The Sense of place in Contemporany Cinema

Publié le 16 novembre 2022 – Mis à jour le 16 novembre 2022
le 7 novembre 2022

de Corinne Maury


 
What purpose does place serve in films? When it is not just a background to actions, or indistinguishable from the landscape, or a simple space to walk through, a kind of neutral territory? Such filmmakers as Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, Bruno Dumont, Béla Tarr, Avi Mograbi, Tariq Teguia, Philippe Grandrieux, Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub and Sharunas Bartas, chose not to focus solely the cinematic narration on the fate of the characters. They showed telluric spatialities, inhabited territories, existential matrices where ways of doing and of living were mobilized, where forces of emancipation and existential weaknesses were carried out. Welcoming rooms, remarkable transitions, havens for individual and communal destinies: place in cinema sometimes implies the insecurity of an unfinished project, sometimes the solidity of fortifications. The Sense of Place in Cinema demonstrates the importance of place and its aesthetic potentialities in film.

Complément en ligne : https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/corinne-maury