Film, Geography and

Although many geographers have used, and still do use, film as part of their teaching strategy, it is only within the past 10 years or so that sufficient quantities of research on this popular medium have been produced to allow for a disciplinary subfield called film geography. Indeed, the earliest disciplinary writings on film, produced for The Geographical Magazine during the 1950s, were aimed at elucidating their usefulness as teaching tools; geographers should be encouraged to use clips from those films that, it was argued, represented landscapes in as faithful a manner as possible, such that students could gain a sense of what it would be like to experience these places firsthand as if they were “in the field.” In this regard, film was regarded as more successful in its mimeticism than were other media, such as photography, in that film managed to capture movement as well as form and so could be used to represent natural and social processes.

The publication of Aitken and Zonn's Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, however, [Page 166]heralded a new era that addressed precisely this assumption—that film should and could provide a transparent “window” to the real world. As geographers generally engaged with broader-scale academic debates over the “crisis of representation,” so film geographers began to address the relationship between the “real” (that which the camera has filmed) and the “reel” (the image on screen).

Two major lines of geographic research have ensued from this examination of the real and the reel. The first stems from Marxist analysis—particularly the work of the Frankfurt School in 1930s Germany—and emphasizes the ways in which film serves to support capitalism ideologically. Emphasis is placed on the fact that film is the product of a highly successful industry; as such, one can trace the form and impact of successive rounds of capital investment and disinvestment, as well as relations of exploitation, across the globe. Moreover, it is argued, the content of such films more often than not serves to divert attention from the broader effects of the global capitalist system in the form of poverty, crime, and environmental degradation. Instead, film content panders to a voyeuristic interest in sex and violence or a more benign concern with the melodramatic plight of the individual. Last but not least, film works to commodify both people and place in the sense that as each becomes part of a film project, the individuality and uniqueness of each are reduced to a standard marketable package. The sum effect is to destroy critical thinking in film watching as well as filmmaking.

And yet not all Marxist analyses are so pessimistic. Frankfurt School member Walter Benjamin argued famously that film offers escapism for audiences; it offers new horizons outside of their day-to-day experiences. This feeling of liberation might not be realized through the actual overthrow of the capitalist system but is nevertheless indicative of the dreams, myths, and expectations that are an integral part of the complex and subtle process of film spectatorship.

The second line of research to investigate the relationship between the real and the reel ensues from a social constructivist (sometimes called poststructuralist) perspective. Social constructivism emphasizes the fact that objects do not exist in a vacuum; instead, they are given meaning through the actions and thoughts of people. Because of the complexity of the life world of each person, we can expect an infinite number of meanings to accrue around an object. In contrast to a scientific understanding of the world, social constructivism holds that one cannot point to one particular meaning as being somehow correct even if there are commonalities across a range of viewpoints as to the nature of a particular object or if one particular way of looking at an object seems to work better than another when attempting to manipulate that object for a particular purpose. Because we cannot escape our own subjectivity, we can merely hypothesize, but never can realize, what an object is like outside of those meanings ascribed to it. In this sense, we cannot point to the “real” nature of anything. Moreover, this means that we as individuals cannot actually “access” someone else's view of the world and so can make no claim toward representing his or her views in an authentic manner.

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