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Explorers on ScreenAdventure! Danger! Romance!

Edited by Sue Matheson and Cynthia J. Miller

Format

£100.00

About this book

Focuses on explorers and adventurers on screen as a lens for examining our understandings of race, place, class, imperialism and gender roles

  • Covers a wide range of global regions, including Asia, the Pacific Islands, South America and North America, as well as explorations and adventures set in space
  • Films discussed include SOS Iceberg, Dersu Uzala, Lawrence of Arabia, Mountains of the Moon, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Barbarosa, The Mummy Trilogy and the Indiana Jones films
  • Chapters are organized thematically, in order to provide readers with multiple perspectives and historical examples of key issues and ideas

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.

Reviews

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.
Table of contents

Introduction: Explorers on Screen—Why Thrilling Matters
Sue Matheson

Part I. Types and Stereotypes

1. The North American Explorer: Types and Comic Stereotypes
Adrian Manning

2. Mapping Mother India in Vidya’s 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 Christensen’s 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 Hepburn’s Adventures in Peliculas de la Selva: Hollywood and Othering in The Nun’s Story (1959) and Green Mansions (1959)
Etienne Boumans

8. Envisioning the Other: Spatial Imagination in Ang Li’s 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 Schepisi’s Barbarosa (1982)
Tom Prasch

12. Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975)—the Western Meets Shintō kannagara
Sue Matheson

13. “Alright, Kid. Ready for an Adventure?”: Generic/Mythic Redefinition in Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian (2019–) and The Book of Boba Fett (2021–2022)
Joanne Vrignaud

14. The Queen and the Cartographer: Constructing Heroes in Disney’s 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, Indy’s 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. Burke & Wills (1985) and Wills & Burke (1985): Lost in the Desert and Deserted by the Audience
Dean Brandum

About the contributors

Sue Matheson

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

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.