Locating the Moving Image , livre ebook

T HE S PATIAL H UMANITIES David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, editors
The spatial humanities is a new interdisciplinary field resulting from the recent surge of scholarly interest in space. It prospects a ground upon which humanities scholars can collaborate with investigators engaged in scientific and quantitatively-oriented research. This spatial turn invites an initiative focused on geographic and conceptual space and is poised to exploit an assortment of technologies, especially in the area of the digital humanities. Framed by perspectives drawn from Geographic Information Science, and attentive to cutting-edge developments in data mining, the geo-semantic Web, and the visual display of cultural data, the agenda of the spatial humanities includes the pursuit of theory, methods, case studies, applied technology, broad narratives, persuasive strategies, and the bridging of research fields. The series is intended to bring the best scholarship in spatial humanities to academic and lay audiences, in both introductory and advanced forms, and in connection with Web-based electronic supplements to and extensions of book publication.
 
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond, USA
Peter Bol, Harvard University, USA
Peter Doorn, DANS, Netherlands
I-chun Fan, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Michael Goodchild, University of California-Santa Barbara, USA
Yuzuru Isoda, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
Kim Knott, University of Leeds, UK
Anne Knowles, Middlebury College, USA
Andreas Kunz, Institute of European History (Mainz), Germany
Lewis Lancaster, University of California-Berkeley, USA
Gary Lock, University of Oxford, UK
Barney Warf, Kansas University, USA
May Yuan, Oklahoma University, USA
LOCATING THE MOVING IMAGE
NEW APPROACHES TO FILM AND PLACE
EDITED BY JULIA HALLAM AND LES ROBERTS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Locating the moving image : new approaches to film and place / edited by Julia Hallam and Les Roberts.
pages cm. — (The spatial humanities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01097-1 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01105-3 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01112-1 1. Motion picture industry. 2. Film criticism—Philosophy. 3. Motion pictures—Production and direction. 4. Motion pictures—Social aspects 5. Arts and geography. 6. Motion picture audiences. 7. Spatial analysis (Statistics) I. Hallam, Julia, [date]- editor of compilation. II. Roberts, Les, [date]- editor of compilation.
PN 1995.L56 2013
791.43’62—dc23
2013024341
1  2  3  4  5     19  18  17  16  15  14
Contents
•    Acknowledgments
1  Film and Spatiality: Outline of a New Empiricism
Les Roberts and Julia Hallam
2  Getting to “Going to the Show”
Robert C. Allen
3  Space, Place, and the Female Film Exhibitor: The Transformation of Cinema in Small-Town New Hampshire during the 1910s
Jeffrey Klenotic
4  Mapping Film Exhibition in Flanders (1920–1990): A Diachronic Analysis of Cinema Culture Combined with Demographic and Geographic Data
Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers
5  Mapping the Ill-Disciplined? Spatial Analyses and Historical Change in the Postwar Film Industry
Deb Verhoeven and Colin Arrowsmith
6  Mapping Film Audiences in Multicultural Canada: Examples from the Cybercartographic Atlas of Canadian Cinema
Sébastien Caquard, Daniel Naud, and Benjamin Wright
7  The Geography of Film Production in Italy: A Spatial Analysis Using GIS
Elisa Ravazzoli
8  Mapping the “City” Film 1930–1980
Julia Hallam
9  Retracing the Local: Amateur Cine Culture and Oral Histories
Ryan Shand
10  Beyond the Boundary: Vernacular Mapping and the Sharing of Historical Authority
Kate Bowles
11  Afterword: Toward a Spatial History of the Moving Image
Julia Hallam and Les Roberts
•    Contributors
•    Index
Acknowledgments
This collection of essays explores the methodologies that are being used by film scholars to develop a new area of inquiry, one we have termed in our concluding comments “a spatial history” of the moving image. The contributors are interested in exploring film production, distribution, and consumption as spatial phenomena, using empirical data and maps to create detailed knowledge of the ways transportation and communication systems shape local and national film practices and pleasures. Some of them are pioneers in what Richard Maltby has termed “the new cinema history,” and they presented their work at the Mapping, Memory and the City conference at Liverpool University in February 2010. The conference was the culmination of a two-year project, Mapping the City in Film, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We are indebted to the contributors, to the amateur cine societies on Merseyside, and collector and filmmaker Angus Tilston for enthusiastic support for the project, Marion Hewitt at North West Film Archive, and Janet Dugdale, Julia Bryan, and their colleagues at the Museum of Liverpool for helping to ensure that the moving image record of Merseyside is archived for the use and pleasure of future generations.
A networking scheme funded by British Telecom and the AHRC enabled Julia Hallam (Liverpool University UK) and Ian Gregory (Lancaster University UK) to bring together internationally renowned scholars from a diverse range of disciplines with digital artists and museum curators. The workshops generated a number of new projects and publications (including this one) and stimulated the development of new collaborations in this emergent area. We are particularly indebted to David Bodenhamer (Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis), who commissioned this collection as part of his Spatial Humanities series for Indiana University Press; David's support and encouragement for this new area of work has been invaluable and we are most grateful to him. We would like to thank Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint an article by Robert C. Allen (2010) “Getting to Going to the Show,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 8(3), 264–76, the British Film Institute for permission to use an image of Patrick Keiller's exhibition City of the Future at BFI Southbank (2007–08), and the Museum of Liverpool for providing images of the interactive map in the History Detectives Gallery. Les Roberts designed the cover for this collection and has overseen both the development of the Mapping the City in Film website and the GIS resource that supports it; Julia would like to extend particular thanks to him for his careful stewardship and creative input.
Finally we would like to thank staff and students in the Department of Communication and Media and the School of Architecture at Liverpool University for their ongoing support for the project and the AHRC for funding the projects that have enabled this new body of work in film and the spatial humanities to develop and thrive.
JULIA HALLAM and LES ROBERTS
ONE
Film and Spatiality: Outline of a New Empiricism
LES ROBERTS AND JULIA HALLAM
SPATIAL (RE)ORIENTATIONS: INTERDISCIPLINARY EXCURSIONS
Metaphor is never innocent. It orients research and fixes results.
—JACQUES DERRIDA
In recent years ideas of the spatial and the cinematic have come together in an irresolute fashion, each fumbling hesitantly toward the other without appearing entirely sure of how or indeed if the other might respond. Discussions and debates around themes of, for example, cinematic geography, cartographic cinema, cinematic cartography, cinematic urbanism, urban cinematics, urban projections, movie mapping, cinetecture, city in film, cinematic city, geography of film, cinematic countrysides, and so on, 1 while testament to a rich and ever more expansive discourse on film, space, and place (albeit one with a disproportionate skew toward the urban), may also be seen as a jumble of discursive waypoints that confound as much as guide our way through a critical landscape that at times resembles an interdisciplinary quagmire.
Spatiality may be the common currency, but, much like the volatile euro, it struggles to hold toget