Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips

Places play an important role as anchoring fictional (books, movies, songs, video games) as well as artistic universes to reality. Conversely, imaginary places affect the way people perceive real places. 'Set-jetting', which transforms film locations into tourist attractions, is a perfect example of the increasing demand for connecting fictional spaces with real places. The interaction of imaginary and real places, which has been for years an operating function of fiction, is increasing both qualitatively and quantitatively. This is not limited to cinema but also affects literature and art. Once located on a map, the fictional place becomes attractive for tourists and a potential source of profit. The connection between imaginary and real places has been transformed by recent dramatic changes in communication and information technologies, and more specifically in the domain of geospatial technologies. These technologies offer more effective ways of georeferencing locations in films, books and art ...

Connecting Real and Imaginary Places through Geospatial Technologies: Examples from Set-jetting and Art-oriented Tourism

Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different? (Benjamin 1999: 83)

A frame for cultural mappings, film is modern cartography. (Bruno 2002: 71)

Cinematic Cartography: Projecting Place Through Film

One may wonder what museums and classification systems have in common. They share a feature of working with the systematisation and reification of relics and objects. For too long there has been an almost indecent preoccupation with measuring and quantifying the existence of disabled people with the grand and commendable objective to know ‘us’ more. Despite these obsessions with disability, the sociocultural relations of impairment and disabled people have remained an afterthought in civic consciousness and at best peripheral in sociologies of the body. The aberrant, the anomalous, the monster or the disabled have formed ‘the background noise, as it were, the endless murmur of nature’, where disability is nonetheless always present in its absence (Foucault, 1970: 155). An act of speaking otherwise, this chapter shifts to a focus on abled(ness) to think about the production of ableism. We all live and breathe ableist logic, our bodies and minds daily become aesthetic sculptures for the projection of how we wish to be known in our attempt to exercise competency, sexiness, wholeness and an atomistic existence. It is harder to find the language and space to examine the implications of a failure to meet the standard or any ambivalence we might have about the grounds of the perfectibility project. This chapter first will outline an approach to expressing ableism (its theoretical features and character) and secondly it will provide an example of how ableism works globally in the knowledge production of disability. Finally I will discuss the possibility of disabled people turning their backs on emulating abledness as a strategy for disengagement both ontological and theoretical.

Projecting Place: Location Mapping, Consumption, and Cinematographic Tourism

This publication views the history of film and commercial entertainment in the USA during the silent era from the bottom up. It is concerned with exhibition practices and programming strategies, ticket prices and seating arrangements, promotional schemes and attempts at legitimation, reform campaigns and moviegoing habits from the local Other CABI sites 

Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930

(2002). Early Swedish (Non-fiction) Cinema and Cartography. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 275-290.

Pelle Snickars

Papers

Early Swedish (Non-fiction) Cinema and Cartography