On Landscape in Narrative Cinema

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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 F ilm 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 19 th 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

Transcript of On Landscape in Narrative Cinema

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MARTIN LEFEBVRE

ON LANDSCAPE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA

Résumé: Des spécialistes des études du paysage ont identifié une tension entre lepaysage conçu comme objet d’observation (le paysage de la peinture) et le paysageconçu comme espace vécu (le paysage de la géographie). Dans cet article, je montreque, 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’àun certain point, qu’elle se résout d’elle-même. Au cœur de cette question réside lacapacité unique du cinéma de conjuguer espace et temps, représentation picturaleet récit, et de les projeter sur le paysage. L’argument nécessite un parcours qui nousconduira 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 numberof the earliest films—including some in the Lumière catalogue—were cele-

brated by spectators for capturing just such views. The natural world also cameto occupy a significant role in one of the first film genres, known as the “travelfilm” whose success lasted until about 1906. The genre was immediately popularwith 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 benefitedfrom several important and deep cultural transformations that affected the modernWestern world throughout that century, though in some cases with increasingspeed as of 1850. These include, for instance, the colonization of Africa and ofthe Indies which brought about a taste in Europe for “exotic” scenery but alsoserved to strengthen metropolitan identity by giving new impetus and meaning tonational landscapes; the drive to settle the American west, which had a similar rolein some respects in the U. S., and led to a fascination for new national landscapessuch as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone, or the Rocky Mountains;the new, faster and more efficient modes of locomotion that made travel easierand safer; industrial capitalism’s production of a new leisure class of touristssoon to be emulated by the rising middle-class; and, finally, also of import, weredevelopments in travel literature, the emergence of anthropology, ethnographyand the natural sciences in the context of Darwinism, all of which managed to

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secure a substantial amount of curiosity. Not surprisingly the second half of the19th 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 thatwhich, in the contemporary era, has brought IMAX films to equally turn towardslandscape 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 plotand realism helped reinforce its specificity over other forms of representation,especially theatre. Thus while natural settings did not provide cinema with itsmedia specificity, they nonetheless offered a formidable expression and exem-plification of the “cinematic” whenever one compared film to the traditionalstage, as was so often done in the early days of film criticism. As pioneer criticand scholar Victor Freeburg wrote, in 1918 in The Art of Photoplay Making, “Forthe first time in the history of the arts which mimic human happenings it hasbecome possible for the spectator to go to the very spot where the action takesplace;”1 “The photoplay,” he added, “is the only art of dramatic representationwhich can dispense entirely with artificial settings.”2 One can look at LaurenceOlivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Henry V as providing a textbook illustration ofthe differences between theatrical and cinematic space, using a natural settingfor the battle of Agincourt as the definitive term of distinction. And, when, in the1950s films began using widescreen formats such as Cinemascope or VistaVision—often along with color—to visually distinguish the cinema from the competingsmall screen black and white picture of television, landscape once again came tooccupy 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 the1950s: The Man From Laramie (1955), The Last Frontier (1955) and Man of theWest (1958). Indeed, so much is obvious in the film trailer advertisement for TheMan from Laramie, where the relatively new cinematic attraction ofCinemascope is literally etched onto the landscape (fig. 1).

Yet, as straightforward and self-evident as this crude and sketchy accountmight appear to be, certain conceptual complications arise when we ask whetherthe 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 alanguage 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 ofhuman 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 disciplinewhere the concept of landscape is used and defined, and in some instances—

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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 withvision and its attendant conceptions such as framing or distance.

This paper does not seek to analyze particular landscapes in the cinema norto dissect specific films where landscape is prominent. My goal, rather, is acomplementary one: that of exposing, albeit in preliminary form, some of theprincipal terms and conditions of possibility for such analyses of landscapes infilms. 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 thatrecurrently troubles landscape studies in cultural geography: “It is a tension,” hewrites, “between proximity and distance, body and mind, sensuous immersionand detached observation. Is landscape the world we are living in, or a scene weare 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 cinemathat 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 callforth both space and time, picture and narrative, into its mode of representationand, therefore, into the representation of landscape.

1. THE AUTONOMOUS LANDSCAPE AND FILM NARRATIVEThe premise for my argument was developed a few years ago in an essay on filmlandscape.4 I shall briefly revisit it here as a prelude for further thoughts on thetopic.

In still media art, as mentioned above, landscape has come to signify thedepiction of a natural space freed from any emphasis on the representation ofhuman figures and eventhood. Achieving this emancipation has taken centuriesand 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—

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

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become part of the painted landscape environment independently of what isgoing on among the figures.”5 With retrospect, several 16th century artists havealso been seen as precursors of the landscape genre proper. These includeAlbrecht 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 humanfigures in their work—Altdorfer being arguably the most spectacular exceptionin this regard—an inversion had nonetheless taken place in the relation thesefigures now maintained with their natural environments. Indeed, with the latterdominating the visual field and completely overwhelming or marginalizing thehuman actors and their actions, landscape could now be interpreted as the truesubject matter of these artworks. The process was then brought to its completionin 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 theemergence of landscape as a pictorial concept distinct from the mere setting thatcomprises characters, actions and events, then one might legitimately questiondominant cinema’s ability to present landscapes. The problem, it would seem,lies in the subsumption of space to the demands of narrative. The distinctionbetween setting and landscape, one might say, is one of pictorial economy: aslong 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 properlyspeaking a landscape.

With this caveat in mind, let us once again consider Freeburg’s The Art ofPhotoplay Making. Though an advocate for location shooting, Freeburg nonethe-less prescribes that filmmakers always “subordinate [the] use of natural setting inthe service of the dramatic action”7 thus ensuring artistic unity through harmonyof the film’s various parts. Not all forms of subordination are equal, however, andFreeburg offers a taxonomy of subordinate functions according to which settingmay be conceived as neutral, informative, sympathetic, participating and formative.

This taxonomy connects setting to events and characters, and loosely chartsa spectrum along an exteriority/interiority axis. At one end of the spectrum wefind 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 expressthe character’s interior state of mind. This forward movement into plot andcharacter psychology also describes the remaining three functions. Thus, theinformative function uses setting to visually give information about the film’scharacters, the sympathetic function sets mood, tone or atmosphere for theevents to unfold, and, finally, the participating function uses setting as an “actingpart in the drama,”8 one capable of casting the dramatis personae’s individualityand moral fiber—as when a natural disaster such as a flood or an erupting volcano

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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 aduel take place somewhere among the trees,” writes Freeburg in discussing setting’sneutral function, “providing the trees are not evergreens trimmed into fantasticshapes, for in such case the spectator would contemplate the trees rather thanthe duelists.”10 According to the aesthetic of narrative subordination championedby Freeburg—which will later become known as “classical” cinema—landscape, asan autonomous entity, is clearly undesirable. One danger, it seems, might be forlandscape to interrupt the forward drive and flow of narrative with “distracting”imagery, thus replacing narrativized setting with visual attractions and unwantedmoments of pictorial contemplation.11 Freeburg’s comments are obviously pre-scriptive, but they point to the possibility of an uneasy marriage of pictorialityand narrative in classical, narrative driven, cinema.

Of course, even under the classical regime, narrative subordination cannot beabsolute. Not only are films and spectators at times unruly, but visual attractionsand 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 viewsof nature have become “unhinged” from the narrative in such a way as to existin their consciousness as “autonomous” landscapes, irrespective of the film-maker’s intention to produce such an effect.12 Again, however, the idea is torecognize that narrative and pictorial landscape often co-exist in a state of tensionin a film.

To explain the emergence of landscape in the film experience, I previouslyidentified 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 asthe “impure landscape”).13 At the root of both of these modes, however, lies thespectator’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 ofintent 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 experienceof landscape art. Thus, to take an obvious example, chances are that, in watchingGus Van Sant’s Gerry (2001), any viewer sensitive to landscape imagery is likely

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

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to interpret the filmmaker’s visual approach—which includes framing and com-position—as calling forth the artistic concept of the autonomous landscape (seefigs. 2 & 3). This interpretation is reinforced by the narrative looseness of thisnon-classical film, the use of temps morts, long takes and relative stillness in thedepiction of often empty natural spaces, and by the fact that, through montage,the landscape formations that succeed one another in diegetic continuity forman impossible geography. Once noticed, such implausible variations in terrainmorphology create a space that defies, resists or exceeds strict diegetic motivationor subordination as well as real world referentiality.14 As a result, the narrativefunction of setting may momentarily fade and the depiction of space acquires, inthe spectator’s gaze, the kind of autonomy traditionally required by pictoriallandscape 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 evenunder the right sort of trees, the spectator can still direct his or her attentiontoward the landscape in such a way as to momentarily break the narrative bondof subordination that unites the forest setting to the raging duel between thefilm’s lead protagonists. And should this not happen during a first viewing, itmight 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. Inghostly fashion film landscapes appear momentarily only to disappear, often secondslater, 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 ofnarrative films and their various natural settings, was interestingly captured andreplicated a few years ago by Los Angeles-based artist Cindy Bernard in a serialwork entitled “Ask the Dust” (c. 1988-1992).15

The work consists of a set of 21 photographs shot by Bernard. They includemostly natural landscapes, but also what French anthropologist Marc Augéwould call non-places,16 as well as one cityscape. What is so peculiar in thisseries, however, is that the photographs all refer to locations for films shot in theU.S. during a twenty year period that begins in 1954 and ends in 1974—an erathat happens to coincide, among other things, with the end of the studio systemin 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 thereare at times slight formal discrepancies between the photograph and the intertex-tual source image (with regards to camera placement, angle or aspect ratio, forinstance17), as well as differences in pictorial content due to the passage of time

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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 MadMad 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 (SergioLeone, 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 (RomanPolanski, 1974) (see figs. 4, 5, 6 & 7).

The referencing is made obvious by the fact that each photograph bears thecorresponding film title as its own, an ironic twist on a common practice in land-scape imagery produced from nature—either painted or photographed—whichconsists in naming the picture after the location depicted. The year of the originalfilm 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 Courtdecision overturning segregation in public schools in the U.S., while 1974 marksthe resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Bernard later explained her project:

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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)

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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 atrajectory between them of America as idealized state through the mostcynical point, and if you take as a given that the notion of a culturallyconstructed landscape is a central component in American consciousnessand American film, would you be able to trace that historical trajectoryin 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 especiallyobvious, for instance, in the films that frame the entire series: Them, where theonly victims of giant black ants—which have mutated by radiation from thenuclear bombings of Japan during the war—are white people, and Chinatownwhich chronicles a father’s ultimate transgression of the Law (that of incest) ina 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 landscapeswith epic views of Monument Valley—which John Ford almost single-handedlyforged into a mythical American landscape—either recurring rhythmically like arefrain or else standing as the ground against which the other photographs in theseries appear. As for the bridges, roads and gas station, they remind us that theset 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 itbegins and ends through variations brought on a single location, namely the bedof 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 spacefor the suggested journey is only partly real, constituting therefore nothing shortof a true heterotopia, yet one not only inaccessible in its wholeness but whosefunction—unlike the various “other spaces” that were once identified by MichelFoucault19—remains unclear or vague. Indeed, the spaces represented in the pho-tographs are, at one and the same time, real and fictional and their referencingoscillates 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 proceedlike the young photographer in Antonioni’s Blow Up as he tries to unearth whatit is that the landscape (a London park and the photos he shot of it) holds toview and yet hides at the same time (a possible murder). But I shall resist thishermeneutic urge. Instead I want to use the fact that these images can be seenas embodying—quite literally one might want to say—the process whereby the

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

In the spectatorial experience of “arresting” or “seizing” the landscape inthe 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 landscapesthat may lie latent, as mere possibilities, in a film’s setting. Moreover, such“bounds”—the ability to esthetically hold something like nature in thought, tocontemplate 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 withthe Kantian notion of the sublime, according to which nature may excite ideasthat exceed the limits of both sense and imagination, and yet still be reined inby reason and a “higher finality.”22 Indeed, in all cases, even when the sublimeis concerned, the aesthetic appreciation of nature seems to require the cultivationof both a “sensuous component” and a reflective or “thought-component” thatdistinguishes it from “hasty” and “unthinking” perception, to borrow once moreHepburn’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 ofnature—the fall of an autumn leaf. If we simply watch it fall withoutany 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 summergone, its symbolizing all falling, our own included. Leaf veins suggestblood-vessel veins—symbolizing continuity in the forms of life, andmaybe a shared vulnerability. Thus the thought-element may bringanalogies to bear on the concrete particulars: this autumn is linked toinnumerable other autumns: to the cycle of seasons.24

It is this very rhythm—the almost abstract rhythm of thought so different fromthat 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 bereceptive to it (one may indeed rush through an art museum as quickly as one canleaf through the pages of a magazine). But it is also something that the cinema,especially narrative cinema, has had difficulty in conveying, even though thiswas a central concern for Eisenstein and Dovzhenko as well as for a number ofpost-war European filmmakers, several of whom —one thinks, for instance, ofRossellini, Antonioni, Godard, Greenaway, Wenders, Tarkovsky and Sokurov—have also been attracted to landscape.

Arresting the film image, literally deterritorializing the setting by transposing

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it from film to photography, all the while severing its narrative bond and offeringit back to us emptied of action and characters, Bernard’s photographs retrieve orrecover 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. InLandscape 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 aprofoundly human artifact. Some of these memories may run deep in culture andhistory, 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 ofhuman presence and affect. Likewise the photographs that make up “Ask theDust” are also profuse with various strata of memory. Photography scholar MarkDurden has suggested that they “possess a quality reminiscent of Eugène Atget’sviews of empty streets,” adding: “what Walter Benjamin had said of them mightjust as well be said of such pictures by Bernard: ‘deserted like the scene of acrime’.”26 Paradoxically, however, this “crime scene” is haunted by the memoryof those very characters, actions and events—those narrative components—thathave been “chased” from the visual field and belong to a past and, at least inpart, 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 ourown imagined scenarios and /or filmic memories. We bring narratives to thesehalf-familiar scenes.”27 But this being the case, it appears that using “Ask theDust” as an analogy to concretely illustrate the conditions for the appearance oflandscape in the cinema leads us straight to a conceptual knot. Indeed, howcould 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 thatotherwise compete with their emergence as film landscapes (i.e. characters,actions, events: narrative)? Untangling this knot is the task of the final section ofthis paper.

3. CONTEMPLATION AND IMMERSION: THE SPECIFICITY OF FILM LANDSCAPES?So far I have proceeded almost exclusively with pictorial assumptions regardinglandscape. Their adequacy for thinking about film landscapes stems obviouslyfrom the pictorial nature of cinema. But were it for those assumptions alone, onewonders 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 fewyears ago, “the relation of cinema to painting is uninteresting if it reduces itselfto a reprising of ready-made images (what we call quotation); it can only be of

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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 particularmodality of fiction.”28 Thus, and perhaps not surprisingly, most of the presentargument has gone toward considering what the pictorial concept of landscapecan bring to our conception of film and, in particular, to our conception of filmspectatorship as a site where objects like landscape or narrative may surface orrecoil 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 narrativefilm 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 landscapein cinema—is not meant to mask the fact that several other factors, includingduration, movement, sound and, especially, music often contribute to that expe-rience as well. For instance, after the mother’s passing in Sokurov’s Mother andSon (1997) we see the young man on several stations of a long walk. At one pointwe see him in a prairie and a train passes behind him (fig. 8). The shot lasts overone 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 thatalso feed on such factors as shot duration, the slow movement of the train andthe 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 minorkey—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 previoussection, can help draw us into the landscape, so that our experience of it may

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

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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 worldwe live in, a constantly emergent and perceptual milieu? Or is landscapebetter conceived in artistic and painterly terms as a specific cultural andhistorical genre, a set of visual strategies and devices for distancing andobserving?29

Unlike traditional art historians, human geographers, social anthropologists,archeologists and others working in cognate fields have of late been concernedless with landscape as an expanse of space surveyed from a distance, or gazedat, than as a lived and inhabited environment. For beyond the fact that landscapeoffered Western painters an early opportunity to display and emphasize pictorialstyle—thus possibly paving the way toward modernism—what makes landscapesignificant, and therefore human, is the role it plays in our forms of life asdwellers, both concretely (in situ) and symbolically (through representations).

Dwelling, of course, belongs to the philosophical toolbox of Heidegger andexpresses the most essential dimension of Dasein, that of Being-in-the-world.Indeed, writes Heidegger, “Dwelling...is the basic character of Being, in keepingwith which mortals exist.”30 Influenced by Heidegger’s and by Merleau-Ponty’scritique 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 froma new perspective. “To perceive the landscape,” wrote social anthropologist TimIngold in an influential essay published in 1993, “is...to carry out an act ofremembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internalimage stored in the mind as of engaging perceptually with an environment thatis itself pregnant with the past.”31

Calling for the adoption of a “dwelling perspective” on landscape, Ingolddevelops metaphors of visuality and aurality that find particular resonance with thefilm scholar. The argument seeks to bring together the qualitative aspects of livedspace and time, or what Ingold calls landscape and taskscape, so that “landscapeas 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 sensiblyask how much of it there is—i.e., land has meaning as a quantity of space. Oflandscape, on the other hand, it makes sense to ask how it is like—i.e., landscapehas meaning as a quality or form of space. Analogous to that relation, but in thedomain of time, is that which holds between labor and “any practical operation,

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carried out by a skilled agent in an environment, as part of his or her normalbusiness of life,” or what Ingold calls tasks, and which for him are the acts thatconstitute dwelling.33 Thus whereas “land [and labor are] quantitative andhomogeneous...landscape [and tasks are] qualitative and heretogeneous.”34 Thetaskscape, in short, corresponds to the “entire ensemble of tasks,” “an array ofrelated activites” that stand for the qualitative dimension of time (just as laborconstitutes its quantitative aspect). To account for landscape and taskscapeIngold asks that we consider painting and music. “Music,” he claims, “bestreflects the forms of the taskscape [while] painting is the most natural mediumfor representing the forms of the landscape.”35 If the analogy of landscape withpainting needs no explaining, the relation of taskscape with music is justified bythe fact that music shares its temporal nature with acts of doing and with therhythmical patterns of life and of the world.

The final step in the argument consists of doing away with this dichotomyby incorporating the concept of taskscape into that of landscape. This impliesacknowledging the temporality of landscape and recognizing it as the enduringor congealed form of the taskscape, of dwelling. It also implies bringing togetherspace and time, picture (landscape) and sound (taskscape). At this point Ingoldswitches 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. Speedingup rather more, glaciers flow like rivers and even the earth begins tomove. At greater speeds solid rock bends, buckles and flows like moltenmetal. The world itself begins to breathe. Thus the rhythmic pattern ofhuman activities nests within a wider pattern of activity for all animallife, which in turn nests within the pattern of activity for all so-calledliving things, which nests within the life-process of the world.36

Through this imaginary film, Ingold seeks to illustrate that human dwelling isnot categorially different from the becoming of the world as landscape. An ideaHeidegger would likely agree with since he conceived of dwelling both as “themanner 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 andare sensitive to them are “at home.”39 As Ingold writes:

Human beings do not, in their movements, inscribe their life historiesupon the surface of nature as do writers upon the page; rather, thesehistories are woven, along with the life cycles of plants and animals,into the texture of the surface itself. Thus the forms of landscape arisealongside those of the taskscape, within the same current of activity.40

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It would be fair to say that whereas pictorial conceptions of landscape tend toemphasize contemplation, Ingold’s temporalized landscape emphasizes immersion:

The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can lookat, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view onour surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvementin the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioningideas about it. For the landscape, to recall the words of Merleau-Ponty, isnot 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 ofIngold’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 thatexists between image and world; an interval whose endless and infinitesimalfolds have served to justify the humanistic project of film studies—whether ofthe aesthetic or of the socio-ideological and political persuasions. Film scholars,however, also know that beyond the potentially naturalizing and relativelyimmersive effects of the cinematic apparatus itself, narrative—and, in particular,classical-style and realist-style narration—can add to film, along with sound andthe power of music to carry affect, a further immersive effect, potentially drawingus 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. Andherein lies, as we saw earlier, the apparent paradox and the lesson revealed bythese photographs: that far from contradicting the emergence of landscape, filmnarrative—as mnemonic presence in this case—may, in its quality as a temporalrepresentation of human dwelling, actually function as a key element in theexperience of landscape as lived space in film. And indeed, it would seem logicalto assume that any specific contribution narrative film might make to the idea oflandscape—and to its use as a symbol to be interpreted—would stem from themedium’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 onehand, as discussed earlier, landscape seems to require a form of contemplativeautonomy, a severing of narrative subservience, while on the other hand it seemsto acquire its significance relative to our ability to immerse ourselves in it and tosee it—or interpret it—as a representation of dwelling thanks, in no small mea-sure, to narrative. Are these competing conceptions of the landscape experiencesimply incompatible in the end? Is landscape as view or picture, as that whichmust be extracted from the flow of the narrative and arrested in thought (in orderto 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

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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 whetherit had already expressed itself differently, say in Petrarch’s purely contemplativemotive for ascending Mont Ventoux or earlier still, say, in Virgil’s Eclogues oreven 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 ofthe Renaissance and further develops during the Age of Reason, leaves littledoubt, 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 remainedconcealed? Were they building dwelling through art? After all, contemplation,when it opens unto thought, is itself a state of Being-in-the-world43. As Heideggersaid to his Darmstadt audience,

If all of us, now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge inHeidelburg, this thinking toward that locale is not a mere experienceinside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the essence of ourthinking of that bridge that in itself thinking persists through the distanceto that locale. From this spot right here, we are at the bridge—we are by nomeans at some representational content in our consciousness. From righthere we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makesroom for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing.44

Comparing Heidegger’s distinction between one’s thinking of the bridge inHeidelburg—even at a distance—and one’s using it unthinkingly (or hastily) tocross the river with the achievement of landscape painting, i.e., its emergencefrom 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 impurelandscapes). Indeed, the analogy helps us differentiate between setting and land-scape in terms not unlike those that, for Heidegger, set apart the same bridgeeither as dwelling or as indifferent river crossing. In narrative film, as I’ve triedto show, the pictorial landscape emerges in a visual culture that still finds itselfunder 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, ourability to experience and interpret the landscape—to discover in it or thinkthrough with it all sorts of symbolic meanings, from purely aesthetic themes topolitical ones, for instance—finds its source in the way it can come to occupy thecenter of our attention. And yet, just as we need to posit at least two ways of

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thinking about the same view of natural space in a given narrative film—eitheras 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 thenarrative: 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 thinkingthat can accompany it—may in turn bring the narrative to further reveal thelandscape as dwelling. In a sense, what we find here is nothing short of a reversalof the early aesthetic prescriptions of Victor Freeburg, for under these conditionsit is now narrative that serves the landscape.

Beyond the fact that narrative cinema is uniquely equipped to show whatP. 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 CGIeffects 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, thepictorial landscape with the temporalized landscape. If narrative is that whichcan serve to conceal the film landscape, that which renders it fragile, it may alsobe, in the final analysis, that which confers to it its specificity and its true depth.

NOTES1. 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. Martin

Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2006).5. Jacob Wamberg’s comment in Rachel Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, eds., Landscape

Theory (The Art Seminar), vol. 6 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 97.6. Beyond style, technique and materials, it is fair to say that what distinguishes these

works 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.

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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 in

Douglas 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 Hockey

Gallery/Viewpoint Gallery, 1995), http://www.sound2cb.com/press/BernardCatalogue.pdf,(accessed 28 February 2009).

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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: Harper

and 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 MelHoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. He is the Director ofARTHEMIS (The Advanced Research Team on the History and Epistemology ofMoving Image Studies) and Editor of Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry.He has published widely on film and semiotics.

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