Cartographic projections: World cinema and the production of place

This dissertation, entitled Cartographic Projections: World Cinema and the Production of Place, analyzes how representations of place, locality and community have emerged as central cinematic tropes in an era of intense globalization. The emphasis on place in world cinema—whether through considerations of contemporary urbanism, the pervasive experience of borders and border crossings, or the negotiation of local history—calls attention to a multitude of anxieties about globalization. I argue that filmmakers have responded to the disjunctive experiences and representations of globalization by calling attention to place as a provisional and indeterminate field. Rather than representing place as a closed system, recent world cinema provides a cartographic approach to place which draws on the medium's indexical claims to the material world and the textual indeterminacy of the cinematic image. My theoretical framework draws on cultural geography's recent reassessment of space as a dynamic and relational concept and film studies' longstanding interest in film's indexical relation to the world as a marker of its specificity. My case studies include works by recent filmmakers who have sought to provide alternative representations of the social and cultural dynamics of globalization to dominant models of global-local relations.;The first two chapters develop a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of contemporary cinematic cartographies drawing on interdisciplinary research in film studies, cultural geography and social theory. Subsequent chapters focus on cinematic cartographies of the global city, the place of the border and the production of memory and historicity in globalizing places, with close readings of films by Jia Zhangke, Patrick Keiller, Chantal Akerman, Terence Davies, Courtney Hunt and Elia Suleiman among others. Drawing on phenomenological analyses of film from theorists including Andre Bazin, Stanley Cavell and Mary Ann Doane, I argue that cinema provides a cartographic methodology for creatively documenting and imagining the conditions of locality amidst the flux of global spatiality.