BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Rambo in Palestine: Desert\, War and the Making of the Planetary F
 rontier - Dr Daniel Mann\, Queen Mary University of London
DTSTART:20230530T120000Z
DTEND:20230530T130000Z
UID:TALK200521@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Valerio Donfrancesco
DESCRIPTION:Produced on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse\, the fil
 m Rambo III (MacDonald\, 1988) delivered an action-packed Cold War story a
 bout the CIA providing aid to the Afghan mujahideen. Israel-Palestine was 
 perceived as a suitable stand-in for Afghanistan\, where John Rambo (Sylve
 ster Stallone) fought alongside local guerrillas against Soviet troops. 
 ‘Israel’\, Stallone explained to a local reporter\, ‘is a perfect re
 placement for Afghanistan. Not only is it bone-dry\, but it’s also in wa
 r.’ With a third of its territory consisting of arid land\, Israel-Pales
 tine’s climate could conveniently simulate the orientalised war zone.\nY
 et the country held another advantage that made it a ‘natural’ substit
 ute. Dozens of declassified documents in the Israeli Military Archive reve
 al lengthy bureaucratic exchanges between Hollywood executives and militar
 y officers\, containing lists of guns\, tanks\, jeeps\, and above all\, sw
 athes of desert land confiscated from the Palestinian population and regul
 arly deployed by the IDF for training purposes.\nPunching holes in the two
 -dimensional representation of landscapes and engaging with the materialit
 y of geographies\, the talk aims to unravel the visual estrangement of des
 ert lands and to pull cinematic worlds ‘down to earth’. By displacing 
 attention from the plots of blockbuster films to the soil that supports th
 eir production and to the people the land belongs to\, the talk offers an 
 urgent reminder that images of desert frontiers are neither universally di
 stributed nor novel and have been predicated on conceptions of resource ex
 traction\, land grabs\, and neo-colonial economies.
LOCATION:HB101
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR