Lively Geographies of Film

Abstract

Despite nearly 40 years of research on the topic of film and geography, geographers have had little to say about location filming or the relationship between film production geographies and the geographies found in the mise en scène. On the one hand, economic geography has focused on the macro processes of Hollywood’s industrial agglomeration and the film industry’s changing mode of production. Here, the microgeographies of production workers, including those of the location scouts and production designers who are responsible for creating the spatial menageries that we see on the screen, have been ignored. What is needed, therefore, is an approach to film and geography that is capable of bridging economic geography, which provides vital insights into the function of the film industry but ignores the film product, and cultural geography, which fosters rich, textured understanding of cultural products and practices but which overly attends to the film text at the expense of its other dimensions. This dissertation addresses this lacuna by exposing some new dimensions of film geography research that will help align film geography with contemporary findings in geographic thought on practice, embodiment, more than-representationalism, and flat ontologies.