Introduction: Screen is the Place

Abstract

'Screen is the Place' situates cinematic space at the centre of film experience, proposing that moving images operate as a unique interface between the historical world and the multiplicity of imaginary or alternative worlds that cinema is capable of generating. Building on the medium’s dual origin —rooted both in photography’s indexical relation to reality and in painting’s subjective, impressionistic gaze— this introduction argues that cinema synthesizes the tension between the material presence of the screen and the boundless spatiality it unfolds. This paradoxical relation lays the groundwork for distinguishing between two fundamental types of cinematic space: those grounded in real, profilmic locations drawn from the historical world, and those produced by framing, editing, sound, and perceptual engagement to create possible or speculative worlds.

The text offers a comprehensive overview of theoretical approaches to cinematic space, tracing their development from classical discussions of diegesis, perspective, and narrative continuity to more recent frameworks influenced by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on Antoine Gaudin’s taxonomy, it outlines four major analytical paradigms —geodiegetic, historical-modernist, plastic techno-aesthetic, and essentialist psycho-perceptive— highlighting their relevance for understanding how film constructs, transforms, and mediates space. The introduction also surveys key interdisciplinary debates that have shaped current scholarship, including studies of cinema and the city, film architecture, and cinematic landscape, all of which position filmic space as a palimpsest shaped by history, ideology, and spectatorship.

Within this context, the chapter introduces the structure of the edited volume 'New Approaches to Cinematic Space', which brings together seventeen essays organised into six thematic sections: urban spaces, architectural spaces, genre spaces, spectral spaces, heterotopias, and the phenomenology of space. The volume progresses from analyses of material, public, and private spaces toward more conceptual examinations of genre-driven, spectral, and mental spaces, ultimately engaging with the perceptual processes that enable cinematic spatiality. Individual contributions draw on case studies from a wide range of filmmakers —including Hitchcock, Kiarostami, Ozu, and Puiu—and genres such as noir, amateur film, psychogeographical documentary, and disaster cinema.

Overall, the chapter presents cinema as a medium that not only represents space but reconfigures it into a conceptual and cultural archive. Through its capacity to preserve memory, articulate historicity, and generate alternative worlds, cinematic space becomes a site where viewers negotiate the relation between body and image, presence and absence, materiality and imagination. 'Screen is the Place' thus positions the screen itself as a heterotopic threshold through which audiences access an infinite array of spatial configurations, inviting new formal, social, and allegorical readings of how cinema produces the worlds that unfold before us.