ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on humanistic approaches to cultural geography in film and media studies as they depend upon methodologies and lines of inquiry developed in varied national contexts. The interdisciplinarity of cultural geography coheres through the types of questions that are posed regarding historical context, subjectivity, and power. These questions are characteristic of cultural studies approaches in critical communication studies, American studies, social history, gender studies, critical race theory, and critical legal studies. Typically, film scholars have approached the geographic in two primary ways: through analysis of on-screen representation of place and through analysis of spectating practice in place. The first approach has been practiced via studies of the representation of specific places on film and through theories adapted from literary studies, such as those that analogize the cinema spectator with the "flaneur”. The second approach is often referred to by its practitioners as "new cinema history.".
