Introduction: screen is the place

Cinema is able to capture the intangibility of life: its moods and feelings, its fleeting moments and liminal spaces. In its origins, it combined the objective input of photography – an outcome of technological progress – and impressionistic drive to crystallise the subjective experience of the world – an inheritance from painting. As a technology based on the principle of assembly, cinema also reveals itself as a self-reflexive medium, capable of producing, transmitting and questioning meaning and human thought. Scholarly literature approaching cinematic space has primarily focused on the examination of off-screen space as a threshold that allowed for chronotopic and narrative space to emerge. According to Antoine Gaudin, cinematic space's polysemic nature can be addressed from a scenographic and narratological approach. Gaudin's work has brilliantly summarised the main lines of research on cinematic space since the spatial turn of 1970s and 1980s, when social sciences and humanities began to question modernity's notions of spatial experience from a transdisciplinary perspective.