Taking Place
Location and the Moving Image
Taking Place argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media. Its original essays analyze film, television, video, and installation art from diverse national and transnational contexts to rethink both the study of moving images and the theorization of place.
Taking Place turns critical attention to the ingredients of place in film, allowing us to regard a given film as a virtual archive of places. This emphasis is all the more welcome in the postmodern world, in which the massive reality of non-place and the hegemony of global space have become predominant. The book is a pioneering venture carried out with notable success.
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor, SUNY at Stony Brook
Taking Place argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media. Its original essays analyze film, television, video, and installation art from diverse national and transnational contexts to rethink both the study of moving images and the theorization of place. Through its unprecedented—and at times even obsessive—attention to actual places, this volume traces the tensions between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, that inhere in contemporary debates on global cinema, television, art, and media.
Contributors: Rosalind Galt, U of Sussex; Frances Guerin, U of Kent; Ji-hoon Kim; Hugh S. Manon, Clark U; Ara Osterweil, McGill U; Brian Price, U of Toronto; Linda Robinson, U of Wisconsin–Whitewater; Michael Siegel; Noa Steimatsky, U of Chicago; Meghan Sutherland, U of Toronto; Mark W. Turner, Kings College London; Aurora Wallace, New York U; Charles Wolfe, U of California, Santa Barbara.
Taking Place turns critical attention to the ingredients of place in film, allowing us to regard a given film as a virtual archive of places. This emphasis is all the more welcome in the postmodern world, in which the massive reality of non-place and the hegemony of global space have become predominant. The book is a pioneering venture carried out with notable success.
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor, SUNY at Stony Brook
For quite some time, scholars of the moving image have wrestled with the challenges posed by the concept of place within the study of cinema, television, and other images. At last, we have an anthology that advances interdisciplinary work on geography and the moving image on multiple fronts. This volume is an invaluable contribution to the ongoing work of understanding the geography of the image in the age of the cinema and beyond, and I recommend it highly.
Anna McCarthy, New York University
The pieces in this volume are filled with historical nuggets, making them engaging and fun for the casual reader. For those who watch movies for a living, this is exciting new critical work that forges a bridge between the study of place and film studies.
blogcritics.org
Featuring a stellar list of contributors and lavishly illustrated with stills, this original, wide-ranging, deeply thought-provoking collection is first class in every respect.
Choice
Rhodes and Gorfinkel’s book is a varied and enervating collection that opens doors to not only a variety of locations but also to a variety of approaches to the ways in which location can be understood.
screeningthepast.com
Contents
Introduction: The Matter of Places
Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes
I. Cinematic Style and the Places of Modernity
1. From Venice to the Valley: California Slapstick and the Keaton Comedy Short
Charles Wolfe
2. The Eclipse of Place: Rome’s EUR from Rossellini to Antonioni
John David Rhodes
3. Tales of Times Square: Sexploitation’s Secret History of Place
Elena Gorfinkel
4. Derek Jarman in the Docklands: The Last of England and Thatcher's London
Mark W. Turner
II. Place as Index of Cinema
5. The Cinecittà Refugee Camp, 1944–1950
Noa Steimatsky
6. Right Here in Mason City: The Music Man and Small Town Nostalgia
Linda A. Robinson
7. When the Set Becomes Permanent: The Spatial Reconfiguration of Hollywood North
Aurora Wallace
8. The Last Place on Earth? Allegories of Deplacialization in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie
Ara Osterweil
III. Geopolitical Displacements
9. The Nonplace of Argento: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Roman Urban History
Michael Siegel
10. The Placement of Shadows: What’s Inside William Kentridge’s Black Box/Chambre Noire?
Frances Guerin
11. Into the “Imaginary” and “Real” Place: Stan Douglas’s Site-Specific Film and Video Projection
Ji-Hoon Kim
12. Doing Away with Words: Synaesthetic Dislocations in Okinawa and Hong Kong
Rosalind Galt
IV. (Not) Being There
13. Moving through Images
Brian Price
14. Living Dead Spaces: The Desire for the Local in the Films of George Romero
Hugh S. Manon
15. On the Grounds of Television
Meghan Sutherland
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
