Iluminace 2025, 37(3):5-20 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1831

Toward a Geographically Specific Understanding of Filmic and Media Matter: An Introduction to a Special Issue

Byron Davies ORCID...¹, Jiří Anger ORCID...²

¹ Universidad de Murcia, Spain ✉

² Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom ✉

It can be difficult to articulate a substantive materialism in film and media studies, owing to the slipperiness of that term and its cognates. Changes in media and their technology can even bring out the materialist elements of supposedly idealist views in past film theory, thus raising the question of whether there is any meaningful contrast with “materialism.” We proffer the hypothesis that these difficulties lose their force as we move away from the global center and toward sites shaped by material scarcity and colonial extraction. Consequently, a materialism thought through to its full implications must be a geographically grounded one. An example is the sololoy cinema articulated by Peruvian filmmaker and programmer Aroldo Murguia: an idea of cinema as materially continuous with cellulose nitrate dolls and related practices of reappropriation in Mexican popular art. We also explore the idea that the more a film is geographically situated away from colonial standardization, the more likely it is to be diegetically transparent to the resources making that very film possible, from its manufacturing to screening to preservation. These hypotheses are presented in the spirit of introducing a set of six written essays and three hybrid audiovisual/written essays, all of them concerned with geographically situated film materials. The essays are organized according to the topics “Infrastructures and Ecologies,” “Archives and Historicity,” and “Concepts and Metaphors.” Ultimately, this Introduction to the special issue “Filmic Matter and Geographic Specificity” frames these essays as models of a vision of geographic specificity’s material survival, as well as of how speaking about the survival of matter is indissolubly linked to place.

Keywords: materialism, film theory, philosophy, geographic specificity

Received: October 2, 2025; Accepted: December 22, 2025; Published: February 3, 2026  Show citation