Nomadic Cinema

Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (2002), Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008), and Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (2016), all published by Columbia University Press. Griffiths received a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research for this book.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Decolonial PraxisPart I. Prehistories and Contexts of the Expedition Film1. Medieval Cartography and the Repressed Imaginary of the Exploitation Expedition Film2. The Dialectics of Adventure: Counterhistory and the Explorers Club in New York CityPart II. The Small Expedition Film and Archival Return3. Intersubjectivity and Selfhood in the Lone-Wolf Expedition4. Southwest Imaginaries: Native American Identity and Digital ReturnPart III. Affective Geography and Spatial Epistemologies5. Cinema in Extremis: Monumentality, Mount Everest, and Indigenous Intermediaries6. Cinema as Visual Small Talk: The Anxious Optic of the 1926 Morden-Clark Expedition Across Central AsiaConclusion: Virtual Reality, Indigenous Futurism, and the Legacy of the Expedition FilmNotesFilmographyBibliographyIndex

In Nomadic Cinema, Alison Griffiths takes us on an epic tour of expedition filmmaking from the silent era to virtual reality, with her usual great rigor and insight. Her expansive approach keeps close eye on the role of the Indigenous peoples who populate early films on the sidelines, and the adventure proves that the archive of colonial cinema remains a rich vein of cultural encounter and reinvention.