Location Shooting Research Articles

The Sense of an Ending: Culture, Capital, and the Fate of (Late) Modern Europe in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999)

As the imaginary deadline or vanishing point of the turn of millennium was drawing ever closer, its associated anxieties and apocalyptic woes offered a fertile breeding ground for suspense, horror, and the fantastic to experience a resurgence in Western cinemas. Roman Polanski’s fifteenth feature film The Ninth Gate, released in 1999, can be read among the various auteur-helmed evidences of such a trend, but also as a self-conscious exercise in the kind of trans-European filmmaking being promoted at the time within the continent, one in which Polanski himself had, willingly or not, already been cutting his teeth for almost two decades after his spiteful return from the US and Hollywood in the late 1970s. On the back of a border-crossing journey in search for three demonic books, this essay will argue, The Ninth Gate manages to discursively interlace both facets. The result, by way of an intermedial concern with the world of literature, a generic involvement with the supernatural, and a meticulous mobilization of cinematic space, location shooting and architecture, is a cynical, self-deprecating reflection on the precarious state of Europe at the time, caught between the memories of glorious but long-fading splendor and a crippling uncertainty about its future and place in an increasingly globalized world.

Materializing the digital landscape: the cinema–ecology complex and Chinese fantasy media

AbstractContemporary cinema and media studies are marked by a materialist turn that highlights material elements, such as objects, non-human agencies, the environment and places on and off screen, as well as the materiality of media productions and consumption. This article expands on the important scholarship of “materialist” media studies as well as existing ecocinema scholarship by stressing the materiality of digital landscapes in contemporary Chinese fantasy (or qihuan and xuanhuan) film and television works that have gained significant popularity in China and Hong Kong. Specifically, this article examines the animist landscape in film and television adaptions of Eternal Love, a fantasy romance television serial that loosely draws on Daoist mythology. Focusing on the material aspects of digital landscapes of Chinese fantasy cinema, the article develops the notion of the “cinema–ecology complex” to address the materiality of digital landscapes, the cinematic footprint of digitally enhanced landscapes through location shooting and the consumption of landscapes as scenic spots, including daka practices, in film studio cities and related film-induced tourism. Ultimately, this article calls for a textual–infrastructural approach in cinema and media studies, which tends to reorient to the infrastructural aspects of media production, distribution and consumption.

Review: Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History, by Charles L. Leavitt IV

Review: <i>Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History</i>, by Charles L. Leavitt IV

Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema

Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema Parichay Patra (bio) Priya Jaikumar. Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 398 pages. $109.95 cloth. $29.95 paperback. Why should we be so scared of a cosmic or cosmological ambition in cinema? It has always been part of the potential—and destiny—of film to mix the smallest with the largest, the immediate everyday with the longue durée of grand history, the microscopic with the macroscopic. —Adrian Martin, “ ‘The Tree of Life’: Great Events and Ordinary People” (2011) Priya Jaikumar’s Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space is a spatial film historiography and much more than what it usually means. It asks a number of complex questions in the context of Indian film historiography, Indian cinema studies, and the various modes of film history writing in general. Jaikumar presents several arguments that are located in apparently disjointed temporalities and makes a strong case for the reconsideration of spatiality in cinema [End Page 101] studies. It should be noted that the historicist research dominates Indian cinema studies, as opposed to some other views that intended to locate Indian cinema in mythological time and narratives. However, spatial history remained largely ignored. Jaikumar’s work addresses this lack in its own idiosyncratic ways. The book has a complex structure and varied, deceptively disjointed areas of interest. This highly ambitious project defies categorization; it acknowledges its debt to 1970s screen theory yet dissociates itself from the continuation of such legacy through its novel sites of inquiry. Its interdisciplinarity has far-reaching connotations and consequences for Indian cinema studies. The book successfully challenges disciplinary conventions and epistemic borders within several established practices and points out the dearth of prevalent cinema studies narrative(s) in India. For Jaikumar, this dearth might mean the absence of spatiality: her book presents the dominant narrative’s inability to explore the potential of space in the discussion on Indian cinema and India as a location for cinema. In this context, Jaikumar engages with such significant works as Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Edward Soja’s political geography to develop her theoretical framework. Jaikumar presents a densely informed case that engages with filmed space, profilmic space, the politics and poetics of location shooting and abstraction, the role of the cinematographic apparatus, and above all the idea of a multiplicity of spatial histories spanning over centuries. The afterlives that she presents are mostly unpredictable, as proclaimed in the book; this only adds to the text’s own unpredictability within the larger fabric of Indian film studies. In several interviews related to her most recent (and, I would say, pathbreaking) book, Jaikumar refers to the infamous U.S. wars in the Middle East as an event that triggered her interest in the politics of specific geographies, the sudden media-induced global visibility of apparently obscure locations and spaces.1 As a researcher who worked extensively on empire cinema and the colonial lives of filmmaking practices in South Asia, Jaikumar has always maintained her distance from the more dominant trends and methodologies in Indian cinema studies. Her previous book, on empire cinema, began with a call to abandon “the rubric of national cinemas.”2 In Where Histories Reside, Jaikumar introduces a spatial film historiography that is sui generis in Indian cinema studies. Here her concentration on fragmented spaces and multiple temporalities moves beyond the dominating framework of the national. The idea of space has not been completely overlooked and ignored in Indian cinematic histories. There is historical research [End Page 102] on the formation of Bombay and its cinema, work treating the city as a cinematic archive, and a 2012 volume of verbal and visual essays that explores “the multiple subjectivities related to cinema and the watermarks it has left on the body of a city.”3 However, Jai-kumar’s work is not restricted to the urban space and the cinematic urbanity: hers is an eclectic collection of spatialities, a sustained theorization of this historiographic model. The novelty of Jaikumar’s approach becomes evident as we look at the dominant historiographies in Indian cinema studies in retrospect. According to Ranjani Mazumdar, the latter has...

Ipar Haizearen Erronka: A boat trip from the Basque Country to Newfoundland

The nature of animated cinema involves the creation of any realistic or fantastical characters, places, and situations. Animation can be used to take characters far from their hometowns on believable journeys without big budgets used on location shooting. The Basque animated feature film Ipar Haizearen Erronka (The Challenge of the North Wind), directed in 1992 by Juanba Berasategi, illustrates how animation can represent a journey and a historic reality in a plausible way. The movie depicts a Basque whale hunting vessel travelling to the wild coast of Newfoundland, Canada in the sixteenth century. Typically, Basque live action movies in the 80s would recreate foreign locations with nearby settings. Ipar Haizearen Erronka avoids this problem by showing America through drawings. In this paper, we will use the movie Ipar Haizearen Erronka to interpret how animation uses backgrounds and objects to represent a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and determine the realistic accuracy of the social and historical moments represented in the movie. We will also see how this journey embodies the characteristics of the literary genre of Bildungsroman, as well as the narrative structures pointed out by Vladimir Propp’s folktale and Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The study also focuses on how the film depicts the most representative characteristics of the journey, and how they are used as filming narrative resources. A closer look will be taken into the main vessels, the captain's logbook, the map, the historical context of the sailing of the ship, the maritime laws where sexism is abundant, the financing of the trip, and the work on board.

Producing Outside the Box: Creative Strategies in the Work of Betty E. Box, 1957–64

This article considers the working practices of British cinema's only major female film producer during the early-to-mid post-Second World War era, Betty E. Box (1915–99). Via reference to her extensive archive at the British Film Institute and the films Campbell's Kingdom (1957), The Wind Cannot Read (1958) and Hot Enough for June (1964), the article charts how Box initially envisaged multi-generational casting for roles that were eventually taken by long-term collaborator Dirk Bogarde. It considers the manner in which she approached the diplomatic complexities of location shooting, with particular focus on Ralph Thomas's military romance The Wind Cannot Read, the first British film to be shot in India for twenty years at the time of its production. The reasoning for Box's ongoing absence, as a female creative figure, from scholarship addressing British cinema, and film production more generally, will also be addressed.

UHD-2/8K Camera Recorder Using Organic CMOS Image Sensor

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">We developed an ultrahigh-definition (UHD)-2/8K camera recorder that uses a complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor with an organic thin-film, instead of photodiodes for the opto-electrical conversion element. The advent of UHD-2/8K Super Hi-Vision broadcasts and an increase in the production of UHD-2/8K programs across a variety of genres necessitate the development of a sensor with a good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high-dynamic range (HDR) to capture the full range of HDR video. To ensure successful use of this sensor, we studied the level diagrams (e.g., balancing of sensitivity, SNR, and dynamic range) that would best fit the sensor’s characteristics and use its strengths, and then proceeded accordingly. For the current UHD-2/8K location shooting, a workflow is needed to record raw data and post-process them into a practical video format. To implement a more efficient workflow, we chose to use Grass Valley HQX compression encoding while adding features that make it possible to store video data in a compressed form and simultaneously generate high-definition television (HDTV) proxy data. The workflow that we envisioned uses proxy data for offline editing and relinks them using online editing equipment.</i>

Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting by Daniel Steinhart (review)

Reviewed by: Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting by Daniel Steinhart Kallan Benjamin Steinhart, Daniel. Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. In Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting, Daniel Steinhart historicizes Hollywood’s current globalized filmmaking practices by offering a detailed historical study of post–World War II Hollywood’s overseas production. Focusing on the late 1940s to early 1960s, Steinhart combines archival research with formal visual analysis to argue that multiple and multifaceted issues—political, economic, geographical, logistical, stylistic, technical, and interpersonal—shaped postwar overseas (that is, “runaway”) production. Any readers who assume that exploitative economic aims alone can account for Hollywood’s shift into overseas production will come away from Steinhart’s study convinced of the more complicated and intersecting forces at play. He argues that “Hollywood’s global power…was at once accommodating and assertive” and offers persuasive examples of the trade-offs involved in intercultural exchanges of talent and craft. Though firmly rooted in the postwar period, Steinhart frames his study in terms of current production practices, suggesting that “[i]n the end, this is a story that helps provide some perspective on the globalized world of today” (20). The book is organized into three sections. The first covers the cultural and industrial contexts surrounding postwar production and explores the complex mix of incentives that lured Hollywood filmmakers overseas. In line with other scholarship, Steinhart shows that access to frozen funds, foreign subsidies, and inexpensive labor enticed Hollywood filmmakers to shoot their films abroad. However, he takes his analysis beyond economic factors to explore filmmakers’ creative motives, particularly their desire to achieve greater realism through authentic foreign location shoots as postwar audiences grew savvier about recognizing Hollywood backlot versions of foreign locales. Steinhart also presents a case study in each section; he first looks at Moby Dick (1956) and unearths the intertwined creative, political, and economic incentives that lead director John Huston to shoot the film in several foreign countries and out at sea. “There’s nothing that compares with the fury of a real storm at sea,” said Huston, as quoted by Steinhart, but he was also taking advantage of a tax exemption for Americans working abroad and avoiding domestic red-baiting hysteria (58). After establishing the industrial, cultural, and economic contexts surrounding Hollywood’s expansion of overseas production, Steinhart uses the book’s second section to describe the actual experience of shooting in a foreign country for filmmakers and below-the-line crew. Anecdotes about American filmmakers adjusting to European production cultures are a highlight; for example, director Vincent Sherman was bewildered by the union-sanctioned twice daily tea breaks he encountered in the UK: “He wrote to studio head Jack Warner in Burbank: ‘Just as we were ready to shoot—came a tea break. This meant that everybody, from the electricians way up high on down—had to stop to get tea!!’” (114). In addition to British teatime (and leisurely Italian morning coffees), runaway productions faced challenges related to infrastructure, equipment, technology, and, importantly for Steinhart, personnel. He writes: “the interchange of people and practices was itself a new production challenge” (94). This exchange of methods between Hollywood filmmakers and local crews is central to Steinhart’s argument. “In going abroad to shoot motion pictures in these countries, Hollywood filmmakers encountered some production practices that resonated with the industry’s way of making movies and other diverging methods. I contend that this encounter wasn’t so much transnational as it was transcultural.” While he allows that scholarship on transnationalism in film studies [End Page 84] “has generated rich insights into the migration of filmmakers, the distribution patterns of films, and the contested identity of national cinemas,” Steinhart's own transcultural approach suggests that Hollywood norms, rather than national identity, most influenced filmmakers’ work abroad (15). At the same time, Hollywood crews absorbed local production cultures, and foreign settings guided filmmaking choices. Runaway productions thus involved a constant give-and-take between opposing forces—between imposing Hollywood methods and adapting to local norms, but also between condescending to “‘native’ casts and crews” and appreciating the skills of local craftspeople, taking advantage...

Right Here in Hollywood: The Greatest Story Ever Told, the American West, and the American Film Worker

Shot on location in the United States, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1963) is an uneasy balance of spirituality, capitalism, nationalism, and the mythology of the American West. Location shooting in the United States was unique in the postwar period, but practices echoed those used in foreign runaway productions.

A 1973 &lt;em&gt;Aramco World&lt;/em&gt; Magazine Feature on Location Shooting in Lebanon

A 1973 feature on location shooting in Lebanon, published in Aramco World magazine, highlights the contemporaneous status of Beirut as an urban center of transnational and transregional media production. The feature's coverage of Honey Baby Honey Baby (1974), a US Black independent prestige film shot on location in Lebanon, occasions a reconsideration of the film's largely lost legacies, alongside the possibilities and limits of Middle East oil company publications for archival historiographies of globally circulating media.

Runaway Hollywood: Internalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting by Daniel Steinhart

Runaway Hollywood: Internalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting by Daniel Steinhart

On Location: Tracking Secret Agents and Films, between Bombay and Beirut

By focusing on Bombay commercial productions shot on location in Beirut, I consider why Lebanon became a prominent destination for foreign film productions between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. The ensuing films' narratives were motivated not only by the Lebanese capital's prominence in globally popular spy-action genres, but also by material histories of contraband circuits (including the circulation of films) and cash flows of foreign exchange. I highlight the wider convergence of several industries on location in Beirut in order to expand histories of both postwar location shooting and spy-action genres, and to foreground routes of South-South media production, subtitling, and distribution.

‘La Nouvelle Vague, elle t’emm---!’ Louis Malle, Zazie dans le métro and the French New Wave

ABSTRACTZazie dans le métro (1960) appears as a quintessentially New Wave film with its youthful protagonist, its location shooting and its many references to cultural history. In addition, the self-conscious play with film technique in Zazie can be seen as a way of exploring the formal specificities of cinema. The film’s deployment of popular genre equates to Raymond Queneau’s use of demotic register and director Louis Malle takes a ludic approach to film grammar (as Queneau does to French grammar) in order to confuse or elide space and time. Yet the film did not meet with the success of other New Wave films and has not been canonized in the same way. This article suggests one explanation may be the comparative lack of indexical connection to a society in a period of acute social change. Indeed, the film challenges the very concept of indexicality through its proliferation of copies and eerie visual jokes about sameness. Zazie dans le métro is a self-contained circuit that seems, at times, almost to mock the New Wave itself.

“Can this hell perhaps be Jules Dassin’s London, which is certainly not the London that belongs to you and me?” Critical responses to depictions of London in The Blue Lamp and Night and The City

1950 was a pivotal year in the production and release of British London-set films. Ealing studios released The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950) in January 1950, while Ealing’s The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) and Pool of London (Basil Dearden, 1951) went into production in the same year. Then, in June 1950, Twentieth-Century Fox released Anglo-American production Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950). For critics, The Blue Lamp sealed Ealing’s reputation to capture a recognisable London, rooted in specific districts with ‘ordinary’ inhabitants with a community ethos. The Blue Lamp set the barometer for London-set films to follow. Indeed, British critics derided Night and the City as an inauthentic depiction of London, one created by ‘outsider’ Jules Dassin, in comparison to Ealing’s ‘familiar’ London. This paper firstly examines of archival documents of the production of location shooting in The Blue Lamp, to demonstrate how the film sealed Ealing’s reputation to capture a recognisable London, rooted in specific districts with ‘ordinary’ inhabitants with a community ethos. It then examines and compares the critical reception of The Blue Lamp and Night and the City, to explore discourses around ‘home-grown’ versus ‘outsider’ perceptions of London in the immediate postwar period.

Gendered Cinematic Landscapes and Production History of Andrew Davies’s Jane Austen From Pride and Prejudice to Sense and Sensibility

This article investigates British writer Andrew Davies' media adaptations of Jane Austen from BBC's Pride and Prejudice (1995) to Sense and Sensibility (2008) and examines how their gendered cinematic landscapes, sexual polemics, location shooting, and production history reframe feminist concerns, societal and class constraints, and complex issues of masculinity and gender bending sexual identity.

The English Village in Emma: An Empirical Study of Heritage Dramas, Location Filming and Host Communities

This article considers location filming for heritage dramas in rural England, focusing on the experiences of the communities that “host” television crews during production. The article specifically examines the filming of the 2009 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, for which the historic Kent village, Chilham, doubled as the fictional Highbury. In doing so, it interrogates two central aspects. First, it illuminates some of the practical issues and economic and cultural impact of location filming for heritage dramas within rural areas. Second, it reflects upon how a community experiences and responds to its status as the host of such a series, considering the impact this has upon questions of identity and heritage. The article draws upon original empirical research, oral history interviews and community archive building conducted within the Chilham community and with Kent Film Office. It explores the memories and experiences of the local population involved in the television location filming process, as both spectators and participants. We thus consider the significance of location from the point of view of those who solicit, resist, profit from, and are caused problems by the temporary transformation of their local space into a television drama shooting space, forging new connections between production practices, location shooting and heritage series and national television/cinema.

The Trail of ’98 (Clarence Brown, 1928) and the Klondike Gold Rush: The Last Big road show of Hollywood’s Silent Film Era

This paper consists in a study of The Trail of ’98 (1928), a film directed by Clarence Brown for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose plot deals with the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada, in 1898. Although this was one of the last great epic films produced by Hollywood in the late 1920s, it remains Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s biggest commercial failure to date. As a result, it is largely unknown and still undocumented today. This paper will aim to create a historical reconstruction of the shooting, establishing its chronology and researching the extreme circumstances of its location shooting. It will also scrutinise the merits of a new, albeit short-lived, widescreen process called Fantom Screen that was used specifically for its exhibition, and its distribution under the concept of road show. Finally, it will analyse the reasoning behind the film’s structure and the specific Hollywood context that led to its commercial failure.

Location shooting in “the Wild East”: risk and masculinity in Hollywood productions in the Philippines

This essay argues that risk has become a crucial part of Hollywood’s transnational media productions, revealing these productions’ links to various forms of masculinity. Entailing the deliberate confrontation of uncertainty, the concept of risk connotes rational decision-making, territorial exploration, economic investment, and, more implicitly, the kinds of masculinities associated with these practices. As such, risk becomes a means of understanding how the older forms of white masculinity associated with empire map onto newer geopolitical contexts, gendering production narratives that seek to mythologize filmmakers as auteurs, businessmen, and danger-seekers. Focusing on American productions in the Philippines, the essay examines risk and white masculinity in three cases of filmmaking: 1970s exploitation cinema commemorated in Machete Maidens Unleashed!; Apocalypse Now and Coppola’s subsequent tourism ventures; and the blockbuster The Bourne Legacy.

‘Up to our eyes in it’: theory and practice of widescreen in the French New Wave

This article explores the relationship between widescreen and the New Wave. The new CinemaScope format arrived in France as the Cahiers du cinéma critics were elaborating the theoretical basis of what would become New Wave filmmaking. Many of the Cahiers critics (Bazin, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette) identified widescreen with the cinema of the future, suggesting that the New Wave would be widescreen. In fact, CinemaScope proved to be a relatively short-lived format and few New Wave directors employed it. In technological terms, the New Wave is much more closely identified with the lightweight equipment of location shooting. Nonetheless, the debates around the introduction of widescreen and the subsequent use of the scope format by Truffaut and Godard illuminate some of the crucial tensions within the New Wave and the culture of film criticism and cinephilia from which it developed. The arguments advanced in favour of widescreen in the mid 1950s were often contradictory and at cross-purposes, as were the filmmaking practices of Truffaut and Godard. Ultimately, the New Wave turned out not to be widescreen but the format nonetheless operated as a space offering a provisional resolution for some of the movement’s key contradictions.

John Grierson’s ‘First principles’ as origin and beginning: the emergence of the documentary tradition in the field of nonfiction film

The exponential increase in academic discussion of documentary since the early 1990s has revived interest in the question – as posed by Bill Nichols – ‘How did documentary film making get started?’.1 The critical or theoretical texts we consider foundational to an academic discipline or subdiscipline such as documentary studies will often frame our answers to questions of origins and beginnings. John Grierson’s ‘minor manifesto of beliefs’, ‘First principles of documentary’ (1932–34), is one such text,2 a short work that John Corner describes as the foundational text of documentary theory.3 Taking Grierson’s intellectual formation and his ‘shrewdly tactical’ manoeuvring into account, Corner summarizes the key arguments of ‘First principles’.4 He notes Grierson’s initial contrast between ‘lower categories’, including travelogues, newsreels, educational and ‘interest’ films, and the newly emergent higher category of documentary.5 I will expand upon this basic but crucial distinction later, as it bears directly upon the question of documentary’s origin and beginnings. Corner also enumerates the ‘major theoretical themes’ of ‘First principles’.6 Grierson’s manifesto advances a notion of realism whose sophistication is sometimes underestimated; it incorporates ‘raw’ location shooting and the filming of real people at work, but moves beyond describing only ‘the surface values of a subject’ to ‘more explosively reveal[ing] the reality of it’.7 More broadly, it promotes documentary’s creative dramatization of information, serving the wider goals of ‘the development of citizenship in modern society’ and ‘the cause of social reform’.8 Corner’s and other writers’ explorations of these themes have contributed significantly to our understanding of Grierson’s definition of documentary. However, one key issue remains unexamined: the stakes involved in consecrating ‘First principles’ as a foundational text.