Hot Locations

This book 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 increasingly depend on states in the former colonies, transforming portions of their territories into quasi-extraterritorial zones stripped from Indigenous stewardship, deregulated as tax-exempt enclaves, and devoted to techno-military experimentation. Hot Locations traces the production of abstracted desert images and re-anchors them in their material relations to land and the humans and nonhumans who reside there. In so doing, Daniel Mann produces a highly original work that theorizes the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both war zone and extraterrestrial world.