Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (eds),
Cinema and Landscape.
Bristol: Intellect, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84150-309-7
US$25.00 (pb)
315pp
(Review copy supplied by Intellect)

Presumably anyone interested in reading Cinema and Landscape, an anthology of eighteen essays edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, is interested in considering landscape and cinema in tandem in order to practice a reading strategy that will reveal something of a film or films’ aesthetics and ideological meaning. However, it would be difficult to extract a useful strategy from this collection, although a few contributors provide material for inductively working out what some of the principles of such a reading strategy would be. On the face of it, the essays do not seem to have been written to any particular brief apart from length (a dozen pages each, give or take a few) and a vague direction to talk about landscape and films from a particular country.

That the individual essays deal primarily with individual national cinemas lends some commonality to the collection, since most authors provide a summary history of the cinema in question. The essays range from Russia to Canada, with stops in places such as Zimbabwe and Cuba along the way, reflecting, apparently, the primary interests of the contributors – who include subject specialists such as Marvin D’Lugo (Spain), Martin McLoone (Ireland), Sue Harper (Britain), and Susan Hayward (France) – rather than any theorizing about the significance of landscape in these particular cinemas or cinema in general. Many of the essays reasonably restrict their scope by focusing on genres or directors or time periods. Perhaps cleverly, the US appears represented by a chapter on “Science Fiction/Fantasy Films” – which are perhaps not so cleverly “equated to fairy tales” (p. 283). There is, quite simply, a haphazard quality to the collection.

Unfortunately, Cinema and Landscape begins with two stultifying chapters meant to set the scene that might cause less persistent readers to give up before getting to the more interesting chapters about national cinemas. While the editors’ introduction is thought provoking, it would have functioned better as an afterword rather than as a foreword, especially if it had worked inductively with the insights to be gleaned from the individual contributions to provide a more synthesized approach to the general subject. For example, it would be up to the editors to point to the similarity between Soviet/Russian and New Zealand cinemas, insofar as the taming of wild virgin territory is part of the national narrative in both countries, according to the chapters on those cinemas. The editors, however, seem to have taken a very laissez-faire attitude to their task.

My choice for first chapter in a reorganized version of this collection would be Wimal Dissanayake’s discussion of films by two Indian directors because he approaches his subject in a clear, exploratory fashion that establishes the terrain, so to speak, before presenting details that make his case. It’s an example of basic, good writing that is sadly lacking in several essays that seem, frankly, too weak to appear in print. For instance, the chapter on Zimbabwe refers to Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, and then comes the following sentence: “Films produced in the Southern Africa region including Zimbabwe reconnaissance the ‘landscape of memory’ (an apt title for one of the series of documentaries produced in the region)” (p. 206). It’s unclear whether that actually is the title of such a series, but from there the author proceeds to blur “memory” and “memorialization”. I’m not sure I understand what the same author means by the following: “The proud focal point of the peoples of the region remains the major cultural manifestations such as the various kingdoms that rose and fell in that territorial surrounding the great lakes. Indeed archaeological and ethno-historical evidence proves that the 16th century built Great Zimbabwe is a product of indigenous Africans – the Shona” (p. 207). But I’m pretty sure I’m confused when a page or so later I read the following: “The Southern African cinematic landscape assails the contradictions of nation as territory as well as nation as a temporal-cultural space. Here is a case for applying Gramscian concepts of hegemony in cultural expressions; the nation embodying specific and regionally defined hegemonic articulations” (p. 208). Few things pique my interest more than a reference to the applicability of Gramscian concepts of hegemony, but this time I was doomed to disappointment, since the case wasn’t made; instead, it’s another empty reference.

The chapter on Chinese cinema provides yet more egregious examples of editorial laxity. The chapter itself tries to comprehend mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese film in eight pages. With reference to a Hong Kong film, the author writes, “Questions of monetary economy in the film (arguably one the main driving forces behind the creation of Hong Kong) is something that the film rejects as a positive: perhaps a nod towards the old Western adage ‘money does not bring happiness’” (p. 223). This goes beyond lack of proofreading, and it isn’t helped when the author writes that “the landscape grants an ideal setting for the multiplicity of personality that both Hei and Bong [the two protagonists] demonstrate” (p. 223). Landscape, it turns out, means “bright airy luxury buildings” and “dark, narrow corridors and apartments.” That’s about as helpful as telling us that Bong’s “relationship to the city streets is one that is nearly always conducted via alcohol as he is almost always weaving his way drunkenly through Hong Kong” (p. 224).

Similarly, the chapter on Japanese cinema poses dubious suppositions that rest on vague speculations about intentionality. The author writes: “In a way which is totally different from Mizoguchi, Teshigahara uses the landscape to assist his ideologies and to complement the story. Indeed, and as it turns out, the surroundings are a perfect accompaniment to the action and a stunning realism of Teshigahara’s art ethic as he uses the topography of rock and slag, intensifying the setting by use of the landscape’s sculptural aspect” (p. 239). It really is unclear just how Teshigahara uses landscape in relation to ideological goals. These sorts of undeveloped thoughts typify this book’s frustrating qualities.

As things actually stand in Cinema and Landscape, the second chapter, a history by Tom Gunning of landscape as changing concept in nineteenth century painting, especially the American practice, is interesting, as he explains how it connects with and influences early cinema, but he repeats a fair amount of material that has been around before (which he himself notes through numerous references to his own earlier publications), and which could be presented more succinctly. It is as though Gunning felt the need to fill in all the details skimmed over by Martin Lefebvre in his “Introduction” to Landscape and Film when the latter says, somewhat casually, that “cinematic landscapes came on the scene of ‘visuality’ at the end of a century that saw the landscape genre flourish in an unprecedented degree in painting” (p. xi).[1]  This chapter is definitely a cut above the others in scholarship and writing, but the editors have also been much more generous with Gunning, allowing him almost forty pages to make his case.

For me, the most interesting aspect of this collection is the fact that the editors as well as some of the contributors use the term “authenticity” on a number of occasions. I’ve been taken to task over the years for using the word, and have even been directed to read Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, which I thought was unfair, since I don’t think I should be considered a supporter of Nazi-era ideas just because I used a term misappropriated by figures associated with evil. So I was most interested in Brad Prager’s discussion of Herzog’s films. He quotes from Noël Carroll on Herzog among others: “It is not just language, literally construed, that these filmmakers distrust, but everything that language – conceived of as a socially inculcated filter of experience – can, in a rather broad sense, be made to stand for” (p. 93). Prager continues, in his own words:

Of course one should not seek to make Herzog’s philosophical aesthetics consistent through and through. Although one hears the distinctively Germanic echo of Heidegger’s discussion of “chatter” (Gerede), and even of Adorno’s contempt for “jargon” in Herzog’s views, his statements have only the rigour required of practitioners of the visual arts, rather than that which would be appropriate to the sphere of the dialectician. Herzog’s main goal is to defamiliarize us from our own landscapes in the hope of providing a sensual experience that stands apart from conventional and academic ways of thinking. Hence he is not only waging a holy war against television, as he declares in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, but also against rhetoric, in the name of experience, or “real life.” (p. 93)

Well, this is all very interesting, and I hardly know where to start. Herzog gets to have Heidegger and Adorno, and is not required to be rigorous in thought. Fine. After all, he’s an artist. But I always found Arnheim more persuasive than Kracauer: Art is about manipulation of material; reality is something different. I also discovered the arbitrariness and fluidity of language as a child, once I realized there were different words for things in different languages. For me, language is an inescapable filter of experience, and art is its own kind of language. While I didn’t expect Cinema and Landscape to be a work of art, I did expect more rigor from its discussion of the relation between cinema and landscape, especially about how juxtaposing the two terms (and the concepts represented by those terms) could be a useful filter for my experience of moving images.

Harriet Margolis,
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Endnotes

[1]  “Introduction,” Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xi-xxxi.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010