Cinema and the Crisis of Cartographic Reason

This chapter is concerned with a problem. It revolves around the state of the relationship between film and geography, a relationship whose recent evolution has been driven by the changing roles of both actors, cinema and geography, in the contemporary culture. As much as geography has, in fact, undergone a radical reconsideration, both as a science and as the epistemic project of modernity, a project whose ideology – its discoursive, non-neutral, “interested” character – has been deconstructed, for example, by recent trends in critical cartography, so has cinema seen fundamental changes in its cultural role after more than a century since its invention. The new course of this relationship impacts a wide spectrum of topics; here I only touch on a number of essential points, sketching – so to speak – a rough outline of the issues facing cinema and geography at this historical juncture.