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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.
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 19th
century landscape art and imagery, the popularity of travel films greatly benefited
from several important and deep cultural transformations that affected the modern
Western world throughout that century, though in some cases with increasing
speed as of 1850. These include, for instance, the colonization of Africa and of
the Indies which brought about a taste in Europe for “exotic” scenery but also
served to strengthen metropolitan identity by giving new impetus and meaning to
national landscapes; the drive to settle the American west, which had a similar role
in some respects in the U. S., and led to a fascination for new national landscapes
such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone, or the Rocky Mountains;
the new, faster and more efficient modes of locomotion that made travel easier
and safer; industrial capitalism’s production of a new leisure class of tourists
soon to be emulated by the rising middle-class; and, finally, also of import, were
developments in travel literature, the emergence of anthropology, ethnography
and the natural sciences in the context of Darwinism, all of which managed to
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Fig. 1. Still from the film trailer for The Man From Laramie (A. Mann, 1955)
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Figs. 2 & 3. Stills from Gerry, Gus van Sant (2001)
ends up “moulding human character.”9 Yet whatever function the setting fulfills,
it must never acquire independence from the narrative. “It is all very well to have a
duel take place somewhere among the trees,” writes Freeburg in discussing setting’s
neutral function, “providing the trees are not evergreens trimmed into fantastic
shapes, for in such case the spectator would contemplate the trees rather than
the duelists.”10 According to the aesthetic of narrative subordination championed
by Freeburg—which will later become known as “classical” cinema—landscape, as
an autonomous entity, is clearly undesirable. One danger, it seems, might be for
landscape to interrupt the forward drive and flow of narrative with “distracting”
imagery, thus replacing narrativized setting with visual attractions and unwanted
moments of pictorial contemplation.11 Freeburg’s comments are obviously pre-
scriptive, but they point to the possibility of an uneasy marriage of pictoriality
and narrative in classical, narrative driven, cinema.
Of course, even under the classical regime, narrative subordination cannot be
absolute. Not only are films and spectators at times unruly, but visual attractions
and spectacle have always been an important part of the cinematic experience.
Indeed, I would dare to say that most spectators have experienced moments—
even in classical films where setting is necessitated by the narrative—when views
of nature have become “unhinged” from the narrative in such a way as to exist
in their consciousness as “autonomous” landscapes, irrespective of the film-
maker’s intention to produce such an effect.12 Again, however, the idea is to
recognize that narrative and pictorial landscape often co-exist in a state of tension
in a film.
To explain the emergence of landscape in the film experience, I previously
identified two modes of presence for it in narrative films: what I have called the
“intentional landscape” and the “spectator’s landscape” (which I also refer to as
the “impure landscape”).13 At the root of both of these modes, however, lies the
spectator’s sensibility to landscape as a visual medium and his or her ability to
“arrest” the image, if only in his or her mind.
Briefly put, the “intentional landscape” rests on an interpretive ascription of
intent by the spectator. It is supported by visual strategies that almost unequivo-
cally call attention to a film’s natural setting in ways that recall one’s experience
of landscape art. Thus, to take an obvious example, chances are that, in watching
Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2001), any viewer sensitive to landscape imagery is likely
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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 ants—which have mutated by radiation from the
nuclear bombings of Japan during the war—are white people, and Chinatown
which chronicles a father’s ultimate transgression of the Law (that of incest) in
a story of political corruption over the control of water in Los Angeles.
Looking at the complete set of photographs at once, as if it were a mosaic,
one immediately notices, of course, the predominance of western landscapes
with epic views of Monument Valley—which John Ford almost single-handedly
forged into a mythical American landscape—either recurring rhythmically like a
refrain or else standing as the ground against which the other photographs in the
series appear. As for the bridges, roads and gas station, they remind us that the
set also depicts a journey—a sort of arrested road movie—through American
(film) landscapes. The journey, moreover, is classically framed—reproducing the
“repetition and difference” structure so common to classical cinema—for it
begins and ends through variations brought on a single location, namely the bed
of the Los Angeles River seen in both Them and Chinatown. Yet because the pho-
tographs are about films as much as they are about actual locations in the world
(e.g., the Los Angeles River, Monument Valley or San Francisco, etc.), the space
for the suggested journey is only partly real, constituting therefore nothing short
of a true heterotopia, yet one not only inaccessible in its wholeness but whose
function—unlike the various “other spaces” that were once identified by Michel
Foucault19—remains unclear or vague. Indeed, the spaces represented in the pho-
tographs are, at one and the same time, real and fictional and their referencing
oscillates between both universes.
It would be tempting to ponder over these images, in rapt cinephilic fasci-
nation,20 enthralled by the pleasure of such uncanny repetitions, and to proceed
like the young photographer in Antonioni’s Blow Up as he tries to unearth what
it is that the landscape (a London park and the photos he shot of it) holds to
view and yet hides at the same time (a possible murder). But I shall resist this
hermeneutic urge. Instead I want to use the fact that these images can be seen
as embodying—quite literally one might want to say—the process whereby the
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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 Bernard’s images as tools for thought.
In the spectatorial experience of “arresting” or “seizing” the landscape in
the flow of narrative, what is at stake, to use a phrase from Ronald W. Hepburn,
are “momentary bounds of attention”21 whereby a spectator recognizes (“inten-
tional landscape”) or otherwise “releases’” (“impure landscape”) the landscapes
that may lie latent, as mere possibilities, in a film’s setting. Moreover, such
“bounds”—the ability to esthetically hold something like nature in thought, to
contemplate it—have been essential to the development of the idea of landscape
(in art and in situ) in the West, even when they appear in a state of crisis as with
the Kantian notion of the sublime, according to which nature may excite ideas
that exceed the limits of both sense and imagination, and yet still be reined in
by reason and a “higher finality.”22 Indeed, in all cases, even when the sublime
is concerned, the aesthetic appreciation of nature seems to require the cultivation
of both a “sensuous component” and a reflective or “thought-component” that
distinguishes it from “hasty” and “unthinking” perception, to borrow once more
Hepburn’s terms.23 This “thought-component” is not opposed per se to move-
ment or duration as may be reported by sensation, but it registers them accord-
ing to its own rhythm. Here again Hepburn is helpful:
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Fig. 8. Still from Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997)
Does the word landscape describe the mutual embededness and inter-
connectivity of self, body, knowledge and land—landscape as the world
we live in, a constantly emergent and perceptual milieu? Or is landscape
better conceived in artistic and painterly terms as a specific cultural and
historical genre, a set of visual strategies and devices for distancing and
observing?29
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carried out by a skilled agent in an environment, as part of his or her normal
business of life,” or what Ingold calls tasks, and which for him are the acts that
constitute dwelling.33 Thus whereas “land [and labor are] quantitative and
homogeneous...landscape [and tasks are] qualitative and heretogeneous.”34 The
taskscape, in short, corresponds to the “entire ensemble of tasks,” “an array of
related activites” that stand for the qualitative dimension of time (just as labor
constitutes its quantitative aspect). To account for landscape and taskscape
Ingold asks that we consider painting and music. “Music,” he claims, “best
reflects the forms of the taskscape [while] painting is the most natural medium
for representing the forms of the landscape.”35 If the analogy of landscape with
painting needs no explaining, the relation of taskscape with music is justified by
the fact that music shares its temporal nature with acts of doing and with the
rhythmical patterns of life and of the world.
The final step in the argument consists of doing away with this dichotomy
by incorporating the concept of taskscape into that of landscape. This implies
acknowledging the temporality of landscape and recognizing it as the enduring
or congealed form of the taskscape, of dwelling. It also implies bringing together
space and time, picture (landscape) and sound (taskscape). At this point Ingold
switches over to a film metaphor:
Imagine a film of the landscape shot over years, centuries, even millennia.
Slightly speeded up, plants appear to engage in very animal-like movements,
trees flex their limbs without any prompting from the winds. Speeding
up rather more, glaciers flow like rivers and even the earth begins to
move. At greater speeds solid rock bends, buckles and flows like molten
metal. The world itself begins to breathe. Thus the rhythmic pattern of
human activities nests within a wider pattern of activity for all animal
life, which in turn nests within the pattern of activity for all so-called
living things, which nests within the life-process of the world.36
Through this imaginary film, Ingold seeks to illustrate that human dwelling is
not categorially different from the becoming of the world as landscape. An idea
Heidegger would likely agree with since he conceived of dwelling both as “the
manner in which mortals are on earth”37 and the earth itself, its mountains,
streams and forests as “nature’s buildings”38 where those who care for them and
are sensitive to them are “at home.”39 As Ingold writes:
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 Petrarch’s purely contemplative
motive for ascending Mont Ventoux or earlier still, say, in Virgil’s Eclogues or
even as far back as Theocritus’s Idylls. If painting is so often singled out, how-
ever, it is because the landscape tradition that first takes hold there at the end of
the Renaissance and further develops during the Age of Reason, leaves little
doubt, from that moment onward, as to the importance of the idea of landscape.
Did these painters and connoisseurs conceive of a new way to express Being-in-
the-world or did their autonomous landscapes “merely” bring forth to our atten-
tion, or “liberate,” a dimension of dwelling that had more or less remained
concealed? Were they building dwelling through art? After all, contemplation,
when it opens unto thought, is itself a state of Being-in-the-world43. As Heidegger
said to his Darmstadt audience,
If all of us, now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in
Heidelburg, this thinking toward that locale is not a mere experience
inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the essence of our
thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking persists through the distance
to that locale. From this spot right here, we are at the bridge—we are by no
means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right
here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes
room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing.44
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 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 and
other such manifestations of nature in pictorial representation in the Ancient world—such
as 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, 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 didn’t 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 Gombrich’s 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 Hamsun’s 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 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 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 Bernard’s “Ask the Dust” series is discussed in
Douglas Cunningham’s article “‘It’s All There, It’s 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).
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