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Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London
Press Reviews:
'Space and being in contemporary French cinema undertakes an ambitious and compelling examination of the spaces of recent French cinema that delves into the ways that space is framed, inhabited, and experienced visually and auditorily. While firmly in the lineage of film studies' spatial turn, Space and being engages in original and insightful ways with cinematic theories of space by analyzing the effects created by use of the hors-champs, motion, sound, color, and intertextuality....Space and being remains essential for specialists of contemporary French cinema and will pique the interest of all scholars working in all areas of contemporary French and Francophone studies.'
Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati, Contemporary French Civilization Vol 39, No 3, 1 December 2014
See the publisher website: Manchester University Press
> From the same author:
Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema (2020)
The Politics of Beauty
For Ever Godard (2004)
Dir. Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt
Subject: Director > Jean-Luc Godard
The Cinema Alone (2000)
Jean-Luc Godard in the Year 2000
Dir. Michael Temple and James S. Williams
Subject: Director > Jean-Luc Godard
> On a related topic:
Cinema and Contact (2020)
The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis
Miraculous Realism (2021)
The French-Walloon Cinéma du Nord
Mixed Feelings in France (2025)
White Femininity and Métissage in French Multicultural Comedy
Nouvelles Femmes (2025)
Modern Women of the French New Wave and Their Enduring Contribution to Cinema
The Cinematic Influence (2024)
Interaction and Exchange Between the Cinemas of France and Japan
Gender in French Banlieue Cinema (2024)
Intersectional Perspectives
Dir. Marzia Caporale, Claire Mouflard and Habib Zanzana
The Ethnographic Optic (2024)
Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema
Through a Nuclear Lens (2024)
France, Japan, and Cinema from Hiroshima to Fukushima
Reframing the European Other (2023)
Identity and Belonging in Contemporary French and German Cinema
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