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Reconnaissance (n.)
“Preliminary examination or survey”, especially of territory or enemy positions for military purposes, attested from 1810 and associated with the Napoleonic Wars. From French reconnaissance “act of surveying; recognition”, from Old French reconoissance “recognition, acknowledgement”.
Recce
World War II military slang (1941), shortened from reconnaissance; used as a verb by 1943. Earlier World War I slang form recco (1917). Pronounced “rekkie”. Denotes a preparatory inspection undertaken to gather information and assess conditions; in filmmaking and project-based contexts, a pre-filming site visit to evaluate light, sound, access and logistics. Compare recon.
Reckless (adj.)
From Middle English recheles, from Old English receleas “careless, heedless”, earlier reccileas, literally “not recking (of consequences)”, from rece, recce “care, heed”, from reccan “to care” + -less. Cognates include German ruchlos and Dutch roekeloos.
A recce.
A few months ago, I typed “Uganda location manager” into my browser. I clicked the first link. I wrote to a local location manager offering to commission filmed location tests for an upcoming feature film. I was preparing a new feature film (still am) and needed to understand where and how it might be shot. Once we established the basics, I also added that I was making a documentary film about a secret expedition organised in 1903 by the British Colonial Office to the highlands of Uganda and Kenya in order to assess the territory as a potential Jewish state. I pasted the following description:
“In 1904, against the backdrop of intensifying antisemitism and pogroms across Europe, European Jewish leaders quietly supported an expedition to East Africa to evaluate the possibility of Jewish settlement in the Ugandan highlands. The mission was discreetly backed by British colonial administrators who described the region as ‘barren, underpopulated and available’. Colonised East Africa was framed as a blank imperial canvas onto which a solution to the Jewish Question could be projected. While many Zionist leaders remained committed to Palestine, others viewed the Uganda proposal as an emergency refuge and as a means of securing political legitimacy within an imperial order. To be accepted by the European states, the Jewish leadership believed, they too must become a colonising power. And they did.
Colonised East Africa was framed as a blank imperial canvas onto which a solution to the Jewish Question could be projected.
One man was tasked with surveying the terrain, climate, agricultural potential and infrastructure of the region. He documented the land through maps, diary entries and photographs, envisioning Mount Elgon as a future centre of Jewish life. Yet something occurred during this expedition that disrupted this vision and led him to vow never to return. His report turned the Zionists’ attention to another geography on the expanding map of the British Empire. Palestine.”
Kamau, the Ugandan location manager, asked where exactly I was hoping to film. He suggested travelling to the locations, producing the standard 15-minute reel of potential sites, and sending it to me as a location test. For that, he explained, he would need maps. I did in fact have several maps of the region. I had found them only weeks earlier, at the British National Archives, catalogued among the records of the Colonial Office. They had been drawn under the guidance of Joseph Chamberlain, outlining the territory proposed under what became known as the Uganda Plan. In Chamberlain’s formulation, the plan promised to resolve two pressing problems for the British Empire. The first was the desire to secure and whiten East Africa by encouraging European settlement in newly colonised territories. The second was the wish to reduce what was perceived as the growing burden of Jewish immigrants in the East End of London. In the racial logic of the Colonial Office, Jews were understood as ‘white but not quite’. This ambiguous status rendered them, in imperial eyes, suitable as a first wave of settlers in Uganda and Kenya, intermediaries between European authority and African land.
We exchanged emails about the violence of abstraction that renders land empty, and the systematic erasure of the people and cultures who inhabited these regions long before they were mapped as imperial assets.
“Why the hell was this territory offered to the Jews in the first place?” Kamau asked me in his next email. As a Jewish filmmaker myself, I asked the same thing. Drawing from these historic maps, the location manager began showing me Google Maps pins where the proposed Jewish state would have been located had the plan come to fruition. “The New Promised Land”, as the colonial administration called it, would be on Mount Elgon, at the border of Kenya and Uganda. As Kamau zoomed in, the land appeared on my screen as a dense patchwork of greens. Today, he explained, this area is designated as a Nature Reservation, meaning any filming would require special permission from the State. But gradually our technical inquiries gave way to broader and more difficult ones. We began discussing land policies and taxation, which are essential for filming. Some echoed colonial land policies. We exchanged emails about the violence of abstraction that renders land empty, and the systematic erasure of the people and cultures who inhabited these regions long before they were mapped as imperial assets. We did not get to what we both recognised as clearly connected to the story of the expedition: the land laws that would, 50 years later, culminate in the Mau Mau uprising, the systematic violence against the Kikuyu, mass detentions, forced labour, torture, starvation and extrajudicial killings. By the time our exchange concluded and the location test for my next film had been completed, it was clear to me that I could not shoot there. Returning to Mount Elgon today would only replicate what I was trying to expose and undo.
Photographs taken by Nachum Wilbush, 1904
Yet, both Kamau and I agreed that the 15-minute recce that resulted from this long exchange had captured something essential. In its very form, it condensed the desires and contradictions we were attempting to capture through the landscape. The recce – as it is often called in the film industry – embodies cinema’s most intimate negotiation with land and its persistent impulse to project fiction into the contours of reality. The recce put the imagination to the test, showing a place as something other than itself. It eerily extends the discreet act of reconnaissance, pursued by the original expedition, which, in this case, also precedes the creative production of a foreign film. Any film. The recce marked the moment when a place is to stand in for an elsewhere, and to absorb a fiction not its own. A threshold practice: neither yet a film nor merely a preparation. It is a speculative act that carries within it the seeds of both production and erasure. It stages a rehearsal not only for filmmaking, but for territorial reconfiguration, where land becomes available for appropriation, translation, extraction and occupation. The recce exposed how closely cinematic practices align with broader histories of colonial vision, in which land is rendered legible and valuable through acts of projection. Suddenly, in this intermediary form, I found the blurry, overlapping desire for my own expedition, scouting locations for a new film, and the historic Jewish expedition in the early 1900s, scouting for a homeland. In both cases, terrain is evaluated for its capacity to host an external narrative and sustain a projected future.
The recce marked the moment when a place is to stand in for an elsewhere, and to absorb a fiction not its own.
In the Recce, cinema and statehood appear here as twin forms of fabulation. Each depends on acts of abstraction, selection and erasure. The recce becomes the connective tissue between these domains, revealing how cinematic practices inherit, produce and reproduce (neo)colonial modes of framing. By focusing on the process of location scouting, both historical and contemporary, the film suddenly reflected back the ethics of projection. What kinds of force are embedded in the act of imagining a place as elsewhere, and how does cinema participate in the long afterlife of colonial ways of seeing that continue to shape perceptions of land, value and desire?
I edited the material into a 15-minute film (the exact duration of the original test, and the traditional length of recces) and sent it back to Kamau. “Maybe this is not a total failure”, I wrote to Kamau. “What do you think? Is this a film?” “Yes”, he replied, “I like it! Maybe there’s no need to come here to film after all :). Maybe it is what it is… a recce.” Now, by adopting the form of the location test, the film foregrounded the dual attempt – to make a film and to seek a homeland – as bound, in different ways, to failure. A rehearsal rather than a premiere. Just as Uganda was for Palestine.
Daniel Mann
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