Summary—“Space I”

· Just as Hollywood's generic conventions require the cooperative participation of the viewer, so the conventions of spatial representation can only transform images into meaningful components of story or spectacle with the cooperation of viewers.

· Hollywood's representation of space works to secure our attention and offers us a succession of ideal viewpoints from which to observe the action. It rewards us for looking at the screen by constantly addressing and satisfying our expectations. One of the ways in which Hollywood's space is Utopian is that it gives us the best view of the action on screen.

· Hollywood's continuity system of spatial construction constructs space as a smooth and continuous flow across shots. In this system the camera usually remains unobtrusive. The continuity system provides a safe space for the development of a story, for the pleasure of spectacle, and for the secure placement of the audience in relation to the fictional world.

· The audience recognizes movie narration as a process of continual displacement between represented space - the area that exists in front of the camera and is recorded by it - and expressive space - space which is endowed with meaning beyond the literal, and which signifies a particular feeling or experience. Represented space is three-dimensional; expressive space often combines the sculptural three-dimensionality of the space in the image with the graphic two-dimensionality of the image itself .

· The cinematic apparatus cannot reproduce the human eye's breadth of vision, or its perception of depth and spatial relations. By using a variety of lenses (standard, wide angle, telephoto) the movie camera can, however, produce quite different representations of spatial and object relations without physically moving.

· The arrangement of screen space is known as mise-en-scene, literally "putting into a scene" or staging of a fiction. It is through mise-en-scene that represented space becomes maximally meaningful.

· In combination with framing and composition, editing also works to make space representative and expressive. Editing can be informative about the present and past and predictive of the future. It modulates and maintains audience interest, and emphasizes details of the action.

· The continuity system observes a number 'of conventions which are fundamental to its construction of screen space. The "center line" or ISO-degree rule insists that the camera stay on one side of a line between two characters, and grants the spectator a relati1ely stable viewpoint on the action. By presenting a succession of shots as the "looks" of characters in the fiction, "eyeline matching" allows the viewer to connect space in separate shots, and provides us with subjective information about characters without robbing us of our sense of physical placement.

Summary—“Space II”

· As viewers, we have two kinds of perceptions of cinematic space. On the one hand we invest the image with depth and volume to make sense of figure movement and action; on the other hand, we recognize the screen as a flat plane which shows us the graphic relations between the elements of its image. The status of cinematic space as neither strictly two-dimensional nor three-dimensional ensures that our attention to the screen takes the form of a play of looks at, into, and through the screen space.

· It is useful to distinguish between viewpoint and point of view. The viewpoint of a shot is a matter of its position in space: its angle, level, height, and distance from its subject. Point of view, however, is a position of knowledge in relation to the fiction. Characters in a scene therefore have both viewpoints and points of view.

· Despite its fundamental continuity, Hollywood space has a history, which has been influenced by technological changes and aesthetic innovations. Changes in spatial representation might also be linked to shifts in subject matter, star image, economic conditions, thematic experimentation, or periods of ideological uncertainty.

· Unsafe space disorients the viewer, emphasizing the power of a movie's image track to control the viewer's look. As well as depriving the viewer of the power of sight by not showing things, it can also make the audience look at whatever is presented to them.

· Unsafe space is a phenomenon of post-Classical Hollywood, and its most influential early occurrence was in Psycho (1960). The pleasure of viewing unsafe space is perverse in that it involves 'taking pleasure in associating with the victim, and audience behavior suggests that the most conventional form this takes involves converting the masochistic pleasure of identifying with the victim into the sadistic pleasures of anticipating and enjoying the victim's experience.

· Movies that exploit the conventions of unsafe space offer their viewers an experience in the exaggeration of anxiety, threatening them with a malign organization of space and rendering the act of looking itself dangerous and liable to punishment. In its more extreme versions, such as The Thing (1982), unsafe space presents its audiences with an experience we might call the cinema of the unwatchable spectacle.