Reframing the spaces of French cinema

Abstract

As a country which offered an intellectual home to post-1968 spatial theory, and whose identity and frame of geopolitical influence is expressed in geometric terms (Hexagone, Francosphère), France offers a propitious, though potentially overdetermined, national context in which to explore questions of space and place. While a special issue of Yale French Studies entitled ‘New Spaces for French and Francophone Cinema’ (2009) helped carve out this field of enquiry in film studies, an impressive range of scholarship has continued apace. This review article discusses recent approaches to cinematic space in contemporary French film and documentary, before focusing on two site-specific studies, the first of which readdresses the France’s capital, and the latter concerning the more peripheral site of the beach. James S. Williams’s (2013) study, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema, offers an ambitious account of how cinematic space is crafted in the work of five contemporary auteurs: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche and Claire Denis. This study skilfully navigates a broad conceptual territory, and ought to be a first point of call for those interested in the relationship between film and spatial theory. For Williams, cinematic space comprises many intraand extra-diegetic dimensions, including the formal constitution of the profilmic field (framing, depth of field), the hors champ, narrative space, landscape, soundscape and spectatorial space (a loose term encompassing both the corporeal site of affective engagement, and spaces of screening and reception). This latter dimension has been the subject of much recent Deleuzian and phenomenologically informed scholarship, but Williams takes care to balance his own appeal to film theory and philosophy with socio-cultural concerns. As he writes in his preface, Space and Being takes up the considerable methodological challenge of ‘develop[ing] a multi-levelled approach [to space,] sufficiently supple and capacious to register in close-up the shifting plays of cinematic form and consciousness [. . .] while at the same time taking into full account the film’s wider, cultural frame, i.e. its more socially, historically and politically defined landscapes’ (xiii). The second titular element, ‘being’, is therefore not simply shorthand for ontological concerns, but is extended in wider ethical, relational terms. Space and Being frequently adopts suggestively multivalent terms (e.g. ‘framing’, ‘in/ exclusion’) to address issues of form, structure and aesthetics, as well as more ostensibly political questions of difference and otherness. For example, Williams’s reading of Kechiche’s La Faute à Voltaire/Poetical Refugee (2000) discusses the filmmaker’s engagement with Republican avatars in urban space to broach questions of socio-symbolic