Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema

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.

The book 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."

Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume 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 author James S. Williams discuss his new book, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema, in this engaging interview: http://newbooksinfrenchstudies.com/2013/07/31/james-s-williams-space-and-being-in-contemporary-french-cinema-manchester-university-press-2013/

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Preface: Making Space
1. Space, Cinema, Being
i. Space in Cinema
ii. Space in Modern French Thought
iii. The Space of the Cinematic Subject
iv. Space and Place in French Cinema: A Tradition
v. Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema
2. Topographies of Being: Space, Sensation, and Spectatorship in the Films of Bruno Dumont
3. Requiem for a City: the Symbolics of Space in the Cinema of Robert Guédiguian
4. Heading Nowhere: Framing Space and Social Exclusion in the Films of Laurent Cantet
5. Re-siting the Republic: Abdellatif Kechiche and the Politics of Reappropriation and Renewal
6. Beyond the Other: Grafting Space and Human Relations in the Trans-cinema of Claire Denis
7. In Lieu of a Conclusion

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