MARTIN LEFEBVRE

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA

Résumé: Des spécialistes des études du paysage ont identifié une tension entre le

paysage conçu comme objet d’observation (le paysage de la peinture) et le paysage

conçu comme espace vécu (le paysage de la géographie). Dans cet article, je montre

que, de toutes les formes de médiation qui président à l’émergence du paysage,

c’est au cinéma que cette tension se manifeste de la façon la plus vive et, jusqu’à

un certain point, qu’elle se résout d’elle-même. Au cœur de cette question réside la

capacité unique du cinéma de conjuguer espace et temps, représentation picturale

et récit, et de les projeter sur le paysage. L’argument nécessite un parcours qui nous

conduira de la peinture au cinéma en passant par la photographie avant de retrouver,

enfin, le cinéma.

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 20 NO. 1 • SPRING • PRINTEMPS 2011 • pp 61-78

Film has a long history of showing views of the natural world. In fact, a number

of the earliest films—including some in the Lumière catalogue—were cele-

brated by spectators for capturing just such views. The natural world also came

to occupy a significant role in one of the first film genres, known as the “travel

film” whose success lasted until about 1906. The genre was immediately popular

with turn-of-the-century audiences and grew out of a visual culture where land-

scape had come to occupy a dominant position. As had been the case with 19th

century landscape art and imagery, the popularity of travel films greatly benefited

from several important and deep cultural transformations that affected the modern

Western world throughout that century, though in some cases with increasing

speed as of 1850. These include, for instance, the colonization of Africa and of

the Indies which brought about a taste in Europe for “exotic” scenery but also

served to strengthen metropolitan identity by giving new impetus and meaning to

national landscapes; the drive to settle the American west, which had a similar role

in some respects in the U. S., and led to a fascination for new national landscapes

such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone, or the Rocky Mountains;

the new, faster and more efficient modes of locomotion that made travel easier

and safer; industrial capitalism’s production of a new leisure class of tourists

soon to be emulated by the rising middle-class; and, finally, also of import, were

developments in travel literature, the emergence of anthropology, ethnography

and the natural sciences in the context of Darwinism, all of which managed to

secure a substantial amount of curiosity. Not surprisingly the second half of the

19th century also saw the introduction of the postcard which was soon to be illus-

trated with an image—most often a drawn or photographed landscape.

With hindsight it is hard not to see early cinema’s attraction towards land-

scape views as something obvious, almost “natural,” an appeal not unlike that

which, in the contemporary era, has brought IMAX films to equally turn towards

landscape views from the onset by way of modern nature films and travelogues.

A few years later, when fictional narrative became the dominant mode of film-

making, the new medium’s ability to harness natural settings in support of plot

and realism helped reinforce its specificity over other forms of representation,

especially theatre. Thus while natural settings did not provide cinema with its

media specificity, they nonetheless offered a formidable expression and exem-

plification of the “cinematic” whenever one compared film to the traditional

stage, as was so often done in the early days of film criticism. As pioneer critic

and scholar Victor Freeburg wrote, in 1918 in The Art of Photoplay Making, “For

the first time in the history of the arts which mimic human happenings it has

become possible for the spectator to go to the very spot where the action takes

place;”1 “The photoplay,” he added, “is the only art of dramatic representation

which can dispense entirely with artificial settings.”2 One can look at Laurence

Olivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Henry V as providing a textbook illustration of

the differences between theatrical and cinematic space, using a natural setting

for the battle of Agincourt as the definitive term of distinction. And, when, in the

1950s films began using widescreen formats such as Cinemascope or VistaVision

—often along with color—to visually distinguish the cinema from the competing

small screen black and white picture of television, landscape once again came to

occupy an important function in what might be called a “practical elucidation”

of cinematic specificity, as eloquently demonstrated by several films of the era,

such as Anthony Mann’s great Cinemascope and color western triptych from the

1950s: The Man From Laramie (1955), The Last Frontier (1955) and Man of the

West (1958). Indeed, so much is obvious in the film trailer advertisement for The

Man from Laramie, where the relatively new cinematic attraction of

Cinemascope is literally etched onto the landscape (fig. 1).

Yet, as straightforward and self-evident as this crude and sketchy account

might appear to be, certain conceptual complications arise when we ask whether

the simple presence of a natural setting in a film necessarily constitutes a land-

scape. For to invoke the term under these conditions might imply calling forth a

language game different from that associated with discussions of painting, draw-

ing or photography. Simply put, as we shall see below, for still media art, “land-

scape” has come to signify a view of nature emancipated from the presence of

human figures and offering itself for contemplation. Yet we ought to remind our-

selves that pictorial art, as important as it may be, is not the only discipline

where the concept of landscape is used and defined, and in some instances—

62 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

human or cultural geography, being a case in point—the concept’s “grammar”

(i.e., what makes its use meaningful in a given context) is less concerned with

vision and its attendant conceptions such as framing or distance.

This paper does not seek to analyze particular landscapes in the cinema nor

to dissect specific films where landscape is prominent. My goal, rather, is a

complementary one: that of exposing, albeit in preliminary form, some of the

principal terms and conditions of possibility for such analyses of landscapes in

films. To put it succinctly, my interest lies in investigating the concept and expe-

rience of landscape in narrative cinema.

In a recent book, Irish geographer John Wylie has pointed to a tension that

recurrently troubles landscape studies in cultural geography: “It is a tension,” he

writes, “between proximity and distance, body and mind, sensuous immersion

and detached observation. Is landscape the world we are living in, or a scene we

are looking at, from afar?”3 In what follows, I intend to show that, of all the dif-

ferent mediated forms through which landscape may emerge, it is in the cinema

that this tension can most vividly manifest itself and even, to some extent,

resolve itself. At the heart of the matter lies the cinema’s unique ability to call

forth both space and time, picture and narrative, into its mode of representation

and, therefore, into the representation of landscape.

1. THE AUTONOMOUS LANDSCAPE AND FILM NARRATIVE

The premise for my argument was developed a few years ago in an essay on film

landscape.4 I shall briefly revisit it here as a prelude for further thoughts on the

topic.

In still media art, as mentioned above, landscape has come to signify the

depiction of a natural space freed from any emphasis on the representation of

human figures and eventhood. Achieving this emancipation has taken centuries

and art historians have unearthed several phases of it. Jacob Wamberg, for example,

has claimed that, as early as the Quattrocento—if not before with Lorenzetti—

“traces of time and work—clouds, atmosphere, cast light; fields, hedges, roads—

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 63

Fig. 1. Still from the film trailer for The Man From Laramie (A. Mann, 1955)

become part of the painted landscape environment independently of what is

going on among the figures.”5 With retrospect, several 16th century artists have

also been seen as precursors of the landscape genre proper. These include

Albrecht Aldorfer (c. 1480-1538), Joachim Patinir (c. 1480-1524), Jan van Amstel

(c. 1500-1542), Lucas Gassel (c. 1500-1570), Herri met de Bles (c. 1510-1555/60),

and Cornelis Massys (c. 1510-1556/7). Though they continued to use human

figures in their work—Altdorfer being arguably the most spectacular exception

in this regard—an inversion had nonetheless taken place in the relation these

figures now maintained with their natural environments. Indeed, with the latter

dominating the visual field and completely overwhelming or marginalizing the

human actors and their actions, landscape could now be interpreted as the true

subject matter of these artworks. The process was then brought to its completion

in the 17th century—often claimed to signal the birth of the autonomous land-

scape as an artistic genre—with the works of Rubens (1577-1640), Poussin

(1594-1665), Lorrain (1600-1682), Ruisdael (1628-1682) and many others.6

Now, if the autonomy of represented space is essential in visual arts for the

emergence of landscape as a pictorial concept distinct from the mere setting that

comprises characters, actions and events, then one might legitimately question

dominant cinema’s ability to present landscapes. The problem, it would seem,

lies in the subsumption of space to the demands of narrative. The distinction

between setting and landscape, one might say, is one of pictorial economy: as

long as natural space in a work is subservient to characters, events and action,

as long as its function is to provide space for them, the work is not properly

speaking a landscape.

With this caveat in mind, let us once again consider Freeburg’s The Art of

Photoplay Making. Though an advocate for location shooting, Freeburg nonethe-

less prescribes that filmmakers always “subordinate [the] use of natural setting in

the service of the dramatic action”7 thus ensuring artistic unity through harmony

of the film’s various parts. Not all forms of subordination are equal, however, and

Freeburg offers a taxonomy of subordinate functions according to which setting

may be conceived as neutral, informative, sympathetic, participating and formative.

This taxonomy connects setting to events and characters, and loosely charts

a spectrum along an exteriority/interiority axis. At one end of the spectrum we

find the neutral setting, which relates indifferently to the action or to the char-

acters, while, at the other end lies the formative setting which seeks to express

the character’s interior state of mind. This forward movement into plot and

character psychology also describes the remaining three functions. Thus, the

informative function uses setting to visually give information about the film’s

characters, the sympathetic function sets mood, tone or atmosphere for the

events to unfold, and, finally, the participating function uses setting as an “acting

part in the drama,”8 one capable of casting the dramatis personae’s individuality

and moral fiber—as when a natural disaster such as a flood or an erupting volcano

64 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

ends up “moulding human character.”9 Yet whatever function the setting fulfills,

it must never acquire independence from the narrative. “It is all very well to have a

duel take place somewhere among the trees,” writes Freeburg in discussing setting’s

neutral function, “providing the trees are not evergreens trimmed into fantastic

shapes, for in such case the spectator would contemplate the trees rather than

the duelists.”10 According to the aesthetic of narrative subordination championed

by Freeburg—which will later become known as “classical” cinema—landscape, as

an autonomous entity, is clearly undesirable. One danger, it seems, might be for

landscape to interrupt the forward drive and flow of narrative with “distracting”

imagery, thus replacing narrativized setting with visual attractions and unwanted

moments of pictorial contemplation.11 Freeburg’s comments are obviously pre-

scriptive, but they point to the possibility of an uneasy marriage of pictoriality

and narrative in classical, narrative driven, cinema.

Of course, even under the classical regime, narrative subordination cannot be

absolute. Not only are films and spectators at times unruly, but visual attractions

and spectacle have always been an important part of the cinematic experience.

Indeed, I would dare to say that most spectators have experienced moments—

even in classical films where setting is necessitated by the narrative—when views

of nature have become “unhinged” from the narrative in such a way as to exist

in their consciousness as “autonomous” landscapes, irrespective of the film-

maker’s intention to produce such an effect.12 Again, however, the idea is to

recognize that narrative and pictorial landscape often co-exist in a state of tension

in a film.

To explain the emergence of landscape in the film experience, I previously

identified two modes of presence for it in narrative films: what I have called the

“intentional landscape” and the “spectator’s landscape” (which I also refer to as

the “impure landscape”).13 At the root of both of these modes, however, lies the

spectator’s sensibility to landscape as a visual medium and his or her ability to

“arrest” the image, if only in his or her mind.

Briefly put, the “intentional landscape” rests on an interpretive ascription of

intent by the spectator. It is supported by visual strategies that almost unequivo-

cally call attention to a film’s natural setting in ways that recall one’s experience

of landscape art. Thus, to take an obvious example, chances are that, in watching

Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2001), any viewer sensitive to landscape imagery is likely

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 65

Figs. 2 & 3. Stills from Gerry, Gus van Sant (2001)

to interpret the filmmaker’s visual approach—which includes framing and com-

position—as calling forth the artistic concept of the autonomous landscape (see

figs. 2 & 3). This interpretation is reinforced by the narrative looseness of this

non-classical film, the use of temps morts, long takes and relative stillness in the

depiction of often empty natural spaces, and by the fact that, through montage,

the landscape formations that succeed one another in diegetic continuity form

an impossible geography. Once noticed, such implausible variations in terrain

morphology create a space that defies, resists or exceeds strict diegetic motivation

or subordination as well as real world referentiality.14 As a result, the narrative

function of setting may momentarily fade and the depiction of space acquires, in

the spectator’s gaze, the kind of autonomy traditionally required by pictorial

landscape imagery.

The “impure landscape,” on the other hand, differs only insofar as the spec-

tator is not led to attribute any “obvious” landscaping intention to the filmmaker

(or to the film). Thus to borrow Freeburg’s earlier example, it may be that even

under the right sort of trees, the spectator can still direct his or her attention

toward the landscape in such a way as to momentarily break the narrative bond

of subordination that unites the forest setting to the raging duel between the

film’s lead protagonists. And should this not happen during a first viewing, it

might well occur with repeated ones.

Depending on one’s aesthetic sensibility, both modes of experience of land-

scape may be said to regularly haunt spectators’ experience of narrative films. In

ghostly fashion film landscapes appear momentarily only to disappear, often seconds

later, existing in a regime dominated by the ebb and flow of spectatorial con-

sciousness, wherein narrative and pictorial qualities may both vie for attention.

2. INTERLUDE: “ASK THE DUST”

The ability to mentally “extract” and to “arrest” landscapes from the flow of

narrative films and their various natural settings, was interestingly captured and

replicated a few years ago by Los Angeles-based artist Cindy Bernard in a serial

work entitled “Ask the Dust” (c. 1988-1992).15

The work consists of a set of 21 photographs shot by Bernard. They include

mostly natural landscapes, but also what French anthropologist Marc Augé

would call non-places,16 as well as one cityscape. What is so peculiar in this

series, however, is that the photographs all refer to locations for films shot in the

U.S. during a twenty year period that begins in 1954 and ends in 1974—an era

that happens to coincide, among other things, with the end of the studio system

in American filmmaking and with a surge in location shooting. Each photograph,

then, seeks to reproduce the framing from a given scene in a film. Though there

are at times slight formal discrepancies between the photograph and the intertex-

tual source image (with regards to camera placement, angle or aspect ratio, for

instance17), as well as differences in pictorial content due to the passage of time

66 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

on some of the locations, the overall effect is nonetheless one of “fidelity.”

The films referenced by the series are: Them (Gordon Douglas, 1954), The

Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1955), The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), 3:10 to Yuma

(Delmer Daves, 1957), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), North by Northwest

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), The Alamo (John Wayne, 1960), Splendor in the Grass

(Elia Kazan, 1961), Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962), It’s a Mad Mad

Mad Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963), Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964),

Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965), The Wild Angels (Roger Corman, 1966),

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio

Leone, 1968), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson,

1970), Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971), The Godfather (Francis F. Coppola, 1972),

Electra Glide in Blue (James William Guercio, 1973), and Chinatown (Roman

Polanski, 1974) (see figs. 4, 5, 6 & 7).

The referencing is made obvious by the fact that each photograph bears the

corresponding film title as its own, an ironic twist on a common practice in land-

scape imagery produced from nature—either painted or photographed—which

consists in naming the picture after the location depicted. The year of the original

film release as well as that of Bernard’s own photo shoots are also indicated.

Both ends of the series are framed by important social and political events:

1954 marks the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) Supreme Court

decision overturning segregation in public schools in the U.S., while 1974 marks

the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Bernard later explained her project:

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 67

Fig. 6. Still from Five Easy Pieces(Rafelson, 1970)

Fig. 7. Five Easy Pieces (Bernard, 1991)

Fig. 5. North by Northwest (Bernard, 1989)Fig. 4. Still from North by Northwest(Hitchcock, 1959)

I had a fairly idiosyncratic thesis that doesn’t really pan out....

Something along the lines of ‘if you take two points in American history

—Brown vs. Board of Education and Nixon’s resignation—and track a

trajectory between them of America as idealized state through the most

cynical point, and if you take as a given that the notion of a culturally

constructed landscape is a central component in American consciousness

and American film, would you be able to trace that historical trajectory

in the way landscape is depicted in American film [?].’18

This attempt, by the artist, to offer a symptomatic reading of the films and land-

scapes she replicates may help explain certain of her choices. This is especially

obvious, for instance, in the films that frame the entire series: Them, where the

only victims of giant black ants—which have mutated by radiation from the

nuclear bombings of Japan during the war—are white people, and Chinatown

which chronicles a father’s ultimate transgression of the Law (that of incest) in

a story of political corruption over the control of water in Los Angeles.

Looking at the complete set of photographs at once, as if it were a mosaic,

one immediately notices, of course, the predominance of western landscapes

with epic views of Monument Valley—which John Ford almost single-handedly

forged into a mythical American landscape—either recurring rhythmically like a

refrain or else standing as the ground against which the other photographs in the

series appear. As for the bridges, roads and gas station, they remind us that the

set also depicts a journey—a sort of arrested road movie—through American

(film) landscapes. The journey, moreover, is classically framed—reproducing the

“repetition and difference” structure so common to classical cinema—for it

begins and ends through variations brought on a single location, namely the bed

of the Los Angeles River seen in both Them and Chinatown. Yet because the pho-

tographs are about films as much as they are about actual locations in the world

(e.g., the Los Angeles River, Monument Valley or San Francisco, etc.), the space

for the suggested journey is only partly real, constituting therefore nothing short

of a true heterotopia, yet one not only inaccessible in its wholeness but whose

function—unlike the various “other spaces” that were once identified by Michel

Foucault19—remains unclear or vague. Indeed, the spaces represented in the pho-

tographs are, at one and the same time, real and fictional and their referencing

oscillates between both universes.

It would be tempting to ponder over these images, in rapt cinephilic fasci-

nation,20 enthralled by the pleasure of such uncanny repetitions, and to proceed

like the young photographer in Antonioni’s Blow Up as he tries to unearth what

it is that the landscape (a London park and the photos he shot of it) holds to

view and yet hides at the same time (a possible murder). But I shall resist this

hermeneutic urge. Instead I want to use the fact that these images can be seen

as embodying—quite literally one might want to say—the process whereby the

68 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

spectator can mentally “extract” and “arrest” landscape from the flow of narra-

tive films to further investigate the relation of landscape to narrative in film. To

put it otherwise: I want to use Bernard’s images as tools for thought.

In the spectatorial experience of “arresting” or “seizing” the landscape in

the flow of narrative, what is at stake, to use a phrase from Ronald W. Hepburn,

are “momentary bounds of attention”21 whereby a spectator recognizes (“inten-

tional landscape”) or otherwise “releases’” (“impure landscape”) the landscapes

that may lie latent, as mere possibilities, in a film’s setting. Moreover, such

“bounds”—the ability to esthetically hold something like nature in thought, to

contemplate it—have been essential to the development of the idea of landscape

(in art and in situ) in the West, even when they appear in a state of crisis as with

the Kantian notion of the sublime, according to which nature may excite ideas

that exceed the limits of both sense and imagination, and yet still be reined in

by reason and a “higher finality.”22 Indeed, in all cases, even when the sublime

is concerned, the aesthetic appreciation of nature seems to require the cultivation

of both a “sensuous component” and a reflective or “thought-component” that

distinguishes it from “hasty” and “unthinking” perception, to borrow once more

Hepburn’s terms.23 This “thought-component” is not opposed per se to move-

ment or duration as may be reported by sensation, but it registers them accord-

ing to its own rhythm. Here again Hepburn is helpful:

Consider, he writes, that paradigm case of aesthetic experience of

nature—the fall of an autumn leaf. If we simply watch it fall without

any thought, it may or may not be a moving or exciting aesthetic object,

but it must be robbed of its poignancy, its mute message of summer

gone, its symbolizing all falling, our own included. Leaf veins suggest

blood-vessel veins—symbolizing continuity in the forms of life, and

maybe a shared vulnerability. Thus the thought-element may bring

analogies to bear on the concrete particulars: this autumn is linked to

innumerable other autumns: to the cycle of seasons.24

It is this very rhythm—the almost abstract rhythm of thought so different from

that of “unthinking hastiness”—that still images have for so long excelled at cap-

turing before conveying it to their spectators who, in turn, may or may not be

receptive to it (one may indeed rush through an art museum as quickly as one can

leaf through the pages of a magazine). But it is also something that the cinema,

especially narrative cinema, has had difficulty in conveying, even though this

was a central concern for Eisenstein and Dovzhenko as well as for a number of

post-war European filmmakers, several of whom —one thinks, for instance, of

Rossellini, Antonioni, Godard, Greenaway, Wenders, Tarkovsky and Sokurov—

have also been attracted to landscape.

Arresting the film image, literally deterritorializing the setting by transposing

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 69

it from film to photography, all the while severing its narrative bond and offering

it back to us emptied of action and characters, Bernard’s photographs retrieve or

recover what some of us might have otherwise missed in our haste as film spec-

tators: landscapes that we can contemplate. And in the process, “Ask the Dust”

helps us to envisage just how such landscapes haunt narrative films.

But this is not yet the entire picture; nor is it the only haunting going on. In

Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama has argued that one of the distinguish-

ing attributes of landscapes in contrast with nature is that memory always per-

vades the former.25 This, according to Schama, is what makes landscape such a

profoundly human artifact. Some of these memories may run deep in culture and

history, revealing themselves in the significance and various meanings that land-

scapes acquire for us. Another way to put it is to say that nature may exist with-

out us, that it doesn’t need us, whereas landscape requires some degree of

human presence and affect. Likewise the photographs that make up “Ask the

Dust” are also profuse with various strata of memory. Photography scholar Mark

Durden has suggested that they “possess a quality reminiscent of Eugène Atget’s

views of empty streets,” adding: “what Walter Benjamin had said of them might

just as well be said of such pictures by Bernard: ‘deserted like the scene of a

crime’.”26 Paradoxically, however, this “crime scene” is haunted by the memory

of those very characters, actions and events—those narrative components—that

have been “chased” from the visual field and belong to a past and, at least in

part, to a world that Bernard’s camera cannot capture (the world of fictional nar-

rative). As Durden writes, the photographs “invite us to fill them up with our

own imagined scenarios and /or filmic memories. We bring narratives to these

half-familiar scenes.”27 But this being the case, it appears that using “Ask the

Dust” as an analogy to concretely illustrate the conditions for the appearance of

landscape in the cinema leads us straight to a conceptual knot. Indeed, how

could it be that, with regard to their very identity qua landscapes, part of the sig-

nificance born by these photographs would rest precisely with elements that

otherwise compete with their emergence as film landscapes (i.e. characters,

actions, events: narrative)? Untangling this knot is the task of the final section of

this paper.

3. CONTEMPLATION AND IMMERSION: THE SPECIFICITY OF FILM LANDSCAPES?

So far I have proceeded almost exclusively with pictorial assumptions regarding

landscape. Their adequacy for thinking about film landscapes stems obviously

from the pictorial nature of cinema. But were it for those assumptions alone, one

wonders what narrative film could be said to offer the representation—or art—

of landscape that has not already been contributed by painting and photography,

often in superior and more satisfactory fashion. As Jacques Aumont wrote a few

years ago, “the relation of cinema to painting is uninteresting if it reduces itself

to a reprising of ready-made images (what we call quotation); it can only be of

70 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

interest if it comes to signify something with regards to cinema as a visual art,

i.e., as something other than narration and representation, and as a particular

modality of fiction.”28 Thus, and perhaps not surprisingly, most of the present

argument has gone toward considering what the pictorial concept of landscape

can bring to our conception of film and, in particular, to our conception of film

spectatorship as a site where objects like landscape or narrative may surface or

recoil in the ebb and flow of our immediate awareness. At this point, however,

it would seem reasonable to turn the question around and ask whether narrative

film has anything at all of import to contribute to landscape.

To begin, I want to clarify that the above emphasis on “arrested pictorial-

ness”—which is surely a fundamental component in the experience of landscape

in cinema—is not meant to mask the fact that several other factors, including

duration, movement, sound and, especially, music often contribute to that expe-

rience as well. For instance, after the mother’s passing in Sokurov’s Mother and

Son (1997) we see the young man on several stations of a long walk. At one point

we see him in a prairie and a train passes behind him (fig. 8). The shot lasts over

one minute and a half and the camera is immobile. In this case, our ability to

“arrest” the landscape image is accompanied—or interpreted—by feelings that

also feed on such factors as shot duration, the slow movement of the train and

the soft echoing of its whistle as it unhurriedly exists the frame, and, of course,

the melancholy musical score (a softly-played and slow piano motif in a minor

key—also a form of movement and duration). I’d like to argue that these feel-

ings, which may grow into the “thought-component” mentioned in the previous

section, can help draw us into the landscape, so that our experience of it may

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 71

Fig. 8. Still from Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997)

not be as distanced—and therefore as purely visual—as we might think.

At the outset of this paper I quoted geographer John Wylie who outlines the

field of landscape studies by referring to tensions operative within it. He asks:

Does the word landscape describe the mutual embededness and inter-

connectivity of self, body, knowledge and land—landscape as the world

we live in, a constantly emergent and perceptual milieu? Or is landscape

better conceived in artistic and painterly terms as a specific cultural and

historical genre, a set of visual strategies and devices for distancing and

observing?29

Unlike traditional art historians, human geographers, social anthropologists,

archeologists and others working in cognate fields have of late been concerned

less with landscape as an expanse of space surveyed from a distance, or gazed

at, than as a lived and inhabited environment. For beyond the fact that landscape

offered Western painters an early opportunity to display and emphasize pictorial

style—thus possibly paving the way toward modernism—what makes landscape

significant, and therefore human, is the role it plays in our forms of life as

dwellers, both concretely (in situ) and symbolically (through representations).

Dwelling, of course, belongs to the philosophical toolbox of Heidegger and

expresses the most essential dimension of Dasein, that of Being-in-the-world.

Indeed, writes Heidegger, “Dwelling...is the basic character of Being, in keeping

with which mortals exist.”30 Influenced by Heidegger’s and by Merleau-Ponty’s

critique of Cartesian epistemology and its division of res cogitans and res exten-

sa, several scholars in the social sciences have begun to look at landscapes from

a new perspective. “To perceive the landscape,” wrote social anthropologist Tim

Ingold in an influential essay published in 1993, “is...to carry out an act of

remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal

image stored in the mind as of engaging perceptually with an environment that

is itself pregnant with the past.”31

Calling for the adoption of a “dwelling perspective” on landscape, Ingold

develops metaphors of visuality and aurality that find particular resonance with the

film scholar. The argument seeks to bring together the qualitative aspects of lived

space and time, or what Ingold calls landscape and taskscape, so that “landscape

as a whole [may] be understood as the taskscape in its embodied form.”32

The first step in this argument implies distinguishing “landscape” from

“land” and defining the taskscape. Of land, explains Ingold, one may sensibly

ask how much of it there is—i.e., land has meaning as a quantity of space. Of

landscape, on the other hand, it makes sense to ask how it is like—i.e., landscape

has meaning as a quality or form of space. Analogous to that relation, but in the

domain of time, is that which holds between labor and “any practical operation,

72 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

carried out by a skilled agent in an environment, as part of his or her normal

business of life,” or what Ingold calls tasks, and which for him are the acts that

constitute dwelling.33 Thus whereas “land [and labor are] quantitative and

homogeneous...landscape [and tasks are] qualitative and heretogeneous.”34 The

taskscape, in short, corresponds to the “entire ensemble of tasks,” “an array of

related activites” that stand for the qualitative dimension of time (just as labor

constitutes its quantitative aspect). To account for landscape and taskscape

Ingold asks that we consider painting and music. “Music,” he claims, “best

reflects the forms of the taskscape [while] painting is the most natural medium

for representing the forms of the landscape.”35 If the analogy of landscape with

painting needs no explaining, the relation of taskscape with music is justified by

the fact that music shares its temporal nature with acts of doing and with the

rhythmical patterns of life and of the world.

The final step in the argument consists of doing away with this dichotomy

by incorporating the concept of taskscape into that of landscape. This implies

acknowledging the temporality of landscape and recognizing it as the enduring

or congealed form of the taskscape, of dwelling. It also implies bringing together

space and time, picture (landscape) and sound (taskscape). At this point Ingold

switches over to a film metaphor:

Imagine a film of the landscape shot over years, centuries, even millennia.

Slightly speeded up, plants appear to engage in very animal-like movements,

trees flex their limbs without any prompting from the winds. Speeding

up rather more, glaciers flow like rivers and even the earth begins to

move. At greater speeds solid rock bends, buckles and flows like molten

metal. The world itself begins to breathe. Thus the rhythmic pattern of

human activities nests within a wider pattern of activity for all animal

life, which in turn nests within the pattern of activity for all so-called

living things, which nests within the life-process of the world.36

Through this imaginary film, Ingold seeks to illustrate that human dwelling is

not categorially different from the becoming of the world as landscape. An idea

Heidegger would likely agree with since he conceived of dwelling both as “the

manner in which mortals are on earth”37 and the earth itself, its mountains,

streams and forests as “nature’s buildings”38 where those who care for them and

are sensitive to them are “at home.”39 As Ingold writes:

Human beings do not, in their movements, inscribe their life histories

upon the surface of nature as do writers upon the page; rather, these

histories are woven, along with the life cycles of plants and animals,

into the texture of the surface itself. Thus the forms of landscape arise

alongside those of the taskscape, within the same current of activity.40

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 73

It would be fair to say that whereas pictorial conceptions of landscape tend to

emphasize contemplation, Ingold’s temporalized landscape emphasizes immersion:

The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look

at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on

our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement

in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning

ideas about it. For the landscape, to recall the words of Merleau-Ponty, is

not so much the object as “the homeland of our thoughts.”41

Now, it is plain enough to grasp that cinematic space is always temporal-

ized, as Ingold’s imaginary film amply illustrates. But the obvious limitation of

Ingold’s film metaphor rests with the seeming transparency with which it con-

ceives the film image and, therefore, with the way it disregards the interval that

exists between image and world; an interval whose endless and infinitesimal

folds have served to justify the humanistic project of film studies—whether of

the aesthetic or of the socio-ideological and political persuasions. Film scholars,

however, also know that beyond the potentially naturalizing and relatively

immersive effects of the cinematic apparatus itself, narrative—and, in particular,

classical-style and realist-style narration—can add to film, along with sound and

the power of music to carry affect, a further immersive effect, potentially drawing

us into a world that resembles our own and often shares with it its very fabric—

as Cindy Bernard’s photographs, discussed above, can serve to remind us. And

herein lies, as we saw earlier, the apparent paradox and the lesson revealed by

these photographs: that far from contradicting the emergence of landscape, film

narrative—as mnemonic presence in this case—may, in its quality as a temporal

representation of human dwelling, actually function as a key element in the

experience of landscape as lived space in film. And indeed, it would seem logical

to assume that any specific contribution narrative film might make to the idea of

landscape—and to its use as a symbol to be interpreted—would stem from the

medium’s ability to temporalize the landscape and move us into it.42

So how are we to account for the emergence of landscape in film? On one

hand, as discussed earlier, landscape seems to require a form of contemplative

autonomy, a severing of narrative subservience, while on the other hand it seems

to acquire its significance relative to our ability to immerse ourselves in it and to

see it—or interpret it—as a representation of dwelling thanks, in no small mea-

sure, to narrative. Are these competing conceptions of the landscape experience

simply incompatible in the end? Is landscape as view or picture, as that which

must be extracted from the flow of the narrative and arrested in thought (in order

to be contemplated), incommensurable with landscape as taskscape or dwelling?

Let us now try to escape some of the confusion raised by this conundrum.

No one knows exactly when the idea of landscape first made its way in the

74 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

Western consciousness, whether, for instance, it emerged in the 16th and 17th

centuries when the Italian term paese, the Dutch landscap or the English land-

skip all came into common usage to discuss a new genre in painting, or whether

it had already expressed itself differently, say in Petrarch’s purely contemplative

motive for ascending Mont Ventoux or earlier still, say, in Virgil’s Eclogues or

even as far back as Theocritus’s Idylls. If painting is so often singled out, how-

ever, it is because the landscape tradition that first takes hold there at the end of

the Renaissance and further develops during the Age of Reason, leaves little

doubt, from that moment onward, as to the importance of the idea of landscape.

Did these painters and connoisseurs conceive of a new way to express Being-in-

the-world or did their autonomous landscapes “merely” bring forth to our atten-

tion, or “liberate,” a dimension of dwelling that had more or less remained

concealed? Were they building dwelling through art? After all, contemplation,

when it opens unto thought, is itself a state of Being-in-the-world43. As Heidegger

said to his Darmstadt audience,

If all of us, now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in

Heidelburg, this thinking toward that locale is not a mere experience

inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the essence of our

thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking persists through the distance

to that locale. From this spot right here, we are at the bridge—we are by no

means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right

here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes

room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing.44

Comparing Heidegger’s distinction between one’s thinking of the bridge in

Heidelburg—even at a distance—and one’s using it unthinkingly (or hastily) to

cross the river with the achievement of landscape painting, i.e., its emergence

from its role as mere “backdrop” in previous traditions of Western picture making,

may go a long way in explaining the importance the genre holds in our experi-

ence of film landscapes (and especially in those cases identified earlier as impure

landscapes). Indeed, the analogy helps us differentiate between setting and land-

scape in terms not unlike those that, for Heidegger, set apart the same bridge

either as dwelling or as indifferent river crossing. In narrative film, as I’ve tried

to show, the pictorial landscape emerges in a visual culture that still finds itself

under the influence of painting’s (and photography’s) own autonomous land-

scape. But it is an experience that runs against narrative’s potential effect of con-

cealing landscape as setting. In narrative film, as in painting or photography, our

ability to experience and interpret the landscape—to discover in it or think

through with it all sorts of symbolic meanings, from purely aesthetic themes to

political ones, for instance—finds its source in the way it can come to occupy the

center of our attention. And yet, just as we need to posit at least two ways of

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 75

thinking about the same view of natural space in a given narrative film—either

as setting or as landscape, according to the factors such as the ones briefly out-

lined above—so it is that we ought also consider two ways of experiencing the

narrative: either as that which conceals landscape or that which may be inter-

preted to reveal it. For though a tension often exists in a film between the picto-

rial experience of landscape and narrative, that experience—and the thinking

that can accompany it—may in turn bring the narrative to further reveal the

landscape as dwelling. In a sense, what we find here is nothing short of a reversal

of the early aesthetic prescriptions of Victor Freeburg, for under these conditions

it is now narrative that serves the landscape.

Beyond the fact that narrative cinema is uniquely equipped to show what

P. Adams Sitney has called “spectacular meteorological displays,”45 i.e., bliz-

zards, storms or the fury of the sea—even though it may require the aid of CGI

effects as in Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996) or The Perfect Storm (Wolfgang Petersen,

2000)—in the end it may be that the medium’s contribution to the idea of land-

scape lies in its ability to combine, in the spectator’s gaze and consciousness, the

pictorial landscape with the temporalized landscape. If narrative is that which

can serve to conceal the film landscape, that which renders it fragile, it may also

be, in the final analysis, that which confers to it its specificity and its true depth.

NOTES

1. Victor Oscar Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: The Macmillan Company,1918), 137.

2. Ibid., 143.

3. John Wylie, Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1.

4. “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema” in Landscape and Film, ed. MartinLefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2006).

5. Jacob Wamberg’s comment in Rachel Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, eds., LandscapeTheory (The Art Seminar), vol. 6 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 97.

6. Beyond style, technique and materials, it is fair to say that what distinguishes theseworks from Minoean frescoes showing nature for its own sake as early as 1700BCE andother such manifestations of nature in pictorial representation in the Ancient world—suchas wealthy villas in Pompeii—has to do with their function as art rather than decoration.

7. Freeburg, 149.

8. Ibid., 161.

9. Ibid., 162.

10. Ibid., 152.

11. Film theory and criticism have often shown a lot of caution and ambivalence toward pic-torialness and pictorial contemplation in the cinema. Béla Balázs, for instance, criticizedover-beautiful compositions for fear that they could create an un-cinematic effect: “Over-beautiful, picturesque shots are sometimes dangerous even if they are the result of goodcamera work alone. Their over-perfect composition, their self-sufficient closed harmonymay lend them a static, painting-like character and thereby lift them out of the dynamicstream of the action. Such beauty has its own centre of gravity, its own frame and doesnot reach beyond itself to the preceding and the subsequent” in Theory of the Film:Character and Growth of a New Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 114-115.

76 MARTIN LEFEBVRE

12. Interestingly, and though he didn’t refer the issue to landscape, Freeburg considered thatfilm viewers regularly arrest moments (or movements) in films, moments that they judgeaesthetically satisfying: “Suppose we watch a diver stepping out on a high springboardand diving into a pool. The whole feat is, of course, a movement without pause frombeginning to end; yet our eyes will somehow arrest one moment as the most interesting,the most pictorial. It may be the moment the diver is about midway between the spring-board and the water, a moment when the body seems to float strangely upon the air.We are not unaware of the other phases, yet this particular moment impresses us; if weapply our fine appraisal of form.

Similarly in a motion picture theatre we unconsciously select moments from the actionbefore us.... At such times the whole pattern on the screen becomes as static as a painting,and its power or weakness, its beauty or lack of beauty, may be appreciated much asone would appreciate a design in a painting” in Pictorial Beauty of the Screen (NewYork: The Macmillan Company, 1923), 50-51.

13. Ibid. The term “impure landscape” was coined in response to Ernst Gombrich’s oppositionbetween the “pure landscapes” that became institutionalized in European genre paintingand the Italian connoisseurs’ interest in paese during the 16th century. See ErnstGombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape” in Norm andForm: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966).

14. Shooting locations include the Valle de la luna in Argentina, Death Valley in Californiaand the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

15. Widely exhibited, “Ask the Dust” now belongs to the permanent collection of theMuseum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles. The title may refer to the 1939 epony-mous novel by John Fante which was adapted for the cinema by Robert Towne in 2006.However, the phrase is also found in Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novel Pan: “The other one heloved like a slave, … and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the fallingleaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him noth-ing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peaceand your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life.” Pan, of course, isalso the name of the Greek deity of shepherds, herds, mountain wilds. He is a figureclosely related to nature and the pastoral life.

16. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London:Verso, 1995).

17. Most of these variations are due to the fact that Bernard was working essentially fromVHS tapes, adding therefore an extra layer of mediation between the actual locationsand her camera lens, one more readily discernible in its effects than if she had workedwith DVDs (which were not available at the time the work was done) or with stills madefrom release prints.

18. Letter to the author from Cindy Bernard dated February 10, 2009.

19. See Michel Foucault, “On Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (1986): 22-27.

20. The issue of cinephilia with regards to Bernard’s “Ask the Dust” series is discussed inDouglas Cunningham’s article “‘It’s All There, It’s No Dream’: Vertigo and the RedemptivePleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage,” Screen 49:2 (2008): 123-141.

21. See Ronald W. Hepburn, “Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” inLandscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65-80.

22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of The Power of Judgment, §23. (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001).

23. Ibid., 66.

24. Ibid., 67.

25. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

26. Mark Durden, “Screen Memories” in the Exhibition catalogue, Cindy Bernard, (James HockeyGallery/Viewpoint Gallery, 1995), http://www.sound2cb.com/press/BernardCatalogue.pdf,(accessed 28 February 2009).

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA 77

27. Ibid.

28. Jacques Aumont, Matière d’image (Paris: Éditions Images Modernes, 2005), 8 (my trans-lation).

29. Wylie, 1-2.

30. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell,2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 362.

31. Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” in World Archaeology 25:2 (1993): 152-174. Reprinted in revised form in The Perception of the Environmen: Essays inLivelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), 189.

32. Ibid., 198. Italicized in the text.

33. Ibid., 195.

34. Ibid., 190.

35. Ibid., 197.

36. Ibid., 201.

37. Heidegger, 350.

38. Paul Young, “The Fourfold,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B.Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 390.

39. Martin Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harperand Row, 1977), 49.

40. Ingold, 198.

41. Ibid., 207.

42. Among the many examples that come to mind there is the opening of Herzog’s Aguirre,der Zorn Gottes (1972): Ethereal chanting voices on the soundtrack accompany a longshot of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes whose tip is lost in the clouds. The camerazooms down the side of the mountain to reveal a long but tiny column of men descend-ing like ants from an anthill. As the scene continues we move closer to the characters,with the camera joining the men in their downward march. The gloomy mountain—itselfa romantic image of the sublime as terrifying nature—seals the fate of the displacedSpaniards searching for El Dorado. One does not move with impunity into this type of(artistic) landscape.

43. “Thinking itself,” writes Heidegger, “belongs to dwelling.” In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 362.

44. Ibid., 358-359.

45. P. Adams Sitney, “Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the Cinema,”in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, 112.

MARTIN LEFEBVRE is University Research Chair in Film Studies at the Mel

Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. He is the Director of

ARTHEMIS (The Advanced Research Team on the History and Epistemology of

Moving Image Studies) and Editor of Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry.

He has published widely on film and semiotics.

78 MARTIN LEFEBVRE