Space and being in contemporary French cinema

📖 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 Guédiguian, 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.

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