Mapping Flat, Deep, and Slow: On the ‘Spirit of Place’ in New Cinema History

This essay engages in a creative, heuristic, and reflexive consideration of the ‘localities’ of cinema audiences by exploring New Cinema History as a place. New Cinema History is conceptualised as a place continually produced in and through its interactions with the heterogeneous multiplicities of situated audiences and experiences of cinema that form the topoi of its landscape of inquiry. In reflecting on how this placialised landscape has been and might be represented, I argue that New Cinema History’s ‘spirit of place’ is most productive when rendered within a ‘splatial’ framework that draws upon practices of flat, deep, and slow mapping to offer new possibilities for bridging space and place, narrative and cartography, and history and geography. These practices motivate myriad forms of collaboration and data exchange among diverse projects and stakeholders that perforate and continually redraw boundaries of knowledge using dynamic, multiple, open tactics for representing and recombining research.