On Cinematic Spectacle in Arid Lands
Desert ecologies are frequently cast as cinematic terrains of war and wonder—emptied, abstracted, and framed as either hostile battlegrounds or alien frontiers. Locations in the Mojave, Wadi Rum, the Sahara, the Arabian deserts have long been militarised for weapons testing, commodified for resource extraction, or enclosed under the guise of environmental stewardship. These landscapes are transformed into vast, ‘natural-sized’ sets for high-budget film productions, masking the material and political realities they embody.
This talk suggests that to understand cinema’s reliance on deserts, we must look beyond the visual frame and attend to the material infrastructures and imperial legacies that shape these geographies. The fictionalised desert—stripped of Indigenous presence and overlaid with spectacle—functions as a global imaginary of empire. By tracing how the screen industry exploits former colonial territories as deregulated zones of techno-military experimentation, this talk calls for a critical re-engagement with desert geographies. As these arid lands increasingly resist erasure and insist on their place in the global present, we are urged to unlearn the desert-as-spectacle and reimagine these ecologies as vital sites within our collective planetary imaginary.