The Space That Forgot What It Was For

In the movement-image, space is always oriented: it has a here and a there, a near and a far, a function — this is where the fight happens, this is the door the hero must reach. The any-space-whatever is what is left when that orientation drains away — a space disconnected from purpose, emptied of its coordinates, no longer a stage for action but a kind of pure place, autonomous and unmoored. Deleuze first glimpsed it in the emptied backgrounds of the affection-image and saw it become fully autonomous in the time-image, where the seer wanders through spaces that no longer offer anything to do. It is not nowhere; it is any-where, a place that has lost its specific dramatic identity and become available for pure contemplation, dread, or wonder.

Antonioni built modern alienation out of it. The emptied piazzas and blank modernist architecture of L'Eclisse and the industrial wastelands of Red Desert are spaces that have lost their human function — places people drift through without belonging, the environment itself expressing a disconnection no dialogue could state. The famous ending of L'Eclisse, abandoning its characters for the emptied corner where they failed to meet, is the any-space-whatever in its purest form: a place defined entirely by an absence, holding the screen on its own emptied terms. And Béla Tarr made the any-space-whatever into a cosmology — the endless mud-plains, the depopulated village, the wind-scoured nothing of Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse, spaces emptied not just of function but almost of meaning, the world reduced to bare, indifferent, exhausted matter.

The concept turns out to describe an enormous swath of modern cinema's most powerful spaces. Andrei Tarkovsky's Zone in Stalker is the any-space-whatever as the sacred — a place drained of normal coordinates where the usual rules of space and purpose no longer hold. Wim Wenders' deserts and emptied cities in Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire are non-places where the disconnected drift. And the contemporary post-apocalyptic film lives entirely in the any-space-whatever — Alfonso Cuarón's ruined, depopulated England in Children of Men is a whole world that has lost its coordinates, space as the image of a civilization that has forgotten its own purpose. The emptied frame, which began as Antonioni's diagnosis of modern alienation, became the default register for filming a world in collapse.

This is the any-space-whatever's deep resonance and its future: it is the space of disconnection, and disconnection is increasingly the modern condition. From the non-place of the airport and the parking garage to the rendered, coordinate-less void of the video game and the digital composite — what Deleuze's heirs call the "any-instant-whatever," space with no privileged here or now — the emptied, purposeless place keeps expanding to fill more of our cinema and more of our world. The any-space-whatever was a discovery about what remains when a place loses its reason to be: not nothing, but a strange, charged, available emptiness, a space that has forgotten what it was for and become, in that forgetting, capable of holding anything — dread, transcendence, the end of the world, or simply the feeling of being somewhere that no longer needs you.

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The line: L'Eclisse → Red Desert → Stalker → Paris, Texas → Wings of Desire → Werckmeister Harmonies → The Turin Horse → Children of Men

This line crosses:

• Too Much Time — slow cinema lives in the any-space-whatever; Tarr's emptied plains and the held shot are the same discovery, space and time both drained of function until they become pure.
• What Comes After the Time-Image? — the digital "any-instant-whatever," rendered space with no privileged here or now, is the any-space-whatever's heir in the era after the photographic index.

Read through: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (the any-space-whatever) · Marc Augé, Non-Places (on the spaces of supermodernity).

A note on the argument: the any-space-whatever is Deleuze's, anchored in his Antonioni and affection-image examples. The line forward to Tarr, Tarkovsky, and the post-apocalyptic void, and the link to Augé's "non-places," is this atlas's mapping, argued as ours.