ABSTRACT
Writing about film is a little like writing about music: it is difficult to translate a sensory experience into something other than itself. In a sense, however, all writing is a process of translation though the degree to which we might recognize these limitations varies from one context to another. To convey the experience of landscape directly, for example, is very different from engaging with depictions of landscape in cinema, literature or music. Cinema presents geographers with an especially rich means to explore the concept of landscape in terms of its lineage to other forms of aesthetic representation and also through the cinematic experience itself as a critical element in modern culture. The creative possibilities for the exploration of landscape in film emerged with the earliest experimental footage from rooftops and moving trains and gradually encompassed ever more ambitious attempts to extend the scope of human sensory experience. The cinematic landscape poses questions at the heart of cultural geography: the tension between phenomenological and materialist readings of space; the changing relationship between technology, aesthetics and modern consciousness; and the role of cinema as a repository of collective memory. Cinema should not be read as a mere cipher for pre-given theoretical assumptions or seen as purely illustrative of a set of predetermined cultural positions. An open engagement with film promises no less than the revitalization of cultural geography and its intersecting conceptual terrains.
