The Pre-Production of Space: Location Scouting and Location Management Practices in Postwar Cinema

Abstract

This dissertation examines location scouting and location management practices for feature films made in the years following World War II. The thesis understands these aesthetic practices as a form of land use, and relates them to broader forms of environmental management and engineering. Chapter One, the Introduction, outlines spatial approaches to film history and film theory, focusing on the growing body of scholarship on film location, and examining how this work fits within the field of the environmental humanities. The second chapter lays out the media theoretical framework, discussing cultural techniques, and situating film location scouting and location management practices within the longer history of the complex relations we hold with space and place. The discussion relates location scouting to historical practices of land surveying, and takes seriously the implications of “scouting” being the term that was most widely adopted by the film industry to signify the practice of searching for film locations. The dissertation features two main case studies that emerged from archival research. The first, discussed in Chapter Three, focuses on pre-production for the film Mogambo (John Ford, 1953), which was shot in various parts of Central and East Africa. Through close analysis of the images and writings produced during the location “survey” for the film, the chapter shows how location scouting photographs simultaneously reveal and conceal—highlighting attractive scenery that might be suitable for a specific setting in a film, while intentionally leaving out features that would not conform to the film’s narrative and aesthetic. Chapters Four and Five function as a diptych—with the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965) being the hinge. A significant portion of the film was shot on location in the Glen Canyon area of southern Utah and northern Arizona, while engineers from the Bureau of Reclamation were building the Glen Canyon Dam, which would soon flood the area to create Lake Powell. Chapter Four offers a “pre-history’ of Glen Canyon as a film location, examining the visual culture of the region—from Sierra Club photo books to government pamphlets, and from films commissioned by the Bureau of Reclamation to the early 1960s television series Route 66. Chapter Five details the location management for The Greatest Story Ever Told, which was presented in studio publicity as its own technological marvel. Staging such a film in a remote location required major construction, including a location camp that could house the vast cast and crew, as well as large-scale sets that recreated the “Holy Land” in the desert of the American Southwest. Techniques of set design that had been honed on a soundstage were applied to a much larger backdrop: nature treated as a blank canvas, to be manipulated at will. Chapter Six examines ways that location scouting can be a generative aesthetic practice in its own right. It analyzes the work of two quite different filmmakers: Samuel Fuller and Pier Paolo Pasolini, showing how both offered an aesthetic program that honors the subtleties of place, with people reacting to qualities of the environment, rather than approaching places as material to be shaped.