ABSTRACT
In the rich and dense pages that inaugurate L’énonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film (1991), the deeply regretted Christian Metz takes up some of the spatial paradoxes that inhabit the language of cinema.1 A medium that offers great vistas where there are few, that thrives on producing illusions of extension in closed confines, cinema owes its charm to the fantasies it elicits of worlds subjectively encountered. Viewers of cinema live a virtual adventure of space and place that resembles what we imagine when we follow the tracks of heroic personages roaming about the Mediterranean in the Iliad or the Odyssey. The languages of cinema, perhaps because they are not really languages in any strict sense, include spatial expression located at the edges of words and in the lagoons of printed letters.
