Geography_and_Film

12/9/23, 11:37 AM Geography and Film - Geography - Oxford Bibliographies
Geography and Film

Christopher Lukinbeal
LAST REVIEWED: 19 JANUARY 2017

LAST MODIFIED: 26 MAY 2023
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199874002-0097
Introduction
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.
General Overviews
The first edited collection on film and media geography was Burgess and Gold’s, Geography, the Media and Popular Culture (see Burgess
and Gold 1985). The editors outline two areas of media geography: an American school that emphasized cognitive and humanistic
approaches, and in contrast, a European school that emphasized ideology and power. Aitken and Zonn 1994, the researchers’ first edited
collection of geographers on film, emphasizes the postmodern turn, dramaturgy, political economics, film, and social theory. Clearly in the
decade since Burgess and Gold, much of the previous divisions had eroded away. Further, a scientific geography and cartography “crisis of
representation” was occurring in the 1990s. This was the debate mimesis, or the “real” off-screen world and the “reel” on screen, and their
interrelationship. The crisis of representation was the idea that the known and knowable world could never be fully understood and was
based on cartographic logic that framed the world as picture and that underlies Western reason (see Lukinbeal and Sommerlad 2022). If
you accept that cartography is memetic, then it also comes with cartographic anxiety, which is entrenched in film language through
establishing and reestablishing shots that ease the anxiety of the viewer by relocating them in a known space in the diegesis (Sharp 2018).
Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997 provides the first compressive overview of film geography using post-structural theory on the one hand and
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an environmental perception theory called transactionalism. Their essay highlights J. K. Wright’s AAG Presidential Address in 1946 for
exploring the place of imagination in geography and opening the door for future research on popular culture, arts, and literature. Echoing
Wright’s call, Watson 1969 states that our ideas of the earth are equally important as the earth in what constitutes geography. By 2000 the
textual metaphor dominated film geography. Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility (Cresswell and Dixon 2002) challenges the memetic
dominance implied in the textual metaphor (see Introduction). The textual metaphor reifies and perpetuates “the tired repetition of reel and
real” (p. 5). Instead, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon put forth the trope
of mobility as a way to resist the fixity imposed on film by the structure of language (see Optics and Mobility). Also addressing the “reel/real
binary,” many have argue that cinema should not be seen as a re-presentation of reality but, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, as “a simulacrum
of the real . . . a machine for constructing different relations between space and time” (Lukinbeal and Zimmermann 2008, p. 19). Whereas
Aitken and Dixon 2006 focuses on key themes in geography like landscapes, space, mobilities, scale and networks—Lukinbeal and
Zimmermann 2006 divides the subfield into four areas: geopolitics; cultural politics; globalization; science, representation, and mimesis.
Sharp and Lukinbeal 2015 discusses the ATR, or author-text-reader, model of studying film geography and offers alternatives to each.
Lukinbeal and Sommerlad 2022 notes that a shift in film geographies from a text to a practice is underfoot. Here, “the emphasis is not on
presentational meaning, but on what representations do and how they do it” (p. 2).
Aitken, Stuart C., and Deborah P. Dixon. “Imagining Geographies of Film.” Erdkunde 60.4 (2006): 326–336.
Provides a summary and critique of the film geography literature and suggests that future research should take a more critical approach to
the intersection between “lived experience” and “the images and material conditions that continuously produce and reproduce our daily
lives” (p. 335).
Aitken, Stuart C., and Leo E. Zonn, eds. Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1994.
An important collection for understanding the roots of film geography and the real/reel binary; while the editors take a transactional and
psychoanalytic approach, the contributing essays show a breadth of perspectives, including transactionalism, semiotics, hermeneutics, and
political economy.
Burgess, Jacquelin, and John R. Gold, eds. Geography, the Media and Popular Culture. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.
Here is another essential collection for those interested in the historical roots of the subfield. The editors discuss major theoretical
approaches to media research at the time—behavioralism, structuralism, and Marxism. The nine essays touch on concepts such as
landscape, hazards, and nationalism.
Cresswell, Tim, and Deborah Dixon, eds. Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002.
A significant challenge to the hegemony of the textual metaphor is attempted through the paradigm of mobility, which is put forth as “an
element in the play of power and meaning within social and cultural networks of signification” (p. 4). The fourteen essays are arranged
around mobility, identity, and pedagogy.
Kennedy, Christina, and Christopher Lukinbeal. “Towards a Holistic Approach to Geographic Research on Film.” Progress in
Human Geography 21.1 (1997): 33–50.
The first comprehensive overview of film and geography through the mid-1990s; it traces film geography through the traditions of
environmental perception and postmodern cultural studies.
Lukinbeal, Chris, and Elisabeth Sommerlad. “Doing Film Geography.” In Special Issue: Film Geography. Edited by Chris
Lukinbeal and Elisabeth Sommerlad. GeoJournal 87.Suppl. 1 (2022): 1–9.
Lead essay introducing fifteen papers on film geographies. The collection includes film scholars in the Society and Cinema and Media
Studies Urbanism/Geography/Architecture Scholarly Interest Group. Focus is on film as practice and representation-in-relations to
approaches. Section includes cinematic cartography, film industry geographies, videography, and documentaries.
Lukinbeal, Chris, and Stefan Zimmermann. “Film Geography: A New Subfield.” Erdkunde 60.4 (2006): 315–325.
Lukinbeal and Zimmermann give a brief history of film geography, highlighting the German tradition, and suggest that there are four key
areas of current and future research into film by geographers. The authors make an impassioned argument against re-presentational views
of cinema.
Lukinbeal, Chris, and Stefan Zimmermann, eds. The Geography of Cinema—A Cinematic World. Papers presented at an
international symposium titled the “Geography of Cinema—A Cinematic World,” at the Institute of Geography, Johannes
Gutenberg-University Mainz, in June 2004. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008.
The editors offer the most-developed discussion of the benefits and limitations of the author-text-reader model for use by film geographers.
The ten essays are arranged around the author, the text, and the reader, depending on which modality the researcher takes as the primary
means of investigation.
Sharp, Laura. ““But how do you show that in a film?” Absence, Cartographic Anxiety, and Geographic Realism through the
Landscapes of Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala.” GeoHumanities 4.1 (2018): 80–96.
While this article is one of the first to theorize about the geography of “absence” in a film, it also does a good job at explaining how
cartographic anxiety is related to film form following the works of Giuliana Bruno and especially her Atlas of Emotion.
Sharp, Laura, and Chris Lukinbeal. “Film Geography: A Review and Prospectus.” In Mediated Geographies and Geographies of
Media. Edited by Susan Mains, Julie Cupples, and Chris Lukinbeal, 21–35. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2015.
Reviews the author-text-reader model overviewing literature up to 2015. It takes over from where Lukinbeal and Zimmermann 2008 left off
but is more comprehensive in coverage.
Cinema and the City
Motion pictures emerged in the “modern” era, a time of increased industrial, technological, and architectural changes that produced new
relationships among space, mobility, and visualization. According to German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, this era was marked by the
societal transition from gemeinschaft (communal, family, and close relations) to gesellschaft (contractual, anonymous, and legal relations),
an insight that has been influential in how the city has been conceptualized in cinema research. Clarke 1997, for instance, argues that
modernity’s ephemeral and fragmentary spaces were most prominently felt within the city. The author suggests that within modernity’s
urban space thrived the “world populated by strangers,” constituting a “universal strangehood” (Clarke 1997, p. 4). It was out of this space
that the flâneur, or urban streetwalker, emerged as the embodiment of the protocinematic experience (see Optics and Mobility). This
pessimistic outlook on the urban experience has further manifested in the common research theme of uncovering the alienation and anxiety
extolled by gesellschaft, and later postmodern dystopia, as these socio-psychological phenomena are inscribed in the cinematic city.
McArthur 1997 is paradigmatic in disclosing this anti-urban sentiment in films where cityscapes are contrasted with the idealism of country
life and pristine nature. This trend in film analysis echoes Orley Holtan’s early work on the examination of films from the late 1960s and
1970s (e.g., Holtan 1971), in which he found the city as impersonal and perpetuating the myth that cities are destructive of humanity.
Challenging these stark binaries and negative depictions of cities, Ford 1994 offers a more nuanced understanding of the cinematic city by
showing the role that lighting and color play in their portrayal. Moving away from a strictly formal analysis, Sanders 2003 examines New
York City both as real and mythical, stating “in its deepest sense, after all, a great city is more than a geographic or economic entity: it is a
distinct locus of image and style, memory and dreams” (p. 4). An even more distinct way to examine cinema and the city, one that also
presents a way forward from the crisis of representation and the dominance of the textual metaphor in film and media research (see
Introduction), is put forward in Gasher 2002, titled Hollywood North. According to Mike Gasher, with Vancouver’s representations nearly
always substituting for generic American urban spaces, location production activity acts as a form of economic hegemony, denying the
region’s agency to be able to represent itself.
Clarke, David B., ed. The Cinematic City. New York: Routledge, 1997.
The first explicit look by geographers at the city through cinema; Clarke suggests that film studies has been overly focused on Ferdinand de
Saussure’s semiotic analysis, and that there is a need to examine how city and cinema are intertwined to the point that we can no longer
pry apart image and reality.
Ford, Larry. “Sunshine and Shadow: Lighting and Color in the Depiction of Cities on Film.” In Place, Power, Situation, and
Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Edited by Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn, 119–136. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 1994.
Ford uses a semiotic approach to contest simplistic depictions of the city as a purely negative space, emphasizing how light and color have
been used in cinema to produce different interpretations of the urban experience.
Gasher, Mike. Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Colombia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2002.
One of the first works to emphasize a specific location and how production, representation, and place come together in film geography.
Uses a humanist perspective but equally challenges Hollywood’s hegemony by shifting the focus away from the removal of Vancouver’s
agency to represent itself on screen to a focus on the production of an economic commodity.
Holtan, Orley I. “Individualism, Alienation and the Search For Community: Urban Imagery in Recent American Films.” Journal of
Popular Culture 4.4 (1971): 933–942.
Holtan examined films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and found three themes on how the city was portrayed: city versus country, city as
the site for loss of innocence, and country as the site of happiness. Holtan claimed that films reified the myth that cities destroy humanity
and make it difficult to create and maintain a sustainable urban environment.
McArthur, Colin. “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City.” In The Cinematic City. Edited by David
B. Clarke, 19–45. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
McArthur updates Holtan’s thesis of the dichotomy between city and country. However, he also compares metropolises with small towns,
and British with US depictions of cities. McArthur claims that Hollywood’s hegemonic view of cities is exported internationally.
Sanders, James. Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Though not theoretically rich, the empirical depth of Sanders’s work extends both temporally as well as spatially across New York City.
Anyone doing research on cinema in New York City should begin by consulting Sanders’s encyclopedia of location production.
Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Studies in Urban and
Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Shiel and Fitzmaurice challenge researchers to move away from textual readings of films to an investigation of the social implications of the
film industry in all its manifestations as a key player in global capitalism. Significantly, Shiel argues “Films are globalization, not its after-
effects” (p. 11).
Optics and Mobility
Doel and Clarke 2007 points out that “while much has been written about the geography of film and the geography in film, the geography of
film qua film remains largely unexplored” (p. 894). As an example of this, Marcus Doel and David Clarke have explored the shift from
animated photography to narrative cinema: whereas the former focused on the spectacle of the mobile image, the latter codified a scopic
regime based on montage. Outside of geography, Friedberg 1993 and Bruno 1993 trace cinema’s new “spatio-visuality” to devices of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as trains, panoramic paintings, the diorama, and the panopticon. These devices allowed people
to walk either through or past alternative orders of spaces where disparate spaces and times were juxtaposed. While the origins of the new
spatio-visuality were found in these apparatuses, the initial mobilization of the gaze, Anne Friedberg contends, was derived from elsewhere.
With the creation of the shopping arcade, architectural innovations enabled the flâneur, or urban streetwalker, to enter buildings publicly
and gaze upon once-private interiors. The predominantly male gaze of the flâneur was mobilized through walking, tourism, and travel and
became feminized by social changes, which allowed leisure shopping (Friedberg 1993). Whereas the flâneur was the male streetwalker
who thrived in this new spatio-visuality, the flâneuse was a “streetwalker” (Bruno 1993). As Clarke and Doel 2007 notes, “the flâneur’s
existence was built upon the sustained disavowal of the cognitive ordering of space, in favor of the self-defined and self-centered aesthetic
spacing” (p. 4). Women were the objects of the flâneur’s gaze when they would roam city streets: they were streetwalkers, prostitutes, and
objects of consumption similar to objects viewed in the arcade windows (Friedberg 1993). From this mobilization of the gaze came motion
pictures, the “imaginary form of flânerie, a “modern” gaze that wanders through space, fully open to women” (Bruno 1997, p. 11). This new
mode of visualizing space was encoded in modern architectural sites of transit, such as in arcades, department stores, railways (Kirby
1988), and exhibition halls. For instance, the railroad and cinema have had a profound effect on perception because, as Doane 1985
explains, “it heralds no less than a technological restructuration of the relation between the traveler/spectator, vision, and space” (p. 43).
Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s work on arcades, Giuliana Bruno argues that these sites of transit were signifiers of a “new notion of space
and mobility, signs of an industrial era that generated the motion picture” (Bruno 1993, p. 45). From its very beginning, cinema and flânerie
were implanted in the cityscape.
Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993.
Bruno explores early silent-era Neapolitan film production. She positions cinema as one among many spatio-visual creations that were
occurring in the industrial age. Streetwalking relates to flânerie and arcades, and the ruined map relates to palimpsest both in the city and
cinema.
Bruno, Giuliana. “Site-Seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image.” Wide Angle 19.4 (1997): 8–24.
Similar to her 1993 book, this paper positions cinema within a wide array of spatial-visual productions. Bruno explores the concept of
montage both within architecture and cinema, by mobilizing the gaze.
Clarke, David B., and Marcus A. Doel. “Shooting Space, Tracking Time: The City from Animated Photography to Vernacular
Relativity.” Cultural Geographies 14.4 (2007): 589–609.
This paper explores the shift between scopic regimes that accompanied the transition from animated photography to film. While animated
photography was concerned with “true motion,” narrative cinema drew from modernity’s vernacular relativity to create a new scopic regime
centered on montage.
Doane, Mary Ann. “. . . When the Direction of the Force Acting on the Body Is Changed: The Moving Image.” Wide Angle 7.1–2
(1985): 42–57.
Doane explores the relationships among train travel, cinema, and subjectivity. Both trains and cinema contribute to the disassociation and
despatialization of the subject, effectively realigning perception, subject, and image into another noncodified space.
Doel, Marcus A., and David B. Clarke. “Afterimages.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.5 (2007): 890–910.
Addressing the question of “in what way is geography visual,” Doel and Clarke argue that montage is central to human geography. This is a
significant paper in film geography literature because it shifts the focus away from the hermeneutics of the image and onto the form of the
image; the most significant aspect of film is that which is absent: the cut.
Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Like Bruno, Friedberg positions cinema within a broad array of protocinematic spatio-visual devices that came about during the industrial
age. More specifically, Friedberg examines the window display in downtown department stores and suburban malls as it relates to cinema.
Kirby, Lynne. “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema.” Camera Obscura 6.2 (1988): 112–132.
Similar to Doane 1985, Kirby explores the relationship between train travel and cinema. However, her emphasis is on the shock, or the
attack on vision, experienced by the train/cinema viewer.
The Cinematic Landscape
The turn toward landscape as representation, combined with geographers’ new interest in popular culture (see General Overviews), led the
author of Burgess 1987 to question the ideological framework of environmental landscapes on television and the ability of such landscapes
to obscure their own production in order to present these images as seemingly “natural.” Similarly, Bertozzi 2001 questions the role that
landscape plays in producing cinematic realism through the work of the Lumière brothers. According to Bertozzi 2001, regardless that
cinema offered a new scopic regime, the form of viewing and technologies used to view always render landscape as authored. Drawing on
new cultural geographers and building on Higson 1984, Lukinbeal 2005 develops a categorical approach to interpreting cinematic
landscapes that is underpinned by the metaphor of text as a tool that allows geographers to “read” movie images. Similarly, Escher and
Zimmermann 2001 explores feature films in relation to landscape as setting, guarantor of credibility, metaphor, myth, actor, location, and
tourist destination. More recently, Chris Lukinbeal has combined cultural studies with spatial analysis to show how cinematic landscapes
always exceed the film image, explaining “a region’s cinematic landscape can never be totalized but always leads to new tasks, new
contexts, and new configurations of meaningful exchange within an ongoing system of production” (Lukinbeal 2012, p. 172). Outside of
geography, the question of cinematic landscapes has become a popular topic since the turn of the twenty-first century, resulting in two
edited collections (Lefebvre 2006, Harper and Rayner 2010) and a monograph (Melbye 2010). Informed by humanistic geography and
studies into precinematic landscape arts of the twentieth century, David Melbye’s book treats the question of landscape allegory in cinema
by asking: “At what point precisely does a landscape setting function psychologically, beyond its usual role as backdrop?” (Melbye 2010, p.
1). In contrast to Melbye’s emphasis on the collective cultural meaning of landscapes in cinema, Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner
focus on the cultural, national, and technical elements of film, as well as the various actors involved in bringing landscapes to the screen.
Likening film and its production to the process of cartographic bricolage, Harper and Rayner state: “Like a map, the cinematic landscape is
the imposition of order on the elements of landscape, collapsing the distinction between the found and the constructed” (Harper and Rayner
2010, p. 16). In contrast to the empirical focus of Harper and Rayner’s collection, Lefebvre 2006 draws broadly from scholars in multiple
fields, including geography, to query the ontology and epistemological interlinkages of cinema and landscape. According to Lefebvre 2006,
landscape in film is “an object that amounts to much more than the mere spatial background that necessarily accompanies the depiction of
actions and events” (p. xii).
Bertozzi, Marco. “Le paysage dans les vues Lumière.” Cinémas: Revue d’Études Cinématographiques 12.1 (2001): 15–33.
There was a belief that the Lumière brothers’ films were perceived to be a new extemporaneous view on the world that was unfettered by
previous scopic regimes. For Bertozzi the scopic regime encompasses both the form of viewing (postcards, paintings) and the technology
of viewing (magic lanterns, camera obscura). However, the Lumière brothers’ cinematography challenges the notion that landscapes are
found, rather than authored.
Burgess, Jacquelin. “Landscapes in the Living-Room: Television and Landscape Research.” Landscape Research 12.3 (1987): 1–
7.
Burgess explores environmental images of television as ideology. This paper is a prime example of the Marxist approach in the early stages
of the new movement in cultural geography.
Escher, Anton, and Stefan Zimmermann. “Geography Meets Hollywood: Die Rolle der Landschaft im Spielfilm.” Geographische
Zeitschrift 89.4 (2001): 227–236.
One of the first essays in Germany focusing on the geography of film. It primarily focuses on the role of landscape in film, as well as
relations to realism, authenticity, and film-induced tourism.
Harper, Graeme, and Jonathan Rayner, eds. Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography. Bristol, UK, and
Chicago: Intellect, 2010.
This is a collection of essays that focus on the role of landscape in different national cinema traditions. It is primarily an empirical rather than
a theoretical contribution to film geography.
Higson, Andrew. “Space, Place, Spectacle: Andrew Higson Explores Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film.”
Screen 25.4–5 (1984): 2–21.
Higson establishes a taxonomy of landscape as space, place, spectacle, and metaphor. Whereas space and place are positioned on either
end of a continuum from the general to the specific, metaphor is when narrative meaning is conferred onto the landscape. Spectacle occurs
when the narrative is disrupted by the pleasure of the image.
Lefebvre, Martin, ed. Landscape and Film. AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Though the introduction positions cinema and landscape in a less-than-desirable theoretical manner, it is still a must-read. The collection of
authors and the diversity of subjects advance geographic thought on cinematic landscapes. Especially read the chapter by David Clarke
and Marcus Doel (pp. 213–244), because it highlights an important transition in cinema from animated photography to narrative cinema.
Lukinbeal, Chris. “Cinematic Landscapes.” Journal of Cultural Geography 23.1 (2005): 3–22.
Lukinbeal elaborates on the categories of cinematic landscapes developed by Higson that emphasize shot size (long, medium, close-up) as
a key factor in how geographic meaning is made. This essay has been influential in how geographers query the relationship between
landscape and narrative in film.
Lukinbeal, Christopher. “‘On Location’ Filming in San Diego County from 1985–2005: How a Cinematic Landscape Is Formed
through Incorporative Tasks and Represented through Mapped Inscriptions.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers
102.1 (2012): 171–190.
This paper highlights the tension between landscape and cinema positioned either as a product or a practice, and it is a seminal study in
the application of geographic information systems (GIS) to the film industry. Through spatial analysis, the San Diego region’s cinematic
landscape is revealed as the ongoing set of practices that occur in order for that landscape to be translated into a finished cultural product.
Melbye, David. Landscape Allegory in Cinema: From Wilderness to Wasteland. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
A light romp through films of the 1960s and 1970s, this book explores allegory, perception, and landscapes of the mind. It deploys an
approach from environmental psychology to understanding cinematic depiction and perception.
Gender and Sexuality
In her widely influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film,” Laura Mulvey argues that there is fundamental gender imbalance in
classical Hollywood cinema (Mulvey 1975). Through the use of camera techniques, the male gaze is privileged by positioning women as
passive objects to be looked at; in short, the male character looks, the audience looks, and the female character is looked at. Mulvey was
one of the first film theorists to apply psychoanalytic and feminist theories to the study of film, an approach that has been adopted in film
geography by Stuart Aitken (Aitken and Zonn 1993, Aitken and Lukinbeal 1997, Aitken and Lukinbeal 1998, Lukinbeal and Aitken 1998). In
Aitken and Zonn 1993, Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn examined gender images in Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli, using transactional
and psychoanalytic perspectives to reveal underlying ecofeminist concepts. They focus on individuals’ struggle between the subjective and
idiosyncratic natural experience, and the objective, rational, societal experience that enforces normative gender roles. Drawing further
attention to place and identity, Gorfinkel 2011 combines textual and extratextual analysis to discuss the way sexploitation films of the 1960s
and the laboring female bodies therein were produced by and productive of a particularly sexualized and degraded imaginary of New York’s
Time Square during this period. In a series of three papers (Aitken and Lukinbeal 1997, Aitken and Lukinbeal 1998, Aitken and Lukinbeal
1998), the authors use post-Lacanian feminist theories of male hysteria to examine patriarchy, masculinity, and power as it relates to scale
in films by Gus Van Sant, Terry Gilliam, and Stephan Elliott. In Aitken and Lukinbeal 1997, it is argued that patriarchy requires a male to be
in place and taking responsibility. This sedentary model does not allow for contestation of patriarchal gender or sexual norms, but relief can
be found through the form of road trips (and road movies) because here one appears to depart from these strictures and to rebel against
sedentary norms. Most road movies, however, end with the protagonist coming home and resituating himself into normative structures.
Mobile identities are liberated through the hysterical spaces brought on by the lack of normative social and spatial structures, which in turn
empowers the individual and challenges institutionalized norms. Myths, in the sense of Jungian archetypes, also act in conformist ways
where performances of identity rehearse thoroughly known and knowing modes of gender and sexual behavior (Aitken and Lukinbeal
1998). Similarly, Holmes, et al. 2004 situates Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show within a changing mythology of the West, arguing
that “identity and place-identity are mutually constitutive” (p. 281). Institutionalized male hysteria works to reify patriarchal gender and
sexual roles, whereas effeminate male hysteria works to break them down. The unsettling paradox within male hysteria is that patriarchal
identities and structures are “natural” and empowered through scalar relations that provide meaning and frame our lives (Lukinbeal and
Aitken 1998). More recently, Aitken 2006 takes psychoanalytics into new directions by exploring patriarchy and masculinity through the
affective image, which goes beyond understandings gleaned through representational readings.
Aitken, Stuart C. “Leading Men to Violence and Creating Spaces for Their Emotions.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of
Feminist Geography 13.5 (2006): 491–507.
The introduction of affective-image analysis toward “reading” a text. This pushes hermeneutical analysis into new areas of emotion, affect,
and nonrepresentational theories. Using Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of affective images also allows for an examination of focal length
and its relation to gender, sexuality, identity, and space.
Aitken, Stuart C., and Christopher L. Lukinbeal. “Disassociated Masculinities and Geographies of the Road.” In The Road Movie
Book. Edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 349–370. New York: Routledge, 1997.
This paper examines the phenomenon of road movies through the gaze of masculinity. It uses psychoanalytic theory to explore identity,
subjectivity, and sexuality as they relate to space and scale.
Aitken, Stuart C., and Chris Lukinbeal. “Of Heroes, Fools and Fisher Kings: Cinematic Representations of Street Myths and
Hysterical Males.” Paper presented at a conference held in 1996 at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. In Images of the Street:
Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space. Edited by Nicholas R. Fyfe, 141–159. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge,
1998.
Using psychoanalytic theory, this paper examines the role of archetypes in shaping masculine identities and the spaces and scales that
unfold from them. From Brazil to Fisher King to 12 Monkeys, Gilliam’s use of streetscapes highlights how masculine identities are
constrained by societal structures and how societal structures are rebelled against, allowing for new identities to be performed.
Aitken, Stuart C., and Leo E. Zonn. “Weir(d) Sex: Representation of Gender-Environment Relations in Peter Weir’s Picnic at
Hanging Rock and Gallipoli.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11.2 (1993): 191–212.
An excellent blend of film and geographic theory and analysis that uses Aitken’s transactional framework and psychoanalysis (“A
Transactional Geography of the Image-Event: The Films of Scottish Director, Bill Forsyth,” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, new ser., 16.1 [1991]: 105–118) to examine the gender-environment images in two of Peter Weir’s movies; suggests that the
images presented in the movies find currency in ecofeminism and in the postmodern sexual order.
Gorfinkel, Elena. “Tales of Time Square: Sexploitation’s Secret History of Place.” In Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image.
Edited by John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, 55–76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Looking at sexploitation films of the 1960s, this paper highlights the intersection of the materiality of place imagery, on the one hand, with
the almost self-conscious awareness of the films’ existence as cultural documents, on the other. Gorfinkel argues that, when combined,
these films inadvertently become documentary footage of a bygone place and social orientation.
Holmes, Grayson, Leo Zonn, and Altha J. Cravey. “Placing Man in the New West: Masculinities of The Last Picture Show.”
GeoJournal 59.4 (2004): 277–288.
This essay explicates the relationship between gender and place identities, by looking to the portrayal of the westerner and the death of
America’s post–World War II small town in The Last Picture Show. Although representing the 1950s, this portrayal is distinctly inflected by
the cultural politics of the West in the 1970s, when it was produced.
Lukinbeal, Christopher, and Stuart C. Aitken. “Sex, Violence and the Weather: Male Hysteria, Scale and the Fractal Geographies of
Patriarchy.” In Places through the Body. Edited by Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile, 356–380. New York: Routledge, 1998.
This is one of the earliest papers to theorize scale in relation to patriarchy, psychoanalytics, and gender and sexuality. It also examines the
role of institutionalized male hysteria as a hegemonic norm of patriarchy and contrasts it with effeminate male hysteria, the counter-
hegemonic other.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18.
Mulvey’s essay is essential to understanding the way that the audience becomes “sutured” to the film’s protagonist through the camera’s
gaze, as well as how psychoanalysis may be used as a “political weapon” to reveal the naturalized gender roles built into classical
Hollywood film form.
Geopolitics
Although Fredric Jameson became well known for his studies in geopolitics and film, it was not until midway through the first decade of the
twenty-first century that political geographers began to take a serious interest in film. At this time, works such as Bunnell 2004, Carter and
McCormack 2006, Carter and Dodds 2011, and Dixon and Zonn 2005 began interrogating the international political implications of power
relations and politics in film. One of the key contributions of Jameson 1992 has been to suggest that film can be used to cognitively map the
geopolitical imaginary, which then helps individuals navigate the complex global power structures of late capitalism that surround, define,
and restrict one’s self and identity. In its critique of Jameson’s work, Dixon and Zonn 2005 uses an anti-essentialist perspective to draw
attention to the active construction of difference and reified categories (real/material/true) that underlie Jameson’s work. Anti-essentialism
allows for a healthy skepticism toward Jameson’s proposed theory of a social totality, or world system. Dixon and Zonn 2005 is part of an
eleven-essay collection on film in the journal Geopolitics, which appeared around the same time as Carter and McCormack 2006 in Political
Geography. In their essay, Sean Carter and Derek McCormack postulate four different ways in which to engage geopolitics through film:
performative logics, scripting, “ways of seeing,” and hermeneutics. Performative logic involves the amplification of affects that occur during
and after a film’s viewing/release. For instance, Bunnell 2004, an examination of the film Entrapment, shows how questions of realism and
the misrepresentation of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, caused the film to become enmeshed in international geopolitics.
According to Tim Bunnell, Entrapment makes it look as if slums and the Petronas Towers coexist. Reception of Entrapment in Malaysia was
quite critical: Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad took personal affront to the slum/tower connotation because he saw this imaging
as a challenge to political legitimacy and national policies of economic development. Scripting relates to how codes and signs are
articulated in a film’s narrative. “Ways of seeing” refers to the “matter of the production and reproduction of particular logics of perception”
(Carter and McCormack 2006, p. 232). Hermeneutics, the dominant mode of inquiry for film geopolitics, focuses on the interpretation of
cultural texts and their relation to other texts. An excellent example of this approach can be seen in Banerjee and Marx 2008, which offers a
reading of how Turks in a German television show become mainstreamed, allowing for the Other to become acceptable to the status quo.
Pushing for a move away from hermeneutics and toward reception studies, Klaus Dodds began incorporating audience analysis into his
research on the James Bond series, by looking to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as a source of viewer interpretation, arguing that
these voices are relevant “because they indicate that Bond films may be important precisely because of the extent to which they can
command such devoted attention rather than whether viewers are necessarily reflexive about the geopolitical knowledge being put to work
in a particular film” (Dodds 2006, p. 188). Furthering this push into fandom, Dittmer and Dodds 2008 makes an important contribution to
popular geopolitics, by outlining a future trajectory of this subdiscipline that emphasizes how popular geopolitics are consumed and with
what effect, which the authors hope will “provide popular geopolitics with renewed impetus and long term intellectual relevance” (p. 440).
Banerjee, Mita, and Peter W. Marx. “Ally Lives Just Next Door . . . German-U.S. Relations in Popular Culture.” Paper presented at
an international symposium titled the “Geography of Cinema—A Cinematic World,” at the Institute of Geography, Johannes
Gutenberg-University Mainz, in June 2004. In The Geography of Cinema—A Cinematic World. Edited by Chris Lukinbeal and
Stefan Zimmerman, 155–170. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008.
An investigation of difference that focuses on Turks and Germans through the mainstreaming of ethnicity. Although popular German
television shows are modeled on American sitcoms, suggesting a transnational scope, they are recontextualized to address issues specific
to the society in which they are situated.
Bunnell, Tim. “Re-viewing the Entrapment Controversy: Megaprojection, (Mis)representation and Postcolonial Performance.”
GeoJournal 59.4 (2004): 297–305.
The central contribution of this paper to film geography lies in Bunnell’s elaboration of the geographies of film reception. This paper traces
the geopolitical outcomes of the film Entrapment and its role in shaping perceptions of Malaysia, modernity, and development.
Carter, Sean, and Klaus Dodds. “Hollywood and the ‘War on Terror’: Genre-Geopolitics and ‘Jacksonianism’ in The Kingdom.”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29.1 (2011): 98–113.
The geopolitics of Hollywood cinema following 11 September 2001 (9/11) is explored in this paper, with a particular emphasis on the film
The Kingdom. Though the authors claim to focus on visuality, editing, montage, and genre, they do not delve into film theory or geographic
literature on film.
Carter, Sean, and Derek P. McCormack. “Film, Geopolitics and the Affective Logics of Intervention.” Political Geography 25.2
(2006): 228–245.
This paper argues for a move toward affective analysis of film rather than simply focusing on textual analysis. Issues of performativity,
amplification, spacing, and affective assemblage are explored through a focus on the geopolitics in the film Black Hawk Down.
Dittmer, Jason, and Klaus Dodds. “Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences.” Geopolitics 13.3
(2008): 437–457.
Offers a summary and critique of popular geopolitics before giving suggestions on future areas of research, especially audience studies.
Focuses in particular on how religion and nationalism may be approached from fandom perspectives as “serial narratives.”
Dixon, Deborah, and Leo Zonn. “Confronting the Geopolitical Aesthetic: Fredric Jameson, The Perfumed Nightmare and the
Perilous Place of Third Cinema.” Geopolitics 10.2 (2005): 290–315.
This paper takes on The Perfumed Nightmare, a film made famous by Fredric Jameson’s reading of it in his book The Geopolitical
Aesthetic (Jameson 1992). It contests Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping by showing it to be just another Marxist metanarrative.
Dodds, Klaus. “Popular Geopolitics and Audience Dispositions: James Bond and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31.2 (2006): 116–130.
This essay is an attempt to shift popular geopolitics away from textual readings and toward audience analysis. In it, Dodds shows how
IMDb can be used as a source of viewer interpretations in the form of “fandom,” by engaging with IMDb’s James Bond discussion board.
Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992.
The Geopolitical Aesthetic is a theoretical treatise focused on First World–Third World relations and the spatial imaginaries, or cognitive
maps, that follow geopolitical relations. This book has an extremely dense writing style, so it is not for the faint of heart. For those interested
in Marxism, cinema, and geopolitics, it is a must-read.
Economic Film Geographies and the Political Economy of Film
Although Storper and Christopherson 1985 and Scott 2005 center on the Hollywood film industry, their primary contribution is to economic
rather than film geography. Economic geography is a salutary addition to film research, however, because it provides a material and
economic base within which to situate critical analysis of cinema. One of the central works in this area is Storper and Christopherson 1985
(The Changing Organization and Location of the Motion Picture Industry), in which the authors offer a four-fold model of on-location filming
of Hollywood filmmaking in North America. The model consists of developed production centers, second-order centers, edge centers, and
occasional sites. This model is based on broader macroeconomic changes in the film industry (Scott 2005) because it moved from a Fordist
model of production to one of flexible specialization. Sites outside developed centers have to compete for what Lukinbeal 2004 terms the
“variable flow of production,” which refers to the number of productions that will occur outside developed centers each year and which the
second-order and edge centers must compete for to survive. The variable flow of production also relates to “runaway production,” defined
by the Screen Actor’s Guild as productions “which are developed and are intended for release/exhibition or television broadcast in the U.S.,
but are actually filmed in another location” (Monitor Company and Screen Actors Guild 1999, p. 1). Runaway production can be
characterized either as “creative” or “economic.” Chris Lukinbeal examined the history of Hollywood’s three waves of runaway production,
using the film Cold Mountain as a foil (Lukinbeal 2006). Cold Mountain was an economic runaway that portrays North Carolina but was
filmed in Romania. On-location filming has been the focus of research in Swan 2001, Lukinbeal 2004, Lukinbeal 2006, and Mathews 2010.
Swan 2001 examines on-location filming in Philadelphia, positing that “the film office is part of the same agenda as the ‘malling’ of the
museum and the leveling of obsolete industrial plant to make way for the next urban theme park” (p. 96). Taking an alternative stance,
Mathews 2010 examines the role of film and urban redevelopment in the Distillery District in Toronto, Canada. The author argues that
filming plays an important role in the creation of place identity and differentiation that is necessary for redevelopment projects. More
recently, attention has moved toward examining motion picture incentive (MPI) programs in the United States and countries around the
world who seek to lure US film production to their region using their taxpayer’s money (Lukinbeal and Sharp 2022).
Lukinbeal, Chris. “The Rise of Regional Film Production Centers in North America, 1984–1997.” GeoJournal 59.4 (2004): 307–321.
Builds on the four-fold model of production locations in Storper and Christopherson 1985 to account for the growing importance of
alternative sites in response to increased television filming. This essay is useful for those wishing to understand the dialectic relationship
between the economic geography of the industry and the production of cultural meaning.
Lukinbeal, Chris. “Runaway Hollywood: Cold Mountain, Romania.” Erdkunde 60.4 (2006): 337–345.
Traces why a movie about Asheville, North Carolina, was filmed in Romania. It places the film within a broader historical context of runaway
production in the United States and tackles the issue of geographic realism, both within the text and the production of the movie.
Lukinbeal, Chris, and Laura Sharp. “‘No Life Here:’ The Effects of Motion Picture Incentive on Below the Line Labor in Hollywood
South.” GeoJournal 87.Suppl. 1 (2022): 43–51.
Provides a historical overview of motion picture incentive programs (MPI) in North American before shifting to how an MPI impacted the
location workers in New Orleans after the film incentive taxes were capped.
Mathews, Vanessa. “Set Appeal: Film Space and Urban Redevelopment.” Social & Cultural Geography 11.2 (2010): 171–190.
The important thing about this paper is its emphasis on the role of film in urban redevelopment. The Distillery District in Toronto was once a
film set and now has been remade as an urban attraction. The broader implications of this paper for social policy are explored, as well as
how representations of place can lead to place making.
Monitor Company and Screen Actors Guild. U.S. Runaway Film and Television Production Study Report. Los Angeles: Screen
Actors Guild, 1999.
This report was the first to document the economic scope of runaway production leaving the United States. It makes a significant
classification of runaway production as either economic or creative and argues that economic runaways should remain in the United States.
Available online.
Scott, Allen J. On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
This is a book on economic geography that looks at industrial districts, business clusters, and agglomeration of the Hollywood film industry.
There’s a historical approach to this work that traces the film industry from New York to Hollywood, but it also delves into cultural economies
and issues of labor and distribution.
Storper, Michael, and Susan Christopherson. The Changing Organization and Location of the Motion Picture Industry:
Interregional Shifts in the United States. Research Report R854. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 1985.
Argues for a four-fold model of on-location filming that consists of Los Angeles and New York City as the developed production centers.
Second-order centers are cities with extensive local media ties. Edge centers are within proximity to Los Angeles and New York City and
flourish on low-budget production where incentives make it cheaper to film.
Swan, Paul. “From Workshop to Backlot: The Greater Philadelphia Film Office.” In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies
in a Global Context. Edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 88–98. Studies in Urban and Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell,
2001.
Points out that much research has focused on the representational aspects of cinema and the city, but little has focused on the political
economy of filming. The city is positioned as discourse as it is transformed into a postmodern spectacle.
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12/9/23, 11:37 AM Geography and Film - Geography - Oxford Bibliographies

Geography and Film

LAST REVIEWED: 19 JANUARY 2017

Cinema and the City

Optics and Mobility

The Cinematic Landscape

Gender and Sexuality

Economic Film Geographies and the Political Economy of Film

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