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Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in space and place, emanating from the arenas of geography, anthropology, and sociology and permeating gender studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and, increasingly, cinema studies.
The cinema is, of course, a spatial art form. Projected on, or otherwise delivered to, a two-dimensional screen (of whatever size), the cinema creates and manages representational space through framing (which delimits space), editing (which connects discrete or adjoining spaces and/or breaks down a larger space into patts), and movement (which allows the spectator to travel through spaces). Additionally, cinema represents places and spaces. On the one hand, through location shooting and set design, the cinema draws on pre-existing knowledge to represent recognizable places that carry some cultural or historical resonance, such as Rockefeller Center. On the other hand, the cinema creates imaginary, but no less resonant spaces, spaces that signify as types, such as images of the suburban single family home, the nightclub, or the office, or spaces that function as fantasy, such as the Galactic Empire. Whether representing real or fictional spaces, the spaces of cinema are both connotative and denotative; they carry meaning related to class, sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and more. Rather than mere backdrop, space propels and shapes narrative.
Two recent books take up the meaning of space in cinema, and especially issues of sex and gender, by attending to representations of a particular space. Lee Wallace's Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (Routledge, 2008) and Merrill Schleier's Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) examine, respectively, the figure of the apartment and the skyscraper. Taken together, these two books demonstrate the range and appeal of space studies as a way of opening up cinematic texts to new ways of understanding space, ranging from the primarily theoretical or abstract to the more social and experiential.
Where Wallace offers primarily formalist readings of five specific film texts to present a largely theoretical argument for the salience of the apartment as an international post-Stonewall lesbian chronotope, Schleier proffers a wide-ranging socio-historical analysis of the skyscraper, grounding her analysis of a large number of American films from the 1920s to the 1950s amid archival research into architecture, corporate culture, design, women's pulp fiction, self-help business manuals, and ephemeral pop culture.
In Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments, Wallace approaches the space of the lesbian apartment as a cinematic chronotope, Bakhtin's term for the spatio-temporal milieu that governs narrative. In Wallace's account, the temporal dimension of the lesbian apartment is somewhat taken for granted: she is primarily interested in the space of the apartment, not merely as subordinate to narrative, but elevated above character and narrative, to consider "sexuality as being assigned by the cinematic space in which it appears rather than attached to the protagonists that move through it" (49). "Telling the lesbian story," according to Wallace, "seems to require, and no more than minimally, the right location" (31). And she suggests that sometimes, all the lesbian story needs is to bring two women together in the same space. Against more stereotypical assignations of lesbian culture to the spaces of the bar, the school room, the prison and the women's college, Wallace views the apartment as assisting the "possibility of an out lesbian life that is not limited to a subcultural or institutional environment" (11).
Wallace focuses primarily on post-classical, post-Stonewall films, arguing that even after the repeal of the Hays Code, Hollywood took the connotative codes of lesbian representation that had been established to maintain lesbian invisibility and redeployed them to "scaffold homosexual visibility" (30), thus mapping lesbianism through space and visual modes of meaning making rather than speech or a discursive model.
Her analysis begins with William Wyler's 1961 version of The Children's Hour, which she reads as a limit case on Production Code aesthetics to suggest "the continued dependence of lesbian representation on cinematic form and style rather than character and plot" (15). Thereafter, Wallace provides close readings of The Killing of Sister George (Aldrich, 1968), The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972), Single White Female (Schroeder, 1992), Bound (Wachowski, 1996), and Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001). The book deliberately ignores not only homosocial Hollywood narratives, such as How to Marry a Millionaire (Negulesco, 1953) or Golddiggers of 1933 (Berkeley, 1933) that could be read, by Wallace's own logic, as producing a lesbian narrative by virtue of situating two or more women in an apartment, but also largely neglects both commercial and experimental lesbian-themed apartment plots by lesbian directors, such as The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (Maggenti, 1995).
The cinema is, of course, a spatial art form. Projected on, or otherwise delivered to, a two-dimensional screen (of whatever size), the cinema creates and manages representational space through framing (which delimits space), editing (which connects discrete or adjoining spaces and/or breaks down a larger space into patts), and movement (which allows the spectator to travel through spaces). Additionally, cinema represents places and spaces. On the one hand, through location shooting and set design, the cinema draws on pre-existing knowledge to represent recognizable places that carry some cultural or historical resonance, such as Rockefeller Center. On the other hand, the cinema creates imaginary, but no less resonant spaces, spaces that signify as types, such as images of the suburban single family home, the nightclub, or the office, or spaces that function as fantasy, such as the Galactic Empire. Whether representing real or fictional spaces, the spaces of cinema are both connotative and denotative; they carry meaning related to class, sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and more. Rather than mere backdrop, space propels and shapes narrative.
Two recent books take up the meaning of space in cinema, and especially issues of sex and gender, by attending to representations of a particular space. Lee Wallace's Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (Routledge, 2008) and Merrill Schleier's Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) examine, respectively, the figure of the apartment and the skyscraper. Taken together, these two books demonstrate the range and appeal of space studies as a way of opening up cinematic texts to new ways of understanding space, ranging from the primarily theoretical or abstract to the more social and experiential.
Where Wallace offers primarily formalist readings of five specific film texts to present a largely theoretical argument for the salience of the apartment as an international post-Stonewall lesbian chronotope, Schleier proffers a wide-ranging socio-historical analysis of the skyscraper, grounding her analysis of a large number of American films from the 1920s to the 1950s amid archival research into architecture, corporate culture, design, women's pulp fiction, self-help business manuals, and ephemeral pop culture.
In Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments, Wallace approaches the space of the lesbian apartment as a cinematic chronotope, Bakhtin's term for the spatio-temporal milieu that governs narrative. In Wallace's account, the temporal dimension of the lesbian apartment is somewhat taken for granted: she is primarily interested in the space of the apartment, not merely as subordinate to narrative, but elevated above character and narrative, to consider "sexuality as being assigned by the cinematic space in which it appears rather than attached to the protagonists that move through it" (49). "Telling the lesbian story," according to Wallace, "seems to require, and no more than minimally, the right location" (31). And she suggests that sometimes, all the lesbian story needs is to bring two women together in the same space. Against more stereotypical assignations of lesbian culture to the spaces of the bar, the school room, the prison and the women's college, Wallace views the apartment as assisting the "possibility of an out lesbian life that is not limited to a subcultural or institutional environment" (11).
Wallace focuses primarily on post-classical, post-Stonewall films, arguing that even after the repeal of the Hays Code, Hollywood took the connotative codes of lesbian representation that had been established to maintain lesbian invisibility and redeployed them to "scaffold homosexual visibility" (30), thus mapping lesbianism through space and visual modes of meaning making rather than speech or a discursive model.
Her analysis begins with William Wyler's 1961 version of The Children's Hour, which she reads as a limit case on Production Code aesthetics to suggest "the continued dependence of lesbian representation on cinematic form and style rather than character and plot" (15). Thereafter, Wallace provides close readings of The Killing of Sister George (Aldrich, 1968), The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972), Single White Female (Schroeder, 1992), Bound (Wachowski, 1996), and Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001). The book deliberately ignores not only homosocial Hollywood narratives, such as How to Marry a Millionaire (Negulesco, 1953) or Golddiggers of 1933 (Berkeley, 1933) that could be read, by Wallace's own logic, as producing a lesbian narrative by virtue of situating two or more women in an apartment, but also largely neglects both commercial and experimental lesbian-themed apartment plots by lesbian directors, such as The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (Maggenti, 1995).
