Harper | Rayner CINEMA AND Landscape [ Edited by Graeme Harper & Jonathan Rayner [ [ While the consideration of landscape on film has been About the editors growing in currency over the past four to five years, as Graeme Harper is Professor CINEMA AND yet no single publication has attempted to embrace the of Creative Writing and multitude of nationalities, cinematic examples and critical Director of Research in Arts approaches that Cinema and Landscape encompasses. and Humanities at Bangor Written by reputed cinema scholars and academic University. innovators, this volume both extends the existing field of Jonathan Rayner is Reader film studies and stakes claims to overlapping, contested in Film Studies at the territories in the art and humanities and the social University of Sheffield, sciences. School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. The notion of landscape is a complex one, but it has CINEMA AND been central to the art and artistry of the cinema. After all, what is the French New Wave without Paris? What are the films of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Landscape Spike Lee, without New York? Cinema and Landscape frames up contemporary film landscapes across the Landscape world, in a concentrated examination and interrogation of screen aesthetics and national ideology, film form and [ Edited by Graeme Harper & Jonathan Rayner [ cultural geography, cinematic representation and the human environment. ] ISBN 978-1-84150-309-7 00 9 781841 503097 intellect | www.intellectbooks.com Cinema and Landscape Cinema and Landscape Graeme Harper & Jonathan Rayner (eds) intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA First published in the UK in 2010 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2010 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2010 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Rebecca Vaughan-Williams Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-309-7 / EISBN 978-1-84150-304-2 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta. Contents Foreword 9 David Desser Acknowledgements 11 Chapter 1: Introduction – Cinema and Landscape 13 Graeme Harper, Bangor University and Jonathan Rayner, University of Sheffield PART I: THE INVENTION OF THE CINEMatic LANDScapE 29 Chapter 2: Landscape and the Fantasy of Moving Pictures: Early Cinema’s Phantom Rides 31 Tom Gunning, University of Chicago PART II: MAPPING CINEMatic LANDScapES 71 Chapter 3: ‘One Foot in the Air?’ Landscape in the Soviet and Russian Road Movie 73 Emma Widdis, University of Cambridge Chapter 4: Landscape of the Mind: The Indifferent Earth in Werner Herzog’s Films 89 Brad Prager, University of Missouri Chapter 5: Visions of Italy: The Sublime, the Postmodern and the Apocalyptic 103 William Hope, Salford University Chapter 6: Landscape in Spanish Cinema 117 Marvin D’Lugo, Clark University Chapter 7: Landscape and Irish Cinema 131 Martin McLoone, University of Ulster Cinema and Landscape Chapter 8: The Ownership of Woods and Water: Landscapes in British Cinema 1930–1960 147 Sue Harper, University of Portsmouth Chapter 9: Filming the (Post-)Colonial Landscape: Claire Denis’ Chocolat (1988) and Beau travail (1998) 161 Susan Hayward, University of Exeter Chapter 10: Landscaping the Revolution: The Political and Social Geography of Cuba Reflected in its Cinema 177 Bob Britton, University of Sheffield Chapter 11: Landscapes of Meaning in Cinema: Two Indian Examples 189 Wimal Dissanayake, University of Hawaii Chapter 12: The Geography of Cinema – Zimbabwe 203 Martin Mhando, Murdoch University Chapter 13: Crises, Economy and Landscape: The Modern Film Face of New China 219 Kate Taylor, Bangor University Chapter 14: Japanese Cinema and Landscape 231 Paul Spicer, University of Portsmouth Chapter 15: A Version of Beauty and Terror: Australian Cinematic Landscapes 243 Graeme Harper, Bangor University Chapter 16: Battlefields of Vision: New Zealand Filmscapes 255 Jonathan Rayner, University of Sheffield Chapter 17: The Landscapes of Canada’s Features: Articulating Nation and Nature 269 Jim Leach, Brock University Chapter 18: Science Fiction/Fantasy Films, Fairy Tales and Control: Landscape Stereotypes on a Wilderness to Ultra-urban Continuum 281 Christina Kennedy, Tiánna and Mélisa Kennedy, Northern Arizona University Filmography 297 Contributors 305 Index 309 6 The Editors Prof. Graeme Harper is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS) and of the RSA, Director of the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at Bangor University, co-editor of Studies in European Cinema (Intellect) and of the new Journal of Popular European Culture (Intellect, 2010). He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, and a panel member of the national Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Dr Jonathan Rayner is a Reader in Film Studies, Convenor of the MA in International Cinema at the University of Sheffield, a recent Caird Senior Research Fellow at The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich (UK), a member of the AHRC Peer Review college, and an Editorial Board member of Studies in Australasian Cinema and Studies in European Cinema. Foreword David Desser éla Belázs’s lyrical paeans to the power of the close up in cinema remain vital components to our understanding of how movies work their magic. And whatever Roland Barthes meant when he wrote, ‘The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn Ban Event’, he still knew that close ups account for much of the pleasures of the cinematic text. Yet surely the Lumière Brothers knew equally well that the long shot, the landscape, could excite the artistic imagination as much as the intimate portrait. Not for nothing do we see a train arriving at a station, workers leaving the factory – the landscape existing in space yet shifting in time. While it is doubtful that people ran screaming from the Grand Café at the sight of a train hurtling toward them, a genuine excitement was indeed experienced when a landscape, at once familiar and now made strange, came alive before their eyes. The cinema’s debt to photography is abundantly clear in the Lumière Brothers’ films; they were, after all, the purveyors of photographic equipment. Yet is not photography equally suited to the landscape as much as the portrait? And who, moreover, living in France in the second half of the nineteenth century could be unaware and unaffected by Impressionism? For all the documentary value in their films, we find marvellous touches of Impressionism: are we excited at the image of Monsieur and Madam Lumière feeding their baby – the very portrait of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie – or is the sight of the rustling of the leaves behind them that truly engages our sensibilities? This is both the birth of cinema and of cinephilia. It is perhaps the ‘impressionism’ of the cinematic landscape that so strongly commands our attention. Like the Lumière films existing on the boundary between the documentary and the experimental, the marvellous, yet perhaps increasingly forgotten ‘city symphonies’ such as Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (Walther Ruttman, 1927) and the two transcendent masterpieces of the genre, A propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1929) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), reveal the power of the cinema to animate space that both freezes it in time yet endows it with timeless mobility. No surprise, then, that so many cinematic movements that followed understand the impressionism of the city. What is the French New Wave without Paris? What are the Cinema and Landscape films of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, without New York? And think of the masterpiece, Tokyo Story (1953). Though not a director of long shots and vistas, Ozu surely has something in mind with those few shots of the sad old couple amid the anonymous megalopolis compared with the graceful sense of home conveyed by the film’s famous opening and closing sequences. The ‘painterly’ associations that landscape inevitably brings to bear have not escaped the greatest of Hollywood’s filmmakers, either: John Ford painted a portrait of the Old West as much with the buttes of Monument Valley as he did the increasingly careworn face of John Wayne. The notion of ‘landscape’ is a complex one, of course, but however it is defined it has been central to the art and artistry of the cinema and to the cinephilia that goes into the creation of a book like this one. 10 Acknowledgements The Editors would like to sincerely thank each and every one of the contributors to Cinema and Landscape for their terrific contributions. These contributions are not only a wonderful reflection of the laudable commitment displayed here by the authors, but also reflect some considerable challenges faced along the way – all of which makes this book the result of what can be achieved by an international community of scholars. Sincere thanks also go to our publishers, the very fine Intellect, to Sam King and the wonderful Intellect team, for their ongoing commitment, their lively ideas and their fabulous creative support. Graeme Harper & Jonathan Rayner Chapter 1 Introduction – Cinema and Landscape Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner 14th May 1930: American actor Johnny Mack Brown (1904–1974) surveys the rugged landscape of the Grand Canyon in Arizona in a scene from ‘Billy the Kid’ (aka ‘The Highwayman Rides’), directed by King Vidor. (Photo by John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images) 14 Photographs are not hand-made; they are manufactured. And what is manufactured is an image of the world.1 Cartography his book is a cinematic circumnavigation.