[Commlist] CFP: Real and Imagined Spaces in Film

We are excited to share the CFP for the conference “Real and Imagined 
Spaces in Film” 
<https://eventos.unizar.es/126084/detail/real-and-imagined-spaces-in-film.html>. 
The conference will take place at the recently renovated Faculty of Arts 
(Facultad de Filosofía y Letras) at the University of Zaragoza on May 
29-30, 2025.

This conference is the final event of the research project "From Social 
Space to Cinematic Space: /Mise-en-scènes /of the transnational in 
contemporary cinema".

Please find the Call for Papers below. The deadline to submit proposals 
is February 3^rd , 2025.

We look forward to welcoming you in Zaragoza.

++++

*Real and Imagined Spaces in Film *(Call for papers)

Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

May 29-30, 2025

*Plenary Speaker:*Áine O'Healy (Loyola Marymount University)

When Mark Shiel argued almost twenty-five years ago that film is more a 
spatial than a textual experience (2001, 6), he was highlighting the 
importance of space in films and arguing for its visibility against the 
traditional predominance of narrative and character in film theory and 
analysis. He was also asking to take cinematic constructions of real 
places seriously, as he later developed in his study of specific 
cinematic cities, particularly Los Angeles (2012, 2018). His 
intervention was important because, with some exceptions (Krause and 
Petro 2003, for example), theories of space in the cinema had until then 
been predominantly textual, starting with those of the Russian 
formalists and continuing later in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s 
“Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu” (1976), Stephen Heath’s 
“Narrative Space” (1981), and Bordwell’s /Narration in the Fiction Film 
/(1985), among others. A more recent theory of space, Antoine Gaudin’s 
/L’espace cinematographice: Esthétique et dramaturgie/ (2015), after 
offering a “cartography” of the most important previous work on 
cinematic space, departs from this formalist slant to some extent, but 
his phenomenological approach and what he calls “espace vécu” (lived 
space) (54-55) are still relatively unconcerned with the social space 
with which cinematic space interacts.

Following Shiel, this conference aims to explore film space as more than 
simply a function of narrative. In that sense, we aim to expand 
discussions of cinematic space to the interface with social spaces and 
real places rather than in the isolation of the text. As Rhodes and 
Gorfinkel have argued, approaches to film space must take into account 
the cinema’s “seemingly natural ability” to record place (2011, viii, 
ix). In other words, film space ought to be studied through its bearing 
on the social world and in its relation to “real places” rather than 
exclusively through the lens of narrative and stylistic construction. 
Thus conceptualized, the cinema becomes a record of the history of 
places and the repository of some of the most powerful and lasting 
cultural discourses about those places.

In this process of incorporation of the social, the historical and the 
geographical into the cinematic, it must not be forgotten that films do 
not offer us real places but heavily mediated versions of them. Real 
places undergo a process of transformation and reconstruction when they 
become part of a film. That is, they become, in a way, “imagined places” 
and spatial discourses about a specific place. The places are important 
but so is the process of transformation, i.e., the process of 
construction of cinematic space. As Gaudin puts it, the cinema does not 
just represent space but it constitutes a spatial experience in itself 
(2015, 71). In that dynamic, therefore, attention must also be paid to 
the specific formal strategies and cinematic mechanisms that turn place 
and social space into film space. In sum, cinematic articulations of 
space play a key role in helping spectators make sense of our world, of 
our place in it and of our various and complex mappings of real and 
imagined locations.

This conference is the final event of the research project "From Social 
Space to Cinematic Space: /Mise-en-scènes /of the transnational in 
contemporary cinema" funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, 
Innovation and Universities. The aim of this conference is to explore 
and discuss the ways in which space is constructed in contemporary 
films, with a special emphasis on the interface between real places and 
cinematic spaces, or between film and the real world.

_Areas to be explored include but are not limited to_:

-Cinematic form and transnational spaces

-Cinematic cities

-Borders in the cinema

-Philosophy and film: cinematic headspaces

-Film space and mobilities

-Space and place in film

-Film geographies

-Imagined spaces

-Institutional and alternative film spaces

-The tourist gaze

-The /mise-en-scénes/ of film genres

-Utopian and dystopian spaces

-The spaces of history and heritage

-Nostalgia and the politicised past

-Lost, erased and missing spaces

-The spaces of intimacy in the cinema

-Age and the construction of space in the cinema

-Film stars and space


*Organising Committee:*

María del Mar Azcona, Pablo Gómez, Rob Stone, Celestino Deleyto.

**

*Submission:*

Please submit a PDF document with a 300-500 word abstract and short bio 
(120 words) in English by *February 3^rd , 2025 *through the conference 
website*:*

https://eventos.unizar.es/126084/upload/real-and-imagined-spaces-in-film.html 
<https://eventos.unizar.es/126084/upload/real-and-imagined-spaces-in-film.html>

To send your proposal, you will need to register as a user on the 
platform. **

*Selected bibliography*

Cooper, Mark Garrett 2002. “Narrative Spaces.” /Screen/, 43:2, 139-57.

Corbin, Amy. 2014. “Travelling through Cinema Space: The Film Spectator 
as Tourist”. /Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies/, 28:3, 
314-329.

Gaudin, Antoine. 2015. /L’espace cinématographique: Esthétique et 
dramaturgie/. Paris: Armand Colin.

Jameson, Frederick. 1993. /The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space 
in the World System/. Bloomington: Indiana U.P.

Krause, Linda and Petro, Patrice, eds. 2001. /Global Cities: Cinema, 
Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age/. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers 
University Press.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 (1974). /The Production of Space/. Trans. Donald 
Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell.

Massey, Doreen. 2005. /For Space/. Los Angeles: Sage.

Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2013. /Border as Method/. Durham, 
NC: Duke University Press.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 2001. “Cities: Real and Imagined”. In Mark Shiel 
and Tony Fitzmaurize, eds. /Cinema and the City: Film and Urban 
Societies in a Global Context/. Blackwell, 99-108.

Prieto, Eric. 2011. “Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and 
Beyond.” In: /Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in 
Literary and Cultural Studies./Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 13-27.

Rhodes, John David and Gorfinkel, Elena, eds. 2011. /Taking Place: 
Location and the Moving Image/. University of Minnesota Press.

Sæther, Susanne and Bull, Synne, eds. 2020. /Screen Space Reconsidered/. 
Amsterdam: Amsterdam, UP.

Shiel, Mark. 2001. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” In Mark 
Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. /Cinema and the City: Film and Urban 
Societies in a Global Context/, 1-18. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Shiel, Mark 2012. /Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles/. London: 
Reaktion Books.

Soja, Edward W. 1996. /Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other 
Real-and-Imagined Places/. Oxford: Blackwell Publisher.

Tally, Robert T. Jr. 2013. /Spatiality./ London and New York: Routledge.

Westphal, Bertrand. 2011 (2007). /Geocriticism: Real and Fictional 
Spaces/. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. New York and Basingstoke: 
Palgrave MacMillan.



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