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Hot Locations examines how vast, arid environments have become a coveted natural resource for American and European film and media producers. Seeking to sustain the colonial imaginary of the uninhabited frontier, the screen industries have increasingly depended on states in former colonies, transforming portions of their territories into quasi‑extraterritorial zones stripped from Indigenous stewardship, deregulated as tax‑exempt enclaves, and devoted to technomilitary experimentation. This book traces the production of abstracted desert images and re‑anchors them in their material relations to land and to the humans and nonhumans who reside on that land. In so doing, this highly original work theorizes the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both war zone and extraterrestrial world.
Daniel Mann is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London and author of Occupying Habits: Everyday Media as Warfare in Israel-Palestine. A filmmaker, his films have been exhibited at leading international film festivals.
“Hot Locations is a vital contribution to materialist-informed film analysis. Moving between screen spectacles and desert substrates, Daniel Mann’s soil-bound approach represents the very best of recent methodological investments in location, infrastructure, extraction, and the inseparable ties between screen worlds and the real worlds that they rely on but also defy.”—Brian Jacobson, author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms
“Set against the backdrop of five captivating zones, this book brilliantly portrays how the Western film industry produces and reproduces colonial dynamics, military attitudes, and extractive practices in existing deserts. It splendidly offers a crucial political analysis and an essential environmental assessment of blockbuster cinematic realms, along with their failure to respect indigenous lives and lands."—Samia Henni, author of Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara
“Hot Locations tracks the transformation of desert landscapes into aesthetic resources around the world, a process as significant to extractive capitalism as breaking ground itself. The book, richly detailed and grounded in careful archival research, pushes environmental scholarship to rethink desert media, its geopolitical contestations, and global impacts today."—Nicole Starosielski, author of Media Hot and Cold
"A well-written, compellingly argued, and theoretically and experientially rich book. Covering an expansive ground, ranging from the American Southwest to the Sahara and from the Negev to Wadi Rum, Hot Locations offers a generative and critical exploration of the cinematic transformation of deserts into sites of visual and material extraction. Writing against widespread imaginaries about arid lands’ death and barrenness, Mann has penned a masterpiece whose multilayered zones combine reflections on nuclear tests, military training, solar energy, conservation, and even digital harvesting of desert landscapes in a manner that places cinema within a long history of overlapping enterprises in desert environments. Hot Locations is a welcome addition to the desert studies library and a must-read for scholars, both established and rising.”—Brahim El Guabli, author of Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences