Description

---

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by Andr Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded - by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and "immersion". The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Ford's westerns to Chantal Akerman's claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller's Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao's award-winning NOMADLAND.

About the Author

---

Ian Christie is a film historian and curator, currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a visiting professor and fellow at universities in Chicago, Tampa, Stockholm, Canberra, Paris and Olomouc, and at Gresham College in London 2017-21, as well as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006. He has written and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam; and contributed to many exhibitions