Place and the Moving Image

Place and the Moving Image offers a rethinking of how experimental, essayistic film, engages with spatial knowledge and environmental awareness. At its heart is the concept of Moving Image Topography - a critical and artistic framework 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 a 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 subtle dynamics between perception, environment, and technological mediation. Rather than separating theory and practice, 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 human forms of experience, through which perspective itself can be (re)gained. Engaging scholars, artists, and practitioners- across fields such as film and media studies, visual art, design, architecture, and philosophy, this book will appeal to those interested in place, environmental aesthetics, indigenous perspectives, and critical film practice.

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