ABSTRACT
An intensely debated issue within film studies is the comprehension of narrative space. Studies on this issue have taken different but interrelated perspectives to examine viewers’ navigation through levels of space in film. Bordwell and Thompson (2013: 84), for instance, distinguish three organizing principles of space: plot space, story space, and screen space. Plot space refers to settings in mise-en-scène; story space can include spaces created in the viewers’ imagination associated with the plot space. That is, apart from settings, story space can encompass narratively significant spaces that are never shown in a film but only imagined by its viewers. The third type of space is on-/off-screen space, often akin to camera manipulation of framing. Most empirical analyses of space in film form, style, and aesthetics are anchored in these three main types of spatial description (cf. Bordwell and Thompson 1976; Rodriguez 1998; Saxton 2007). In discussions at a more abstract level, Jones (2015a) proposes approaching space in Hollywood action films from the perspective of cultural theories. Cutting, Iricinschi, and Brunick (2013) develop a method for portraying character associations in an abstract sequence of two-dimensional maps and for structuring narrative dynamics of an entire film in a conceptual space.
