ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Stockholm Cinema Studies 6
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Stockholm Cinema Studies 6 Out of Site Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema 1969–1974 Henrik Gustafsson Stockholm University ©Henrik Gustafsson, Stockholm 2007 Cover image: Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) Epigraph: Sam Shepard, “Gary Cooper, or the Landscape”, Cruising Paradise: Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1996) ISSN 1653-4859 ISBN 978-91-85445-65-3 Printed in Sweden by US-AB, Stockholm 2007 Distributor: Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm Where did you here about the West in Sweden? Movies. American movies. We see that great landscape in our dreams. It haunts us. So it’s the landscape that grabs you more than the characters? Yes. That vast background. So in Sweden, when you’re watching an American western, you’re all staring at the background? Is that it? Sam Shepard, “Gary Cooper, or the Landscape” Contents Introduction.......................................................................................................... 9 Towards a Definition: Space vs. Landscape .......................................................... 14 Previous Research ................................................................................................ 19 Methodological Considerations.............................................................................. 22 Making Sense, Making Meaning............................................................................ 24 Contemplating and Interpreting Landscape................................................................. 27 The Aesthetics of Landscape: Landscape Film, Fine Art and Abstraction.............. 28 The Politics of Landscape: From Refuge to Battlefield .......................................... 32 The Making and Un-making of Nature’s Nation ..................................................... 35 Landscape and Semiotics: From Text to Medium.................................................. 37 The Instability of Landscape .................................................................................. 40 The New Hollywood: Lost Illusions, Double Visions.................................................... 43 Robert Altman and the Advantage of Environment ................................................ 47 Key Topics and Chapter Outline............................................................................ 52 Closing Remarks ................................................................................................... 54 1 An Image in Place of an Image ..................................................................... 57 Empty Land and the Invention of Origin in Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point, and The Last Movie Travelogues: Dennis Hopper and the American Art Film ....................................... 62 Discovery and Destruction in Zabriskie Point......................................................... 66 Continental Visions, Unobtainable Dreams............................................................ 68 Empty Land ........................................................................................................... 73 The Last Movie...................................................................................................... 75 Coda: Earth Feeling/Made-Up Image .................................................................... 79 2 No Neutral Ground......................................................................................... 83 Roads to Realism in The Rain People, Five Easy Pieces, and Two-Lane Blacktop Covering the Ground: New Realist Practices......................................................... 85 Everywhere and Nowhere: Pathos, Ethos, and Realism........................................ 88 New Realism and New Topographics.................................................................... 90 “A Noble Capitalizable Commonplace”: The Rain People and Five Easy Pieces... 92 Two-Lane Blacktop................................................................................................ 99 Non-exceptional Landscapes and the Redemption of Physical Reality................ 102 Coda: Going into Orbit......................................................................................... 105 3 Neither Here nor There................................................................................ 109 Landscape and Nostalgia in Badlands Nostalgia as Style and Theme............................................................................. 112 Future-Past.......................................................................................................... 116 Innocents Abroad ................................................................................................ 119 Badlands: From Daybreak to Setting Sun............................................................ 121 Story-space vs. Landscape: Strategies of Non-alignment in Badlands ................ 127 Reconsidering Nostalgia Film.............................................................................. 129 Coda: Frameworks .............................................................................................. 131 4 Re-call of the Wild........................................................................................ 135 Landscape and Memory in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and Deliverance Describing the Landscape, Making the Man........................................................ 137 From Manifest to Latent Destiny.......................................................................... 140 Where History Begins.......................................................................................... 142 The Code of Wilderness in Peckinpah’s West ..................................................... 144 Rituals of Commemoration: Nostalgia as Mythic Self-Consciousness ................. 149 Reflection and Re-creation: Tableaux, Lakes and Mirrors ................................... 151 Deliverance ......................................................................................................... 154 Dickey and the Wild as Poetic Property............................................................... 156 Identification and Transfiguration......................................................................... 160 Coda: Possess/Possessed .................................................................................. 163 5 Daylight Noir and the Dark Side of Landscape .......................................... 167 Landscape as Mise-en-Abyme in Chinatown Film Noir and the End of the National Landscape................................................ 171 Dark Passages and High Sierras: the National Landscape and its Other ............ 175 New Hollywood Noir and the Paranoid Pastoral .................................................. 178 Chinatown ........................................................................................................... 181 Mulwray’s Garden................................................................................................ 183 The Unintelligibility of Nature ............................................................................... 186 Coda: Screen/Land.............................................................................................. 190 Conclusion....................................................................................................... 193 Acknowledgments........................................................................................... 204 Works Cited..................................................................................................... 205 Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 205 Internet and Radio .................................................................................................... 222 Exhibitions ................................................................................................................ 222 Artworks.................................................................................................................... 223 Filmography.............................................................................................................. 223 Introduction You can only think about something if you think of something else. For ex- ample, you see a landscape new to you. But it’s new to you because you compare it in your mind with another landscape, an older one, which you knew. Edgar in Eloge de l’amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) Notwithstanding the continual change that land undergoes, two predictions can be made regarding the emergence of a new landscape: that it transpires in the light of our expectations and previous encounters, or that it evolves from a change of mind and from an altered relationship between self, society and environment. Thus, changes wrought on a landscape are not the same as changes wrought on the land, but on ways of perceiving, representing and communicating an experience of land. One such instance of newness was boldly announced by Robert A. Sobieszek in the opening paragraph of an essay about the late 1970s desert photography of Lewis Baltz in which he claims that “landscape underwent rather grave changes between 1956 and 1979.”1 Bracketed by John Ford’s The Searchers and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, this was a time, Sobieszek continues, when “a new order of land- scape had taken hold of the imagination.” The “radical shift in perceiving the landscape” that he proposes is one from the solid and permanent toward the treacherous