Paris Plays Itself: Widescreen and the City

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the video work of Thom Andersen and the film criticism of Manny Farber, this article argues that negative space in widescreen cinema constitutes a kind of optical unconscious whose urban content can be reactivated through a critical re-viewing of films that privileges location over narrative content. In a discussion of three French widescreen films of 1967, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Samurai, it further suggests that genre films with no avowed urbanistic content may provide insights into the city unavailable from a more explicitly sociological cinema.

KEYWORDS:

• urbanism
• widescreen
• negative space
• optical unconscious
• Thom Andersen
• Manny Farber

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Douglas Smith

Douglas Smith teaches literature, cinema and theory in the French and Francophone Studies section of the School of Languages and Literatures at University College Dublin. He is currently working on a cultural history of postwar France focused on the representation of space. Recent publications include an edited special number of the journal Paragraph dedicated to the film critic and theorist André Bazin (2013) and a chapter in A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, edited by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).