From the expanse of the American great west to the mountainous landscapes of North Korea, Cinematic Countrysides draws on a range of genres to demonstrate how film texts come to prefigure expectations of rural social space and how these representations are shaped by the material circumstances of "lived" rural experience. For the first time, leading scholars in geography, film, and cultural studies have been drawn together to explore the multiple ways cinema and countryside are co-produced: how "film makes rural" and "rural makes film." At the heart of this volume’s apprehensions of the "cinematic countryside" is a concern that ideas of rurality in film are central to wider questions of "modernity" and "tradition," "self" and "other," "nationhood" and "globalization," and the "cinematic city."
Introduction * What Are These Cinematic Countrysides?--Robert Fish * Far From the Fatal Shore: Finding Meaning and Identity in the Rural Australian Landscape--Jonathan Rayner * Nature and Nation in North Korean Film--Carol Medlicott * Mapping the Nation and the Countryside in European "Films Of Voyage"--Maria Rovisco * Lurking Beneath the Skin: Pagan Landscapes in the Popular Imagination--Tanya Krzywinska * Militarised Countrysides: Representations of War and Rurality in British and American Film--Rachel Woodward and Patricia Winter * Mediating the Rural: Local Hero and the Location of Scottish Cinema--Ian Goode * "Imagination Can Be a Damned Curse in this Country": Material Geographies Of Filmmaking and the Rural--Andy C. Pratt * Lord of the Rings and Transformations in Social-Spatial Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand--Martin Phillips * Idylls and Othernesses: Rural Childhood in Film--Owain Jones * Deviant Sexualities and Dark Ruralities in the War Zone--Michael Leyshon Catherine Brace * Feral Masculinities: Urban Versus Rural in City Slickers and Hunter’s Blood--David Bell * Amateur Film and the Rural Imagination--Mark Neumann and Janna Jones * Amber and an/other Rural: Film, Photography and the Former Coalfields--Katy Bennett and Richard Lee
