Description
Book SynopsisEngaging Film is a creative, interdisciplinary volume that explores the engagements among film, space, and identity and features a section on the use of films in the classroom as a critical pedagogical tool. Focusing on anti-essentialist themes in films and film production, this book examines how social and spatial identities are produced (or dissolved) in films and how mobility is used to create different experiences of time and space. From popular movies such as Pulp Fiction, Bulworth, Terminator 2, and The Crying Game to home movies and avant-garde films, the analyses and teaching methods in this collection will engage students and researchers in film and media studies, cultural geography, social theory, and cultural studies.
Trade ReviewThis is a remarkable book. It is a very readable volume of essays that substantiates the importance of film study in geography and geographic study of film. * Annals of the Association of American Geographers *
Singularly smart, these essays excavate the dense spatialities—both fixed and destabilized—at work in the moving image. Cresswell and Dixon have compiled what is surely a landmark volume in cultural geography. -- John Paul Jones III, University of Kentucky
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction: Engaging Film Part 2 Engaging Mobility Chapter 4 Rethinking the Observer: Film, Mobility, and the Construction of the Subject Chapter 5 Spectacular Violence, Hypergeography, and the Question of Alienation in Pulp Fiction Chapter 6 Telling Travelers' Tales: The World through Home Movies Part 7 Engaging Identity Chapter 9 Lacan: The Movie Chapter 10 Chips off the Old Ice Block: Nanook of the North and the Relocation of Cultural Identity Chapter 11 Masculinity in Conflict: Geopolitics and Performativity in The Crying Game Chapter 12 Smoke Signals: Locating Sherman Alexie's Narratives of American Indian Identity Chapter 13 Pax Disney: The Annotated Diary of a Film Extra in India Chapter 14 Modern Identities in Early German Film: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Part 15 Engaging Pedagogy Chapter 17 Practicing Film: The Autonomy of Images in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf Chapter 18 The Real Thing? Contesting the Myth of Documentary Realism through Classroom Analysis of FIlms on Planning and Reconstruction Chapter 19 On Location: Teaching the Western American Urban Landscape through Mi Vida Loca and Terminator 2 Chapter 20 "We Just Gotta Eliminate 'Em": On Whiteness and Film in Matewan, Avalon, and Bulworth Chapter 21 Using Film as a Tool in Critical Pedagogy: Reflections on the Experience of Students and Lecturers
