Book Description
Illustrated This book is an innovative attempt by a leading film theorist to locate cinema-from the earliest experiments, via the work of Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles and many others, to contemporary European art cinema- alongside philosophy, painting, geography and travel in terms of a history of modernism. The focal point of Promised Lands is a vast collection of geographical and ethnographic films and photographs made around the world, The Archives of the Planet. Based in Paris, the collection was amassed by a French banker, Albert Kahn, in the 1900s, and for a time it was run by the Professor of Geography at the Collège de France, Jean Brunhes. The collection is, for Sam Rohdie, an astonishing instance of French modernism comparable to the philosophical work of Henri Bergson. Promised Lands weaves a narrative of speculative and analytical fragments around the rich resources of the collection. Each chapter is named for a real or imaginary place and the sum is a study that, in its interdisciplinary range and its attempt to integrate personal and cultural history, redefines modernism as a shifting geography of artforms, desires, and practices of understanding.

About the Author
Sam Rohdie is Professor of Film Studies at Queen's University, Belfast. Editor of Screen in the 1970s, he is the author of books on Pasolini and Antonioni as well as a study of Rocco and his Brothers in the BFI Film Classics series. He is currently working on a Fellini lexicon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This book is an innovative attempt by a leading film theorist to locate cinema—from the earliest experiments, via the work of Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Wells, and many others, to contemporary European art cinema—alongside philosophy, painting, geography, and travel in terms of a history of modernism.