Place and the Moving Image by Brun, Elisabeth;

Short description:

This book offers a rethinking of how experimental film practice engages with spatial knowledge and environmental awareness. It will engage those interested in place, environmental aesthetics, indigenous perspectives, critical film practice, film and media studies, visual art, design, architecture, and philosophy.

Long description:

Place and the Moving Image offers a rethinking of how experimental film, and especially essay film practices, engage with spatial knowledge and environmental awareness. At its heart is the concept of Moving Image Topography – a critical and artistic model for thinking with the moving image about the relation between technological forms and place structures, and how these shape our experience of environments, whether natural, built and lived.

Responding to urgent questions in eco-media and artistic research, Elisabeth Brun argues that place is not merely a setting or backdrop, but a critical generative force in experimental film – a vital lens for understanding the eco-critical and epistemological potential of moving image arts and their modes of thinking. Through a rigorous and interdisciplinary approach that combines theory, close readings of essayist and materialist film practices, and artistic research in her sub-Arctic home village, Brun explores how the moving image can render visible the often invisible dynamics between perceptual experience, spatial environments and technological mediation. Rather than treating theory and practice as separate domains, this book shows how both emerge from the same topographical foundation. At stake is not only how to understand film, but how we understand our own grounding – the inseparability of Earth’s textures and our forms of experience, through which perspective itself can be (re)gained. It will engage scholars, artists and practitioners interested in place, environmental aesthetics, indigenous perspectives and critical film practice – across fields such as film and media studies, visual art, design, architecture and philosophy.

The experimental film 3xShapes of Home (2020) is central to this study and is included as a Routledge online Support Material to this book.

"Place, as distinct from space, remains a problematic topic in contemporary theory, including film theory, often being overlooked or neglected.  In a highly original and creative undertaking, Elisabeth Brun’s new book addresses this issue head-on, showing how experimental film, and film more broadly, is fundamentally shaped by its topographical character. This a major contribution both to film theory and to the thinking of place that is likely to have an important impact well beyond the confines of film theory alone."

-- Jeff Malpas, University of Tasmania, Australia

"Numerous studies of the essay film have appeared in recent years, but Brun's book stands out as one of the most sophisticated and original. It brilliantly focuses on the topos of place as part of the recent spatial turn in the arts and humanities and as a rich and often overlooked arena for essayistic epistemological strategies. That the author’s own stunning essay film 3xshapes of Home--a meditative representation about the village in which she grew up--parallels and supports this argument adds a scintillating layer to this superb work."

-- Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, USA

"Elisabeth Brun’s book is a beautifully fluid synthesis of explorations between theoretical and creative realms, offering its readers engaging and stimulating perspectives through which to deepen understandings of the human relationship with place. Through the tool of the camera and essay-film, and with emphasis on embodiment and ways of knowing, her research foregrounds ‘topographical thinking’ and the essential role of place in meaning-making and identity. Brun’s weaving of artistic practice, theoretical inquiry, and methodological innovation makes compelling reading for academics and practitioners across film, geography, architecture, landscape architecture, the environmental humanities, and all those concerned with the power and potential of spatial experience.” 

-- Anna Ryan, architect and geographer, University of Limerick, Ireland

Table of Contents:

Introduction 

Part I: Place, Perception and Cinematic Thinking

1. Beyond Politics: On How the Essay Film Thinks

2. Born Out of a Topographical Sense: From Space to (Unspoken) Place in Cinema Theory 

Part II: Towards a Moving Image Topography

3. Thinking Film through Place: Topos and Experimental Practice

4. Topographical Acts of Movement (TAM): The Acts and Attitudes of Film Thinking

5. 3xShapes of Home: a Topographical Moving Image Experiment 

Conclusion 

Script - 3xShapes of Home (7:00 min)

Index