Category Archives: Heterotopias in Cinema

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Dogville from Lars von Trier

Posted on December 16, 2010 | 2 Comments
Dogville, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), is somewhere in between nowhere (utopia) and elsewhere (heterotopia). The representation language is limited to its very minimal aspect: nil for the outside world, lines on the floor for walls, specificity of the houses symbolized by a unique element. This space is just like any other spaces in cinema, it exists outside the reality since it is representing this same reality. The heterotopia, here is thus questioning the relationship maintained between the subject and the representation in a comparable way that Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This, is not a pipe). The aesthetic of the movie is therefore created by this minimal representation and provokes (at least for me) a strong feeling of claustrophobia.

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Posted in Cinema, Heterotopias in Cinema

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Punishment Park by Peter Watkins

Posted on December 16, 2010 | 3 Comments
I already posted something about Punishment Park, not a long time ago, although it seemed that this movie should belong to HETEROTOPIA IN CINEMA…
Directed by Peter Watkins in 1971, Punishment Park is filmed borrowing the documentary vocabulary in order to create an ambiguity on the reality of this story. In fact, the movie introduces a “state of emergency” decreed by Richard Nixon (inspired by the real McCarran Internal Security Act) and authorizes federal authorities to detain people who could “represent a risk for society” without referring it to the American Congress. In this regard, arrested people can choose either to spend some time in prison or to participate to Police training in Punishment Park.
Punishment Park is a remote place in the Californian desert where young dissidents have to walk for 60 miles without being recaptured by the police. The pseudo-documentary dramatizes a session which turns to human hunting after a cop is being killed. Dissidents are shot one by one.
Punishment Park is therefore an heterotopia in its extraction from the “real world” and the total abolition of law it implies, bringing human to a state of cold violence between predators and preys.

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Posted in Cinema, Heterotopias in Cinema, Law, Politics, Science Fiction

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Werckmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr

Posted on December 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

Werckmeister Harmonies is the seventh movie of the brilliant Hungarian director Bela Tarr. One of the main characteristic of it, is that it is composed only by thirty nine shots (for a two hours movie).

The plot is set in a small village of Hungary which can already be considered as an heterotopia thanks to its remoteness and the extreme filtration of exchanges between the outside world and the village. In fact, the only foreign element is a strange circus troupe carrying a whale inside a truck and lead by an evocative character called The Prince. Just like in Lars van Trier’s Dogville, the outside world seems barely to exist, or at least does not endure representation and when the main character wants to get away from his world, he is being chased by an helicopter which definitely recalls Francois Truffaut’s Farenheit 451.
Anyway, the real heterotopia here is represents by an hospital which is being attacked at some point of the movie in a long shot visiting the entire building and observing a group of people beating up patients. The “real world” is taking over this “other space” until assailants meet the human in its nudity, in its fragility, in its pitifulness. Continue reading →

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Posted in Cinema, Heterotopias in Cinema

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Avalon by Mamoru Oshii

Posted on December 16, 2010 | Leave a comment
Avalon is a movie by Mamoru Oshii created in 2001, just before Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. This film dramatizes a uchronian dowdy world -we can recognize Eastern Europe- in which some people make a living by plugging themselves on a virtual reality and fighting as free-lance or team soldiers against each other.
This whole virtual world -the movie is actually tackling the even notion of reality- can be considered as an heterotopia for its entrance/exit protocols (see picture below), and the juxtaposition of several worlds. Although some territories are even more increasing this notion of “other space”. Ruins and abandoned factories are often hosting the scenery of this movie from which an atmosphere of strangeness is created.

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Posted in Cinema, Heterotopias in Cinema, Science Fiction

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Introduction

Posted on December 16, 2010 | 2 Comments

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

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Posted in Cinema, Foucault, Heterotopias in Cinema, Philosophy