Out of the Classroom, to the Movies: Geography on the Big Screen
Type de matériel :
35
The Géocinema film festival, the creation of a team of geographers from Université Bordeaux Montaigne, has provided an alternative venue for the informal study of geography for ten years now. Moving beyond the classroom into the screening rooms of central Bordeaux's legendary Utopia art and repertory Cinema. Géocinema attracts various publics : students, movie lovers, and neighbors of the movie theater where the Festival takes place. There, for three full days, audiences are able to experience mainstream films in which geographical thinking underpins conceptual structure and plot. Serving as supports for a conversation between the general public and accademics, these films also propose valid content for the study of geography and geographical approaches to knowledge. This paper looks back on the festival as a space of experimentations, for the public and for the invited speakers (all scholars) alike. We first present the innovations in higher education didactics tested at the festival, and how the festival makes geographical approaches and concepts accessible to general audiences. We then address Festival content, examining themes tackled over the years, as well as speakers conferences' outcomes from the various festival editions. Lastly, we focus on the science-fiction genre where geographical content tends to command a central narrative role, and where the idea that space is never merely décor is for us most evident. Geocinema shows how movies efficiently reveal the spatial dimension of any given society.
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