Landscape Allegory in Cinema (Introduction) (original) (raw)

Landscape allegory in cinema : from wilderness to wasteland

Landscape allegory in cinema : from wilderness to wasteland, 2010

This study seeks to understand the form of cinematic space referred to as 'the landscape of the mind,' in which natural, outdoor settings serve as outward manifestations of characters' inner subjective states.

Landscape Allegory in Cinema Chapter Four (Depiction of Landscape in Avant-Garde Films)

Landscape Allegory in Cinema, 2010

Abstract and naturalistic strains of landscape allegory became less poignant during the silent and early sound period of filmmaking. However, as they became less divergent and more symbiotic, these strains eventually had a fresh impact with the rise of experimental narrative filmmaking in the 1960s.Landscape allegory can be found in both avant-garde films and mainstream feature-length films during this time, dispelling the notion that these two modes of cinema are so disparate.

Introduction: Defining Landscape Allegory

Landscape Allegory in Cinema, 2010

When watching narrative films, we normally devote our attention to character presence and interaction rather than the settings or backgrounds. Accordingly, cinematic locations serve as backdrops for characters that shape the story on their own. Consider Hollywood epics like Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958), William Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959), or Henry Levin’s Genghis Khan (1965): the magnificent locations do little more than set the stage for these films’ grand narratives. But setting can also have a psychological dimension functioning beyond the supportive role of backdrop. Filmmakers are able to manipulate the film’s setting in order to reflect inner subjective states of the principal character or protagonist. Once a film has established a more complex psychological premise for any main character, it can correlate this individual’s mental universe to natural outdoor locations specifically through a more aggressive approach to framing, editing, and juxtaposition. In the same way that Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) suggests its narrator’s insanity through contorted interior sets, certain films use outdoor locations to express their protagonists’ internal conflicts.

Landscapes as Realms of Indistinction in Contemporary British Cinema

An analysis of the role of landscape in the recent films of Peter Greenaway, Ben Rivers and Ben Wheatley. How does cinema depict the relationship between cinema landscapes and mankind, as individuals, cultural agents and political bodies? These films use outside spaces to explore how aspects of human life are haunted by the distinction between man and animal.

Psychological Landscape Films: Narrative and Stylistic Approaches

This article serves to broadly address formalist approaches to rendering natural settings psychological in cinema, or, in other words, mobilizing landscapes to function beyond their usual function as narrative backdrop. By “formalist” it should be understood that such an approach to visual representation is both inherently aggressive and experimental, where one implies the other, especially when compared to more realist modes of expression. Instead of human characters portrayed within an authenticating wilderness, as in the typical classical Hollywood Western, the precise topography of the landscape becomes reflective of a particular human consciousness.