Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MARTIN LEFEBVRE
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.
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 19th
century landscape art and imagery, the popularity of travel films greatly benefited
from several important and deep cultural transformations that affected the modern
Western world throughout that century, though in some cases with increasing
speed as of 1850. These include, for instance, the colonization of Africa and of
the Indies which brought about a taste in Europe for exotic scenery but also
served to strengthen metropolitan identity by giving new impetus and meaning to
national landscapes; the drive to settle the American west, which had a similar role
in some respects in the U. S., and led to a fascination for new national landscapes
such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone, or the Rocky Mountains;
the new, faster and more efficient modes of locomotion that made travel easier
and safer; industrial 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
19th 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
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Fig. 1. Still from the film trailer for The Man From Laramie (A. Mann, 1955)
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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 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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Fig. 4. Still from North by Northwest Fig. 5. North by Northwest (Bernard, 1989)
(Hitchcock, 1959)
Fig. 6. Still from Five Easy Pieces Fig. 7. Five Easy Pieces (Bernard, 1991)
(Rafelson, 1970)
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
Foucault19remains 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
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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. 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 attention21 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:
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.
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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
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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 earth37 and the earth itself, its mountains,
streams and forests as natures buildings38 where those who care for them and
are sensitive to them are at home.39 As Ingold writes:
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
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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 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-world43. As Heidegger
said to his Darmstadt audience,
If all of us, now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in
Heidelburg, this thinking toward that locale is not a mere experience
inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the essence of our
thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking persists through the distance
to that locale. From this spot right here, we are at the 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
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.
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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).
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,
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 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.
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