Locating Europe: Recommendations and overview

Locating Europe through popular culture is not difficult. On international screens, Europe appears to be literally all over the place. European services attract international productions to ‘media meccas’ like Leavesden Studios in London, to overwhelming natural locations in Iceland, to ‘medieval’ nature in Northern Ireland or to strategically coordinated production services across the Czech Republic. Iceland appears in James Bond films, Berlin in American series like Homeland, Czech locations represent Poland in Danish drama, while international players on the market - like HBO and Netflix – increasingly film their productions on-location across the European continent.
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Today, locations have become ‘big business’ in film and television production. As a result, places are traded like never before, commercialized through screened popular culture and rebranded afterwards as tourist attractions. As much screened popular culture is adapted from printed media, literary place branding also plays an important part in reimagining European places. The relationship between popular culture and places is a powerful tool in catching the attention of media users, visitors and producers.
Through nine analytical and two methodological chapters, this report presents research into location placement in a range of exemplary European crime narratives in three sections with different geographical scopes. A focus on the UK is due to its dominance in the genre, but the report pays profiled attention towards the Nordic region and also considers the fast rising South-Eastern European locations and settings in popular crime narratives. On the one hand, focusing on these locations provides an opportunity to see patterns in physical location placement on a continental level. On the other hand, it is also possible to decipher contours of ideologies of European places in popular culture. In other words, locations are clearly still a practical matter in producing popular culture, but at the same time, locations motivate a shift in the cognitive geography of Europe: i.e. showing attention to lesser known places across the continent generates a more widespread consciousness around a European space.