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The introduction advances a theoretical framework for interpreting how New Chinese Cinema auteurs shoot on-location as a mode of “place making,” the experiencing and imaging of rural shooting locations as places. Drawing from poststructural cultural geography, production culture studies, environmental psychology, and critical tourism studies, I demonstrate how production environments are more than blank canvases, but places where cultural meanings are being continually contested. As cultural elites, auteurs make coherent disorienting social changes by engaging in production as lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage. The rural is thus a stage for auteurs to perform their aspirations for social activism, while location shooting constitutes an embodied and performative practice through which auteurs make meaningful sense of their ever-shifting and often precarious roles of authorship. Consequently, images and representations of the rural in the resulting films cannot simply be classified as signifying one cultural logic or another. Rather, they bear traces of the institutional politics, social tensions, and geopolitical ambivalences negotiated by auteurs during production, thus confounding distinctions between the ideologically complicit and subversive, a reductive binary too often mobilized by scholars when periodizing Chinese and Taiwanese film histories.

It would appear that indigenous film production is likely to continue to expand in Scotland. Even if Scotland remains a small national cinema in global terms, it is to be hoped that it will carry on making a big impact globally. Whether it does or not, however, it seems probable that international film coproductions and location shooting will, because of the mutual benefit that Scotland's landscape brings to filmmakers from outside Scotland, the Scottish film industry and related industries like tourism. The increasingly blurry boundaries surrounding the category of ‘Scottish’ cinema require a reconsideration of Scottish filmmaking and filmmaking in Scotland inclusively, both in terms of its artistic and popular merits and in relation to an increasingly global context of production and distribution. Moreover, a brief survey of a few of the films not discussed in this book illustrates the variety of fantasy Scotlands that continue to exist and that have been created by filmmakers within, and from outside, Scotland, and the exploration of identities they facilitate.

This chapter examines the issues surrounding the Hal Ashby's next directorial assignment Being There. It discusses Ashby's concerns about Lorimar and his enthusiasm for the story of the film which he called “our favorite film to be.” It also describes the shooting location and Lorimar's budget for the film. The film starred Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas.

This chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to provide a brief history of the Arriflex 35 in North America from the end of the Second World War up to the introduction of the 35mm Arriflex BL in 1972. The book argues that the Arriflex’s impact proved particularly marked in three areas: in the encouragement the camera provided for location shooting; in the options the camera gave cinematographers for intensifying visual style and content; and in the doors the camera opened for low-budget and independent production.

The siting of early movie studios outside the gates of Paris had direct consequences for the promotion of the suburban landscape as an object of visual interest rich with narrative potential. Addressing the dynamics of ‘creative interaction’ between filmmaker and location, the author examines common industry practices from the turn of the century to 1920 based on an extensive filmography of Pathé and Gaumont shorts and features. Generic street views shot in such suburbs as Vincennes served to depict places that the fiction tagged as Parisian; editing-room sleight-of-hand could make two topographically distant locales appear as contiguous. Viewers were indifferent, however, to precise localisations of the streets, buildings and topographical features projected on screen; what mattered was the development of a rapport between narrative form and mood, character and place, as the comic films of Max Linder and the crime serials of Louis Feuillade make clear.

This chapter describes in detail the preproduction and production histories of the anti-Semitic costume drama Jud Süss (1940), Harlan’s most infamous film. Two screenwriters and one director have already struggled with the project when Harlan takes over in mid-November 1939, his work being initially that of a script doctor. Joseph Goebbels is pleased with the changes Harlan makes to the script and his dramaturgical skill, which is based largely on his experience in the theater. In his quest for authenticity, Harlan visits the Lublin and Prague ghettos to select Jewish extras. Finding a suitable male lead turns out to be difficult because for complex reasons most actors are ashamed to be associated with the part of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer. Given the omnipresence of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Jud Süss raises the question why the German film industry has avoided this matter for so long before this point.

This chapter examines the ways in which a range of films shot in New Towns or other suburban locations in Britain during the 1970s offer evidence of shifts in representations of criminal behaviour which can be tied to the apparent modern ‘newness’ of these locations. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the film The Offence employs location shooting and impressively designed interiors (shot in the studio) in order to evoke a rapidly changing nation which is unsure of how to police itself. The chapter develops in order to examine how far crime and gangster films of the period such as The Squeeze and Get Carter often depict cruelty being meted out to young, innocent characters, and places these representations within socio-cultural context.

This chapter examines Dario Argento’s debut film L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970) and its representation of Rome’s urban history. The film uses the structure of detective fiction to conduct a thorough interrogation not of any individual suspect but rather of the city of Rome itself. This is revealed, on one hand, in the film’s cataloging of elements of Rome’s urban space via location shooting. The shots established call attention to various types of architectural thresholds (especially doors and windows) in modern Rome, rather than simply allowing diegetic space to take hold by indicating the parameters and properties of the film’s narrative space. In other words, spatial orientation, is evacuated from these establishing shots in favor of an analysis of urban and architectural phenomena.

This chapter deals with Harlan’s willingness to accept artistically inferior assignments only because they allow him to work outside Germany. Large parts of Die blaue Stunde (The blue hour, 1953) are shot in Italy; apart from that, the film is remarkable for portraying marriage problems in a humorous manner. A two-part adventure, Sterne über Colombo (Stars over Colombo, 1953) and Die Gefangene des Maharadscha (Prisoner of the maharaja, 1954), is shot in India and again deals with marriage problems as well as a tortured father–son relationship, the kind Harlan himself experienced with his father. Finally, the spy thriller Verrat an Deutschland (Betrayal of Germany, 1955), shot in Japan, is Harlan’s reflection about his own guilt in Nazi Germany and Söderbaum’s complicity in it. He gets bad reviews for all four films, but the Indian films are successful at the box office. His sympathetic treatment of Communists in Verrat an Deutschland leads to the last thing he wants after his comeback: a political controversy.