Imagining Geographies of films

Abstract

Allow us the indulgence to begin this essay with the proclamation that the study of film within the discipline of geography has now come of age. Certainly, in terms of the number of articles and books published over the last decade or so, it seems reasonable to argue that the subfield has reached a critical mass (cf. AITKEN a. ZONN 1994a; KENNEDY a. LUKINBEAL 1997; CLARKE 1997; CRESWELL a. DIXON 2002). Moreover, and importantly in terms of imagining the subfield, invigorated theoretical debates on the character of representation and meaning production have resulted in the development of both spatial ontologies of film and filmic ontologies of space. This theoretical sophistication offsets the narrow empiricism of earlier work, dispelling notions that geographers either naively embrace certain films as tools for representing geographic concepts (landscape, space, place and so forth) or they unabashedly borrow from film theory to help elaborate geographic questions (BROWNE 1994; CLARKE 1997; CRESWELL a. DIXON 2002). Indeed, this series of recent developments, loosely held under the rubric of anti-essentialism, are sufficiently complex that an overview of the kind we have written here does not do justice to the theoretical and empirical nuances of the subfield. In a halting attempt to capture some current concerns over the production and consumption of meanings, we outline a number of ‘key’ geographic concepts ‐ landscapes, spaces/spatialities, mobilities, scales and networks ‐ that have been put to work by film geographers, but which, as part and parcel of broader disciplinary debates, have also been themselves re-imagined through an engagement with film.