Conference panel at the 36th EAAS conference: Performing Freedom in Space from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Cinema

The nature and ideology of the notion of freedom have been a constant preoccupation in the history of U.S. cinema from its beginnings in silent films. The general desire to modernize social thinking was the backbone of the ideology promoted by Hollywood in the classical era, when a transnational concept of taste based on morally inoffensive, ideologically neutral messages revolved around wide concepts of democracy, tolerance, and freedom. In the following historical phases, specific genres, constructions of mise en scène, filmic space, and performing traditions have contributed to what we might describe as the stylistics of “American” freedom. This panel offers a formal approach to the study of such a cinematic configuration, namely, the analysis of “performance in/of space”, that is, the way in which actors’ performances and mise en scène combine to produce meanings in films.

Pesce articulates a theoretical framework re-examining a long tradition of film analysis that treats human figures as inseparable from their environment, drawing on acting styles and the meanings attached to the star persona in contemporary Hollywood. One Battle After Another (2025) reveals how the interface between performance and mise-en-scène functions as a privileged vehicle for conveying stratified cultural conceptions of freedom. Deleyto crosses the Atlantic to explore how the close interconnection between performance and space speaks to national and transnational notions of freedom within present-day ideas of Europe in Before Midnight (2013). In this case, certain types of acting combine with the use of real locations to construct a filmic space that speaks, from a hybrid American-European perspective, to debates around the present and the future of the EU. Salvi examines the ambivalences of the nation’s founding ideals, observing how Humphrey Bogart’s performance in Casablanca (1942) constructs a concept of freedom for its turbulent times. While Bogart embodies the national ideology of individualism, Rick’s Bar represents a cosmopolitan view that challenges the notion of unlimited freedom. The internal dynamics between space and character reveal how the film reverses the traditional treatment of the primacy of the individual over the environment. Gómez argues that Denis Villeneuve’s films Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) develop a discourse that treads a fine line between freedom and oppression, as the narrative moves between the cosmopolitan disposition of the protagonist, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), and his messianic impulses. The relationship between the representation of spaces and actors’ performances bring the contrast between the liberatory and messianic dimensions of the films to the surface.