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February 2003, Week 3

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From:
Mark Jancovich <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 17 Feb 2003 17:41:26 +0000
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Cinematic Countrysides

Edited by Robert Fish, University of Nottingham, UK

There is an extensive literature on cinema and the city, most notably
Clarkešs The Cinematic City. The following volume will operate as a
counterpoint to this body of work, and begin to foster a literature on (what
is often constituted as) the cityšs other: the rural. While film present us
with numerous representations of rural worlds, cinema is also bound up with
a series of material geographies in which films are not, and never have
been, merely consumed within urban spaces. As Robert Allen has repeatedly
stressed, cinema has never been simply an urban phenomenon. In the process,
the book will seek to problematicise the distinction between the urban and
the rural, in which the former has frequently been equated with dynamism,
difference and the future, and the latter with the inert, homogeneity and
the past.  The volume will examine constructions of the rural that have
present this as an idyll consigned to a mythic golden age (Brigadoon), or
inversely as a degenerate backwater (Texas Chainsaw Massacre).  It will
involve a comparative analysis of different countysides, considering the
various ways in which countrysides have been imagined in different national,
regional and historical contexts. However, unlike much of the work on cinema
and the city, the volume will go beyond questions of representation and
critic-driven analyses of the formal and the textual, to investigate the
contexts of production, mediation and consumption in which they take shape
and assert influence.

For example, articles might cover:

s The geographical organization of cultural industries and the production of
cinematic countrysides
s The marketing of rural places to cultural industries through regional film
commissions, etc.
s The technical and creative practices involved in the production of
cinematic countrysides
s The cultural histories within which particular representations of the
countryside are produced
s The countryside as imagined by outsiders (whether from the city, other
countries, other times.)
s Genre and the countryside (horror and the countryside; comedy and the
countryside; the thriller and the countryside; the road movie etc.)
s The cultural politics of cinematic representations of the countryside
(identitifications and antagonisms of gender, class and ethnicity etc.)
s Relationships between nation, regionality and rurality in cinematic
representations
s The intertextual relations of rural films (including relationships between
films and textual reworkings  within publicity, marketing literature)
s Rural exhibition and display practices; travelling cinema
s Cinematic countrysides and audience identifications; readings of the rural
audience
s Social and material transformation of rural areas through cinematic
representation (such as tourism - New Zealand after Lord of the Rings, etc.
- and migration)

Schedule for Completion

Proposals Due by 1 May, 2003. Selection of proposals by 1 July 2003.
Manuscripts due by 1 February 2004. Requests for revisions will be made by 1
May 2004. Final Versions due by 1 July 2004. Submission to press 1 September
2004.

Dr Robert Fish
Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geography
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham
NG7 1LP

Tel: + 44 (0) 115 951 5455
Fax: + 44 (0) 115 951 5249
Eml: [log in to unmask]

----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite

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