Film. Geography: stirring still remains

Abstract

Inspired by the distinction that Gilles Deleuze drew between the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image,’ the paper considers the ‘film’—the ‘skin’—of ‘film geography,’ not in terms of the customary geography of film, the geography in film, or the geography from film, but rather in terms of geography as film, a literal ‘film’ geography or ‘filmic’ geography. To get under the skin of film geography, the paper proceeds in three parts. The first part shatters the conception of film as a re-presentation. The second touches a raw nerve by channelling the power of the false. The third splits open and unfolds the two faces of film, namely the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image.’ By way of conclusion, the paper ends its flaying of film geography with a ‘stirring still’ taken from Michael Madsen’s (2010) Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, which documents the construction of Onkalo, the world’s first deep-geological nuclear-waste disposal facility that must remain undisturbed for at least 100,000 years once the tomb is sealed in the early twenty-second century.