2There is thus a “relative dispersal of audiovisual geographies” (Corsi & Buire, 2019) across various approaches: the geography of representations (Pleven, 2011), geopolitics (Moïsi, 2016), tools and methods for research and education (Browaeys, 1999 ; Garret, 2011) involving the idea of a “film involving geography or geographers or the practice of geography more broadly”, and the cultural study of borders transcending their geopolitical framework (Mekdjian, 2014).

5As pointed out by Simoes (2012), back in the early twentieth century Jean Brunhes had already considered film’s heuristic value for geography. Indeed, the epistemology of the subject has significant historical density, and although mainly rooted in a “multisensory ethnographic method” (Garrett, 2011), has also given rise to a series of specific works on the geography of James Bond (Bourgeat & Bras, 2014), street cinema in Havana (Corsi, 2014), space in the work of Miyazaki (Trouilard, 2013), and zombie films (Pinto, 2014). Additionally, considering that “cinema as we understand it […] was the matrix for television, video games, and YouTube” (Staszak 2014), this special issue links this epistemology to various audiovisual productions from contemporary culture industry, in which TV series are of ever greater importance. Indeed, they have made good any shortcomings they may once have had in terms of production quality and quantity or audience figures, with cinema and TV series now having ever more points in common. Proof of this comes from the serialisation of films taken from novels, comics, and other literary sagas (The Lord of the Rings, Millenium, Batman, Evangelion); film productions inspired by series (El Camino, The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, Cowboy Bebop); TV series inspired by films (Star Wars, Fargo, The Exorcist); the fact that renowned actors and filmmakers are involved in series (Mathieu Kassovitz and J.-P. Darroussin in The Bureau, Kevin Spacey in House of Cards); and certain documentaries made by leading filmmakers (James Cameron with Alien of the Deep) or using film actors for the voice-over (Brad Pitt as the narrator for Voyage of Time), along with an increasing number of documentary festivals since the 1990s. More broadly, modes of consumption also indicate the hybridisation between “traditional” film productions and audiovisual productions, what with home cinemas, people watching on-the-go, pirating, binge watching, and so on.

6We hold that present-day audiovisual productions may be characterised as total social facts in Marcel Mauss’s meaning of the term. TV series in particular have become a significant component of cultural consumption. They are extremely individualising, partaking in a geography of personal space and daily life; at the same time, they generate new global networks of belonging, sociability, and cooperation. Cinema has retained its strong position, as shown by its rebound after repeated predictions of the demise of cinema impacted by DVDs, the internet, streaming, pirating, home cinemas, and the drop in public funding (in France)—notwithstanding cinema’s being classified as of only mediocre necessity during the pandemic. Its strength is confirmed by major box office successes such as Avatar 2 and Barbie, which once again raise precisely the question of the hybridisation of techniques, formats, and aesthetic devices in audiovisual media.

7The analysis of “audiovisual geographies” in the papers published in this special issue opens new perspectives for this emerging field of research. The “geographicity” of audiovisual productions—that is, both the way they may be constructed as geographical objects, and the way geographers (or spatial scientists more generally) apprehend such objects—is no longer in question. However, the range of examples illustrating the diversity of heuristic theories and methods in this field needs to be expanded. The authors gathered in this issue contribute significantly to this, and we thank them for their papers. Banton, Beck & Pioch look at how audiovisual productions may be used in participatory and decision-making processes relating to territorial development. Other articles analyse how audiovisual productions may construct territorial stories and imaginaries: “fantom places” (Brenu), the city of Montpellier (Poulot), or the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a former administrative region (Marichez). These works consolidate the grounds on which the epistemology of audiovisual geography is based, sketching a critical inventory of dominant and more marginal paradigms (Marques), of privileged and less prominent concepts and ideas, together with methodological biases and reference corpora. They also provide a way of examining the reciprocal links between geographical imaginaries and spatial realities (Wadbed).

8Geographical imaginaries may be thought of as seeking to distinguish between or reconcile spatial representations and realities (Castoriadis, 1975). Once again, their multiple interpretations of space and discursive performativity have much to tell us about audiovisual geographies, be it “geographical wonder” (Puyo, 2022), or the geography of the “apocalypse” (Melquiond, 2022) and of “American fears” (Neuman & Vergez, 2022). The spaces of audiovisual production contain many lessons about the representation of neighbourhoods, places, towns, and landscapes, and especially about how we relate to them.

10Another aspect the authors of this issue explore is the audiovisual industry’s socio-spatial and socio-territorial impact. As cultural products, audiovisual productions may have heuristic purposes, acting as a “mirror of society” (Winckler, 2005) and/or “paraphrase of reality” (Esquenazi, 2014). But they are also the products of a vast industrial system which makes both a symbolic and a material impact on territories, being a polluting industry (The Shift Project, 2021) partaking in an unequal economy still based largely on the star system and on reproducing a neoliberal myth, fabricating clichés, encouraging mass tourism, with the power to disembody how we relate to spaces and territories.

11These frequently archetypal objects partake in a pastiche placing cultural practices in a “society of the spectacle”, as formulated and denounced by Guy Debord in 1967, a few years after his Contre le cinéma (1964). Several works of geography have also emphasised how geographicity has to some extent been expelled from cinema. Film narrative is so powerful and so realistic that filmic language encloses spectators in narrative identification (Lévy, 2013). Carried away by the story, spectators are no longer able to pay full attention to the space where the action is taking place, except in films where it is not a decor but an agent in its own right—“films which thereby particularly draw geographers’ interests” Staszak notes (2014). Denmat (2018) notes how David Harvey has argued that film reduces the complex history of daily life to a series of images on a screen without depth. Kociemba (2007), for his part, raises the question “Does Hollywood globalise our ways of seeing?”. The same critiques apply to American TV series (Billard & Brennetot, 2009, Billard et al., 2012), whose representation of space also has a performative effect: “the TV drama does not just build a series of spectacularly beautiful scenery, but assembles an ‘effective geography, the same that affects the actual reality, transforming its meaning and value’” (Marrone, 2009, 223) (Bonazzi, 2019: 246). Additionally, though audiovisual products create imaginary worlds, these are also rooted in spatial and territorial realities: regions, towns, houses, characters, costumes, sound, and lighting. And we may examine the place these spaces, places, and beings have on screen, the place the screen accords to them, and the place they otherwise occupy, and so corroborate the idea that “sometimes a place is so consubstantial with its series that it cannot be allowed to outlive it” (Deroide, 2022).

12Thus critical examination of audiovisual productions relates both to their content and the spatial representations or "produced spaces” they create, and to the very concrete “production spaces” in which they are made. Nicolas Marichez takes a positive view of how territorial imaginaries may be revalued by TV series, not solely in terms of audiovisual content but also by integrating the complex relation between productions and territories (regions, cities, and larger spaces marked by a collective identity). Marie-Laure Poulot examines the myth of a territorial narrative guiding the production of TV series set in and around the city of Montpellier. From a critical perspective, the siting of industries is influenced by the relationship between location and cooperation strategies. She thus suggests using the perspective afforded by contemporary theories and methods of spatial analysis to supplement our understanding of the creative industries’ geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural strategies. This is an extension of the way cinema has established a “new urban aesthetic”, with territorial marketing being the main agent constituting this hyperreality (Gravaris-Barbas, 1999).

13For both Marichez and Poulot, this relationship is built up around political goals and industry siting strategies, receiving the public and local stakeholders gravitating around the industry, and any resultant externalities such as the staging of events or promotion of territorial resources, with landscapes playing a leading role; and more broadly around the relationship industries have to the territory where they are located exploring mobility, supply circuits, cluster effects, links to other industries, and the co-construction of identity that they engender. Although TV productions were at one time an “overlooked” genre in the production of territorial images (Bryon-Portet, 2011), Poulot and Marichez show the role they now play in creating the territorial fabric. Their papers help us to move beyond the idea of the “city as decor” as described by Gravaris-Barbas (1999) at a time when localities were content to be used solely for shoots rather than for all the general means deployed for audiovisual production. And we may henceforth all accept that “geographical interpretations of films show that space is not a mere substrate or decor in the fiction, but fully participates in the narrative while revealing how our societies function” (Collignon et al. 2016).

14Thus Charles Marques argues in favour of considering audiovisual productions not simply as rooted in their territory, but as a social space in their own right. He holds that “a screening may be a social, cultural, and even a civic activity”. Studying public auditoriums in Seine-Saint-Denis and how they are collectively run, Marques invites us to consider how power relations induced by the territorial planning of culture may partake in neoliberal disorder as well as in cultural initiatives and image education which for their part, he states, tend to territorialise civic democracy. This tension generates what Will Straw calls audiovisual “scenes”, nuanced by local particularities. Maëlle Banton, Élise Beck, and Sylvain Pioch take an additional step towards joint endeavours by stakeholders and researchers working in territorial development, looking at audiovisual creations by geographers to see why stakeholders’ discourse may lack representativity. Using a corpus of 200 films, they explore how to convey a sensitive reading of a territory, and what this might imply for the scientificness of socio-cultural objects produced by scholarship, at the interstice between spectator’s experience and geographers’ discourse (Simoes, 2012). The authors in this issue thus analyse “geography films” as an information and negotiation device which may revitalise how citizen-oriented policies tackle spaces and may encourage geographers “to make the move from analysis to production” (Garrett, 2011).

15Avoiding the pitfall of considering audiovisual productions to be essentially virtual and immaterial, the neo-materialist dimension to our authors’ papers shows that while the audiovisual creates imaginary worlds, these are based on material realities constituting diegetic spaces (the houses, characters, costumes, sound, and lighting, together with the bodies inhabiting them). Additionally, neither the production or consumption of audiovisual objects can do without the territories on which they depend, and which are caught up in the extended relationship between the political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the society composing them. Analysing the link between the imagined and the real is thus of particular importance at a time when we need to think as ecologists, feminists, and defenders of democracy. A narrative aesthetic constructs more-than-real spaces, and so is arguably far from anodyne, and the (re)production of images of instituted power is fully worthy of critical attention (Bonazzi, 2019). Socio-environmental impacts also need to be considered, bearing in mind that both the setting—and its concealed, less photogenic aspects—have financial, technical, ecological, and human costs whose materiality alters the world. The audiovisual economy also produces all types of waste whose processing is of interest. It could here be useful to consider how other social sciences approach audiovisual productions.

16It is in such a spirit that Nathan Brénu discusses an imaginary production shuttling back and forth between cinema, real abandoned places, and the making of YouTube legend-tripping videos. Ghost hunters who film themselves in contemporary ruins, whose media uses are being reconfigured, illustrate the hybridisation of audiovisual productions combining fantasised, archetypal, and mundane geographies staging this “spectral ecology”. Similarly, Nathanaël Wadbed hypothesises that the film I Am Legend is an anti-modern yet eschatological critique of humanity’s relationship to the environment. Taken together, their papers lead to new ways of thinking about the heuristic nature of a socio-environmental critique of audiovisual geographies. By exploring the post-apocalyptic dimension to I Am Legend, Wadbed unearths a complex dialectic between representations of an idyllic wilderness and the monstrosity of humankind having followed the path of progress. Although fictitious, the spatial staging, he argues, reflects existential questions humanity faces concerning environmental problems in the broadest sense.

17Thus this special issue of Territoire en mouvement opens up several avenues for further research into audiovisual geographies, combining epistemological perspectives, particularly concerning their educational dimension, and critical analysis of the links between produced spaces and spaces of production. It tells us how geography, urban planning and development, and spatial and territorial approaches more broadly may enable us to “rethink social sciences’ usage of [audiovisual objects], for they cannot function in the same way when analysing a fictional reality and a realistic fiction” (Faure & Taïeb, 2015).

18As objects conveying many different forms of spatiality and territoriality, audiovisual productions still have much to tell us about how societies relate to the spaces and territories they occupy; whether it be to reaffirm the “beauty of the real” (Mottet, 2005) in portraying a reality of the world embedded in the ordinary and the everyday, or else to reinvent and imagine the geographies of yesteryear and of the future, from the most ordinary to the most emblematic places in our contemporary world.