Place and the Moving Image

Place and the Moving Image offers a rethinking of how experimental film, and especially essay film practices, engage with spatial knowledge and environmental awareness. At its heart is the concept of Moving Image Topography – a critical and artistic model for thinking with the moving image about the relation between technological forms and place structures, and how these shape our experience of environments, whether natural, built and 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 to 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 online Support Material to this book.