An innovative study of the neglected topic of cinematic representations of the countryside, through historical analysis, theoretical critique and explorations of genre, national cinema and urban representations

Introduction1. What are these cinematic countrysides? - Robert FishPART I. Nations, borders and histories 2. Far from the fatal shore: finding meaning and identity in the rural Australian landscape - Jonathan Rayner3. Nature and nation in North Korean film - Carol Medlicott4. Mapping the nation and the countryside in European ‘films of voyage' - Maria Rovisco5. Lurking beneath the skin: pagan landscapes in the popular imagination - Tanya Krzywinska6. Militarised countrysides: representations of war and rurality in British and American film - Rachel Woodward and Patricia WinterPART II. Mobile productions and contested representations 7. Mediating the rural: Local Hero and the location of Scottish Cinema - Ian Goode8. ‘Imagination can be a damned curse in this country’: material geographies of filmmaking and the ruraL - Andy C. Pratt9. Lord of the Rings and transformations in social-spatial identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand - Martin Phillips PART III. Identity, difference and otherness10. Idylls and othernesses: rural childhood in film - Owain Jones11. Deviant sexualities and dark ruralities in The War Zone - Michael Leyshon Catherine Brace 12. Feral masculinities: urban versus rural in City Slickers and Hunter's Blood - David BellPART IV. Mediating experience and performing alternatives 13. Amateur film and the rural imagination - Mark Neumann and Janna Jones 14. Amber and an/other rural: film, photography and the former coalfields - Katy Bennett and Richard Lee

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the 'spatialities of cinema' across the social sciences and humanities, yet to date critical inquiry has tended to explore this issue as a question of the 'city' and the 'urban'. For the first time, leading scholars in geography, film and cultural studies have been drawn together to explore the multiple ways in ideas of cinema and countryside are co-produced: how 'film makes rural' and 'rural makes film'. From the expanse of the American great west to the mountainous landscapes of North Korea, Cinematic Countrysides draws on a range of popular and alternative film genres to demonstrate how film texts come to prefigure expectations of rural social space, and how these representations come to shape, and be shaped by, the material and embodied circumstances of 'lived' rural experience. At the heart of this volume's varied apprehensions of the 'cinematic countryside' is a concern to argue that ideas of rurality in film are central to wider questions of 'modernity' and 'tradition', 'self' and 'other', 'nationhood' and 'globalisation', and crucially, ones that are central to an account of the 'cinematic city'.