Idle, Hattie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4627-5006 (2025) The “Empty Centre” of Paris: Logics of Exclusivity in the Tourist Romance. Frames Cinema Journal.

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Abstract

This article contends with the cinematic form of the tourist romance, investigating how it represents and ideologises urban space through its appropriation of the figure of the flâneur. I discuss here how this subgenre of the romantic comedy is fundamentally bound up with concerns over space, mobility, consumption, and discursive boundaries between inside and outside. I suggest that the figure of the urban flâneur subject is mobilised within this genre as a fantasy of white, bourgeois subjectivity who transforms and takes ownership of city space through means of his romantic encounters, therefore enacting what I suggest is the genre’s endemic spatial logic: a necessarily exclusionary logic which hinges on upholding raced, classed, and gendered power structures. However, while conversations on the tourist romance have largely revolved around dominant US forms, I instead seek to widen the scope of study by analysing a film within the broader global genre which unsettles this understanding of space and the flâneur itself – South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s Parisian romance Night and Day (2008).

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
DOI:	10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2992
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Films
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/16345

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