Space
South Asian cinema’s consistent integration of the tableau aesthetic into its filmic space, and the region’s complex colonial inheritance of Western novelistic modes of address made this an unconvincing proposition, according to Stephen Heath.
Abstract
In a 1972 essay titled ‘Narrative Space’, Stephen Heath offered an initial exploration of space in film. Despite what may be dismissed too easily as its Eurocentric frame that characterised 1970s Screen theory, the essay is important to thinking about cinematic spatiality (Heath, 1986). Norming to dominant narrative modes of classical Hollywood cinema, Heath (1986, p. 385) distinguished the tableau views of ‘early film space’ presented through ‘fixed-camera frontal scenes linked as a story,’ from cinematic elements such as camera movement, positioning, edits and mobile frames that construct the vision of narrative films. These elements of mobility, he argued, introduce potential spatial excesses that are controlled by a unified subject position. The production of this subject position, which is also the film’s central agential consciousness, transforms a film’s shots and sequences into legible narrative space. The cinemas of South Asia, which do not necessarily adhere to this norm, test such a definition. Indeed, a classificatory system founded on the ‘perspectival codes of figuration inherited from Quattrocento’ (Heath, 1986, p. 385) in early fifteenth century Italy introduced a fundamental problem for cinemas that did not inherit perspectival spatial codes.1 Heath’s elaboration of narrative space conveyed an implicit developmental teleology not shared by South Asian cinemas. According to his argument, the fixity of early cinema’s tableau aesthetic was ‘broken up in the interests of the unity of action and place and subject view’, primarily because Heath (1986, p. 394) defined cinema as a progressive extension of ‘the narrative models of the novelistic’. South Asian cinema’s consistent integration of the tableau aesthetic into its filmic space, and the region’s complex colonial inheritance of Western novelistic modes of address (discussed in scholarship tracing multiple genealogies of ‘realism’ and ‘modernism’ in the South Asian context) made this an unconvincing proposition (for two scholars separated in time and approach writing on the question of realism in Indian cinema, see Chakravarty [1993] and Majumdar [2016]). The consignment of frontal and iconic articulations of images to the realm of naïve film-making was overturned in the study of South Asian cinemas as much as it was refuted in writings on early cinema (Gunning, 1994, 2004). Scholars writing about films from India have long paid minute attention to cinema’s spatial organisation as a visual inscription and negotiation of the region’s history. For example, Madhava Prasad (1998, p. 20) has shown that the ‘aesthetics of frontality and its interface with realist conventions of narration have to be seen in the light of