MARTIN LEFEBVRE

ON LANDSCAPE I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA

Rsum: Des spcialistes des tudes du paysage ont identifi une tension entre le
paysage conu comme objet dobservation (le paysage de la peinture) et le paysage
conu comme espace vcu (le paysage de la gographie). Dans cet article, je montre
que, de toutes les formes de mdiation qui prsident lmergence du paysage,
cest au cinma que cette tension se manifeste de la faon la plus vive et, jusqu
un certain point, quelle se rsout delle-mme. Au cur de cette question rside la
capacit unique du cinma de conjuguer espace et temps, reprsentation picturale
et rcit, et de les projeter sur le paysage. Largument ncessite un parcours qui nous
conduira de la peinture au cinma en passant par la photographie avant de retrouver,
enfin, le cinma.
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE DTUDES CINMATOGRAPHIQUES
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 filmsincluding some in the Lumire cataloguewere 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 capitalisms 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
19
th
century also saw the introduction of the postcard which was soon to be illus-
trated with an imagemost often a drawn or photographed landscape.
With hindsight it is hard not to see early cinemas 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 mediums 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
Oliviers 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 colorto 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 Manns 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 MARTI N LEFEBVRE
human or cultural geography, being a case in pointthe concepts 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 cinemas 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 Quattrocentoif not before with Lorenzetti
traces of time and workclouds, atmosphere, cast light; fields, hedges, roads
ON LANDSCAPE I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 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 16
th
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 workAltdorfer being arguably the most spectacular exception
in this regardan 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 17
th
centuryoften claimed to signal the birth of the autonomous land-
scape as an artistic genrewith 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 cinemas 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 Freeburgs 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 films 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 characters 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 films
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 personaes individuality
and moral fiberas when a natural disaster such as a flood or an erupting volcano
64 MARTI N 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 settings
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 Freeburgwhich will later become known as classical cinemalandscape, 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
Freeburgs 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 narrativewhen 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-
makers 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 spectators landscape (which I also refer to as
the impure landscape).
13
At the root of both of these modes, however, lies the
spectators 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 films natural setting in ways that recall ones experience
of landscape art. Thus, to take an obvious example, chances are that, in watching
Gus Van Sants Gerry (2001), any viewer sensitive to landscape imagery is likely
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Figs. 2 & 3. Stills from Gerry, Gus van Sant (2001)
to interpret the filmmakers visual approachwhich includes framing and com-
positionas 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 spectators 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 Freeburgs 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
films lead protagonists. And should this not happen during a first viewing, it
might well occur with repeated ones.
Depending on ones 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 Aug
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 1974an 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
instance
17
), as well as differences in pictorial content due to the passage of time
66 MARTI N 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), Its 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 natureeither painted or photographedwhich
consists in naming the picture after the location depicted. The year of the original
film release as well as that of Bernards 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 I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 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 doesnt really pan out....
Something along the lines of if you take two points in American history
Brown vs. Board of Education and Nixons resignationand 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 antswhich have mutated by radiation from the
nuclear bombings of Japan during the warare white people, and Chinatown
which chronicles a fathers 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 Valleywhich John Ford almost single-handedly
forged into a mythical American landscapeeither 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 journeya sort of arrested road moviethrough American
(film) landscapes. The journey, moreover, is classically framedreproducing the
repetition and difference structure so common to classical cinemafor 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
functionunlike the various other spaces that were once identified by Michel
Foucault
19
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 Antonionis 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 embodyingquite literally one might want to saythe process whereby the
68 MARTI N 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 Bernards 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 films setting. Moreover, such
boundsthe ability to esthetically hold something like nature in thought, to
contemplate ithave 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
Hepburns 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
naturethe 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 veinssymbolizing 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 rhythmthe almost abstract rhythm of thought so different from
that of unthinking hastinessthat 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 I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 69
it from film to photography, all the while severing its narrative bond and offering
it back to us emptied of action and characters, Bernards 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 doesnt 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 Eugne Atgets
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 eventsthose narrative componentsthat
have been chased from the visual field and belong to a past and, at least in
part, to a world that Bernards 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 representationor 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 MARTI N 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-
nesswhich is surely a fundamental component in the experience of landscape
in cinemais 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 mothers passing in Sokurovs 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 accompaniedor interpretedby 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
keyalso a form of movement and duration). Id 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 I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 71
Fig. 8. Still from Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997)
not be as distancedand therefore as purely visualas 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 landlandscape 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
stylethus possibly paving the way toward modernismwhat 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 Heideggers and by Merleau-Pontys
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 isi.e., land has meaning as a quantity of space. Of
landscape, on the other hand, it makes sense to ask how it is likei.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 MARTI N 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 natures 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 I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 73
It would be fair to say that whereas pictorial conceptions of landscape tend to
emphasize contemplation, Ingolds 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 Ingolds imaginary film amply illustrates. But the obvious limitation of
Ingolds 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 studieswhether 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, narrativeand, in particular,
classical-style and realist-style narrationcan 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 Bernards 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
narrativeas mnemonic presence in this casemay, 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
landscapeand to its use as a symbol to be interpretedwould stem from the
mediums 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 itor interpret itas 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 MARTI N LEFEBVRE
Western consciousness, whether, for instance, it emerged in the 16
th
and 17
th
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 Petrarchs purely contemplative
motive for ascending Mont Ventoux or earlier still, say, in Virgils Eclogues or
even as far back as Theocrituss 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-world
43
. 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 bridgewe 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 Heideggers distinction between ones thinking of the bridge in
Heidelburgeven at a distanceand ones 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 Ive tried
to show, the pictorial landscape emerges in a visual culture that still finds itself
under the influence of paintings (and photographys) own autonomous land-
scape. But it is an experience that runs against narratives potential effect of con-
cealing landscape as setting. In narrative film, as in painting or photography, our
ability to experience and interpret the landscapeto discover in it or think
through with it all sorts of symbolic meanings, from purely aesthetic themes to
political ones, for instancefinds 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 I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 75
thinking about the same view of natural space in a given narrative filmeither
as setting or as landscape, according to the factors such as the ones briefly out-
lined aboveso 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 experienceand the thinking
that can accompany itmay 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 seaeven 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 mediums contribution to the idea of land-
scape lies in its ability to combine, in the spectators 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. Martin
Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2006).
5. Jacob Wambergs 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 and
other such manifestations of nature in pictorial representation in the Ancient worldsuch
as wealthy villas in Pompeiihas 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. Bla Balzs, for instance, criticized
over-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 good
camera work alone. Their over-perfect composition, their self-sufficient closed harmony
may lend them a static, painting-like character and thereby lift them out of the dynamic
stream of the action. Such beauty has its own centre of gravity, its own frame and does
not 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 MARTI N LEFEBVRE
12. Interestingly, and though he didnt refer the issue to landscape, Freeburg considered that
film viewers regularly arrest moments (or movements) in films, moments that they judge
aesthetically satisfying: Suppose we watch a diver stepping out on a high springboard
and diving into a pool. The whole feat is, of course, a movement without pause from
beginning 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 we
apply our fine appraisal of form.
Similarly in a motion picture theatre we unconsciously select moments from the action
before 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 as
one would appreciate a design in a painting in Pictorial Beauty of the Screen (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1923), 50-51.
13. Ibid. The term impure landscape was coined in response to Ernst Gombrichs opposition
between the pure landscapes that became institutionalized in European genre painting
and the Italian connoisseurs interest in paese during the 16th century. See Ernst
Gombrich, The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape in Norm and
Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966).
14. Shooting locations include the Valle de la luna in Argentina, Death Valley in California
and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
15. Widely exhibited, Ask the Dust now belongs to the permanent collection of the
Museum 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 Hamsuns 1894 novel Pan: The other one he
loved like a slave, and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling
leaves, 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 peace
and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life. Pan, of course, is
also the name of the Greek deity of shepherds, herds, mountain wilds. He is a figure
closely related to nature and the pastoral life.
16. Marc Aug, 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 from
VHS tapes, adding therefore an extra layer of mediation between the actual locations
and her camera lens, one more readily discernible in its effects than if she had worked
with DVDs (which were not available at the time the work was done) or with stills made
from 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 Bernards Ask the Dust series is discussed in
Douglas Cunninghams article Its All There, Its No Dream: Vertigo and the Redemptive
Pleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage, Screen 49:2 (2008): 123-141.
21. See Ronald W. Hepburn, Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in
Landscape, 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: Cambridge
University 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).
ON LANDSCAPE I N NARRATIVE CI NEMA 77
27. Ibid.
28. Jacques Aumont, Matire dimage (Paris: ditions Images Modernes, 2005), 8 (my trans-
lation).
29. Wylie, 1-2.
30. Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell,
2
nd
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 in
Livelihood, 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 Herzogs Aguirre,
der Zorn Gottes (1972): Ethereal chanting voices on the soundtrack accompany a long
shot of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes whose tip is lost in the clouds. The camera
zooms 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 mountainitself
a romantic image of the sublime as terrifying natureseals the fate of the displaced
Spaniards 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 smiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry.
He has published widely on film and semiotics.
78 MARTI N LEFEBVRE