In his important book Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Edward Dimendberg provides a cultural geographical analysis of the ‘regulation of spatial territories’ in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood film noir. Drawing distinctions between ‘two discrete but interrelated modes’ – ‘centripetal space’ (that is concentrated urban space, often comprised of ‘immediately recognizable and recognized spaces’) and ‘centrifugal space’ (that is non-centred or dispersed spatial tendencies) – he outlines compelling new methods for analysing this culturally and historically specific production cycle. A vital component of Dimendberg's argument concerns location filmmaking. For a variety of complex reasons, post-war US film noir was a ‘beneficiary of innovations that permitted greater location cinematography’.

Unfortunately, however, Dimendberg overlooks the significance of a topic that would benefit from more perspicuous scholarly attention – namely, the question of how filmmakers secure permission to shoot in spaces other than a sound stage to begin with. Because Dimendberg does not approach this matter directly, he inadvertently treats the phenomenon of location filmmaking as if it happens merely by accident, chance or else an act of will. In other words, the stories that lie behind the capacity to secure and utilise real-world locations remain untold and hence hidden. Across the pages of his otherwise commendably thorough book, the processes through which post-war US films noirs arranged the capture of non-studio images appear largely inexplicable.

An example of Dimendberg's limiting conceptualisation of this key aspect of location cinematography may be found in his discussion of Johnny One-Eye (Robert Florey, 1950). Considering decisions made with respect to location choices, he reports that, in a departure from its prior literary source, the film transposes its New York settings from ‘the abandoned brownstones in which [protagonist] Martin hides from “East Fifty-third Street over near Third Avenue” to MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village’ and claims that ‘[A]lthough the reasons for this switch must remain a topic of speculation, one might surmise that the selection of Greenwich Village … provided a greater opposition to the area around Times Square.’ A series of unanswered questions stubbornly lurk behind such pronouncements though. Why ‘must’ the reasons for such a ‘switch’ exist merely as ‘a topic of speculation’?