A common european home? Filming the urban thirdspace in Marc Isaacs’s lift (2001)

Focussing on how people dwell in contemporary, late-capitalist, postcolonial Europe, Marc Isaacs’s documentary cinema is space-based, insofar as it finds its raison d’être in precise places, whose real and metaphoric values it simultaneously represents, foregrounds and contests. Almost entirely set inside a lift in a tower block in East London, Lift (2001) is an eloquent example of Isaacs’s spatial methodology. Mobilizing concepts from critical theory and political geography – in particular, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia and Edward W. Soja’s Thirdspace – this article argues that, by offering a utopian reading of the common European home, Lift holds a critical mirror to the urban West. Its strategy consists in situating the spectator vis-à-vis non-singular others through a series of triangulations of subjects, which aim not so much at measuring the distance between what may seem like antithetical, fixed positions, but at suggesting fluidity and repositionings on the plane of both textual and social discourses.