On Conan and Rocks
Only one character outmuscles Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan The Barbarian (1984) and that is the very landscape he travels across throughout the film. It dwarfs everyone and everything in it, a bulging land of stone with mysterious fires glowing in the hills and endless dune seas between dangerous cities. From driftwood homes on windswept beaches to castles carved right into gargantuan escarpments, the Hyborian Age is as much a geological epoch as it is a setting for high adventure.
“Once great men lived here. Giants. Gods. Once, but long ago”.
— Mako the Wizard
John Milius clearly wanted to make a film about a frontier landscape. Production designer Ron Cobb has indicated as much in talking about the film he was working on with Milius prior to Conan— a biography of folkloric mountain man Jeremiah Johnson. He describes the set design as “Primitive, larger than life landscapes of the unknown west” which could just as easily describe the world depicted in Conan. The vision that Milius and Cobb shared and eventually realised with Conan was one that could be populated with identifiable cultures who have emerged from the harsh and unforgiving world around them. Cobb describes it, conceptually, as the “true story” of Conan, on which creator Robert E. Howard produced the embellished myths for pulp magazines in the 1930s.
Conan was shot in Spain, a country that offers all the psychological and visual characteristics needed for this story: wide open badlands, mystical marshes, and dangerous mountain ranges. The terrain of the barbarians. Many of the opening sequences were shot at the Ciudad Encantada (the Enchanted City). This is a place of vast Karst topography, primarily made of limestone and dolomite that date back 90 million years to the Cretaceous period. Continuous acidic rainwater has dissolved the limestone, creating grooves and hollows in hills and rock walls, sculpting unusual formations made up of the unevenly distributed dolomite. They look like monstrous fists and oversized fungus. Giant ancestral skulls and big earthly bones all turning to dust in slow motion. Some of the most recognisable monoliths have been given names by the locals such as El Mar De Piedra (The Stone sea), Seta (Mushroom) Hipopótamos (Hippopotami), and Amantes (Lovers). The Ciudad Encantada is perfectly suited to this story of a world in transition—the ancient slowly disintegrating into the modern. Limestone is a character here, the calcified skeleton of oceans long since evaporated, the past slowly wearing away in time. Dolomite is too, as an aggregate-in-waiting for the construction of cities and homes. The literal bedrock of civilisation. The world emerging from the rocks.
Surprisingly, for such a cinematic landscape—one readymade for Paella Westerns—the Ciudad Encantada has appeared in very few films. The most notable of these are Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary (1968), Sergio Leone’s early swords and sandals epic The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), and the early Ray Harryhausen fantasy The Valley of Gwangi (1969). In short, it has been used for worlds still in formation and worlds still being conquered.
My own experiences of walking through similar landscapes include a visit to Uluru, a colossal piece of sandstone in the middle of Australia that has broken through from deep below into endlessly flat grassland. You feel a deep, resonant connection to the landscape there. It’s not just the size of the monolith that affects you, though that is awe-inspiring, but something else, something unimaginably ancient and mystical. Only a year ago I was living in the Blue Mountains, which is essentially the slowly disappearing basin of a dead sea. Each day, giant plateaus of sandstone are being eroded by rain and wind. While it features large areas of forest—native eucalypts and banksia — the presence of rocks and boulders of ironstone and other rusting sediment are everywhere. It looks and feels incredibly old, particularly when punctuated by the cry of the black cockatoo, a primeval sound that reverberates through the millennia. It is also home to the last of the prehistoric Wollemi pine, so precious that their location in a remote part of the valley is kept a secret from the public. These places feel like they belong to an exceedingly rare connection to our past, and it is not hard to imagine them as the sorts of places that a young barbarian might roam.
