Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
1 - Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
Summary
Over the last two decades the world has emerged as a ubiquitous trope in our audiovisual landscape: whether we think of multinarrative films directed by global auteurs, such as Babel (Alejandro González Inárritu, 2006), 360 (Fernando Meirelles, 2011) and Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson, 2009); the explosion of documentaries and TV series that have the planet as their focus, including Planet Earth (BBC, 2007 and 2016), Home (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009), and countless others carrying Earth in their titles; the 3D variations of this genre as produced for the IMAX theatre, such as Sacred Planet (Jon Long, 2004) and A Beautiful Planet (Toni Myers, 2016); ‘world symphony’ films like Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2011), One Day on Earth (Kyle Ruddick, 2012) and Life in a Day (Kevin Macdonald, Loressa Clisby, 2011); or even a single web-environment like Google Earth. Connecting these otherwise disparate audiovisual forms and formats is a simple – though of course ultimately unattainable – goal: to depict not a world, but the world, that is to say, the entire world.
No doubt such a proliferation of world-encompassing formulations is largely connected to socio-economic globalising processes on the one hand, and an acute sense of our global environmental crisis on the other, and thus restricted to contemporary phenomena. Yet a quest to encompass the whole world certainly has precedents in media and film history. In this essay I argue that the global imaginaries surrounding the emergence of cinema provide a meaningful field against which contemporary ones can be held up and deconstructed, and vice versa. While globalising phenomena and discourses are often associated with the end of the twentieth century, a look at the media-scape within which cinema emerges reveals that grappling with the world as a – and in its – totality was deeply built into the visual culture of the time – a phenomenon that resulted in no small measure from the contemporary popularity (and feasibility) of round-the-world travels and imperialist expeditions. To investigate some of the earliest examples by which the world was visually encompassed and the respective discourses they mobilised might thus help us shed a more nuanced light on the ways we currently conceive of and perceive the Earth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Journeys on ScreenTheory, Ethics, Aesthetics, pp. 19 - 35Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018