Doing film geography

Abstract

Film geography as a subdiscipline of cultural and media geography is a long-established field of research that since its emergence more than twenty years ago has diversified into a variety of perspectives. Nowadays, a critical perspective on film is central, which no longer considers the medium merely as a text, but rather as a social practice—a perspective that continues to focus not solely on the meaning of representations, but on what representations do and how they do it. Following Roberts’ (in: Edensor, Kalandides, Kothari (eds) The Routledge handbook of place, Routledge, London, 2020) call for ‘doing film geography,’ this introductory article to the Geojournal Special Issue on Film Geography provides an overview of current trends in the field as well as an overview of the essays included in this collection. In addition to the established film-as-text perspective, we examine the burgeoning research in cinematic cartography, film industry geographies, and videography/documentaries.