Cinematic Space
As part of its fundamental operational properties, the motion picture captures a slice of the visible in order to create its specific spatiality. In its quality as a medium capable of activating transformative processes at the intersection of spatiality and visuality, cinema has actively participated in the construction of concepts such as ‘place’, ‘landscape’, or ‘environment’, and has developed strategies for making social relationships visible as well as their association with a territory, city, or region. This is why cinema can prove crucial as a source for understanding a historical space. More generally, when understood as a language, a means of expression, and an experience, film remains a gateway to understand our visual culture and our cultural, artistic, and social history. Analyzing the medium of film today, at a time when film seems to be shedding the mediatic specificities that previously linked it to the cinema, is to study it from a privileged position that allows not only for a re-interrogation of its aesthetics and its mediality but also to investigate its historical manifestations dependent on industrial practices and changes in its technical apparatus. The methodological approach advanced here is designed to alternate between different scales of observation in order to address cinema as a creative, productive, and cultural ensemble. The approach is applied in ways that range from the close-reading of the individual film to the study of the political-social context of the production system, from the analysis of the forms of mise-en-scène of Italian cinema to the investigation of the broader figurative and narrative palimpsest that was crucial in defining Italy’s identity to be explored beyond the boundaries of a national cinema. We attempt to investigate spatiality on various levels and scales, be it the analysis of spatial constructions in the movie itself, be it the reconstruction of the cultural context of the spaces and places represented on film, including an identification of what has deliberately been left out and thus remains in the “off.” The variation and recombination of different scales of observation will allow for novel and comprehensive interpretations.
In the reporting period, the focus was on the cinematic representation of work in the city and on the staging of landscape in film. Special mention should be made of the screening and discussion of the recently rediscovered silent film La montagne infidèle by Jean Epstein, to which a workshop was dedicated in collaboration with the Casa del Cinema.
