Cinema cartographies: dialoguing with the teaching geographic imaginary

Abstract

This paper derives from the project “On school screens: cinema and teachers of Geography”, from the International Research Network “Images, Geographies and Education”, which sought to diagnose the practices of Geography teachers with cinema and, from there, to study elements that could contribute to the regulation of the Law 13006/14. We search for clues to understand if the visual cartographic culture, present in the training of school Geography teachers, manifests itself in the choices of films used as imagery resources in Geography classes. In order to achieve this goal, we identified and systematized different approaches to studies on the connections between cartography and cinema, constituting a framework about the mapping impulse and detailing Castro's approach (2015) that distinguishes cartographic forms or cinematographic expressions from the mapping impulse: panoramas, aerial views and atlas. We selected three of the most cited Brazilian films, first mentioned by teachers participating in the research, of different genres, namely, “Central do Brasil”, “Encontro com Milton Santos: o mundo global visto do lado de cá” and “Ilha das Flores”, which were analyzed in the light of the cinematographic expressions of the mapping impulse. We concluded that it is possible that the mapping impulse influences the choices of films to be used by Geography teachers in the classroom, indicating the strength of the visual culture of cartography, which may induce the use of cliché images that limit students to think about the space from other possibilities.