Place and the Moving Image

Essay Film Practice as Topography
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-77897-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Advances in Film Studies

Place and the Moving Image offers a rethinking of how experimental film practice engages with spatial knowledge and environmental awareness. At its heart is the concept of Moving Image Topography — a critical and artistic model of thinking through the camera about the relationship between technological forms and place structures, and how these shape our experience of environments, including the natural, the built, and the lived.

Responding to urgent questions in eco-media and artistic research, Elisabeth Brun argues that place is not merely a setting or backdrop, but a critical generative force in experimental film — a vital lens for understanding the eco-critical and epistemological potential of moving image arts and their modes of thinking. Through a rigorous and interdisciplinary approach that combines theory, close readings of essayist and materialist film practices, and artistic research in her sub-Arctic home village, Brun explores how the moving image can render visible the often-invisible dynamics between perceptual experience, spatial environments, and technological mediation. Rather than treating theory and practice as separate domains, this book shows how both emerge from the same topographical foundation. At stake is not only how we understand film, but how we understand our own grounding — the inseparability of Earth’s textures and our forms of experience, through which perspective itself can be (re)gained. It will engage scholars, artists, and practitioners interested in place, environmental aesthetics, indigenous perspectives, and critical film practice — across fields such as film and media studies, visual art, design, architecture, and philosophy.

The experimental film 3xShapes of Home (2020) is central to this study and is included as a Routledge Support Material to this book.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brun, Elisabeth

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Part 1: Place, Perception and Cinematic Thinking

1. Beyond Politics: On How the Essay Film Thinks

2. Born Out of a Topographical Sense: From Space to (Unspoken) Place in Cinema Theory

Part 2: Towards a Moving Image Topography

3. Thinking Film Through Place: Topos and Experimental Practice

4. Topographical Acts of Movement (TAM): the Acts and Attitudes of Film Thinking

5. 3xShapes of Home: a Topographical Moving Image Experiment

Conclusion

Index

Script - 3xShapes of Home (7:00 min)

Über Autor(innen)

Elisabeth Brun is an award-winning visual artist, filmmaker, and theorist working across artistic research, media aesthetics, and spatial theory. She holds a PhD in Media and Communication from the University of Oslo, Norway and a Post-Master’s in Public Art from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her doctoral work was awarded Kings´ College´s Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment.