Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
strands in the emerging field of what can be broadly defined as “cin-
ematic cartography.”
7
These are briefly summarized in the following
five paragraphs.
The first of these categories and the one that is most securely ground-
ed in the material and symbolic aspects of place is the mapping of film
production and reception. In the United States, scholars such as Robert
C. Allen and Jeffrey Klenotic have begun to explore the use of Geograph-
ical Information Systems (GIS) and digital mapping in historical studies
of film distribution and consumption. As Allen points out, despite the
“historical turn” that has shaped recent directions in film scholarship,
as a discipline “film studies continues to be dogged by ambivalence to-
wards the use of empirical methods.”
8
Identifying the potential that re-
sources such as GIS can offer the film historian, scholars such as Allen
are therefore pushing forward research in this area in new, significant,
and productive ways. Allen's project Going to the Show uses over 750
Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of 45 towns and cities in North Carolina
between 1896 and 1922. Drawing on a dataset featuring information on
1,300 movie venues identified from the maps and an extensive archive
of contextual materials, such as newspaper advertisements and articles,
photographs, architectural drawings, and city directories, Going to the
Show “situates early movie going within the experience of urban life in
the state's big cities and small towns. It highlights the ways that race con-
ditioned the experience of movie going for all North Carolinians - white,
African American, and American Indian.”
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Similarly, Klenotic is using
GIS technology to explore the social and geographic contexts of film dis-
tribution and exhibition in New Hampshire.
10
Both Allen and Klenotic
are part of the HoMER network (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and
Reception), an international group of film scholars established in 2004
whose aim is to “promote understanding of the complex, international
phenomena of filmgoing, exhibition, and reception.”
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The development
and subsequent availability of database collations of data relating to film
practices - whether in terms of production and exhibition, or geogra-
phies of consumption and location, or information on genre, studio loca-
tions, and paterns of distribution - has meant that cartographic meth-
ods of geohistorical analysis are now increasingly recognized as valuable
tools for historical research on film.12
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