Professor of Media Studies, University of Ulster and Co-Editor of Theorising National Cinema - Paul Willemen
The necessary refusal to consume films as merely character-driven narratives means that we must learn to see all the layers of visual storytelling, including and especially the places and spaces that make stories resonate with the complex rhythms of history. Fowler and Helfield's anthology, Representing the Rural, gives film and cultural studies a genuinely comparative dimension by addressing the urban-rural dialectic in a wide variety of national-regional cinemas. Their book opens up a long-awaited, new perspective on and in film studies."
Distinguished Service Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Co-Editor of the Historical - Marcia Landy
Representing the Rural breaks new ground in the writing of cinema history, offering fresh perspectives on the character and place of national identity in cinematic explorations of the land, peasants, landscapes, and cultures caught up in the transition from rural to metropolitan spaces. The twenty essays explore films from five continents, different moments in cinema and social history, and other art forms. This book fills a necessary niche in the growing literature on tension between 'the country' and 'the city,' tradition and modernity, and the possibility of nation and national cinema in a postcolonial, globalized world."