Space and Cinema

In questo articolo si propone una riflessione geocritica sul cinema a partire da Black Dahlia di Brian De Palma (2006), attraversando la tradizione del film noir e considerando la particolare relazione di questo genere con spazi e geografie "reali". È affrontata nello specifico la questione della rappresentazione di Hollywood (e di Los Angeles) nei film (noir) hollywoodiani, allo scopo di verificare una differenza fondamentale, per quanto certo non l'unica, nella costruzione degli "spazi disturbanti" tra racconto cinematografico e racconto letterario. Mentre la geocritica letteraria solitamente ripete che simili spazi "interferenti" sono (de)costruiti seguendo strategie "eterotopiche", il caso del film noir mostra come il cinema-un locative medium del tutto singolare-possa semmai praticare più efficacemente l'opposta strategia "omotopica".

This paper aims at offering a geocritical exploration of cinema starting from The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006) and retracing the tradition of the noir film genre, taking into consideration the peculiar relations between this genre and "real" spaces and geographies. The question of Hollywood cinema representing Hollywood itself (and Los Angeles) will be considered in order to verify a fundamental difference between how "disturbing spaces" are constructed in cinema and in literature. While the geocritical approach to the study of literature usually maintains that similar "interfering" spaces are (de)constructed through "heterotopic" strategies, the case of noir film genre shows how cinema-a very singular locative medium-can effectively rely on "homotopic" strategies, instead.

Bu çalışmada sinemada mekânsal ilişkilerin dayalı kısıtlayıcı ve özgürleştirici potansiyellerinin nasıl ifade edildiği araştırılacaktır. Pierre Nora'nın hafıza ve mekânlar arasındaki ilişkiye dair vurgusu göstergeleri olarak değerlendirebiliriz. Mekânlar sadece anlatının gerçekleştiği yerler olmanın ötesinde, karakterlerin mekânla olan ilişkileri ve o mekânlarda gerçekleşen sosyal ilişkileri bağlamında da önem taşırlar. Aidiyet kadar dışlanmak da mekânsal çalışma için seçilen filmler kadın karakterlerin merkezde olduğu anlatılara sahip olduklarından, aidiyet ve kimlik temaları toplumsal cinsiyet bağlamında değerlendirilecektir. Bu bağla dönemde üretilmiş, bağımsız yapım Yurdu (Senem Tüzen, 2015) ve Tereddüt (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2016) filmleri incelenerek kullandıkları biçimsel stratejiler karşılaştırılacaktır.

In this study, the way gender be investigated through the analysis of spatial relations in cinema. Based on Pierre Nora's emphasis on the relation between memory and spaces, we can evaluate spaces as signs of identity and belonging. Spaces, beyond merely being places that narrative events occur, are, in the context of characters' personal and social relations. Exclusion, as much as belonging, emerges within spatial relations. Hence the films selected for this study, with women themes of belonging and identity, will analysis of Until I Lose My Breath Clair-Obscur (YeşimUstaoğlu, 2016), that are independent productions and were made in the same period, their formal strategies will be discussed.

'Space' and 'place' are mutually depending experiential categories, as proposed by Yi-Fu Tuan, where 'place' signifies location, stability, safety, pause within the movement, and 'space' indicates a sense of yearning, a drive to transcend the boundary, an overarching trajectory towards 'here and now', illuminated with the sense of being and becoming. Gaston Bacherald on the other hand postulates the reverberation of spatial imagination within the most commonly encountered architectural elements which are abound in our living localities, both indoor and outdoor. While 'place' has a mappable quality, bounded space may have a measurable quality. In Indic tradition the space has been conceived both as bounded and unbounded, a philosophical move to account for the 'apeiron' while confined in the affairs mostly related to the 'peiron'. In the domain of cinema, we find a curious flow of space and place related characteristics. We always have to situate a camera in a 'place', but what we record becomes a 'cinematic space', no longer a representational image of a place or a location. The place where the camera is placed does not have a frame; the camera frames and creates the off-screen space, which remains invisible to the sensory eye, but immediately lends itself to the contextual imagination of potentially countless variations, a sort of cognition of overtones, mainly absorbed through the mode of 'involuntary attention'. It was Hugo Munsterberg who commented on the importance of involuntary attention even in the primary act of seeing a film almost a century ago, which nevertheless has a dimension of lived phenomenological time. In case of conceiving a real location-based film in a place according to the so-called requirements of a story/script or a fictional idea, often there is a tendency to fit the 'space' into the frame of the intended narrative, which seems to be the dominant practice throughout the history of cinema. In terms of portrayal of characters also, the similar approach prevails-casting of actors is done according to suitable faces, inherent gestures, at times even idiolect criteria, to give the necessary body to the conceived narrative. In these cases, primarily the trajectory is from the 'generalized idea of reality' to the 'specific instantiation of that idea in actual reality'. The question to ask is-is it possible to conceive narrative cinema from the opposite end, i.e. from the end of real place and real people? Is it possible to create narrative where the movement would be from the specificities of experienced reality to a personalized and internalized presentation of the same? In the proposed paper, it would be articulated through some examples of Indian cinema and world cinema that there are significant attempts to approach the narrative cinema where the felt/imagined pulses from the real space play more important role than the seamless narration of the film. Often in those works, the audience encounter a qualitative difference of cinematic experience in terms of 'affect' and 'flow'-the pleasure of seeing an immersive story shifts to an appropriation of 'montage of spaces' with different, and at times unexpected emotional ruptures and convoluted associations.

The aim of this study is to discuss the hodological space –a special form of experienced space–, based on the comparison of experienced space and the physical/mathematical space, in the context of cinema art. In this study, following the arguments about basic premises and the theoretical approaches on space and cinematic hodological space, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) is analyzed formally and contextually. The main findings and the conclusions of the cinematic hodological space –that experienced by Doctor Cemal's (Muammer Uzuner)– analysis would be summarized as: (1) the route of Doctor Cemal and the others during the search, constitutes the hodological space; (2) in the film, the patriarchal hierarchic social relations come together with space, to draw Doctor Cemal's cognitive map. Various power relations that related to space become visible through the path; (3) the cinematic hodological geography of the film conflicts with the administrative map of Anatolia, so that is referring to experienced space concept once more.
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Bu çalışmanın amacı, deneyimlenmiş mekân ve fizikî/matematiksel mekân karşılaştırmasından hareket ederek –deneyimlenmiş mekânın özel bir biçimi olan– hodolojik mekânı sinema sanatı bağlamında tartışmaktır. Çalışmada, mekâna ve sinemasal hodolojik mekâna dair temel önerme ve kuramsal yaklaşımların tartışılmasının ardından Nuri Bilge Ceylan'ın Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (2011) adlı filmi biçimsel ve bağlamsal çözümleme yöntemleriyle incelenmiştir. Filmde, Doktor Cemal'in (Muammer Uzuner) deneyimlediği sinemasal hodolojik mekânın çözümlenmesiyle şu temel bulgu ve sonuçlara ulaşılmıştır: (1) Filmde gerçekleşen arama etkinliği boyunca, Doktor Cemal ve diğerlerinin izlediği yol hodolojik mekânı meydana getirir; (2) Filmde ataerkil hiyerarşik ilişkiler mekânla bir araya gelerek Doktor Cemal'in bilişsel haritasını oluşturur. Mekânla ilintili çeşitli iktidar ilişkileri, mekân sayesinde görünür hale gelmektedir; (3) Filmin sinemasal hodolojik coğrafyası Anadolu'nun yerleşim yerlerini gösteren idari haritayla çelişmektedir ki bu durum bir kez daha deneyimlenmiş mekân kavramsallaştırmasına atıfta bulunur.

In this study, the cinematic spaces in the films of Derviş Zaim are examined as a stage on which events, facts and characters exist and as a platform on which cinematic action occurs. In the study, Derviş Zaim’s filmography is analysed by textual and contextual methods. For this, each film of the director is deconstructed on the basis of its space plans. Quantitative data obtained from this work of deconstruction is presented, where appropriate, in charts, graphs and images. This data served as basis for contextual analysis. Moreover, interviews conducted with the director are included to the study through content analysis. In the study, firstly cinematic spaces are examined as elements of the director’s cinematography via textual analysis. Secondly, it analysed how the director created cinematic tension between different types of spaces –categorized as interior, exterior, and in-between spaces through editing/montage while transforming the cinematic meaning.
The main results of this study, considering Derviş Zaim cinema in terms of cinematic spaces, would be summarized as follows: The space in Derviş Zaim cinema is used as the essential element of the film action, as the platform of the narration correspondingly action of the narration. The cinematic narration is enriched by jumps between interior and exterior spaces and the space not only constitutes a platform for the story, but also is used to create a new narration itself, to build the cinematic tension. The director transfers the tension between interior and exterior spaces to the tension of the story. While the tension becomes an element that merges spaces, the space serves as a platform for both the tension and narration. The space, the tension and the narration are developed in a triple relationship.
***Bu çalışmada olayların, olguların, karakterlerin varoluşlarını bulduğu sahne ve sinemasal eylemin gerçekleştiği platform olarak, Derviş Zaim filmlerindeki sinemasal mekânlar değerlendirilmektedir. Çalışmada Derviş Zaim’in filmografisi biçimsel ve bağlamsal yöntemlerle çözümlenmektedir. Bunun için yönetmenin filmleri, mekân bağlamında planlarına ayrılmış, nicel veri elde edilmiş; bu veriler gerektiği yerde tablolaştırılmış, şekil haline getirilmiş ya da görselleştirilmiştir. Elde edilen bu veriden, bağlamsal çözümleme gerçekleştirilirken yararlanılmıştır. Bununla birlikte yönetmenle gerçekleştirilen söyleşi ve görüşmeler içerik çözümlemesiyle nitel verilere dönüştürülerek çalışmaya dâhil edilmiştir. Çalışmada öncelikle yönetmenin sinematografisinin öğeleri olarak sinemasal mekânlar biçimsel çözümlemeye tabi tutularak yorumlanmıştır. Bunun ardından iç, dış ve ara mekânlar olarak sınıflandırılan farklı mekân tipleri arasında kurgunun/montajın olanaklarıyla, yönetmenin bir yandan sinemasal gerilimi yaratırken diğer yandan sinemasal anlamı nasıl dönüştürdüğü yorumlanmıştır.
Derviş Zaim sinemasını mekân bağlamında değerlendiren bu çalışmada özetle şu sonuca ulaşılmıştır: Derviş Zaim sinemasında mekân, film deviniminin asli öğesi ve anlatının platformu olarak, anlatının devinimine denk bir biçimde kullanılmaktadır. İç ve dış mekân geçişleriyle sinemasal anlatı zenginleştirilmekte ve mekân sadece sinemasal anlatıya platform oluşturmakla kalmayarak bizatihi anlatıyı ileri taşıyan sinemasal gerilimi oluşturmak için kullanılmaktadır. Yönetmen, iç ve dış mekânlar arasındaki gerilimi öykünün gerilimine taşımaktadır. Gerilim bir yandan mekânları birleştiren bir öğe haline gelirken mekân da hem gerilime hem de filmin anlatısına bir platform teşkil etmektedir. Mekân, gerilim ve anlatı üçlü bir ilişki içinde ilerler.

This paper takes a spatial approach to the question of social inclusion for LGBQT people in South Koran popular culture. The last two decades have seen the emergence of a more open gay scene in Seoul, the growth of queer community activities such as the LGBQT Film Festival and Seoul Pride, and increasing—albeit often ambivalent—visibility for queer characters in South Korean media. While the acceptance of LGBQT lifestyles are increasingly accepted by the Korean public, especially in younger demographics, public queer cultural events and political debate of LGBQT rights often faces vehement opposition from conservative and Christian groups. Moreover, the emergence of queer identities in South Korea should be understood as subject to the complex antinomies of Korea’s 'compressed modernity’. Contemporary Korean queer identities are constructed through a nexus of earlier Korean queer community habitus, globalised queer cultures, localising practices, and the circulation of western and other Asian queer people, images, and ideas. Korean queer identities also negotiate gradients of privacy and publicness, and inclusion and exclusion across social environments shaped by competing traditional and emerging ideologies of familism, the importance of affiliation networks in contemporary Korean society, and the individualism of neoliberal culture. At the same time, the digital communications and dating practices through which individual/group relations are mediated in queer communities often have socially atomising effects, and the range of queer community meeting places is limited by the commercialised production of space in neoliberal Seoul. How, then, do Korean queers position or imagine themselves within the urban fabric of the city?

This paper maps the spaces of queer life in Seoul constructed in Korean queer films. It suggests that two spatial tropes predominate the spatial imaginary of Korean queer film: Queer heterotopia and tactics of temporary spatial appropriation. Michael Foucault theorises heterotopias as other spaces that stand outside the regime of norms of disciplinary society. Queer places, such as gay bars and clubs and gay ‘room salons’, function as ‘transgression heterotopia’s in which gender and sexuality evade the discipline of heteronormative society. Foucault separates space into that of norms and ‘other places’. Michel De Certeau theorises that even within the power structures of normative space, the ‘powerless’ can deploy their own tactics of spatial usage, albeit always through temporary appropriations. Such tactics are also common in Korean queer films. They are deployed in deserted buildings, waste ground, remote rural spaces, cars parked under bridges on the banks of the Han River, and in quiet public toilets at night. Indeed, the ‘dark night’ becomes a chronotope of and metaphor for a covert queer subjectivity. Yet, with its heterotopias and spatial tactics, Korean queer film obscures the spatialities of (what Gillies Deleuze terms) ‘control societies’ that function so differently from the spatialised prohibitions of disciplinary society. The paper concludes by asking how Korean queer film addresses the experience of the queer neoliberal subject in contemporary Seoul.

These two chapters are taken from my book The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford UP, 2000). They give a close reading of one film each by a Catalan and Basque auteur and place that filmic practice in the context of nationalist politics and the response to it in their respective autonomías.

This article reads the Resident Evil film franchise (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012) through theoretical work on the spatial strategies of neocapitalism, arguing that the films visualize abstract theories of spatial production and control. Throughout the franchise, virtualized and falsified experiences of space are shown to effectively manage human subjects, and the repeated use of simulations and clones highlights the reproducibility of both space and its occupants. The work of Henri Lefebvre is here employed to examine these representations, in particular his writing on the ‘abstract space’ upon which capitalist society relies. In such space, Euclidean emptiness and uniformity replace embodied geographies and histories, and human action is carefully proscribed and managed. The article uses textual and narrative analysis to show how the Resident Evil films explore such neocapitalist spatial strategies and argues that the franchise repeatedly and forcefully reminds viewers that seemingly neutral or taken-for-granted spaces might in truth be controlled and functionalized spatial productions.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HPVI3T43gP4xbzEqkgEj/full

Entre 2012 et 2018, les références a la crise sont occasionnelles et elliptiques sur les écrans, mais, de manière prégnante, elles s'infiltrent dans les dialogues et expliquent, parfois hors-champs, le comportement des personnages : d'absente, la crise est devenue omniprésente, nous pourrions même parler de phénomène viral. En faisant le choix d'aborder le sujet frontalement, beaucoup de films mettent en évidence le caractère spatial d'une crise qui s'est faite de briques et de spéculation immobilière et dont les écrans reproduisent les espaces les plus paradigmatiques : les places contestataires, les chantiers abandonnés, les appartements vides ou, au contraire, trop pleins, en raison de la cohabitation forcée de plusieurs générations, la fuite à travers I'émigration et/ou les espaces virtuels. Les pages qui suivent tenteront de définir les particularités de ces lieux récurrents dans la plupart des films qui traitent de la conjoncture économique ; puis nous attirerons I'attention sur d'autres films qui s'éloignent de la référentialité des lieux pour inviter à dépasser la crise, en favorisant parfois une inversion cathartique des pouvoirs et des valeurs. À travers ce parcours spatial, ce
sont différentes réactions et réponses a la récession et à I'austérité qui se dessinent et, parmi elles, une contestation de la réorganisation spatiale qui semble vouloir s'imposer.


Villarmea Álvarez, Iván & Álvarez, Marta. 2019. "Paysages de la crise dans le cinéma espagnol: du chantier a WhatsApp en passant par Berlin", en Montero, Laureano; Katsika, Karolina; Canto, Lise & Álvarez, Marta (Eds.), Espaces de la crise - Crise de l'espace. Binges: Éditions Orbis Tertius: 173-191.