It’s impossible to resist the pull of space materializing in a film. It’s like something opening under your feet or the discovery of a door in a room you thought you knew. It is surprisingly rare but creates a unique feeling that cannot be ignored or forgotten.
Most films are spaceless. What they give us to see are characters in a scenery. We mentally take note: this is a bedroom, this is a police station, a bridge, or the Andromeda galaxy, but these are just bits of information in a plot, not space.
If you want to feel what I am describing as spaceless and by contrast what space can be when it appears, watch Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958). It’s a perfect example of a ‘flat’ film that suddenly opens midway through its narration. Coincidentally the film’s title sequence shows us a map, as if Louis Malle warned us that this is not just a love story but also a territory he will explore.
In The Lovers, we follow Jeanne, the bored wife of a provincial newspaper publisher. Jeanne regularly escapes to Paris, spending time with Maggy, her chic frivolous friend, and Raoul, a kind albeit dull Polo player who happens to be her lover. Jeanne goes to trendy parties, attends Raoul’s polo game, and drives around in her cabriolet. She goes places but these do not come across as spaces. The Polo game is a cubist abstraction of long-handled mallets, Paris a painted urban decor, and her friend’s bedroom a stage.
In fact, everything in Jeanne’s world is flat. She looks at her surroundings without being in it and, to be honest, in the first part of the movie, we feel just the same.
If you ask anyone to describe the space of a specific scene right after watching a movie you will probably get a blank stare. No one remembers where the grandfather clock was in the living room when the farewell letter was read or if the window was on the left or the right of the bathtub when the heroine was crying. There is an attraction towards the characters, their faces first, then what they say, and last what they do. But the real reason for this lack of attention is that there was most likely no space at all to begin with, only backgrounds. These can be breathtaking like in Jeanne Campion’s The Power of the Dog or in Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, and yet still be just that. The extraordinary thing about cinema is that showing a site is not enough to create a space.
Jeanne drives back from Paris but her car breaks down. She accepts a lift from a man named Bernard who turns out to be a distant relative of her husband. Bernard ends up staying for the night at Jeanne and her husband’s mansion. Maggy and Raoul are already there, invited for the week-end by the now-suspicious husband. The mansion is a large boxy French house surrounded by a maze of woods. The first time we see its facade of closed shutters, it feels empty like only uninhabited houses can be. Inside, the space is disjointed, much like how Jeanne feels throughout the first part of the film. The rooms are cramped and communicate through too many doors. We walk with Jeanne from one to another, yet none matter.
And then something happens.
Jeanne cannot sleep, maybe because of the full moon, maybe because of the loud music coming from a disc that Bernard left on the turntable. She walks down the mahogany staircase like a ghost from an Edith Wharton story. When she steps out, Bernard is there - and what springs between them isn’t ghostly at all.
Over the next hour, they will fall in love while walking into the woods but this is not what makes us ecstatic. What holds us is neither the romance nor the quite silly dialog they blurt out, no, what sucks us in is the space. There is a depth where everything before was flat. What was a mere backdrop opens all around them: we go with Jeanne and Bernard inside the woods. There is a river below the narrow wooden bridge where they walk. The boat they step in slides along the river and under the trees.
I won’t add a video of these scenes here because what comes after and before has to be watched to feel the difference. Space is not felt more because it is outdoors by contrast of the Parisian indoors. Space has nothing to do with nature or landscape shots. There is an equally amazing feel of space in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, most of which occurs indoors. It’s also never the aesthetical qualities of a location that create space. For example, the space in Contempt that made an impression on me is neither the stunning Casa Malaparte nor the beautiful Capri Island, it’s the abandoned desire path that Michel Piccoli and Giorgia Moll run to join Jack Palance in a Cinecittà screening room.
Similarly, what I feel as space is the tall grass where the final fight takes place in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, not the fabulous landscapes of Ran. It’s neither the massive jungle of Apocalypse Now, nor the empty swimming pool of Three Women, or the wondrous breezy field in Mirror, but the river lined with maple trees in Going Places, the lake embankment in Story of a Love Affair, or the suburban woods in Petite Maman.
What these spaces all have in common is that they are never ‘looked at’ or admired by a character. They are made space by the presence of someone, usually more than one person. Without humans, there is no space. In The Lovers, we start to feel space when the silhouette of Bernard appears far behind Jeanne and we are waiting to see if he will come any closer. Space materializes in their relation to one another not in relation to them. What the movies make us understand is that space is relationship.