Three Non-Places of Supermodernity in the History of French Cinema

The telescoping of time and shrinking of space are both effects of a modernist space that is made possible by the late Nineteenth Century’s new technologies such as the locomotive and the cinema. It is, then, no coincidence that the birth of cinema took place on the platform of a train station at La Ciotat in 1895, for since its inception, the cinema has been drawn to such spaces of modernity precisely because the transformation of human perception (or phenomenological space) that it renders possible is mirrored so closely by the reorganisation of physical space in the post-industrial urban sphere (or physical space). The confluence of the history of the cinema and that of the urban spaces of modernity has been examined at length by critics such as Benjamin and Kracauer; rather than expand upon this history, in this article I will instead examine cinematic representations of three spaces of modernity, each of which is situated at a distinct historical juncture: Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) and Roch Stephanik’s Stand by (2000), each of which is produced in periods we might term, respectively (albeit somewhat problematically), the modern, the postmodern and, after Auge, the supermodern. However, what this analysis will make clear is that, in spite of the paradigm shifts that such a taxonomy appears to imply, what changes in these cinematic representations across this period is the relation of these films’ protagonists to the spaces in which they move as opposed to the spaces themselves, which are always, it will be argued, already supermodern or, perhaps, always simply modern

Art · Art history · Media studies · Movie theater · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · European history and politics · History