Constructions of cinematic space : spatial practice at the intersection of film and theory

This thesis is an attempt to bring fresh insights to current understandings of cinematic space and the relationship between film, architecture, and the city. That attempt is situated in relation to recent work by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen, and others on the importance of the city in the current global framework, along with the growing body of literature on film, architecture, and urban space. Michel De Certeau's threefold critique of the city, set forth in The practices of Everyday Life, structures a comparative analysis of six primary films, aired as follows, with one air for each of three chapters-Jacques Tati's lay Time and Edward Yang's Yi Yi, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle, and Franqois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay!. Along with De Certeau's notions of satial ractice, walking rhetorics, and the pedestrian speech act, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze-including work from the Cinema texts and A Thousand plateaus-is developed in relation to existent film theory on movement, time, and space.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Comparative Media Studies.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Jacobson, Brian R

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William Uricchio.

• Comparative Media Studies.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39189

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39189