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• 1 media/992px-Paul_Strand,_Wall_Street,_New_York_City,_1915.jpg media/THE-RIVER-1-copy.jpg term 2016-01-04T19:35:28-08:00 Landscape Theory 23 some general thoughts image_header 222883 2024-03-20T13:19:13-07:00
  As a form of visual representation, landscape is often conceived as one of a binary, in contrast to the portrait. And this binary framework, landscape vs. portrait mode is completely embedded in our everyday experience of our contemporary technological handmaidens —  the phone orientation, or the two options given when printing a page.   This rectangle of vision is so ubiquitous as to be literally naturalized in our cinematic experience with its assumptions of value and hierarchies such that the wideness of the screen is what determines the better or higher the quality of the cinematic experience afforded us. Obviously, if you can see a giant, blockbuster film at one of those IMAX 70mm theaters, the cinematic experience must be way better and more immersive…  I don’t think we actually see horizontally or vertically, but these two essentialist categories of framing are quite difficult to allude.  And yet, it seems curious to me that cinema, with its overt preference for the landscape mode of presentation would mainly consign landscape itself to the background.  WTJ Mitchell describes landscape as “generally the  “overlooked,” not the “looked at,” (vii).  In film terms, landscape is most often regarded as the backdrop, a setting for a story about people, and not fit to be a subject in and of itself.   Even in documentary about places, the landscape is usually where something takes place to people or through which subjects travel to get to places where people are doing particular things.

  Martin Lefebvre, in the introduction to his edited collection of essays Landscape and Film,  suggests that the history of the film form itself begins with images of the natural world in movement. He suggests that this attraction of seeing places and the appeal of cinematic sightseeing precedes the “grand scale development and domination of narrative cinema…”  He writes, “it’s almost as if the décor had been set first and the cinema was simply waiting for the players to arrive and turn it into the setting for some unfolding drama.” (xi)  Interesting, at least for the art history nerds among us, Lefebvre also notes that in this respect, cinema was inverting the development of the landscape form of painting in Western art, which has often been narrated as a “slow emancipation” of the representation of place and view from “the demands of eventhood and narrative.” (xi)

  So, what does it mean to regard landscape as a subject in and of itself and what implications might a focus on filmed representations of landscape itself have for representation in general?  Having devoted myself to an investigation of the history and theory of landscape representations in art and film, I herewith would like to offer you a few preliminary findings, some proto-theories, guides and reasons for placing landscape at the center of our attention.  In so doing, I have been thinking through a number of different forms or genres of landscape film.  Which is to say, types of film which are centered on the representation of landscape and place per se, which make landscape the subject in and of itself, rather than simply the setting.  In these forms, I suggest that landscape functions as a central character.  

  In this project, I’m interested in pushing this concept of landscape film beyond the ways in which landscape usually functions as an aspect of narrative or as a reflection of character.  There are, of course, many tropes in narrative film in which the landscape takes on an aspect of a human character, such as the way that weather is often used as a kind of reflection for moods or tempers of a the central character.  Antonioni is one filmmaker whose work is often discussed in this regard.  I’m also interested in pushing beyond another common way that landscape is figured in film as a definition of genre. I’m thinking of the way that particular types of landscapes serve as definitions for genre types, such as “The Western” and “the Road movie” or in  Sci-Fi films. In these modes, the strange and/or difficult landscape is often figured as a narrative obstacle for the central human character, who must traverse through or survive the harsh and difficult conditions.  In moving beyond ideas of landscape as either a setting for or as a metaphor for a character’s inner state or external conflict, I want to suggest that the landscape as, in and of itself, taken as a subject worthy of film/moving image representation provides us humans with an all too rare opportunity to explore what might exist beyond individual consciousness; beyond the kind of subjectivity which is usually the function of narrative (whether fictional or non-fictional) and toward a different kind of consciousness: one which approaches a collective experience of shared perceptions and material realities.