Film and Geography

Author-Text-Reader

Geographers have primarily engaged the cultural politics in the space of the mise-en-scène, or space within the frame of the movie screen. The focus then has been on understanding how social and spatial meanings combine with narrative and audiovisual representations to produce cultural “texts.” With textual, or hermeneutical, analysis, a researcher seeks to interpret and understand the various [Page 1111]meanings of a cultural text. Different theoretical approaches can be brought to bear on the readings of a text; however, film geography has typically focused on three logical sites of investigation: the author, text, and reader. With a focus on the author, analysis is limited to the production of a film and is often focused on auteur theory, where the director's vision of the meaning within the film is of utmost importance. However, a focus on the author can be expanded to include the cultural era within which the entire production of a film was created.

With a text-centered focus, the researcher becomes an “expert-reader” of the social-spatial meaning embedded within the film. The expertreader seeks to denaturalize ideologies and expose hidden power relations or social differences within the text. In film, landscape is often a metaphor for a particular type of cultural politics, helping to naturalize ideology, power relations, and social difference. While most expert-reader analysis focuses on the content of the film, some analyses specifically engage with the film's form. Interest in a film's form, or more precisely how the visual and audio elements of film are assembled into a representation, has sparked the interest of many geographers. This is especially of importance since many claim that geography is primarily a visual discipline but little has been done to examine just how the visual works to produce geographic knowledge. Film is formed by the frame of the screen, the mise-en-scène, and montage (a technique in film editing, literally meaning “putting together”). Like cartography and landscape painting, film is a product of linear perspective, or a representational system through which one can create the illusion of space on a flat surface. As such, many in film studies, geography, art history, and cultural studies have been interested in film as a modern-day cartography. The central difference between the form of linear perspective in cinema and cartography lies in the angle of the viewer: With film, the camera substitutes for the subject's eye; in cartography, the orthographic view displaces the subject so that she or he is directly above any point on a map.

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