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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Hybrid Spaces. Film Worlds and the Aesthetics of Representation
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2009-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Oliver Schmidt
2009/10/01
Universität Bremen
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Ph.D. Thesis Project - Hybrid Spaces. Film Worlds and the Aesthetics of Representation
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HYBRID SPACES.
FILM WORLDS AND THE AESTHETICS OF REPRESENTATION
Oliver Schmidt / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
Universität Bremen




   The depiction of space has always been a key feature in cinema. The aesthetics of its represen-
tation, however, changed through film history, varies from genre to genre, and is essentially
linked to the style of certain filmmakers or movements like Italian Neorealism or New
Hollywood. Nowadays, since the 1990s an increasing number of films not only follow experi-
mental narrative strategies, but also tend to use space as a central aspect of filmic artificiality, rep-
resenting impossible spatio-temporal worlds as in Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), non-linear
narrative space as in Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), and highly artificial image spaces as in
Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001). My hypothetical starting point is that although today’s
Hollywood cinema is still largely consistent with the classical studio era, certain films seem to
bring new aesthetics to the screen, which could be described as deconstructed, synthetic, or bet-
ter: hybrid spaces. Analysing space in recent cinema therefore does not merely mean interpreting
the story of a film. Rather, it also involves the conditions of story representation, more precisely,
as David Bordwell2 puts it, the strategies of world-making, plot architecture and visual style that
govern the films’ design.
   Hence, one aim of my research is to determine what exactly the notion of space in cinema refers
to, focussing on textual structures of films as well as on cognitive activities of the spectator. This
question is closely linked to recent debates in social science and humanities on the so called spa-
tial turn, with a particular focus on two defining terms: topology and topography. Both may be
considered crucial aspects of the comprehension of film, that is to say, constructing topological
frames (logic of space) and topographical networks (structures in space) on different textual lev-
els. As a working hypothesis, I distinguish three basic levels of spatial relationships in film:
diegetic space, narrative space and image space. Each of these is considered to establish inde-
pendent spatial frames and networks, which are more or less consistent and more or less conven-
tionalised. But all of them are regarded as contributing to the ontology of the film world.
   The second aim of my research is to analyse how movies since the early 1990s and especially
since the year 2000 play with these conventions of cinematic space construction in order to pro-
vide the audience with experiences which decisively differ from experiencing common
Hollywood-films. The focus is set on the laws that govern diegetic, narrative and visual spaces,
their ontological limitations and the dissolution of space boundaries.
   David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) seems to be the prototype film that shows an almost com-
plete breakup of diegetic space: the actress Niki Grace (Laura Dern) gradually loses her sense of
reality and steps into the world of the film she is working on. What follows is an odyssey through
fragmented diegetic spaces, whereby not only the status of story space is kept floating – is it part
of the real film world, or part of the fictional world of her film project? – but also her identity

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. IX, no. 13, Fall 2009                                                             119
OLIVER SCHMIDT

which is in permanent transgression. Despite the fact that Inland Empire’s story is a variation of
the haunted house motif, it brings up the question of the conditions and possibilities of con-
structing diegetic space in cinema, and in so doing it differs significantly from our experience of
conventionalised film worlds. Here it seems to be a lack of discourse relations between single
diegetic spaces that causes a fragmentation of story space on the whole. In this respect, Inland
Empire resembles films like Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001), eXistenZ (David Cronenberg,
1999) or even L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), where the status of reality
is kept ambiguous, and thus hybrid.
   There are other quite different concepts of narrative space put forward by Stephen Heath,
Umberto Eco, Michail Bachtin or Edward Branigan. Regardless of any ideological implications,
all these approaches emphasize the act of narrating which significantly shapes the appearance of
the fictional world. In this respect, narrative space becomes an optional space for the story char-
acters, limiting their possibilities of acting and the probability of events. Casino Royale (Martin
Campbell, 2006), for instance, pretends to continue the diegetic world of James Bond, but at the
same time represents a narrative space that is governed by laws quite different to those already
known from the James Bond film series. For the first time, Bond seems to move through a story
space where his narrative supremacy is no longer valid, and where his physical integrity is exis-
tentially threatened. Given the fact that we are watching a James Bond movie set in a typically
diegetic world, we are experiencing a different narrative space which modifies the aesthetic con-
figuration of the film world and makes it in a way incompatible with the preceding Bond films.
   A different mode of representation is also made possible by image space, which is similarly
governed by laws of (audiovisual) representation, such as the permanent split screen in Mike
Figgis’ Timecode (2000) or, for example, the artificial environments in Zack Snyder’s 300
(2006), which clearly distinguish the film from other sword and sandal movies such as Gladiator
(Ridley Scott, 2000) or the prior Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960). Image space and also sonic
space therefore constitute the look and the feel of the story world on the level of depiction, and
as such they contribute to the basic character of the film world as well.
   This interpretation of diegesis, narration and image as aspects of the spatial style of filmic
world-making opens up the perspective to the question of identity, modulation and compatibility
of film worlds in a historical process, and to the cinematic experience these films provide as “high
concept breakouts” (Bordwell) in relation to the audience’s expectations, cognitive activities and
their prior knowledge.




1     Thesis in progress at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany.
      Advisors: Prof. Dr. Irmbert Schenk and Prof. Dr. Rainer Stollmann.
2     David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It. Story and Style in Modern Movies, University of
      California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles 2006.




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