The `place` of Film: Cinematic Spaces, Sites, Settings

Course content

This course aims to familiarize students with the necessary tools to critically analyze and historically contextualize cinematic representations of space. With a global emphasis, we will consider the ways in which cinema defines, reconsiders, and reshapes the notions of place. We will explore various approaches to “cinematic space” by studying a wide array of themes, concepts, and theories while also considering what happens to viewer’s sense of space and place in different media environments. The topics of the course will include domesticity, borders and movement, screening space and spectatorship, cine-museology, national and transnational spaces, animated worldmaking, and digital realisms. While the focus of the class will be on historical, social, and cultural distinctions in relation to the spatial representations on screen, we will also pay precise attention to formal and stylistic techniques as well as to the narrative and non-narrative organization of films we analyze.