Sightlines · a concept

asw disconnection

built by shadow/fragmentation (expressionism, Bresson's part-spaces).

On screen: space cut into disconnected affective fragments

Satyricon (1969) — the hermaphrodite's grove, the insula, Trimalchio's tiered cavern — each a self-contained world with its own spatial and chromatic logic, cut into disconnected affective fragments no longer serving…
J'Accuse (1919) — The front photographed flat, gray, cluttered and obscured by smoke, wire and earth, cut so fast that the montage 'removes the viewer's ability to locate themselves in space.'
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — The systematic refusal of eyeline matches and establishing shots — Joan looking left does not yield a judge looking right — cutting the room into disconnected affective fragments so she is present…
Limite (1931) — Depth deliberately flattened so rock faces and vegetation read as abstract fields rather than places; a town reduced to a few walls and a doorway; space fragmented into affective pieces instead of…
The Blood of a Poet (1932) — The hotel corridor with its unlocatable gravity, joining keyhole to keyhole as a run of affective fragments rather than a navigable setting for action
Detour (1945) — Ulmer stages nearly everything in limbo: a table, a lamp, a bed and blackness; the fourth wall of a room is routinely unlocatable, fog and pooled darkness serve as set extension, and the…
They Live by Night (1949) — Single-practical-source lighting isolates the couple in a small bright volume inside a black room, and the film's refusal of location realism (sets, backlot, process driving plates) makes the outside…
Orpheus (1950) — The Zone, shot in the real bombed-out ruins of the Saint-Cyr academy — raking light, slow tracks, deliberately withheld geography so the underworld never resolves into a navigable map.
The War of the Worlds (1953) — Barnes lights the farmhouse in fragments — the probe's beam sweeping across debris, faces caught in slivers, deep shadow occupying most of the frame — so the space stops functioning as a setting for…
It's Always Fair Weather (1955) — The "Why Are We Here?" luncheon, each man's private dismay sung simultaneously in his own panel over "The Blue Danube"; and the 1945 farewell rendered as a triptych.
The Big Combo (1955) — Rudi Feld's near-empty spaces (boxing-arena back corridors, an antique dealer's gallery, a rented room, a hotel bathroom) lit in isolated pools that never resolve into a mappable floor plan.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) — Split screens and traveling mattes produce a frame holding two spaces married on the optical printer; the basement stops functioning as a setting and becomes affective fragments
Mon Oncle (1958) — The Arpel garden's stepping-stone path and the lawn that must not be walked on, which force guests into a stiff diagonal shuffle: ground designed so its parts no longer join into a walkable path.
A Midsummer's Night Dream (1959) — The forest is built as pools of illumination ringed by deep blue-black shadow, shafts through foliage and backlit haze, against the period's standard flat even stop-motion lighting; space becomes…
Pickpocket (1959) — The theft set pieces cut the body and space into matched fragments of hands and pockets you cannot map spatially; the cut severs, the gesture rejoins.
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) — The attic as a sealed-off affective fragment, cut from the domestic space below and charged with pure dread — the space of psychosis.
L'Eclisse (1962) — The final montage returns familiar objects (barrel, section of fence) as disconnected fragments that no longer compose a place
The Trial (1962) — doors open onto rooms that cannot be where they should be; the cutting defies continuity so the world becomes one impossible continuous interior
The House Is Black (1963) — Walls, gates, corridors and courtyards are shown without ever diagramming the colony; the dossier notes there is no map and the viewer never learns the layout, which is deliberate — space registered…
The Silence (1963) — Timoka's Kafkaesque corridors where 'normal social coordinates have ceased to function' — space fragmented into disconnected affective zones that isolate rather than orient
The Trial of Joan of Arc (1963) — The courtroom and cell are never established as whole spaces; Burel's camera isolates fragments — hands, feet, chains, doors, the shackle on Joan's ankle — and the recurrent inserts of feet crossing…
Blood and Black Lace (1964) — The apparently vast, endlessly deep mirrored salon is a modest set multiplied by glass matte paintings, forced perspective, miniatures and rear projection, producing a space cut into affective…
Dog Star Man: Part IV (1964) — Extreme close-ups that abolish scale cues so a patch of skin, a mountainside and a stained-glass fragment become formally interchangeable; no establishing shots, no eyelines, no spatial contract
Red Desert (1964) — Di Palma's telephoto lenses compress depth, pressing Giuliana flat against pipelines and chain-link onto the same plane as the infrastructure
Daisies (1966) — Kaleidoscopic fragmentation and collage dissolving rooms into color, texture, and cut-out shards — space cut into disconnected affective fragments
The Brick and the Mirror (1966) — Night Tehran caught mid-transformation and half-built, with construction and rubble photographed with the same interest as faces; door frames, corridors, scaffolding and window grilles cutting…
Petulia (1968) — Charity galas, hospital corridors, malls, the Hilton ballroom and RV lots shot with flattening telephoto so figures float before billboards and marching bands — affective fragments, not settings for…
Shame (1968) — Handheld movement and jolting reframings in the war sequences; barren open ground with no cover, the improvised prison, and finally a gray, directionless sea strewn with bodies.
Targets (1968) — Kovács's long-lens compression in the freeway shootings, figures flattened against the roadway with distance abolished optically while remaining absolute physically; Los Angeles as a flat field of…
The Swimmer (1968) — the county rendered as disconnected affective fragments rather than a continuous map; its extreme is the abandoned pool where a lonely boy pretends to swim in empty concrete
Invasion (1969) — Recognizable Buenos Aires locations including La Bombonera assembled into a topography that cannot exist, complete with mountains; Santiago: "an enormous violence we did to ourselves."
Sweet Charity (1969) — Surtees's framings isolate a hip, a hand, a bowler hat, and Fosse's cutting breaks musical phrases with hard cuts and multiplies perspectives within a single beat, so the Fandango Ballroom registers…
A Touch of Zen (1970) — The bamboo-grove ambush gives combat as 'glancing fragments — a flash of a body, a sword, a treetop', with Hu deliberately withholding a clear geography of the fight to preserve mystery and graphic…
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) — The set-pieces fragment into close-ups of hands, blades, fabric and eyes cut against each other with the geography deliberately withheld, so no coherent space of action is ever established.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) — Čuřík consistently withholds the establishing shot; interiors are rarely mapped, so a cellar leads to a courtyard that leads to a bedroom that was elsewhere five shots ago — the film's spatial…
Silent Running (1972) — The green forest pocket and the dead corridor sit beside each other as two feelings that never resolve into a single place
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972) — Almost no establishing shots; Brakhage refuses master-shot grammar so no safe spatial map of the room can be built. Instead: gloved hands, the lip of a drain, a scale, a face — fragments carrying…
All the President's Men (1976) — The Library of Congress crane shot pulling vertically up until the two men become points in an abstract architectural geometry — a space that ceases to be a setting for action.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) — The cabaret photographed in stage-light murk, faces caught backlit and half in shadow, framings off-center and cramped — space cut into disconnected affective fragments rather than a legible setting…
Cross of Iron (1977) — Coquillon finds obscuring smoke, churned earth and bodies so that the geography of battle is deliberately hard to read, mirroring the men's confusion.
House (1977) — Collaged mattes, iris wipes and dense superimposition (the Anger debt) cut the mansion into affective fragments that never resolve into a coherent floor plan
The Meetings of Anna (1978) — Hotel rooms, corridors, station platforms, night trains, fluorescent lobbies: fragments linked only by rails, never settings for action.
Alien (1979) — The Nostromo's corridors cut into disconnected, silhouetted fragments that stop being a setting and become pure menace.
Quadrophenia (1979) — Sean Barton's riot cutting: fast, fragmentary, deliberately disorienting, 'assembled from shards, with no master geography', shot handheld from inside the crowd as though by someone caught in it.
City of Pirates (1984) — Shuttered Portuguese villas, corridors and coastline that are precisely described yet never assemble into a map — spaces that stop being settings for action and become disconnected affective…
Stranger Than Paradise (1984) — Each single-take location sealed off from the next by a hard fade to black, so space never accumulates into a continuous journey
Come and See (1985) — Groups form and dissolve in fog and forest; the geography of atrocity is never mapped, and the barn massacre places the viewer inside the crowd with no vantage point.
Terrorizers (1986) — Widescreen compositions of glass, concrete and gas storage tanks; tiny figures pinned against blank modernist façades, space fragmented past usefulness for action.
When the Wind Blows (1986) — The blast abandons the domestic idiom for a violent shift of imagery and colour, collage and archival-style textures — the register deliberately fractures into fragments that no longer compose an…
A Short Film About Love (1988) — 'The shot/reverse-shot across the void of the courtyard that stands in for the whole relationship'; the blokowisko staged 'as both prison and observatory,' with Tomek's ascetic room and Magda's flat…
Alice (1988) — Doors that open into drawers; an apartment whose rooms don't add up — space cut into affective fragments joined by association, inherited from Un Chien Andalou's room-onto-a-beach cut.
Violent Cop (1989) — counter-intuitive blocking 'isolates characters from each other even when they share the frame,' rendering environments as places where people fail to connect
Damage (1992) — Sexual encounters 'cut rhythmically rather than for spatial continuity, sometimes in near-abstraction of limbs and light,' with a shallow focal plane isolating the lovers from any surrounding context.
Lessons of Darkness (1992) — Carbonized soil, lakes of crude, severed wellheads filmed as disconnected affective fragments; a real country dissolved into "A Planet" — affect with the geography burned away
Life, and Nothing More… (1992) — Blocked highways, ruined villages around Koker and Poshteh, rubble that is no longer a stage for action — the film's geography is a set of disconnected fragments joined only by driving.
Chungking Express (1994) — The corridors are fragmented, disconnected affective space — the 'Chungking Forest' where people pass without connecting
Rebels of the Neon God (1994) — Characters are placed inside doorframes, corridors, stairwells, window grilles and vehicle interiors, and with almost no shot/reverse-shot two people in one frame do not seem to share a scene.
Fallen Angels (1995) — Doyle's 9–18mm wide-angle distortion of real Kowloon locations — noodle shops, the all-night McDonald's, the underpass — turns settings into disconnected affective fragments where figures a foot…
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) — Knowland's shallow focus dissolves planes of the set into blur, isolating a hand, a face, an antler, so corridors become states of mind rather than mappable settings.
The Blade (1995) — Counter-classical cutting with an extraordinarily short ASL: whip pans handing off mid-blow, foreground bodies, timber, cloth and smoke wiping the lens, impacts arriving as fragments from which no…