Explorers on Screen

Sue Matheson is Full Professor of English at the University College of the North in Manitoba, Canada. Her interests in film, culture, and literature may be found in more than sixty articles published in a wide range of books and scholarly journals. She is the editor of Love in Western Film and Television: Happy Hearts and Lonely Trails, A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western, Women in the Western and The Good, the Bad and the Ancient: Essays on the Greco-Roman Influence in Westerns. She is the author of The Westerns and War Films of John Ford and The John Ford Encyclopedia. Cynthia J. Miller is a cultural anthropologist specializing in visual media. She teaches in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College, and is the editor or co-editor of twenty scholarly volumes, including Journeys Into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horror (2023), as well as the author of dozens of articles in journals and edited scholarly volumes. Cynthia is the recipient of the Peter C. Rollins prize for a book-length work in popular culture, and the James Welsh prize for lifetime achievement in adaptation studies.

This well-curated collection, covering the gamut of screen history from the silent era to the present, gets to the heart of what an explorer is. As they journey to new physical, psychological and cultural territories, these explorers find acceptance or ostracism, representative of their perceived roles as saviours, helpmates or cultural imperialists. Until now, their cinematic portrayals have received scant scholarly attention, but this volume gives them their due, reminding viewers not only of their exciting, gripping experiences but also of the complicated, often controversial, issues that they represent.

• Introduction: Explorers on Screen—Why Thrilling MattersSue MathesonPart I. Types and Stereotypes1. The North American Explorer: Types and Comic StereotypesAdrian Manning2. Mapping Mother India in Vidya’s Kahaani (2012)Adith Suresh and Sony Jalarajan Raj3. A Necessary Adventure: Child Explorers and the Senses of BelongingMatthew Cipa4. Nerdy is the New Sexy: Adventuring Librarians in The Mummy (1999) and The Librarian (2006)Alley Marie Jordan5. The Inward Explorer and the Outward Jester: Benjamin Christensen’s Film Adaptation of Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)Andrew GrossmanPart II. Othering People and Places6. Footprints in the Sand: The Well-Worn Path of Middle East Exploration in FilmMat Hardy and Sally Totman7. Audrey Hepburn’s Adventures in Peliculas de la Selva: Hollywood and Othering in The Nun’s Story (1959) and Green Mansions (1959)Etienne Boumans8. Envisioning the Other: Spatial Imagination in Ang Li’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)Katheryn M. Linduff9. Mountains and Mysticism: Escapism and Authenticity in the Cinematic Exploration of the HimalayaTim Chamberlain10. Adventures in Xenophobia: The Light at the Edge of the World (1971) as a Cultural ArtifactDavid MelbyePart III. The Lore in Explore11. “Bring Me His Cojones”: The Mythical West of Fred Schepisi’s Barbarosa (1982)Tom Prasch12. Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975)—the Western Meets Shintō kannagara Sue Matheson13. “Alright, Kid. Ready for an Adventure?”: Generic/Mythic Redefinition in Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian (2019–) and The Book of Boba Fett (2021–2022)Joanne Vrignaud14. The Queen and the Cartographer: Constructing Heroes in Disney’s Atlantis FilmsAidan Norrie15. Antipodean Exploration: The Films of Werner HerzogRoger HillmanPart IV. History Remade16. Myth/History: Richard Burton in Mountains of the Moon (1990)Jon Cowans17. Adapting Daniel Boone, Adapting AmericaHope Hodgkins18. The Darker Side of Indiana Jones: Dunhuang, Indy’s Prototypes, and the Temple of Doom (1984)Shuchen Wang19. “The Impossible Comes to Screen”: Real and Reel Exploration in S.O.S. Iceberg (1933)Iris Haukamp20. Burke & Wills (1985) and Wills & Burke (1985): Lost in the Desert and Deserted by the AudienceDean Brandum