L’image-espace : propositions théoriques pour la prise en compte d’un « espace circulant » dans les images de cinéma

Abstract

The issue of space offers a fertile starting point for exploring and deepening a power of film so far neglected by classical theory. Following the books of Gilles Deleuze (L’image-mouvement et L’image-temps), it seems that one of the major current tasks of film aesthetics could be to think an “image-espace cinema”: a cinema that would make the space not just a background, a pattern or an actant, but at the same time, an important existential issue and a critical material of its own plastic composition. This requires developing new theoretical tools, that would less depend on the pictorial or theatrical categories, as on the “grammar” specific to the classical narrative and editing, and more closely linked to the basic powers — cineplastic and rhythmic — of moving pictures. This new paradigm entails that filmic space has no permanent substance: it is never given as a stable object, a fixed form. On the contrary, space is the subject of constant shaping, circulating through the images of the film.

Keywords

• abstraction
• cinema
• space
• phenomenology
• rhythm
• void