ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century visual experiences in Europe and North America such as the panopticon and the diorama anticipated the contemporary escape offered by cinema, the web and video-gaming. After its inception cinema rapidly became a global phenomena. Cinema was introduced to the world by the Lumiere Brothers, very soon after its invention, through a 1896 travelling exhibition. The startling and enduring impact of Hollywood cinema over other global cinematic aesthetics was first raised to academic consciousness by Laura Mulvey’s feminist critique. Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon argue that mobility, like space and identity, ‘has no essential meaning or essence outside of the discursive field into which it is inserted’. Importantly, mobilities are constructed in particular ways to produce, reproduce and/or challenge social relations. Current geographic study is about invigorating and reinforcing insights that are not just about mapping spatial metaphors on to moving images.
