I have been doing some work in the past year or so on the representation of space in films made in USA and Europe by transnational and exilic filmmakers. In an upcoming article in East West Film Journal (8:2, 1994) I discuss the dynamics of closed spaces and spaces of immensity and the inscription of memory, loss, nostalgia, nationality, gender, and ethnciity. In transnational and exilic films made by independent and third world filmmakers in the West, the closed spaces are usually highly distopic while the open spaces are utopian. One represents here and now while the other encodes there and then. Although there are rare cases in which claustrophobia is valorized. Hamid Naficy Department of Art and Art History Rice University [log in to unmask]