ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what extent Henri Lefebvre’s work might prove useful for understanding the spaces created by moving image media, in particular those representations of urban space with which cinema is often associated. Lefebvre’s spatial triad delineates between spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces, with the second term naming abstract, often visual conceptualisations of space. The movement and visual variation introduced by the cinematic apparatus into this perspectival code threatens to potentially destabilise it as a system, and is for Heath tamed in narrative filmmaking through compositional staging and continuity editing techniques. The contemporary city is not only ‘cinematic’ insofar as it utilises visual logics to implicitly place space beyond the control of its inhabitants, but also for the reason that it is inundated with screens. L. Webb applies Lefebvre’s work on the city in the 1970s to the way Paris was being represented cinematically by French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard.