Geography and Film

Abstract

A sustained inquiry into film by geographers began in the 1980s. Films were studied as cultural texts and as cultural commodities. Film as text assumes that it is authored, read, and interpreted according to the unique positionalities and contexts of viewing. Geographers deploying the author-text-reader (ATR) model tend to operate from a variety of anti-essentialist standpoints and have used this approach to answer questions about how the internal meanings of films are produced and consumed, paying particular attention to issues such as the city, mobility, landscape, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics. Conversely, geographers interested in film as a cultural commodity, an object of symbolic value circulating within the global economy, may choose instead to follow a production-product-distribution-consumption approach. According to this model, the significance of cinematic goods cannot be wholly understood by focusing on the film texts’ internal meaning but must be examined in relation to the economic conditions of their production and consumption. Film is therefore an assemblage of textual and extratextual processes and actors. Research in this area has focused on issues such as the industrial complex of film production, distribution, and consumption; the transnational practices of film industries following the information revolution of the 1970s; and the ensuing cultural hegemony of Hollywood on the global stage. Although the continued use of the text metaphor has been the subject of debate since the turn of the twenty-first century, this approach and its attention to film content has come to prevail in film geography research and hence constitutes a large portion of the works selected in this article. There has been a rising interest in cinematic cartography with some special journal collections published as notable books, including Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema in 2007 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); a special issue on cinematic cartography (Cartographic Journal 46, no. 1 [2009]), edited by Sébastien Caquard and D. R. Fraser Taylor; Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool by Les Roberts in 2012 from Liverpool University Press; the special collection “#Mapping” in NECSUS 18, no. 2 (2018) by Avezzù, Castro, and Fidotta; and Media’s Mapping Impulse by Lukinbeal et al. in 2019 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). More recent publications are reflective of place-based film studies where landscapes are produced or consumed. A special issue, Doing Film Geography (Volume 87, Supplement 1), with fifteen papers was edited by Chris Lukinbeal and Elisabeth Sommerlad for GeoJournal in 2022. The editors’ work reflects a growing movement toward empiric place-based fieldwork paired with a variety of analytic techniques, such as hermeneutics, economics, cartographic, and nonrepresentational theories, to name a few.