Spaces

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by André 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 Ford's westerns to Chantal Akerman's claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller's Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao's award-winning NOMADLAND.

Ian Christie is a film historian and curator, currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a visiting professor and fellow at universities in Chicago, Tampa, Stockholm, Canberra, Paris and Olomouc, and at Gresham College in London 2017-21, as well as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006. He has written and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam; and contributed to many exhibitions

Editorial, Acknowledgements, 1. Introduction: Phenomenologies of Screen Space - Ian Christie, Part 1 Spaces of Spectatorship, 2. Panoramic Space and the Mesdag Show - Luke McKernan, 3. Places of Exhibition - Mark Cosgrove, 4. Lockdown as a Mental Space of Communication - Roger Odin, Part 2 Spaces on Screen, 5. THE GO-BETWEEN's picturesque: figure (and disfigurement) in the landscape - Mark Broughton, 6. Akerman and Domestic Space - Sarah Leperchey, 7. Sequence and Simultaneity: Robinson's Spaces - Patrick Keiller, 8. Unhoused: on the American Spaces of NOMADLAND - Ian Christie, Part 3 Spatial Speculations, 9. Conjuring Space on Page and Screen, a dialogue - Isobel Armstrong and Ian Christie, 10. Fly me to the moon... extraterrestrial projections in artists' film and video - Catherine Elwes, 11. Stereoscopic Space in Cinema: an Embodied Experience - Yosr Ben Romdhane, 12. Of Drones and the Environmental Crisis in the Year 2020 - Teresa Castro, 13. Afterword: Beyond the frame: immersion, new technologies and old ambitions - Ian Christie, Index.