The space in film and the film in space: Madrid's Retiro Park and Carlos Saura's Taxi

As part of the larger reconciliation of film analysis and cultural geography, this essay seeks to bring together the on-screen representation of city-spaces and the off-screen urban processes that shape those very spaces. This approach departs from two long-standing traditions of scholarship the first envisions film-space to evoke merely the constructed fictional world of metaphor and abstract ideas, and the second sees city-space to be that static object which is subsequently captured and represented on-screen. In contrast to both of these paths of criticism, Fraser argues that film-space and city-space are deeply entwined. The resulting blend of cultural geography with film analysis reveals the possible complicity of cinema with the urban processes of capital accumulation and cultural differentiation. A close reading of Madrid's Retiro Park, both off-screen as well as in Carlos Saura's film Taxi, shows that in each case the tendency of capitalist development to sell place reigns supreme.