Taking Place

LOCATION AND THE MOVING IMAGE

JOHN DAVID RHODES

AND ELENA GORFINKEL
EDITORS

University of Minnesota Press

MINNEAPOLIS · LONDON
A version of chapter 5 was previously published in October 128
(Spring 2009). An Italian version was published in two parts
in Bianco e nero 560 (November 2008) and 561–562 (May
2009).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taking place : location and the moving image / John David
Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel [editors].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6516-7 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-6517-4 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Setting and scenery. 2. Place (Philosophy)
in motion pictures. 3. Space in motion pictures. 4. Cities and
towns in motion pictures. 5. Motion picture locations.  I.
Rhodes, John David. II. Gorfinkel, Elena.
PN1995.9.S4T35 2011
791.430'25—dc22
                                  2010048759

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator

and employer.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction: The Matter of Places
ELENA GORFINKEL AND JOHN DAVID RHODES

Toward the end of his Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer writes some of the most
explicitly humanist passages to be found in the book, a book whose subtitle is, we
should remember, The Redemption of Physical Reality. In the final chapter, under
the subheading “Moments of Everyday Life,” Kracauer wonders if the “small units”
of contingent, material existence captured on and by film have a power over and
above their service and enchainment to a film’s plot-driven, narrative project. Such
a small unit, Kracauer contends,

no doubt . . . is intended to advance the story to which it belongs, but it

also affects us strongly, or even primarily, as just a fragmentary moment
of visible reality, surrounded, as it were, by a fringe of indeterminate vis-
ible meanings. And in this capacity the moment disengages itself from
the conflict, the belief, the adventure, toward which the whole of the story
converges. A face on the screen may attract us as a singular manifestation
of fear or happiness regardless of the events which motivate its expression.
A street serving as the background to some quarrel or love affair may rush
to the fore and produce an intoxicating effect. Street and face, then, open
up a dimension much wider than that of the plots which they sustain.1

This is an account of a spectatorship that is both distracted and overcathected. A

concentration on what might be the “wrong” or unimportant part of the image
threatens (or promises) to usurp the stately or hurried progress of the narrative,
and a world of meaning that the image does not mean to impart seems to pour
down on us from the screen. Feminist film theory would take up the challenge
of the face’s ability to arrest narrative, while semioticians have elaborated an un-
derstanding of what happens when we find other meanings in images than the
ones we presume were intended.2 But the street’s ability to enthrall us has not
been as well understood. When the background suddenly becomes foreground

vii
viii | ELENA GORFINKEL AND JOHN DAVID RHODES

and we wonder, “What is that place?” or else we murmur, “I know that place!” we
register something—an experience of place through the moving image—about
which surprisingly little has been said.3
Our experience of the moving image is intimately connected to our experience
of place. That “movies take place” (pace Michael Snow) is a cliché of both realist
location shooting and avant-garde film practice. Nevertheless, the phrase continues
to resonate richly. Films are shot either on location or in the studio. In the first
case, films take actual places—take images of places, record impressions of the
world’s surfaces—and archive them on celluloid. This seemingly natural ability
of the cinema to record place enthralled early filmmakers, who devoted endless
reels of film to panoramas (urban, rural, familiar, foreign) or to urban traveling
shots often made by standing a camera on a streetcar and letting it capture the life
of a city as seen by an unblinking, one-eyed commuter. Even in studio shooting,
film continues to exert its natural affinity to act as archiving agent. Whether or
not we know it, we are being given information about the nature of Paramount’s
two main shooting stages when we look at the closing scenes of White Christmas,
while similarly, Fellini’s La dolce vita is an object lesson in the spatial capacities
of Stage 5 at Cinecittà.
But beyond what they record, document, and archive, films also take place
in another way: they have to be seen somewhere. The space of the theater, while
it has been under threat by “home entertainment” for the last half century, has
been and continues to be a powerful social and psychic space—a space, in fact,
where the social and the psychic seem most to lose their distinctness and bleed,
in darkness and in light, into one another. Very often, an experience of a film may
be memorable less for the film itself and more for the theater in which one has
seen it. Films and other moving image artifacts (video installations, site-specific
projections) may also be produced to be seen in one specific place alone. In this
case, film’s apparent affinities to be reproduced and shown anywhere are refused.
Instead, it is forced to work with and against its nature: it must take place and
perhaps represent place, but only in this place and nowhere else.
Cinema must, by its very nature, exhibit places to its spectators and lure its
spectators to places of exhibition. Despite the chiasmic logic of this statement,
which may at first appear as nothing more than a truism, its rich implications
have been rarely considered in detail by moving image historians. This lacuna
in film studies is all the more surprising given the recent attention devoted to
the study of place by scholars working in, across, and between the disciplines
of geography, philosophy, history, art history, and literary studies. Our intention
in this collection is to put this growing body of work on place in conversation
 INTRODUCTION | ix

with cutting-edge historical and theoretical scholarship on moving image media.

Edward S. Casey—one of the leading contributors to place studies in the field
of philosophy—has claimed that our “immediate placement” as subjects “counts
for much more than is usually imagined. More, for instance, than serving as a
mere backdrop for concrete actions or thoughts. Place itself is concrete and at one
with action and thought.”4 Casey’s emphasis on the centrality of place to the con-
stitution of subjectivity needs to be adopted and adapted for the study of moving
image media. The metaphor of the “backdrop,” in fact, resonates with the typical
figure–ground relations that obtain in the construction and consumption of moving
images: very often, the place of the image is registered as mere “backdrop”—the
necessary material support for the human action that will transpire before it. This
“ground,” however, does more than support the action; the essays we have collected
here demonstrate that the place or location of the moving image is, like the place
of human subjectivity, “at one with action and thought.”
In a sense, all these essays seek to particularize our understanding of the
emplacement, the location, of the moving image, and in that sense, they embrace
Casey’s understanding of place as “the phenomenal particularization of ‘being in the
world.’”5 These essays tend to look at what has been overlooked, taken for granted,
or ignored. Thus the emphasis—even overemphasis—on place as a heuristic,
practiced in concert with a diverse array of theories and methodologies, produces
not only new readings of individual moving image artifacts but, more important,
a new understanding of how the moving image works, how it constitutes itself in
and through emplacement, how we may understand it anew and afresh through
the particularizing lens of place.
Place, however necessary it is as the precondition of human subjectivity, is
not only a constitutive force but a constructive one as well. As J. Nicholas Entrikin
suggests, “our relations to place and culture become elements in the construction
of our individual and collective identities.”6 Identity is constructed in and through
place, whether by our embrace of a place, our inhabitation of a particular point in
space, or by our rejection of and departure from a given place and our movement
toward, adoption and inhabitation of, another. The notion that place inflects and
informs the construction of human identity (which is only one aspect of human
subjectivity) might seem to operate under the assumption that place itself is a
natural category: it is the land, the sea, the sky above. Recent scholarship in hu-
man geography has sought rigorously to demonstrate, however, that place itself
is constructed and is something that has already been acted on prior to its acting
on the human subject.7 Place, after all, is a subset of that larger category, space,
and as Henri Lefebvre has famously taught us, “(social) space is a (social) product.”8
x | ELENA GORFINKEL AND JOHN DAVID RHODES

Cinema, one of the primary moving image technologies studied in this collection,
is, as we know, a social product as well: it is produced collectively and consumed
collectively. The places and spaces of its production and consumption are also,
moreover, vital to any understanding of its aesthetic, political, or cultural agency.
To take only the most obvious and convenient example, one cannot understand
the textual construction of classical Hollywood filmmaking without understanding
the spatial practices of the Hollywood studios, as well as the place of those studios
in Southern California. We know, for instance, that the American film industry
transported itself from its first home on the East Coast to Hollywood for a nexus
of reasons, all of them having to do with the nature of Hollywood as a specific
geographical place: its year-long availability of natural sunlight, the diversity of
landscapes (mountain, coastal, urban, desert, etc.) within close range of the studios,
the lax labor laws in Los Angeles, and so on. Similarly, we cannot understand the
operations of the classical Hollywood film without understanding the places of its
consumption, a claim whose interest has been demonstrated forcefully by recent
work on exhibition sites situated at the crossroads of film studies and geography.9
What is implicit in all of the preceding is that place and cinema share an in-
triguing and morphologically consonant doubleness: both are felt and have been
understood to be simultaneously natural and constructed, to be the effects of both
ontology and the articulations of a code or codes. Cinema as photographic medium
has been notoriously and controversially appealed to as a medium of “truth” in
which the natural world (often the landscape—place—itself) lays its impress on
the physical material of the filmstrip.10 This same understanding has been revised,
and even abjured, by an understanding of cinema as depending less on its debt to
the world it photographs and more on its operations as a text, or as an instance of
speech, language act, or code.11 Place, meanwhile, as we have seen, can be experi-
enced or understood both as the ultimate, entirely natural a priori (“To be at all—to
exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind
of place.”12) and as a fabrication—a product of human artifice, cultural construc-
tion, and ideology (“landscapes, like written texts, encode powerful social, cultural,
and political messages that are interpreted by their viewers”13). The theorizations
of cinema and place are therefore both replete with the tensions between ontology
and codedness. We hope it is obvious and compelling how opening up moving
image studies to the study and theorization of place might be a way of enlivening,
broadening, and sharpening the debates in both fields.
Another of the aims of our collection is to redirect the long-standing attention
paid to space in film studies and other humanities disciplines toward a sustained
consideration of place. Space cannot exist without place, and yet cinema’s relation
 INTRODUCTION | xi

to place as such has not been properly theorized. The contest between these
terms, space and place, has been influentially theorized by Michel de Certeau.
Place, for de Certeau, is “an instantaneous configuration of positions”; in other
words, it is “an indication of stability.”14 Place is the antithesis of movement and
therefore of change and (revolutionary) possibility. Space names, for de Certeau,
the medium through which such change is possible. Space is “actuated by the
ensemble of movements deployed within it.”15 De Certeau argues that a place is
like “the street geometrically defined by urban planning” that is “transformed
into a space by walkers.”16 We agree with Margaret Kohn that de Certeau’s terms
and his definitions of them are actually “poorly chosen metaphors for a politics
of domination or nostalgia.”17 We would argue that the accretion of history in a
given location actually provides the traction necessary for resonant and forceful
political intervention. As Kristin Ross has written apropos of the destruction by
the Communards of the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune of 1871,
“an awareness of social space . . . always entails an encounter with history—or
better, a choice of histories.”18
Cinematic space and its construction by and through the cinematic apparatus
was, as we know, one of the central objects of 1970s film theory’s assault on real-
ist representation. The bracing spirit of this theory and its critique of “bourgeois”
perspectival vision forced us to consider the ideology of vision itself, though it
did so in a way that suggested that the apparatus’s ideological power to look out-
stripped the significance of whatever it might look at. Nevertheless, intrinsic to
the problematizations of apparatus theory and psychosemiotics was a concern for
the relationship between ideology and vision’s organization through cinematic
conventions that sought to tame the disruptions of spectacle, the details, embodi-
ments, and textures of the profilmic, to serve (classical) narrative form and flow.
If we reconstruct the concerns of these theories in relationship to place, and the
difficult kernel of the locational “real,” we see the ways in which the preoccupa-
tion with spatiality, coherence, and flow was always tarrying with the disjunctive
power and inherent fascination of the profilmic. In wresting place from its status
as mere setting and narrative “support,” this collection focuses on the generative
structures, aesthetic conditions, and political implications of the profilmic, draw-
ing background to foreground, periphery to center.
The attention we pay to specific places is meant furthermore to answer a range
of questions. We are interested in how films—whether they are fictional or docu-
mentary—can act as archives of specific places. What kind of historical knowledge
does film grant us about places and the ways they have been inhabited and used?
How does cinema’s archive of place (an archive produced, in many cases, almost
xii | ELENA GORFINKEL AND JOHN DAVID RHODES

unconsciously) interact with our memory of places as well as our contemporary

use and habitation of them? How can films and other moving image technolo-
gies transform places through modes of exhibition? What is the work of the site-
specific film or video installation? And to what extent can any projection of a film
in a given place be considered specific to that site? How can film be mined for an
understanding of general rhetorical and cultural discourse of and on place? When
do places matter, and when do they not? How does a specific location allow itself
to be subsumed as background, and how can it resist such subsumption? How
can a political and politicized practice of attention to the place of the moving im-
age serve to reanimate the practice of politicized image making more generally?
We ask and seek to answer these questions in resistance to pervasive discourse
that proclaims the purported death of place in the era of late (or global, postindus-
trial) capitalism. Such claims about the end of place are usually predicated on the
fact that many places look the same as other places and are populated by people
who dress the same and consume the same consumer goods as people everywhere
else. The situation, according to some observers, has become so dire that the very
reality of place has been superseded; place has acceded to what anthropologist
Marc Augé calls the nonplace, “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or
historical, or concerned with identity.”19 Augé’s conceptualization of the nonplace
is suggestive to the point of ambivalence;20 however, despite his acknowledgment
that “thought based on place haunts us still,”21 his category of the nonplace seems
to us to possess a potentially colonizing and ontological nonspecificity not unlike
the nonplace itself. We mean this collection to resist a too-rapid or too-fashionable
accession to the repetitive enjoyment that seems to attend the prophesying of
the advent of the nonplace. We draw inspiration from the work of geographers
like Doreen Massey and John Rennie Short, who have argued that it is precisely
now, in our contemporary moment of postindustrial globalization, that place—as
both material location and theoretical practice—becomes ever more vital.22 We
believe—perhaps too optimistically—that a stubborn insistence on place might
serve as a tactic (and even a topos) with which to resist the forces (ideological,
material, rhetorical) that have threatened to flatten our notion of the uniqueness,
the power, and the political potential of both place and the moving image.

LOCALLY GLOBAL
Place might be anticipated here to emerge as a term heroically opposed to space, the
local in opposition to the global and so on. Certainly a redirection from space (as
a uniform property of cinema) to place (as a strikingly heterogeneous and specific
element recorded by or sensible in a film) is one of this collection’s concerns. This
xxvi | ELENA GORFINKEL AND JOHN DAVID RHODES

NOTES

1 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, with an

introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1997 [1960]), 303.
2 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 198–209 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986); Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music,
Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 52–68 (New York: Macmillan, 1988).
3 Recent scholarship has tended to privilege various genres of places: the rural, (so-
called natural) landscapes, and cities. For scholarship on the first two categories,
see Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield, eds., Representing the Rural: Space,
Place, and Identity in Films about the Land (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University
Press, 2006), and Martin Lefebvre, ed., Landscape and Film (New York: Routledge,
2006). Scholarship on cinema and the city has recently become quite a large
and fast-moving field of study. For work in this area, in which the particularity
of cities figures importantly, see Charlotte Brunsdon, London in Cinema: The
Cinematic City since 1945 (London: BFI, 2008); Edward Dimenberg, Film Noir
and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); David James, The Most Typi-
cal Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005); Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An
Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); John David
Rhodes, Stupendous Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007); and Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the
Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For
work on cinema and place from a more geographical perspective, see Stuart C.
Aitken and Leo E. Zonn, eds., Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography
of Film (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994).
4 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the
Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xiii.
5 Ibid., xv.
6 J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity
(Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1991), 1.
7 Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds.,
The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use
of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); W. J. T.
Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
 INTRODUCTION | xxvii

8 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1991), 26; emphasis original.
9 Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire, with Sarah Stubbings, The Place of the Audience:
Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (London: BFI, 2003).
10 This is the understanding of cinema proposed most forcefully by André Bazin
and Siegfried Kracauer. Cf. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 2 vols., trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970–71).
11 This is the understanding of cinema proposed by a number of theorists. Among
the most influential of these are Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of
the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974);
Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg/
BFI, 1968); and Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, selected and trans. Stephen
Heath (London: Fontana, 1977).
12 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), ix.
13 DeLyser, Ramona Memories, xviii.
14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 117.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2003), 21.
18 Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
(London: Verso, 2008), 8. First published 1988 by University of Minnesota Press.
19 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans.
John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 77–78.
20 “Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely
erased, the second never totally completed” (79); “The possibility of non-place
is never absent from any place” (107).
21 Augé, Non-places, 114.
22 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), esp. the essays “A Global Sense of Place” (146–56) and “A Place
Called Home?” (157–73); John Rennie Short, Global Dimensions: Space, Place, and
the Contemporary World (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).
23 Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1981), 37.
24 Ibid., 43.
25 Ibid, 49. Heath has taken the term from Edward Branigan’s “Narration and Sub-
jectivity in Cinema,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975.
26 Ibid., 19. Heath also borrows this phrase from Michael Snow. Snow’s remarks
to this effect appear in “Ten Questions to Michael Snow,” an interview by Simon
Hartog; cf. Michael Snow, The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, with a foreword
by Louis Dompierre (Waterloo, Ont., Canada: Wilfred Laurier University Press,
1994), 51–52.