Cinematic landscape and social memory

• Author(s): Azevedo, Ana Francisca de
• Date: 2013
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/29812
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Cinematic landscape; Social memories; Collective identity; Dictatorship
• Document Type: Part of book or chapter of book
• Language: English
• Editor(s): Cabecinhas, Rosa; Abadia, L.

Description

Earth figured by cinema far from being a neutral task is a technique of representation engaged with a modern dominant visual order, a model of knowledge inside which the production of space participates in the reproduction of dominant social patterns. In the last decades geographers try to develop different methodologies for approaching the production of space by linear narrative in cinema and to understand how this spatialities shape interpersonal relations and collective identities. Within this field, the study of the role of cinematic landscape in the fabric and the reworking of social memory is a central path, namely for understanding the construction of geographical imagination. Through this article I will try to discuss and clarify how cinematic narratives fracture the tendency promoted by cultural industry for depicting landscape as a coherent portray of people and place, discarded to legitimate absolute space as universal category, namely by questioning institutional modes of production and by disclosing conventional categories of space-time representation. By presenting an analytic technology developed within the scope of a research project engaged with rethinking the relations between geography and cinema, I will try to show how cinematic narratives allow the emergence of a polyphony of voices and subjects in formation claiming the mediums efficiency for expressing different relations with material world, so as the realignment of social forces. The focus will be on one selected case study that allows the comprehension of how cinematic landscape envelopes narrative identities, functioning as a strong contribute for reframing social memory in postnational and postcolonial worlds.