Navigations and Negotiations: Examining the (Post)Colonial Landscape of The Assam Garden

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to foreground the idea of the garden as a cinematic space predicated on its ability to accommodate movement, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Fuelled by Doreen Massey and Karen Lury's exchange in the 1999 Space/Place/City themed issue of Screen, especially Massey's assertion that investigations of the cinematic city should not be at the expense of other sites of interest, I use The Assam Garden (1985), directed by Mary McMurray, as a British case study to explore the garden's inherent mobility. Importantly, I consider this spatial quality in both aesthetic and ideological terms. Drawing inspiration from a variety of scholarship, including Martin Lefebvre's investigation of the cinematic landscape (2006) and Edward Said's theories of Orientalist discourse (1978), I thus question the Assam garden's function as setting, spectacle and social space and, in particular, whether it can transcend the initial meanings ascribed to it by the fixed male gaze of a colonial official. By connecting the garden specifically to the large-scale movements of colonial and postcolonial journeys I ultimately seek to persuade that this space is fundamentally cinematic and deserves further examination.