The Sense of Place in Contemporary Cinema

What purpose does place serve in films? When it is not just a background to actions, or indistinguishable from the landscape, or a simple space to walk through, a kind of neutral territory? Such filmmakers as Chantal Akerman, Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, Bruno Dumont, Béla Tarr, Avi Mograbi, Tariq Teguia, Philippe Grandrieux, Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub and Sharunas Bartas, chose not to focus solely the cinematic narration on the fate of the characters. They showed telluric spatialities, inhabited territories, existential matrices where ways of doing and of living were mobilized, where forces of emancipation and existential weaknesses were carried out. Welcoming rooms, remarkable transitions, havens for individual and communal destinies: place in cinema sometimes implies the insecurity of an unfinished project, sometimes the solidity of fortifications. The Sense of Place in Cinema demonstrates the importance of place and its aesthetic potentialities in film.

Dr Corinne Maury is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès. She is the author of several books in French, including Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du commerce 1080 Bruxelles, de Chantal Akerman (2020), Du parti pris des lieux dans le cinéma contemporain (2018), Habiter le monde. Éloge du poétique dans le cinéma du réel (2011); L’Attrait de la pluie (2013). She is the co-editor of Filmer les frontières (2016), Béla Tarr, De la colère au tourment (2016), Raymonde Carasco et Régis Hébraud: à l’oeuvre (2016) and Écrire l’analyse de film. Un enjeu pour l’esthétique (2019).