The Machine Aesthetic

Film was allied with live performance because of its movement and also because many actors started in vaudeville. Hollywood often reproduced Broadway plays, prompting critics to try to define what might be specifically cinematographic, such as a facility for shifting from one layer of consciousness to another. Film allowed for a new kind of experience of dramatic art, more remote than theater in some ways but also endowed with new resources such as the close-up, location shooting, and a broad public sometimes apt for unaccustomed themes and treatments. Urban anonymity and the social effects of an increasingly mechanized environment were recurrent themes. The displacement of silent film by talkies was widely lamented, often on the grounds that silent film was just coming into its own as an art form, an early instance of questioning the reliability of technological progress.

Early Years, Early Films

Rosi's cinematic sensibility was influenced by his father's photography and sketching, his formative years he spent in Naples, and his apprenticeship with Visconti. La sfida (The Challenge, 1958), his debut work, which shows great affinity with the work of Cartier-Bresson, announces Rosi's future themes: the seductions and traps of power, the collusion between organized crime and business, the harsh social reality of Italy's South. His second, more ambitious work, I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), is one of the first Italian films confronting the cultural and ethnic issues arising from southern Italian emigration. The film, which alternates documentary-like scenes with popular Italian comedy, is enhanced by the location shooting that will become a hallmark of Rosi's cinema. Rosi departs from the overly melodramatic style of La sfida and develops an aesthetic characterized by a realist exactness of space and penchant for exploring psychological states of mind.

Operatic Microhistory

Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965), a thematic departure from earlier films, is a bold experiment in shooting “freely” without a script. The film, informed by a keen sense of class consciousness and Rosi's penchant for location shooting, centers on the career of a matador, Miguel Mateo “Miguelín,” a peon who leaves the country for the city to escape poverty. Visually, Rosi’s searing exposure of the corruption and exploitation rampant in contemporary Spain is achieved through the use of a long 300mm lens. Sacrificial rituals also lie at the heart of Carmen (Bizet’s Carmen, 1984), Rosi's only experiment in opera adaptation. Also shot in Andalusia and featuring actual soldiers, gypsies, and locals, Carmen counterposes realistic settings to staged theatricality.

Conclusion

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding that commoditize cultural signs in line with the states’ soft power objectives. Drawing from examples of recent location-shot film and media, including En Chen’s Island Etude, Chi Po-lin’s Beyond Beauty, and Zhejiang TV's Keep Running, I demonstrate how location shooting since Taiwan’s membership in the WTO has been institutionalized within the discursive contours of the “Love Taiwan” movement, a process which can be compared with the PRC’s marketing of the “Chinese Dream” to domestic tourists via convergent and place-based film and televisual media. While the resulting national brands could not appear more different, these discourses operate on the shared assumption that for place identities to be readily consumable and exportable, they must be coherent within a global “experience economy” that circulates images of distinctive yet fixed cultural identities. This reduction of place into readily consumable cultural signs can be contrasted with the enigmatic representation of Shanghai found in Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew, which fashions on-screen Doreen Massey’s notion of the “progressive place,” a poststructuralist reinterpretation of place that focuses on conflicting sociocultural processes that imbue spaces with richly layered meanings. Building on Massey's concept of the progressive place, this chapter argues that location-shot film and media in China and Taiwan, more than offering diversely themed experiences, have untapped potential in cultivating alternative public cultures through reflexive, minor, and performative modes of place making.

Hou Xiaoxian as Ambassador

This chapter closely traces the evolution of Hou Xiaoxian's contentious modes of place making while he shot on-location in China for the “Taiwan Trilogy," where Southern Chinese locales sometimes substituted for Taiwan’s historical settings. Location shooting in China for City of Sadness presented Hou with his first opportunity to perform a role as a cultural ambassador in an unprecedented period of cross-strait geopolitical thaw. After cross-strait relations became more normalized, Hou widely publicized his intentions of location shooting in Fujian for The Puppetmaster (1993). During this shoot, Hou articulated his theory of “authenticating life,” or the reenactment of lived experience. To authenticate the life of famed Taiwanese puppeteer Li Tianlu, whom he believed to be a living embodiment of Chinese-ness, Hou re-staged live budaixi shows in Fujian, hoping the environmental aura of present-day China would conjure for Li memories of colonial-era Taiwan. Assistant director Chen Huaien, however, counters that it was Taiwanese culture which required salvaging, not China’s. “Authenticating life,” Chen implied, relied on inauthentic means of reenactment to produce what only felt superficially authentic. The final section explores this contradiction as it is manifested in Good Men, Good Women (1995) – Hou’s first, and final film to feature present-day Chinese settings. I demonstrate that the filmmakers were unable to experience their production environments in Guangdong as anything more than through a “tourist gaze.” Hou finally experienced the constraints of “authenticating life,” and more broadly, the complexities of salvaging cultural Chinese heritage in an increasingly volatile period of cross-strait relations.

The Authorship of Place

The Authorship of Place is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s. Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises. In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing transformed sites of film production into symbolically meaningful places of collective memories and aspirations. These production practices ultimately enabled auteurs to experiment with imagining communities in novel and contentious ways. Guiding readers on a cross-strait tour of prominent shooting locations for the New Chinese Cinemas, this book shows how auteurs sought out their disappearing cultural heritage by reenacting lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage while shooting on-location. This was an especially daunting task when auteurs encountered the shooting locations as spaces of unresolved historical, social, and geopolitical contestations, tensions which were only intensified by the impact of filmmaking on rural communities. This book demonstrates how complex circumstances surrounding location shooting were pivotal in shaping representations of the rural on-screen, as well as the production communities, institutions, and industries off-screen. Bringing together cutting-edge perspectives in cultural geography and media anthropology, this work revises Chinese film history and theorizes ground-breaking approaches for investigating the cultural politics of film authorship and production.

Chapter 26

Chapter 26 is devoted entirely to Cary Grant’s most famous and frequently revived film, North by Northwest (1959). It argues that North by Northwest is not just a great Cary Grant film, it is the Cary Grant film; that is, a summation of his entire career. The chapter discusses the making of the film, beginning with Ernest Lehmann’s screenplay. Lehmann set out to write “the Hitchcock film to end all Hitchcock films”, and this evidently included many elements of the three previous Hitchcock-Grant collaborations: Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), and To Catch a Thief (1955). Each of the five acts of North by Northwest, it is argued, puts the star through the paces of a single Cary Grant film. At the beginning of each act, his character is initially debonair and nonchalant, but then steadily becomes more tense, alarmed and threatened. This is brilliantly realized in the film’s climactic third act, when Roger O. Thornhill is chased across an empty prairie by a crop dusting plane. Both absurdly excessive and genuinely thrilling at the same time, the scene is now one of the most iconic moments in cinema history. The chapter details the film’s extensive location shooting, including time at Mount Rushmore for the final scene. It considers Eve Marie Saint as the quintessential Hitchcock blonde, and it discusses the film’s reception from its first release in 1959 to its modern reputation as a highly influential, classic film.

Chapter 25

Cary Grant and Betsy Drake’s marriage limped forward for two years after his affair with Sophia Loren. In the midst of this, Loren arrived in Hollywood and Grant began pursuing her again, asking her to marry him. He was finishing Kiss Them for Me (1957) at the time. Producer Jerry Wald had been trying to film this Second World War story for years, but it was only when Grant signed to star in it that the project got the green light. Grant enjoyed working with the film’s director, Stanley Donen, but he was ill-suited to play a soldier having weekend leave in San Francisco. The film was one of the very few flops in his later career. He then made Houseboat (1958). Drake had written the original screenplay thinking that she and Grant might star in the film together. At Grant’s request, the studio assigned other writers to rewrite it as a vehicle for Sophia Loren. The comedy, about an Italian nanny falling in love with her boss, culminates in their marriage. This was a difficult scene for the stars to film after Loren refused Grant’s own proposal. Indiscreet (1958), directed by Stanley Donen and co-starring Ingrid Bergman, was a happier production. This delightfully sophisticated romantic comedy benefits from Donen’s imaginative direction and from location shooting that captures the glamour of the London setting.

From Stage to Screen

Oklahoma! was a surprising success on Broadway, and although the Theatre Guild considered other possible creative teams for new musicals, the now-sealed Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership proved hard to resist. A touring company was in place by late summer 1943, and Oklahoma! traveled internationally after the end of World War II (not least, to London’s West End in 1947); meanwhile, the Guild needed to replace cast members leaving one or other productions of the show. In 1953, Rodgers and Hammerstein bought the Guild’s rights to all three of the shows they had done under its auspices (including Carousel and Allegro). In part, this was to maximize their profits from intended film versions. The 1955 film of Oklahoma! took advantage of the new Todd-AO wide-screen process and location shooting to produce a vivid rendition of the show that, however, also needed to be followed, or resisted, in subsequent stage versions.

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.