"Creative Geography": Reflections about the film editing in "Madrid" and "Innisfree"

Abstract

Creative geography, one of the experiments carried by the filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov, proposes that an imaginary landscape can be produced into the mind of the viewers by the editing of the film, only juxtaposing several images from different locations. Driven by this theoretical legacy, this paper presents a revision of this fictional landscape in two film essays from the eighties production: Madrid and Innisfree. The editing builds in both cases a metalinguistic discourse by the use of precedent films with the objective of stimulate the affective participation of the public to achieve the goal of a creative geography. While the editing in Madrid constructs a conflictive space between the republican past of the city during the Spanish Civil War and its democratic present, in the case of Innisfree a bond is achieved between the ethnographic present and the fictional past portrayed in John Ford’s The Quiet Man, and also a tribute is payed to the real geography that held its locations and, simultaneously, the inhabitants of the mythologized Ireland of the movie.