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The role of space and place in the creation of visual narratives constitutes one of the most dynamic and exciting debates in contemporary film studies. How does film construct space? What are the spatial codes and strategies that it uses? What is the relationship between space and time in film? How do spatial constructs enable us to understand new concepts of identity and the politics and geographies of exile and displacement? Such questions, whose importance to contemporary film and culture is fundamental, are explored in wide-ranging, challenging essays that re-evaluate and extend recent theoretical debate in relation to the regional and national cinemas of Europe.
Alongside critical essays by scholars of international repute the book contains original contributions by practising film directors. Characterised by its interdisciplinary, cross-national focus, it is thematically structured to provide an insight into smaller and less well-explored cinemas as well as those of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Spain. Authoritative, lively, and jargon-free, these essays provide the reader with a clear understanding of the significance of space and place, and a fresh perspective on the fascinating diversity of European cinema.
List of contents
Contents: Pierre Sorlin: Urban Space in European Cinema - Laura McGee: Space, Place, and Identity in Andreas Dresen's Night Shapes, the Last German 'City Film' of the Twentieth Century - Luana Babini: The Urban Soul of British Cinema of the 1990s: London as Cinematic City in Mike Leigh's Naked and Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth - Ernest Hampson: Roman Cityscapes in European Cinema: Tarkovskii's Nostalgia and Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect - Axel Goodbody: Rural Spaces in German Film: Jürgen Brauer, Longing and Tom Tykwer, Wintersleepers - Phil Powrie: Space, the Crowd, and Prostitution in André Calmettes's Carmen - Mikel J. Koven: Space and Place in Italian Giallo Cinema: The Ambivalence of Modernity - Anthony Coulson: Paradise Islands: Van Dyke's White Shadows in the South Seas and F.W. Murnau's Tabu - Helma Sanders-Brahms: The Lost Face of Germany - Ann Marie Condron: Personal Identity, Power, and Contested Space in Joseph Losey's Monsieur Klein - Santiago Fouz-Hernández: Javier Bardem: Body and Space - Evelyn Preuss: To See or Not to See? Topographies of Repression in Konrad Wolf's I Was Nineteen and The Naked Man on the Sportsground - Martin Brady: Wide Open Spaces: Building Memory in Brechtian and Avant-garde Cinema - Jackie Collins: Yoyes: A Space (Place) of One's Own - Peter Wagstaff: Traces of Places: Agnès Varda's Mobile Space in The Gleaners and I - Wendy Everett: 'The Eye of the Inner Ear': Terence Davies and the Space/Time Dimension - Victoria Pastor-González: The 'Present Absents' in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours Trilogy - Les Roberts: Non-places in the Mist: Mapping the Spatial Turn in Theo Angelopoulos's Peripatetic Modernism - Evgenii Tsymbal: Andrei Tarkovskii: From 'Sculpted Time' to 'Inspired Nature'.
About the author
The Editors: Wendy Everett is Senior Lecturer in Film and French at the University of Bath.
Axel Goodbody is Reader in German Studies at the University of Bath.
Report
«Der Sammelband, mit der Filmografie der behandelten Titel, bio-bibliografischen Angaben zu den Autoren und einem Index ausgestattet, vermittelt auf der Grundlage neuester filmtheoretischer Ansätze nicht nur die funktionalen Zusammenhänge von Raum und Zeit. Er führt den Fachleser auch in die komplexe Thematik von Raum-Konstruktionen ein, die im europäischen Film insofern eine immer wichtigere, erkenntnisfördernde Rolle spielen werden, als sie dem in einer entfremdeten Welt existierenden Individuum zumindest Spuren einer Identität aufzeigen können.» (Wolfgang Schlott, Medienwissenschaft)
