Runaway Hollywood: Internalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting by Daniel Steinhart (review)

Writing in 2006, Giuliana Bruno announced that cinema studies had "joined in the spatial turn that cultural history and theory have taken in recent years."¹ The "spatial turn" in film and media studies has been tremendously generative as scholars consider how cinema orients us within the world, how the relationship between film and space has helped redirect our thinking about modernity, and how that relationship materializes memories and imagination, as well as how the filmmaking process transforms the lived world. Despite broad interest in the relationship between space, place, and cinema, including several works that address contemporary location shooting, Hollywood location shooting in the postwar period has been largely neglected until Daniel Steinhart's Runaway Hollywood.²

Steinhart's expansive project weaves together an argument about film form as well as an argument about production labor. The book has three parts—"Foundations," "Production," and "Style"—each comprising four body chapters based on primary research conducted in the United States and Europe, as well as analysis of trade publications. Each section is anchored by a case study that delves into the production of a specific film, namely Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956), Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), and Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956). The scope and length of the case studies make them ideal to assign in undergraduate courses focused on postwar film or a topical course on the relationship of production process, film form, and style. Although the headings separate production and style, one of the strengths of the book is that it considers how production and style are intertwined. The dual concerns of film aesthetics and industrial practice function symbiotically in the overarching analysis of postwar location-based cinema.

Runaway Hollywood takes on two main tasks: to show how Hollywood adapted its production methods when film shoots moved abroad and to consider how international location shooting contributed to postwar visual styles. Steinhart characterizes the foreign influence on Hollywood as one of "continuity and change," arguing that even though Hollywood filmmakers had to adapt to some regional practices when on location, it was ultimately important for them to retain the essential qualities and production values that made their films globally successful.³ As Steinhart explains in relation to aesthetic practices: "Filmmakers made locations a more prominent component of a film's visual design while simultaneously bringing these locales in line with the conventions of Hollywood story and style."⁴ Steinhart has ample examples of how Hollywood studios used locations in service of conventional Hollywood narratives despite encounters with global filmmakers. For instance, some directors in Italy collaborated with and consulted Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio DeSica despite resisting the influence of Italian Neorealist style.⁵ As Steinhart shows, Hollywood's mode of production and style have been resilient, even when filmmakers encountered different ways of doing business and opportunities for new stylistic approaches.

Runaway Hollywood largely addresses the relationship between industrial practices and film form rather than taking a more cultural studies approach toward ideology and textual politics. The discussion of film form in chapter 4 is especially detailed, and Steinhart draws from a wide range of examples shot on locations around the world to show how Hollywood films relied on certain compositional conventions, such as depth within the frame, to privilege narrative even when shooting in foreign locations. Steinhart notes that filmmakers frequently had to get creative in order to create space and dynamism within real spaces, as was the case for Vincente Minnelli with Gigi (1958).⁶ In Gigi, cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg had to devise a lighting scheme for Maxim's that would allow him to shoot in the mirror-filled restaurant. Strategies deployed to deal with the real-world challenges of locations often created striking effects within films shot on location. The argument about film aesthetics, however, shows that production studies and analysis of a film's formal elements are never mutually exclusive.

The focus on labor...