place. Also, how the cinematic space tries to recreate those horrors, bestial passions and disregard for humanity in the larger political arena will also be examined. At the same time, sexuality and gender relations where women’s bodies became site of conflict between two communities will also be discussed. Moreover, how the personal experiences of filmmakers during the times of partition shaped their cinematic depictions will also be enumerated. Films which remind us of that communal carnage called partition, for instance, Lahore (1949, Hindi), Chhinamula (1951, Bengali) Megha Dhaka Tara (1960, Bengali), Subarnrekha (1965, Bengali) Garm Hawa (1973, Hindi), Tamas (1987, Hindi) Bombay (1995, Hindi), 1947 Earth (1998, Hindi), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (1998) Fiza (2002, Hindi), Pinjar (2003, Hindi) Dev (2003, Hindi), Partition (2007, English) and Midnight Children (2012, English) will be examined.

Audio Facilitates the Perception of Cinematic Continuity by First-Time Viewers.

Previous studies concluded that first-time film viewers often had difficulty integrating shots into a coherent representation of the depicted events in the absence of a familiar action through the film cuts or a salient eye-gazing of a character in the film. In this study, we investigated whether diegetic sound (i.e., sound that seems to originate from the depicted cinematic space) could effectively bridge shots for first-time viewers. Across a range of films, both dialog, and salient environmental sound (e.g., barking dogs) helped first-time viewers connect shots. However, sound was not always successful in supporting first-time viewers' interpretations. While experienced viewers were able to understand less-familiar linking sounds and environments, first-time viewers found this difficult. Overall, a range of diegetic sounds helped first-time viewers understand spatiotemporal relations between shots, but these viewers still had difficulty integrating views of unfamiliar environments.

Perceptions of authority and freedom in late Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav film

ABSTRACTThe article examines the notions of authority and freedom in the cinematic spaces of the former Yugoslavia and its successor states from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. The relevant time span saw not only the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the dissolution of the socialist system, but also the rise and fall of political leaders of various orientations. It was often in relation to this sphere of authority that freedom was negotiated in the artistic public space, resulting in projects whose principal function was to question the very authority they depicted. At the same time these films exposed the fragile societal architecture that signalled the need for a different type of political discourse in the 1980s. The 1990s brought forth films that further examined the putative pillars of the now collapsed state, employing humour as one of the principal strategies to reveal the repetitiveness and paradoxes of the historical/political developments. The films analysed include Rajko Grlić's Samo jednom se ljubi/You Love Only Once (1981); Emir Kusturica's Otac na službenom putu/When Father Was Away on Business (1985); Goran Marković's Tito i ja/Tito and Me (1992) and Vinko Brešan's Maršal/Marshal (1999).

Transient Spaces and Places: Inside an 80s Cinema Hall in Lahore

The space of cinema in Pakistan is a tense, fraught, constantly shifting territory. It has often come under direct attack for being a corrupting Westernizing influence upon society. It has also been made vulnerable as part of a larger scheme of privatization of public and semi-public spaces, and increasing forms of capitalist globalization. I have been curious about the cinema theater as a site for reception of cinematic content as well as a negotiated space of classed, ethnic and gendered relations. In this extract from a conversational interview, I chat with a Lahori cinemagoer about his memories of cinemagoing in the 1980s. It was a chance to rediscover the city that I grew up in, but in a different time and through someone else’s memories. We talk about his navigation and knowledge of the city’s infrastructure, its possibilities and its limits, all the while locating cinema at the heart of his transgressions under Zia’s military dictatorship

Montage October: Dialectic of the Shot

In “Montage October,” which appeared in Artforum in January 1973, Rosalind Krauss argues that Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film was not only a celebration of a Marxist victory but also a demonstration of Marxist dialectical reasoning through montage. Krauss contends that rather than passively reconstructing the chain of circumstances that culminated in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, Eisenstein hoped to draw a filmic equivalence between the leap of revolutionary consciousness, which opens up access to the future by transcending the real, and the leap of visual consciousness, which goes beyond the normal bounds of filmic space.

Point of view: Engaging with history and memory in the classroom

Abstract South Africa’s turbulent past has led to its history being rewritten a number of times. The events of the last 450 years in particular have had a huge impact on the social, political and historical context, resulting in the current social tropes and inequalities emerging frequently as topics for discussion in the classroom. In April 2015 students at the University of Cape Town embarked on the RhodesMustFall campaign. The spirit of the campaign spread quickly across the country as students and citizens embarked on heated debates and protests on the significance and memory of such monuments. In the classroom students were encouraged to rethink monument spaces and interrogate the politics of remembering within the context of film studies. The theoretical framework focused on Marita Sturken’s premise that history, culture and memory are immersed in cultural artefacts that play a significant role in how we understand the past and its relationship with the present and the future. This article will discuss key theoretical ideas that emerged through interactions with students with reference to the RhodesMustFall campaign and how the cinematic space acts as a platform to rethink monument spaces.

The changing cinema spaces of Accra: Fragmented spectatorship and the loss of empathy

Abstract Cinema theatres are designed to foster collective emotional responses. Ghana’s capital Accra, like many other African cities, used to be full of such spaces. Urban infrastructures no longer support cinema theatres, and subsequently, television, video and small screens, in general, have replaced the dark room. This study explores some key aspects of how film spectatorship is embedded in the historical and current geography of Accra. It traces the undoing of cinema and its spaces, as well as the possible consequences of this development. The article retells an artistic research process that took place in a video parlour in Accra. The findings of the artistic research are supported in part by theories on space and apparatus. In Accra, collective spectatorship has turned into a mostly random event. Passers-by watch short glimpses of narratives without a pre-existing understanding of, nor commitment to, the narrative. Fragmented spectatorship can ultimately lead to a loss of shared feeling – empathy – between audience members and film characters, and as a consequence, between members of broader societal and even global contexts.

Building a Small Cinema: Resisting Neoliberal Colonization in Liverpool

In its stated aim of “creating cinemas not supermarkets,” the Small Cinema project voiced its alterity to the recent redevelopment of Liverpool’s city center and those of other former industrial cities throughout the Midlands and the north of the UK. These regeneration projects addressed the problem of a shrinking manufacturing base by replacing them with service industries, a move which has entailed the privatization of vast tracts of public space. Conversely, the building, functioning, and general praxis of the Small Cinema project suggests a mode of practice that more accurately fits within the paradigm of a collaborative commons than a capitalist marketplace. The project’s exemption from market criteria grants it the freedom to pursue public over private goods, thereby constituting a point of resistance to the ongoing neoliberalization of the city and changes to government policy that make it increasingly difficult for non-profit projects to exist. Historically speaking, cinemas have been accessible to the working class in a way that other artistic media have not. However, while the history of film as a tool for political subversion is well documented, less attention has been paid to the physical construction of independent cinematic space, its programming/running, and its potential as a node of resistance to neoliberal colonization. This paper uses the case study of the Small Cinema project in Liverpool as a means by which to understand how cinematic spaces can counteract the effects of policies that continue to have such a detrimental impact on the arts and education, as well as social health and well-being.

Blood and race – The black male vampire as action hero in the Blade trilogy

Abstract This article examines the representation of the black male vampire as an action hero in the Blade trilogy. Specifically, this article builds on Yvonne Tasker’s scholarship on racial discourse in the action cinema, where her reading of Predator 2 (1990) leads her to contend that ‘blackness is repositioned in terms of the monstrous within the film’s symbolic hierarchy’. Extending this argument to a relatively less analysed but commercially successful text, we suggest that even when cinematically presented as an action hero in the Blade trilogy, male vampiric blackness is inevitably conceived as aberrant, gesturing towards the failure of cinematic containment strategies. These complex and contradictory articulations ‘queer’ Blade from within, producing a peculiar cinematic vampiric masculinity and masculine identity that renders Blade as both an action hero and a villain. To this end, this article considers the spectacle of the black male vampiric body in action and inaction, and how other characters in the trilogy (re)define Blade’s vampiric masculinity. Consequently, this article examines how and why other forms of (white) masculinities threaten the survival of the protagonist and concludes by making the claim that the Blade trilogy has opened up a cinematic space for understanding the complex narrative strategies involved in the negotiation and articulation of marginal identities within a cultural system of hegemonic practices.

Gaze of the spectre in It Can Pass Through the Wall

Abstract Through a prolonged single shot evoking a gaze that belongs to bodies located at an elsewhere, the film affirms the evidence of the spectre. Implementing a careful denial of reciprocity, the spectre is rendered invisible as it dwells both the inside and outside of the cinematic space.

Voice in the Metadiegetic Space of the Motion Picture

This extension of the authors publication cycle Audiovisual Means of Creating Metadiegetic Space in Cinema (Vestnik VGIK #1(31), 2017; #2 (32), 2017) is a historical, artistical and technological survey of special sound-design techniques that make it possible to use the expressive potential of a human voice in a subjective (metadiegetic) space of the motion picture and through the voice to separate the metadiegetis from the sound realism of the diegesis of an audio-visual production.

La casa Malaparte: espacio fílmico y arquitectura de autor

Hay una rica y variada interrelación entre la arquitectura y el cine. Algunas casas y edificios singulares adquieren personalidad y casi la condición de personajes en determinadas películas, tanto en el cine de género -la “casa encantada” en el cine de terror- como en filmes de autor. La casa Malaparte de Capri responde a una arquitectura muy personal y se ubica en un espacio singular que ha servido, en distintos rodajes, para un espacio fílmico que trasciende el mero marco o contenedor de historias; forma parte de una tipología de casa que desafía la gravedad. La adaptación de la novela del propio Curzio Malaparte emplea esta casa como escenario de algunas secuencias, más por su pertenencia al escritor que por el espacio en sí mismo o su lugar en el relato. A partir de una novela, Godard crea en El desprecio un texto rico en capas y evocaciones que remite a la mitología de Ulises al tiempo que reflexiona sobre la imposibilidad del amor y la supervivencia de la pareja.