Multimillion-dollar film productions are on the hunt for vast arid landscapes. With the rising popularity of cinematic depictions of worlds ravaged by heat and environmental degradation, deserts have become increasingly desirable film locations for Euro-American war and sci-fi films. To locate the proper settings for anthropogenic narratives about the planetary frontier, film producers venture out to arid areas in the Middle East and North Africa, where local governments promise tax rebates, low-cost workforces and most importantly, open desert lands. Jordan, the UAE, Morocco and Israel-Palestine have set up bespoke legal and financial infrastructure that open up desert lands as locations for film productions while restricting access to the native communities that inhabit the desert. Parts of the Wadi Rum reserve, and the Sahara, Arabian and Naqab deserts that have been seized from native inhabitants, militarised for testing, privatised for extraction, or closed off for nature conservation are becoming ‘nature-sized’ studios for spectacular cinema. In this configuration, the desert continues to exist as both frontier and ‘sacrifice zone’, simultaneously a fantasy playground and a technoscientific wasteland, despite the heavy use of visual effects and computer graphics.
The project, led by Daniel Mann, seeks to disentangle cinematic representations of extra-terrestrial worlds from local disputes over lands by closely examining the geopolitics behind cinema production and its effects on indigenous communities. Combining film studies, earth sciences and environmental humanities, it aims to unravel the visual estrangement of the land and to pull cinematic worlds ‘down to earth’ to uncover the material relations that hold together contrived images of the planetary frontier. By displacing attention from the plots of blockbuster films to the soil that supports their production, and to the people the land belongs to, the project aims to find new ways to address the violence intrinsic to the abstraction of geography. This shift of scale, from the planetary to the local, will offer an urgent reminder that narratives of humanity under threat are neither universally distributed nor novel and have been predicated on conceptions of resource extraction, land grabs, and neo-colonial economies.
Still from “Dead Lands”, Daniel Mann, 2023