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 it 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, 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 losing its mediatic specificities linked to the cinema, is to study it from a privileged position that allows not only for a re-interrogation about 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 forwarded here is designed to alternate different scales of observation in order to address cinema as a creative, productive and cultural ensemble. 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 and that is to be explored beyond the boundaries of a national cinema. The exploration of the spatiality inside and outside the camera frame enables a change of scales, the combination of which will generate new and comprehensive interpretations.
