The landscape of landscape (and film)

When I first found Martin Lefebvre's volume Landscape and Film, I was pretty happy, because Lefebvre's arguments about the way landscape functions matched pretty closely with what I wanted to look at. Landscape and Film was published in 2006, and since then, a few interesting projects have gotten underway, namely a book involving my current research inspiration, Tom Gunning, called Cinema and Landscape.

It was published in 2009. It touts itself as "the most comprehensive study of film landscapes ever published."

As part of a continuing project with Cinema and Landscape, I learned that an international conference on "Cinema and Landscape" was held in the United Kingdom at the University of Sheffield, less than a month ago! Zut! I just missed it by a few weeks and a few thousand miles. The topics were to include:

landscapes of national cinemas; aesthetics; landscape and film; place, identity and the role of film; geo-political film-scapes; film directors and landscapes; new readings in film geography; landscape and film form; travel, journeys and filmic landscapes...And more!

That "and more" part has me especially excited. Imagine the possibilities of "And More!" I also found a recent graduate conference in landscape studies had concluded in March at Indiana University, the 2010 Landscape, Space, and Place Conference. The topics for this one include:

landscape ecology; landscape architecture; cultural landscape; symbolic landscape; sense of place; historical landscape; landscape and the arts; landscape-related pedagogy

I also found that The Society For Landscape Studies held a "Spring Field Weekend" in mid April, in conjunction with the Sussex Archaeological Society. It seems Spring is the time to hold conferences, and I just missed the boat. Luckily, many conferences post past paper abstracts, like the Landscape, Place, and Space Conference in Indiana...so hopefully I won't have to wait too long to see what this year's event was all about.

Another conference taking place in the United Kingdom is the Emerging Landscapes conference at University of Westminster, a joint venture between The School of Architecture and the Built Environment and The School of Media, the Arts, and Design. Although the deadline for papers has passed, the conference is June 25-27, I wonder how one might find a way to sneak in and attend a few lectures...

It seems in general that I've missed the conferences for this go-round, at least for submitting papers; and they don't have much in the way of archived video or other media, at least at this point in time. Abstracts might be useful to understand what conversations people are having, but actually attending one of these seems like it would yield the greatest results.