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.
Listen to James S. Williams speaking about his book http:
//bit.ly/13xCGZN. (Copy and paste the link into your browser)
