The Mediapolis Q&A: Chris Lukinbeal’s Cinematic Cartography: Scale, Analysis, Topography

Scott Rodgers: Chris, your book Cinematic Cartography brings together a truly distinctive set of fields, including film studies, human geography, and geographic information science. Scholars of cinematic landscapes have published in Mediapolis a fair bit, but it’s rare to hear from a scholar like you who’s also deeply embedded in GIS and spatial analysis. I think this lays the groundwork for a unique book, and listeners might like to hear a bit more of the story for that book and how it all came into being.

So, what inspired you to bring these disciplines together? And how did your background in GIS shape the way you approached cinema and cartography?

Chris Lukinbeal: I think I have to go back a little further than that. I am currently and have been Director of GIS programs for the last twenty years, so it’s sort of natural for me to want to use a GIS approach. But I think this story begins a lot earlier than that.

When I started in geography as a graduate student and even as an undergrad, I came out of the Carl Sauer school tradition of “morphology of landscape” studies. But I was also a practicing cartographer and was the cartographic editor for California History Journal and some other journals like that through grad school.

So I always had this sort of blend of the two. But when I started doing film geography research in the 90s, it was the landscape and film approach, which we’ve seen a lot in Mediapolis. And it was sort of the rise of new cultural geography with Denis Cosgrove, Duncan and Ley, and those people sort of contesting the old notions of non-political views of landscape and sort of the integration of looking at representation as equal to actually going out into the field. So, sort of that rise of landscape and film was beginning in the 1990s with sort of the postmodern turn.

At the same time, I was very interested in more of an economic approach to film and kind of latched onto film production and the economics of that. And there was a tradition in geography that was looking specifically at Hollywood. But the economic approach was much more of a regional kind of approach. So, the economic geography allowed me to do cartographic work and traditional sort of regional studies, but the landscape and film exposed me more to social theory film studies, and the tradition of landscape kind of brings it all together.

But I was always driven by the interdisciplinary work of Giuliana Bruno, Anne Friedberg, Mary Ann Doane, and even Lynn Kirby with her book Parallel Tracks and the railroad work that she did. Then, coming out in the early 2000s, I started seeing this rise in both cartography and a focus on film form that was really exciting to me. Tom Conley’s book that came out,

Cartographic Cinema, and Sébastien Caquard’s special edition in The Cartographic Journal were very exciting to see. Sort of the rise of Giuliana Bruno, Teresa Castro’s work, and personally, a favorite of mine is Giorgio Avezzù’s work, from film studies and art history, focusing on cartography.

But at the same time, there was this work by Marcus Doel and David Clarke, and they’re out of Swansea, looking at the history of film form. And they really charted this transition from what they called animated photography to narrative cinema, kind of at the very birth of cinema. And their work on montage, their publication “Afterimages,” really left a profound effect on me. They asked the question, basically: there’s people doing geographic work on film, but where’s film qua film? Why aren’t you focusing on the form of film itself?

And so I felt like that early turn with cartography and film form really drove me to bring the GIS work I had been doing in film production and the landscape work I had been doing together. And that was sort of the origins of this book.

SR: The concept of “cinematic cartography” is central to the book, and you frame that as a convergence of two fields, obviously cinema and cartography. You see these as sort of sharing a historical lineage, but then they diverge in certain ways in how they represent space. And you describe them as basically distinct scopic regimes where cinema is rooted in perspectivalism, and cartography is rooted in projectionism. So, could you unpack that divergence a little bit more for us? You know, how do these regimes differ in the ways they conceptualize geography or spatiality? And what does that mean for how we experience space through film versus through maps?

CL: Let me go back to my distinction a little earlier on landscape and film because this is really the tradition where I started to think more clearly about cinematic cartography. Both landscape studies and film studies can trace lineage to perspectivalism or linear perspective. And we can look at that as coming out of the Renaissance with Brunelleschi and the early work of Alberti, which provides a nice interdisciplinary link to art history. So some of the early journals that were very impactful for me were Wide Angle and October, things like that, that kind of brought things that didn’t quite seem to fit, but in kind of a new convergence.

Then again, in the early 2000s through the 1990s, we could see the rise of critical cartography that was occurring. J.B. Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” in 1989. But then moving forward out of that, the idea of these scopic regimes being mutually related and contributing to one another, but also paradoxically opposite actually comes from John Pickles’s work, which is he’s a cultural geographer out of UNC Chapel Hill and did a book called History of Spaces, where he brought up the “cartographic paradox,” as he called it, about this legacy coming out of the Renaissance, both using grid types of formulas to configure space, but the use of the grids are similar, but very different. And that difference really rests in the concept of scale and how scale is deployed in linear perspective, which really doesn’t have a scale because you’re measuring from the eye to the vanishing point versus cartographic scale, which you can measure depending on what scale you’re at, literally on the surface of the earth by the grid system.

It’s interesting to note, though, that the history of space and the history of cartography, especially coming out of the Renaissance has a very strong relationship to the landscape studies as well. So, if you read Denis Cosgrove’s work, especially his earlier work on the bourgeoisie and landscape paintings and how we’d own space, and how the naturalization of space and the politics of it through paintings to reinforce power regimes is very similar to how cartography was later critiqued by Harley, Pickles, and others. And I think Cosgrove is a great example of bridging that divide between history of landscape studies and history of cartography and linking them together. And I feel like I was just playing with that thread in the book a little bit. So diving between landscape studies and critical cartography, and history of cartography kind of readings to tease out these two scopic regimes.

SR: So they’re more related, I guess. Like one could almost look on the surface and [see] there’s a kind of contrast between these scopic regimes. But I guess what you’re saying is there’s more interweaving than might be obvious on the surface?

CL: Yes. And it’s a complicated history is what I would say, where you could look at the mathematical history of creating scaled grids that work as either a frame space, orthogonal lines meaning at a vanishing point, or a gridded space that removes the subject, creates kind of an optimal objective viewpoint. There’s those histories but then there’s sort of a divergent history in how they present realism, as well. That you can think of perspectivalism, the window on the world analogy or the picturing the world analogy, versus cartography which is more of a snapshot that sort of removes time, if you will, that fundamental principle of Ptolemy’s cartography as well. And then how we deal with those two types of space in visualizations are dramatically different.

SR: So you’ve already mentioned Ptolemy. One of the things I wanted to pick up on is the way that your book reconnects with Ptolemy’s – who’s a foundational figure in Western geographical thought – ideas, and specifically his distinction between geography, chorology, and topography.

Now, the first thing to say is that listeners who are unfamiliar with those terms might like if you gave a brief characterization of what each refers to. But, from there, I guess I wanted to explore your argument that cinema’s perspectivalism aligns most closely with topography, which we might also describe as place, perhaps. So, tell us a bit, I guess, specifically, how do cinematic techniques – things like montage, narrative structure, or establishing shots – how do these help us produce a more humanistic spatiality, perhaps? One that’s grounded in lived experience, things like emotional resonance, and so on?

CL: Okay, so let me, I’ll do the classic descent through space here. Ptolemy was a geographer and astronomer in Alexandria during the Roman Empire, and he framed knowledge of the world through mathematics and the scale-based hierarchy, if you will. A lot of history of cartography and landscape studies has talked about this: it really derived the world as picture through mathematics, and was rediscovered during the Renaissance. It sort of provides a foundation of ontological thought, if you will, in Western tradition. And his hierarchy actually started with cosmography, if you will, astronomy, looking out, positioning the earth within the solar system and the universe, geography being the scope of the entire oikoumene, or known world at the time.

Chorology was more about the regional spaces of location like you’re pulling into Venice, a port. Whereas topography was kind of a subset of chorology. And yes, “topo” referring to “place.” But throughout the “graph” or “graphy” is the representation of those spaces. So we can see sort of the tradition of everything above topography having some relation to map projections and latitude and longitude, which we got from Ptolemy as well, and the positioning and location of space.

But throughout this process of looking at this, I felt it was really useful to look at scale and how scale is related to each of these. And so everything above topography is based on map projections and scale as a geometric construct that is rational, is definable, is measurable, but isn’t human. It’s disembodied. It’s objectivized in a way that human subject is removed. Except for when you get down to topography, when you’re dealing with place and picturing the world. And I always felt that at that level, we’re dealing with scale in a very different way because you’re dealing through linear perspective where you don’t have a defined measurable quality scale, even though you can create it. You’re dealing more with what I call in the book “anthropometric scale” or scale through the body. I argue that if we look at the history of topography itself, especially Tom Conley’s work, we’re talking about an active participant in the environment, some engagement, a haptical relationship of movement through the environment. He uses the example of a snail moving through the environment because it has to be in touch and touching as it’s moving along. And cinema owns a lot of those same qualities, but it kind of plays with it, the representational quality of both touch, touching of how we sense movement, and the use of montage and traveling through space is very different than when we think of more of a cartographic production of space.

So I was very interested in those kind of two different scopic regimes, and you can kind of see how over time they, that distinction dissolves with new technologies that we don’t really, can’t say the view from above, the cartographic view from above and the view from below or the topographic cinematic one. They are meeting and mingling these days. But more theoretically, they have this sort of antipodal kind of relationship.

SR: Yeah, I can see them meeting, absolutely. I’m thinking just as you were saying that about, if you’re on Google Maps, for instance, and then you move to Street View, or even indeed Google Earth, where there’s this sort of effort to create a kind of transition even between a very classically cartographic top-down view, if we want to call it that, and then go to a street perspective. So I think they are meeting from even ordinary people’s point of view.

But I was actually going to ask also just about the concept of scale, I guess maybe more so in geography. There had been some debate about this in the past couple of decades, at least in geography, where many scholars were trying to push for a different way of thinking about scale. I guess what we might call a more experiential or constructivist sense of scale where it’s not just something that’s constructed as an objective kind of levels, or as a way of understanding actual distance in relation to what’s shown on a map, or these sorts of traditional conceptions of scale, but it’s sort of something that’s perceived and put forward in conversations or in interactions with others. Is there any sense that even in geography, the sense of scale that you’re referring to, one that is a bit more embodied and subjective, is starting to take hold?

CL: No. [Laughs] How’s that for an answer? It’s interesting for me to be discussing scale and being at the University of Arizona, and I’ll point out the irony to listeners, that the idea in human geography of there’s no such thing as scale comes from the University of Arizona with Sallie Marston, J.P. Jones, and Keith Woodward, who are all faculty here. And I remember seeing their talk in Denver at the AAG conference, I don’t know, sometime in the mid 2000s. And I distinctly remember somebody asking them, “What about cartographic scale? How does this configure within your debate?” And they basically said, “Oh, you’re fine. You can just keep using it the way you’re using it. This doesn’t deal with that.”

And that always struck me. And I would say challenged me to start querying: “What about cartographic scale? What is it that’s different in its use?” And I have to agree with them. I mean, their construct was more following Don Mitchell’s notion of “no such thing as culture,” a kind of a deconstruction. But for them, it was the imposition of a cartographic scale onto social constructs and social logic of everyday life. And it doesn’t really apply. That’s not what geometric scale is supposed to be about. So, I applaud them for that, but it really doesn’t address cartographic scale, and so in the book, I kind of looked at the history of those arguments, but also scale was being debated in GIScience. It was being debated in art history as well at the time and these were very different debates and nobody was really talking to one another.

So, I started getting interested in establishing shots. And I kept wondering, “Why are these things here all the time? Why am I seeing them at the beginning of movies? What purpose are they using for?” And I remember Giuliana Bruno’s The Atlas of Emotion talked a little bit about cartographic anxiety and how establishing shots would kind of bring you back and tell you where you’re located, give you that sense of place and allow you to navigate space. More in that, what we were saying that embodied kind of personal sense of – sensing scale through the body is what I would call it – which seemed very ironic to me compared to what was going on in the human geography debate.

But if I back up just a little and say, I feel like with scale itself, scale is what imposes the idea of picture of the world, of mathematical configuration of the world and our understanding. And once you kind of accept that logic, you’re fully framed within it. And so within, I’d say, the first 15 years of my career looking at film geography, I really didn’t want to use GIS in cartography because by doing so, you’re accepting a very distinct view of space and place that is pre-configured in advance. It’s, if you will, the inscriptive kind of logic that things that are written in stone and can’t be changed versus more of a fluid kind of understanding of scale, an embodied one.

So what I started looking at was – with the history of scale as a representational construct – that scale is a social construct, but that doesn’t mean that we can just disown it and get rid of it. Social constructs have implications, like the same thing if we think of latitude and longitude or street addresses or things like that. How it’s deployed and used and how we conceive of it before its deployment, I think is very important. So for me, the Cinematic Cartography book, the use of scale, it was more about film geography than about cartography. It was a means to explore two different constructs of space through a very central ideal: scale. I feel that scale is the central construct for film geography itself, that it’s what creates space. It’s how we move through it. It’s how linear narrative, if you will, and montage scenes if image events are constructed. But it’s not something that you go and read. You can’t deploy and say “I’m going to do a scalar reading of X” because then you’re already using it as a social construct. Scale is always already there. It’s sort of embodied through an anthropometric sense or it’s infinite through a cartographic sense, where it’s just simply repeating itself. It becomes that hall of mirrors, if you will. So this is where I refer to scale almost as like a fractal articulation, that the more you look, the more you see the same of the self.

So it’s got this sort of a representational history. And that’s what I was trying to unpack, that it’s a culturally laden one. And depending on where you start from with scale, it can lead you into very different ends with research. And so I kind of use scale both for Ptolemy, kind of going top down from the universe to the locale, but also in the idea of how we understand representations themselves and how it’s being deployed in these two different instances: cinema and cartography.

SR: I do remember that AAG: actually, it was my first AAG ever going to. And I remember the questions being asked, like you say, about that particular conception of scale way back when in 2005. But I think what you’re discussing, or the way you’ve brought these questions back a couple of decades later, does address some questions that just weren’t really being asked at that time. So I think it’s really productive. And I think it’s interesting to do it with film, actually, and through techniques like establishing shots and montage. I think it really gets at it in a way that might be more difficult if one was just sort of using geographical concepts and talking about it in an abstract way.

I wanted to turn now to a couple of bits of the book where you’re getting into some, let’s say, case studies or kind of empirical cases of some kind, but also which exemplify the conceptual approach you’re taking as well. The first of these is the book’s seventh chapter, which is presented as a chorological analysis of San Diego as a cinematic region. And I homed in on this one partly because a lot of our listeners might be interested in particular in cities, given that’s Mediapolis‘s overall main focus. But, also, I think that this chapter is a great example of how your expertise in GIS comes into play, because you’re examining spatial distributions of different forms of film and television production. So, tell us a bit more about what this kind of spatial analysis reveals about the cinematic city, and how does it help us understand the relationships between film production, urban geography, and the aesthetics of place?

CL: The San Diego research comes originally from my dissertation work, which I completed in 2000. And then there was a few chapters and articles before the Cinematic Cartography book on the San Diego work. But I would characterize the way I presented it in the Cinematic Cartography book more as a regional analysis of an economic type of industry, which is a very classical way of studying economic geography itself.

So, I would say I prioritized sort of the economics of film production over the cinematic landscape in this case. In other papers, I talk about that type of focus [as] configuring the cinematic landscape as an ontogenesis, an ongoing practice within regions. And I like that kind of concept because I feel like since even the 1980s, or more like 1990s with the rise of cable television, regional film industries are sort of the backbone of film production throughout the world. And sort of seeing like, how does a regional film production nexus work? What does it do? What sort of landscapes does it have afforded to it that can be used? What can it play as? Who’s going to be the big stars in that region?

I know we’re focusing on San Diego, but I remember in about 2015, I took a group of grad students from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz to Los Angeles. We did a bunch of work looking at film production, and their task was to interview the stars of L.A. And in this case, it was the Nate Starkman Warehouse and the train station or other, you know, prominently featured locations. I mean, they had two weeks to kind of like go and ask these buildings questions.

But this is the kind of work that I was thinking of. It’s very fitting for Mediapolis, too. That, for me, the work that I did in the book was kind of looking at densities, distributions, and trying to understand the type of film industry that was going on in San Diego. The main character was that there was a local independent production facility, Stu Segall, and at the same time, there was one in De Laurentiis in North Carolina. Those were kind of like the examples just before the rise of Vancouver, if you will – take a look at Mike Gasher’s stuff on that.

I was kind of looking to see: what is it about the different types of productions? Literally, features, TV shows, TV movies, and how do they use space differently? And how is that reflected in the landscape? So, feature films, for instance, love to hug the coastline and to get that to play Florida or LA. And especially the richer coastlines in the North County. Television shows were very weird, though, because they would jet inland quite a bit. San Diego is Mediterranean climate. It’s got the coastal beautiful community, but as you move inland, you get hot internal valleys, and then you can go up to pine tops, snow-covered mountains, and then out to the desert. So you get quite a diversity, and you could see the television productions would pick up on that, and one would be able to move around a lot more. So I want to say that it was kind of an understanding of an industry’s footprint in the urban landscape itself.

One particular case study I did was in Erica Stein’s book [with Germaine Halegoua and Brendan Kredell], where I did some cinematic land use mapping. This is classic land use mapping: Where is the industry biggest footprint? Where did they go back to over and over to kind of mine different images from the city? I did some classic GIS analysis on this, but a lot of that was based on interviews with local scouts and film commissions.

So, one region that has become very well known to me: “Anywhere USA”. Any regional film production that wants to show the U.S. on U.S.-based productions, they have to have an Anywhere USA. And this is that kind of old East Coast suburban look. You can’t have palm trees. They used to put “NPT” – no palm trees – in the script to remove them. No California bungalows; can’t have that. It’s got to be that old classic colonial or Victorian architecture. So, I really felt like I was doing my work on this. I would go out and be looking for – I was a ghost hunter is what I would tell people. You would show up and go, “Yes, something was filmed here, but what’s so unique about it?” But then if you start looking at the locations over and over again, you could start seeing these contrasting differences and “Oh, that’s why they’re not using that house, they’re using this one because it looks, you know, East Coast kind of looks.”

So for me, approaching the film production industry has been very fruitful to understanding cinematic landscape and film geography more broadly. And it follows the tradition in geography where you do case studies, you have a region you look at, you do analysis within them.

SR: Yeah, I’d love to see a map like that of Toronto, where I’m from originally, because it’s full of Anywhere USA sites. I used to see them all the time around my university, actually, when I was an undergraduate. A lot of the productions would park a lot of their vehicles. I can remember leaving a class once and there was a New York City bus with bullet holes across the side of it. But I’ve always had this fascination about these locations that can get chosen to be very different places. And similar to San Diego, Toronto has lots of places that can look like other places. I guess one last thing to say about that is, to my relief maybe as a Canadian, noticing that Toronto is actually playing itself a little bit more in productions than it once did. Whereas I used to always be, you know, kind of constantly correcting people saying, “you know where this was really filmed, right?”

But anyway, let’s move on to the last question I want to ask, which turns to another one of the case studies you have in the book – and there’s a few, but we’re just looking at two here. So, in the course of arranging this interview, I mentioned to you that I actually was in Tucson for a week relatively recently, and how, despite having met you before, only very briefly, of course, I didn’t get in touch. But I was also reflecting, later on, [about] my visit to Tucson, and I was looking through Google Maps because I pinned all these places I wanted to go. One of the places I’d pinned as “want to go” was Old Tucson Studios. But I didn’t go to that either. So, I didn’t get in touch with you and I didn’t go to that. So, the first question is, did I miss something great?

CL: No. I’m laughing a little. It’s a very odd question because I’ve been to Old Tucson a lot. I went as a tourist a long time ago with my family. I feel like Old Tucson is interesting because of its history. It reminds me a lot of what I mentioned of San Diego, where I felt like I was a ghost hunter. Today, Old Tucson is better known for its Fright Night, for Halloween, for its steampunk convention. It really is a montage of event space, if you will. But it has this history to it that is very unique. And until you get to know the history, I don’t want to say don’t go, but it’s not the first place on my list that I send tourists.

SR: Right. It obviously had an instrumental role in your book, at least. I also want to mention that it’s something that you did write about previously in Mediapolis.

CL: Yes, Joshua Gleich and I started a project at Old Tucson Studios, and we did a special collection for Mediapolis on it. If you can get with a film location historian and have them take you around Old Tucson and surrounding areas, you will just love it. It’s just the most fascinating thing ever. If you just go with the family for a single day, it’s sort of “meh”. It’s like whatever, unless they have a gunfight going on at the time. You know, it’s just not quite the same.

But I felt that Old Tucson was very unique for Joshua and I, and especially for me following up later with some of the more advanced geospatial analysis that I did. It was a historical analysis of a regional film industry. The same that I did in San Diego. Same I’ve done in L.A. and New Orleans. But this is one where most of the work has been done in the past. The Western genre has kind of passed it by. Like most Western studios and ranches throughout the Western U.S., it burned down in 1995, or almost over half of it burned. And same thing with the Paramount Ranch burned in one of those fires. So a lot of its history is kind of gone and they’re trying to rebuild but kind of with a genre that’s not quite there. And yet Old Tucson did more than just Westerns – but that was really what it was known for, was sort ofthat history.

But at its time, it was one of the biggest adobe constructions in the United States. So, it does have this kind of unique history, but the studio itself, and that was more Joshua Gleich’s kind of focus, was kind of this adaptive reuse over time that they’d come in, they’d build a building like the Joe Kidd courthouse, and then they’d leave. So you’d have these sorts of legacy things that would come and go and change.

But the area of Southern Arizona more largely was what fascinated me and still fascinates me and that’s where the “Hombre chapter” comes from as well. If you take the imposition of a film production policy that the 30-mile zone, if you will, and loosely implant it anywhere and in any region, you can start to see the geographies that are afforded to a production’s region. And it had to be within three-hour drive, so it extended a little further. But the diversity of landscapes that you can get in Tucson is just outstanding. The Sonoran Desert is one of the most biodiverse deserts in the world. It has elevation that goes up to snow-packed mountains all the way down to the big saguaro cactuses. One of the things I mentioned in the book is that the vegetation regimes line up very well with Hollywood. So, you could go outside of Hollywood and have that oak grass woodlands and creosote kind of scrub look. You could have everything but the saguaro cactus outside of a Hollywood studio. So it allows you to transition between Hollywood and this Western film set very easily.

For me, the legacy of Old Tucson is more in the landscapes than at that one set, and I think that’s what is missing when you go to see that. They also had a Mescal Set that was out in Benson, Arizona, where, oh my god, Judge Roy Bean was filmed out there. Tombstone, the one with the big mustache version, that was out there. And a couple others that they just built this out on the middle of a bluff just to give you a look. And then they even had a third set out on the Empire Ranch, a cattle ranch, which was largest cattle ranch in Southern Arizona back then, that they had for Monty Walsh. That was just this little remote place. And if you go out there, I remember when I drove out to Senoita the first time, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m in Arizona. Are you kidding me?” It’s like, I drove over a hill, I’m in saguaro land with all my cactus, get over the rise, and it’s this lush grasslands everywhere. I thought I was in Nebraska or something. I had no idea that there was this much diversity in Arizona.

So, I think that sort of that topographic legacy of Old Tucson. It really astounded me and kind of kept me intrigued. What I was working on in the final version of the book was we had done some drone mapping and use of LiDAR to kind of capture the studio. And I was making a couple of different models. I started with an Arizona model, which was the 1930s movie that’s founded the set. I jumped up to Rio Bravo because they realigned the streets, and Joshua Gleich was able to get some really good data from the Oscars Museum. Literally, I made a realignment of the street at the height of film production in the 50s. And then I was looking at Joe Kidd because Joe Kidd took place in the part of Old Tucson that is now gone, that was burnt out by the fire. So the Joe Kidd courthouse, they had an old Kansas Main Street. And at the very end of Joe Kidd, do you remember the train crashes into the bar? That’s the Reno is the name of the train. All of that is gone. They still have Reno out there. But we were basically ghost hunters again. We’re making models of buildings and cities that don’t exist anymore. So, I felt like Tucson was a very unique regional film industry. Mostly one in the past, but one that offers a very different geography to look at. I encourage people to go check out their own regional film industries and see what’s going on.

Chris Lukinbeal

Chris Lukinbeal is the Director of GIST at the University of Arizona. In the last thirty years his research has engaged film and media geography, cinematic cartography and landscape, on location filming, geographic media literacy, and the geographies of media form. His books include: The Geography of Cinema; Mediated Geographies and Geographies of the Media; Place, Television, and the Real Orange County; and, a Media’s Mapping Impulse (forthcoming). He is one of three founding editors for the book series, Media Geography at Mainz and an Associate Editor for the journal Geohumanities.