Focuses on explorers and adventurers on screen as a lens for examining our understandings of race, place, class, imperialism and gender roles.
Explorers on Screen: Adventure! Danger! Romance! brings together essays that break new ground on films featuring explorers and adventurers from the Age of Exploration to the present. It focuses on fictional and dramatized representations, rather than biopics, as these create the most interesting reflections of the attitudes, ideals, aspirations and tensions at work in their eras of production and reception.
It provides readers with the conceptual tools to more deeply consider the portrayals of these characters, both fictional and real, and the ways in which they shape and reflect key historical figures and moments. The volume’s essays offer interdisciplinary approaches from film studies, history, anthropology, philosophy and literature to bring fresh and complex perspectives to each chapter and the volume as a whole.
Arvustused
This well-curated collection, covering the gamut of screen history from the silent era to the present, gets to the heart of what an explorer is. As they journey to new physical, psychological and cultural territories, these explorers find acceptance or ostracism, representative of their perceived roles as saviours, helpmates or cultural imperialists. Until now, their cinematic portrayals have received scant scholarly attention, but this volume gives them their due, reminding viewers not only of their exciting, gripping experiences but also of the complicated, often controversial, issues that they represent. * Kathy Merlock Jackson, Virginia Wesleyan University *
Explorers on Screenthrilling matters
Sue Matheson
Part I. Types and Stereotypes
1. The North American Explorer: Types and Comic Stereotypes
Adrian Manning
2. Mapping Mother India in Vidyas Kahaani (2012)
Adith Suresh and Sony Jalarajan Raj
3. A Necessary Adventure: Child Explorers and the Senses of Belonging
Matthew Cipa
4. Nerdy is the New Sexy: Adventuring Librarians in The Mummy (1999) and The
Librarian (2006)
Alley Marie Jordan
5. The Inward Explorer and the Outward Jester: Benjamin Christensens Film
Adaptation of Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)
Andrew Grossman
Part II. Othering People and Places
6. Footprints in the Sand: the well-worn path of Middle East exploration in
film
Mat Hardy and Sally Totman
7. Audrey Hepburns Adventures in Peliculas de la Selva: Hollywood and
Othering in The Nuns Story (1959) and Green Mansions (1959)
Etienne Boumans
8. Envisioning the Other: Spatial Imagination in Ang Lis Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon (2000)
Katheryn M. Linduff
9. Mountains and Mysticism: Escapism and Authenticity in the Cinematic
Exploration of the Himalaya
Tim Chamberlain
10. Adventures in Xenophobia: The Light at the Edge of the World (1971) as a
Cultural Artifact
David Melbye
Part III. The Lore in Explore
11. Bring me his cojones: The mythical West of Fred Schepisis Barbarosa
(1982)
Tom Prasch
12. Akira Kurosawas Dersu Uzala (1975)the Western meets Shint kannagara
Sue Matheson
13. Alright, kid. Ready for an adventure?: generic/mythic redefinition in
Jon Favreaus The Mandalorian (2019 ) and The Book of Boba Fett (2021
2022)
Joanne Vrignaud
14. The Queen and the Cartographer: Constructing Heroes in Disneys Atlantis
Films
Aidan Norrie
15. Antipodean exploration the films of Werner Herzog
Roger Hillman
Part IV. History Remade
16. Myth / History: Richard Burton in Mountains of the Moon (1990)
Jon Cowans
17. Adapting Daniel Boone, Adapting America
Hope Hodgkins
18. The Darker Side of Indiana Jones: Dunhuang, Indys prototypes, and the
Temple of Doom (1984)
Shuchen Wang
19. The Impossible Comes to Screen: Real and Reel Exploration in S.O.S.
Iceberg (1933)
Iris Haukamp
20 Lost in the desert and deserted by the audience: How Burke & Wills (1986)
failed to connect with the public
Dean Brandum
Sue Matheson is Full Professor of English at the University College of the North in Manitoba, Canada. Her interests in film, culture, and literature may be found in more than sixty articles published in a wide range of books and scholarly journals. She is the editor of Love in Western Film and Television: Happy Hearts and Lonely Trails, A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western, Women in the Western and The Good, the Bad and the Ancient: Essays on the Greco-Roman Influence in Westerns. She is the author of The Westerns and War Films of John Ford and The John Ford Encyclopedia. Cynthia J. Miller is a cultural anthropologist specializing in visual media. She teaches in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College, and is the editor or co-editor of twenty scholarly volumes, including Journeys Into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horror (2023), as well as the author of dozens of articles in journals and edited scholarly volumes. Cynthia is the recipient of the Peter C. Rollins prize for a book-length work in popular culture, and the James Welsh prize for lifetime achievement in adaptation studies.
