Spaces

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by Andr Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and immersion. The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Fords westerns to Chantal Akermans claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keillers Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhaos award-winning NOMADLAND.