The Spatial Cinema: An Encounter between Lefebvre and the Moving Image

Machine Space is an essay film that explores the city of Detroit as a space of movement and circulation. This city is negotiated in the moving image as a palimpsest of maps, spatial metrics and automotive infrastructure; illustrating the material and discursive layers that have constructed this now post-industrial metropolis. This is a city where, in the words of the urban thinker Henri Lefebvre,

'the production of space itself replaces - or, rather, is superimposed upon - the production of things in space.' (Lefebvre 1991, p.62)

This practice-as-research doctoral project explores an interface of Lefebvre's 'production of space' with the cinema; as visual artefact, a phenomenological document; and as media exhibited in a screening space. The result is a productive discourse of 'Spatial Cinema.'