The term ‘landscaping’ usually refers to any activity that modifies the visible features of the territory, but also identifies a genre of painting, photography or film devoted to the representation of landscape. In fact, landscape film is an aesthetic tradition that depicts the natural or built environment through attentive observation. Its mise-en-scène depends on three basic choices: finding the most appropriate camera position to show a given landscape; deciding the mobility of the camera, which can remain still, pan to left or right, or move in a tracking shot; and establishing the exact length of each shot.
Landscape film prefers long and static shots because they are able to stimulate the optical unconscious: images that are lengthier than necessary according to the narrative conventions of mainstream storytelling actually invite the audience to look at those details that might pass unnoticed at first sight. Moreover, the length of a shot is a key feature to distinguish landscape film from landscape photography, because the communicative possibilities of the moving image can change, expand or clarify the meaning of a freeze frame. In these cases, the inevitable question is ‘why and for what reason does this image last that long?’, and the answer, when this device succeeds, is that lengthy shots can give new or different meanings to the landscape in political, economic, social, cultural or ideological terms.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, according to Elena Oroz and Iván G. Ambruñeiras, American landscape film set out ‘a kind of critical geography of the political and cultural significance of places (and non-places), tracing the footsteps of the past and following them to the present’ (2010: 334). In work such as James Benning’s California Trilogy – a triptych formed by
El Valley Centro,
Los and
Sogobi (1999, 2000, 2001),
An Injury to One (Travis Wilkerson, 2002),
Chain (Jem Cohen, 2004),
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, 2007),
California Company Town (Lee Anne Schmitt, 2008) or
Blue Meridian (Sofie Benoot, 2010), the signs of the passage of time are interpreted as presences or absences, or even as the subsequent overlap of both, producing a palimpsest in which the accumulation of socio-historical meanings and subjective experiences establishes a link between collective stories and personal memory. This is to say that landscape itself has become a repository of events and emotions, and consequently plays ‘a social role’, as explained by American urban planner Kevin Lynch in
The Image of the City:
The named environment, familiar to all, furnishes material for common memories and symbols which bind the group together and allow them to communicate with one another. The landscape serves as a vast mnemonic system for the retention of group history and ideals. (1960: 126)
Lynch studied the perception of urban space by its own inhabitants, because he considered that understanding the relationship between human being and built environment was essential to improve this environment. According to him, urban renewal did not have to change ‘the physical shape itself but the quality of an image in the mind’ (1960: 117), inasmuch as cognitive mapping is organised through a set of environmental images that come from both the external characteristics of a place and the subjective gaze of an observer. Therefore, if landscape can be condensed into a mental image, landscape films could be a record and a product of those images, or more exactly, of the filmmaker’s environmental images. Considering that this record would also include the socio-historical meanings and subjective experiences associated with a given landscape, the subsequent analysis of these films will retrieve the cognitive mappings of the past in order to explain the relationship of individuals and communities with built environment over time. Indeed, landscape films offer, at their best, the possibility of time travelling through space, ‘as if the gaze of the camera were able to penetrate opaque landscapes, digging them as if they were archaeological sites, delving into their forgotten memories’ (Castro 2010: 151).
Depending on the degree of subjectivity, it is possible to distinguish three different types of landscaping. The most objective one would be ‘observational landscaping’, whose minimalist mise-en-scène is exclusively limited to looking at and listening to landscape. The filmmaker who has best used this device is probably James Benning, the director of One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (1977/2004) – a diptych that depicts the impact of urban crisis on Milwaukee – and the aforementioned California Trilogy that establishes a circular dialectic between the rural, urban and natural landscape.
The second type entails a greater degree of subjectivity on the part of the filmmaker, who intends to relate the current look of landscape to its former incarnations, whether the buildings or structures that formerly stood in the same spot, or the events that took place right there years or centuries ago. I term this device ‘psychogeographical landscaping’ because it refers to works that simultaneously depict landscape as a historical location and a lived space, paying particular attention to the emotional effects of the territory in the subject, who may be both the viewer and the filmmaker. A few examples of this device would be
L.A.X. (Fabrice Ziolkowski, 1980),
Thames Film (William Raban, 1986) or Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Trilogy, formed by
London,
Robinson in Space and
Robinson in Ruins (1994, 1997, 2010). All of them combine the objective record of landscape with its historical and sociological interpretation, thereby offering a series of counter-narratives of urban change in cities such as Los Angeles or London.
Finally, the third type of landscaping is the most subjective one, because it develops a personal reading of the territory based on the filmmaker’s own experiences of it. In principle, there are not too many differences in the way of filming space between this strategy and the previous two, but the images are this time accompanied by a first-person commentary that makes explicit the link between the filmmaker and the landscape. For this reason, as this commentary usually has a clear autobiographical component, I have decided to name this strategy ‘autobiographical landscaping’. In these films, such as News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977) or Lost Book Found (Jem Cohen, 1996), the depicted space is always a lived space, whose current appearance allows filmmakers to return to the cities they knew at a particular time of their life. The ultimate purpose of this type of landscaping is the same as that of urban self-portraits, the device discussed in the second part of this book, but its main formal strategy is still the direct record of the cityscape. Accordingly, autobiographical landscape films never include reenactments, archival footage or the filmmaker’s on-camera presence, because their main subject is space itself rather than urban change, the passage of time or the filmmaker’s memory.
Overall, landscaping is concerned with the shape of space, its historical evolution, its current appearance and especially its visual perception, because any cinematic space is always perceived doubly: first by the filmmaker and then by the audience. The next three chapters will describe and discuss the formal features and possible meanings of these three variations, from the most objective to the most subjective one in a prearranged sequence that shows the gradual evolution of observational documentaries towards the performative mode.