Landscape Allegory in Cinema: From Wilderness to Wasteland

Landscape Allegory in Cinema

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema From Wilderness to Wasteland David Melbye

LANDSCAPE ALLEGORY IN CINEMA

Copyright © David Melbye, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10407–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Melbye, David Landscape allegory in cinema : from wilderness to wasteland / David Melbye. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10407–5 (alk. paper) 1. Landscape in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.L29M35 2010 791.43966—dc22

2009050883

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For My Parents: Ann Davis Melbye and Roy Wilbur Melbye

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Contents Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Defining Landscape Allegory Pre-Cinematic Appearance of Landscape Allegory Landscape Allegory as an Avant-Garde Gesture Narrative Cinema’s Assimilation of Landscape Allegory Mainstream Allegories of Imperialist Politics Continuation of Landscape Allegory

1 8 11

One

Landscape Depiction before Cinema Anthropocentric Landscape in the Middle Ages Classical Landscape in the Renaissance Landscape as Subject in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting The Influential Sunscapes of Claude Lorrain Neoclassical Landscape as Subject in the Eighteenth Century

21 22 25

Spiritualized Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century European Sublime Landscape American Sublime Landscape Landscape Sketches of Edgar Allan Poe

35 37 39 42

Two

14 16 18

27 30 32

Three Advent of Filming Landscape Allegory Early Wilderness Photography Early Abstract Landscape Photography Early Cinematic Depiction of Landscape

47 48 51 52

Four

59 59 62 63 66 68 69

Depiction of Landscape in Avant-Garde Films Brakhage’s Dog Star Man Confluence of Avant-Garde and Mainstream Cinema Enrico’s La rivière du hibou La rivière du hibou’s River Progression La rivière du hibou’s Overland Segment La rivière du hibou’s “Home” of the Avant-Garde

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Contents

Five

Spiritual Wasteland Films The Western’s “Duel in the Sun” Allegory The Wasteland Informed by Space/Place Theory Jodorowsky’s El Topo

73 73 78 81

Six

Italian Wasteland Allegory Antonioni’s Island Allegories Pasolini’s Mountain Allegories Desert Allegories: From Spaghetti Westerns to Zabriskie Point

85 87 91 93

Seven

Australian Outback Allegory Roeg’s Walkabout Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock

99 100 103

Eight

Landscape Allegory in Hollywood The Western Megalomaniac versus the Third World Landscape Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King Coppola’s Apocalypse Now

111

Nine

Ten

112 113 116 118

River/Jungle and Other Imperialist Allegories Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo Boorman’s Deliverance Friedkin’s Sorcerer Futureworld Landscapes: Planet of the Apes, Zardoz, and 2001: A Space Odyssey Reversal of Landscape Allegory

123 123 126 128 130

Landscape Allegory in Other Narrative Contexts Landscape in Noir Films High Sierra Treasure of the Sierra Madre Landscape in Hitchcock Films Spellbound Vertigo Landscape in Road Films Easy Rider Vanishing Point Landscape Allegory as a Critical Discourse

139 140 141 142 144 145 146 148 149 150 151

132 135

Contents

ix

Conclusion: Landscape Allegory into the Future Landscape Allegory Returns to Avant-Garde Origins Landscape Allegory in Recent Hollywood Films Landscape Allegory in Asian Cinema The Human Mind as Macroscopic Space

153 154 156 159 161

Appendix: Chronology of Landscape Allegory

163

Notes

183

Bibliography

189

Index

197

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Acknowledgments This study is an accumulation of interests reaching back as far as high school, where my senior thesis paper was on Edgar Allan Poe. I eventually became familiar with his landscape sketches in courses I took during my undergraduate years at University of California San Diego, and, in at least one of these courses, I recall how much I appreciated seeing corollary nineteenth century American paintings, which the professor provided in class. I also took courses on European and American Art History, which introduced me to the sublime and other landscape movements. And I first came into contact with allegory in courses on Chaucer and Medieval Literature, as well as in courses for a minor I pursued in Classical Studies. I wish I could thank all the professors I came across in my youth who in their own way contributed to my discovery of landscape and allegory. In my early years as a graduate student at California State University Los Angeles, I found the opportunity to devote particular attention to Poe’s landscape sketches. A research paper I did on this topic, in turn, contributed content to this book. I am deeply appreciative of one professor in particular, John Cleman, who demonstrated an uncommon passion for topics covered in his seminars. He gave his time generously out of class as well to exchange ideas and grapple with the complexities of Poe’s prose. His encouragement stayed with me through the years, well beyond my brief time there in completing a Masters degree in English Literature. Finally, during my time as a doctoral student at University of Southern California, I developed relationships with a number of professors who would inspire me to rein in my broad interest in landscapeoriented art, literature, and cinema. Before he left to teach at New York University, Dana Polan was my committee chair and offered me much guidance over the years in approaching my research to the general topic of landscape in cinema. Like John Cleman, he gave his time generously and always showed a great enthusiasm for my focus. Marsha Kinder, a longtime leader of the department, was also very encouraging, and, at one point, was able to facilitate my inclusion in an exclusive seminar on allegory, held at the Getter Center. Leo

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Braudy, the outside member of my dissertation committee, offered me invaluable help in compiling the most important studies on landscape within the broader Humanities, not to mention the worthy attention he gave to my evolving drafts. Anne Friedberg, also on my committee, provided the most rigorous notes for improvement on my drafts— something I appreciate more in hindsight. Despite the caring attention of so many brilliant minds, I could not have gotten through the writing phase of my dissertation without Akira Lippit, who was willing to take on my project despite an extremely pressured deadline. As my chair, he provided the insight and encouragement I needed to complete my study. The process of revising and expanding my dissertation for publication was grueling, but immensely rewarding. I could not have done it without the help my longtime friend Damon Pipitone, who, serving as my copy editor, brought so much clarity to my work as well as contributed worthy ideas for untried approaches. And I deeply appreciate the insights and film suggestions of my close friend Andrew Syder, who was at USC with me. Robert Folkenflik’s review for Palgrave was also particularly helpful in guiding my revisions. Lastly, I am indebted to my friend Ruley Espiritu for giving his time generously in the design of this book’s cover art.

Introduction Defining Landscape Allegory 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. This book focuses on the cultural forces that allow natural landscapes in cinema to behave like an assembled Caligari set. These “landscapes of the mind” define a particular approach to cinematic space in which natural, outdoor settings serve as outward manifestations of characters’ troubled psyches. This study pursues a fundamental question on the use of natural landscapes in narrative cinema: At what point precisely does a landscape setting function psychologically, beyond its usual role as backdrop? The intention here is to demonstrate that a clear line can be drawn between the normal, supportive use of landscape as backdrop and the more experimental use of landscape as an allegorical component to film narrative. Philosopher and film theorist Gilles Deleuze defines experimental cinema as a “double composition” or blending

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of “physical cinema” (defined by everyday action) and “intellectual cinema” (defined by the imitation of mental activity).1 In this context, “experimental” confers the cinematic attempt to depict not only actual human events within natural outdoor settings, but psychological events through these settings as well. In the most obvious sense, the line between normal and experimental derives from a film’s basic narrative intentions. Typically, narrative cinema seeks little more than to entertain its audience with an engaging story. However, there are certain films whose narratives move decidedly into this experimental realm—in the deliberate juxtaposition of their psychologically complex characters with carefully selected, framed, and edited natural landscapes. It is the specific nature of this juxtaposition I consider here since it is more than the deliberate foregrounding of landscape in Hollywood historical epics or in landscape-oriented westerns like John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) or Burt Boetticher’s The Tall T (1957). While narrative setting in these two westerns, for example, becomes a locus of cultural investment even to the point of frontier mythmaking, the natural landscape’s psychological meaning in experimental films is pushed even further. In the latter case, filmmakers exploit these settings moreover by manipulating their natural features into an outer macroscopic reflection of inner transformations. The landscapes of our natural world become landscapes of our minds. The transformation of space in general into a place of specific meanings is inherently a social phenomenon. In discussing how space is mythologized, landscape theorists like J.B. Jackson and Yi-Fu Tuan affirm that the mere presence of humankind makes an otherwise mute landscape “speak” and that the language of each landscape is idiosyncratic to the body or nation of people in a position to confront it, depending on how it figures in their common experience and imagination. This collective interpretation of the environment is a significant part of what we refer to as culture. Consequently, a landscape’s meaning may vary drastically from one culture to the next, and, at the same time, may be universal. In his study Interpretations of the Ordinary Landscape, Donald Meinig explains this concept as follows: We regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behavior, and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time. Every landscape is an accumulation, and its study may be undertaken as formal history, methodically defining the making of the landscape from the past to the present. 2

Defining Landscape Allegory

3

But landscapes also become meaningful when they are outside a particular culture’s everyday experience. For example, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 documentary Nanook of the North exploited the home of indigenous Eskimos in the remote Hudson Bay region for the consumption of American audiences who invested this icy peripheral zone with a sense of wonderment. While a landscape may remain constant (excepting, of course, where natural resources are to be found), its figurative meanings are ever-changing according to the inherent mutability of human cultural presence. Even an inhospitable wasteland may be retained and live on in the collective imagination of societies that have left it for more habitable regions—or simply observe it from a safe distance. Once a natural landscape has become encoded with meanings specific to a particular culture, this landscape can come to symbolize something beyond itself to the people who make up that culture. That is, it takes on an allegorical dimension. There should be some clarity as to what is meant here by “allegory” or “allegorical” within a visual context. Angus Fletcher, an authority on the literary use of this concept, defines it as follows: “In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’ ”3 Because this study focuses on how cinematic space can also “say one thing and mean another,” I shall define a cinematic allegory as an assembled narrative mode, wherein the principal characters move beyond their normal protagonist/antagonist functions and into a symbolic dimension of meaning. Cinematic allegories usually have a narrower range of characters, each connoting a specific meaning or idea. Such narratives invite a second interpretation beyond the immediately visible world that is otherwise sufficient in more conventional films to entertain an audience. Audiences do not interpret cinematic allegories on a case-bycase basis. Instead, a cultural lexicon allows audiences to recognize filmmakers’ deeper intentions beneath the narrative’s surface. By the same token, our larger understanding of allegory derives from visual paradigms that have evolved over an extended period of time to achieve their present cultural currency. In his discussion of the allegorical mode in a postmodern context, Craig Owens affirms this notion of evolution: “Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter.”4 According to this idea of the “culturally significant,” an allegorical film communicates meanings to its targeted audience beyond what

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other audiences may be in a position to perceive. This applies to the earlier notion of how the specific meaning of any natural landscape varies from culture to culture, and so resonates uniquely within the collective imagination or experience of a given nation. In certain cases, even another nation’s experience within a certain characteristic landscape can become meaningful to a nation whose topography is totally dissimilar. For example, in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and similar Italian reinterpretations of the Hollywood western, the characteristic desert wastelands of the American frontier become arenas for a critique of modern Italian urbanization and social alienation. Ultimately, both characters and their surroundings can be manipulated to serve an allegorical mode of narration. What is the real purpose of allegory? With its conflation of human beings and natural phenomena, Greco-Roman mythology set a complex precedent. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, human characters transform into trees, stones, or other features of the landscape. In the First Book, for example, the nymph Daphne defies Cupid’s anger by becoming a laurel tree, and the nymph Syrinx resists the advances of Pan by turning herself into reeds. In the medieval period, allegory specifically served to address taboo subjects that were inappropriate for open discussion or literal contextualization within Christian society. One such subject was eroticism. Allegories such as Roman de la Rose (circa 1237) and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (1383) reveal a sophisticated system of figurative innuendoes borrowed from the natural universe. In depicting garden scenes, the former poem uses the image of a rosebud to refer to love and sexual copulation, while the latter portrays a series of birds seeking mates. Although somewhat opaque to modern readers, this language of flora and fauna was accessible to readers of the time because it had evolved slowly from Greco-Roman examples. Political issues were also prone to forms of indirect critique. For example, the continuation of the first part of Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun (1240?–1305?) expands the allegory with a wealth of outside references, such as the story of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in order to satirize various aspects of contemporary society. Fletcher refers to this kind of narrative as “Aesop-language,” intended “to avoid censorship of dissident thought.”5 The consummate political allegory is Dante’s Inferno (1321), wherein the author encounters individuals from his political life in a subterranean landscape of torment and penance. For example, Filippo Argenti, a Florentine

Defining Landscape Allegory

5

member of the Black Guelph political faction and an enemy of Dante, accosts him as he crosses the river Styx in the poem. As late as the eighteenth century, political allegories such as Voltaire’s Candide (1759) or Zadig (1747) continued to have popular appeal in Western culture. Their virulent attacks on oppressive political systems and religious attitudes attempted to escape censorship with the use of an indirect, allegorical mode of fiction still accessible enough to reach a wide audience. Candide, for example, demonstrates the folly of blind optimism through the global misadventures of its protagonist. Voltaire intended his allegory as an indictment of contemporary Enlightenment thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) who argued that the world must be perfect since God created it. Like earlier appearances of literary allegory, cinematic allegory derives from a cultural tendency toward social critique. A prolific period for such films can be associated with the 1960s and ’70s, a period commonly characterized by an intense correlation between narrative experimentation and social consciousness in mainstream cinema. These years were a time of great cultural upheaval, not only in the United States and Europe, but globally as well. The aftermath of the Second World War saw an increasing trend toward cultural and political reexamination, as well as a reinterpretation of space. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, Richard Murphy, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorists of the shift from modernism to postmodernism attest to this transformation. Deleuze describes the postwar “break”: The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. There were “any spaces whatever,” deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these anyspaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted; they were seers.6

As an example, Deleuze cites Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s film Stromboli (1950). Specifically, its incorporation of a bleak volcanic landscape anticipates the psychological correlation between such landscapes and bourgeois caricatures in certain films of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. This latter director intended L’avventura (1960) and subsequent films more ostensibly as indictments of modern existence after World War II.

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema

In the postwar era, technological advances in the worlds of both work (computers) and leisure (sports cars, speed boats) brought on a massive transformation of lifestyle within the increasingly urbanized spaces of reconstruction. During the 1960s, European and American student populations in particular were skeptical of these “improvements” and their ability to enhance the quality of life. Proceeding from the Frankfurt School’s conception of “late capitalism” (especially according to Adorno and Horkheimer), Fredric Jameson asserts that the real “preparation” for this period began in the 1950s and came to fruition in the “generational rupture” of the ’60s. He designates the year 1973 (“the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of a great wave of ‘wars of national liberation’ and the beginning of the end of traditional communism”) as the official advent of a “new dynamic” of capitalism as well as a new cultural sensibility.7 Such was the kind of cultural climate that fostered films, and art in general, that takes a more pessimistic stance toward the state of the world at this time. This cultural defeatism reflected a growing disillusion with traditional Christian beliefs, political attitudes toward “Third World” nations, as well as modern society’s investment in technological advancement. Furthermore, the historic threat of government censorship established the incentive for less direct forms of social critique—especially allegory—regardless of specific national context. Just as the subject of eroticism was veiled in medieval Christian allegory, narrative cinema during this roughly 20-year period of aggressive cultural reevaluation encouraged deeper readings beyond the usual surface levels of audience engagement. Familiar characters, plots, and settings were manipulated to function as a condemnation of modern existence and the state of the world. Within the context of what Deleuze refers to as modern cinema (or “time-image” films), the on-location activity of incorporating wastelands and other peripheral wildernesses was an indirect yet provocative strategy by which to critique modern, urbanized existence. In addition to the American desert, filmmakers used similar locations in Italy, Spain, Mexico, and other bleak terrains for this purpose. Antonioni, for example, not only exploited his own country’s inhospitable islands of the Mediterranean, but also sought out locations in California’s Death Valley and Africa’s Sahara Desert for his allegories of spiritual disillusionment. Beyond functioning as supportive backdrops, these landscapes become characters unto themselves, establishing a notion of resistance toward the obsessive will of these films’ protagonists. Within this paradigm of psychological struggle,

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the landscape-as-antagonist approach also established a historical arena for the reexamination of Europe and America’s imperialistic histories. In this context, certain films depict a male protagonist as a characteristically “Western” megalomaniac who struggles against the landscape itself in an attempt to discover the limitations of his own obsessive will to power. Examples of this latter allegorical paradigm are Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim (1965), Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). This period of experimental, intellectual, and pessimistic filmmaking ultimately gave way to a more escapist, surface-level approach to entertainment in accordance with an increasing cultural complacency. But before it faded, this period produced a number of allegorical films wherein the natural landscape is integral to the narrative. This body of films effectively demonstrates the potential for natural settings to transcend their supportive function as a backdrop for human events. Beyond simply a technique of cinematic allegory, landscape allegory establishes a wider conceptual link between space and popular culture. It is the topography of our minds’ innermost thoughts projected upon the natural universe around us. But such a narrative mode did not suddenly arrive with the cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. Instead, it has a long aesthetic tradition in the pre-cinematic media of both painting and literature. The history of Western painting alone is sufficiently vast to complicate the notion of landscape allegory, and one period’s understanding of how landscapes are meaningful is quite different from another’s. For example, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of how vast, mountainous landscapes could invoke emotions of sublime exultation help to distinguish this period from previous eras. Nevertheless, both the European and American cultural demand for painted natural landscapes, especially as an independent subject, evolved and eventually translated into both early photography and cinema. Literature, too, allegorized the landscape in ways that became paradigmatic for narrative cinema. While landscape allegory should really be associated with late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of Romanticism, it is worthwhile to trace landscape depiction farther back to learn how the natural landscape became such a powerful reflection of occidental sensibilities. These various pre-cinematic appearances of landscape allegory alert us to the numerous ways in which landscape can become figurative—and how many of these ways were assimilated

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by both narrative and nonnarrative cinema in order to tell stories through the landscape itself.

Pre-Cinematic Appearance of Landscape Allegory The first two chapters provide a historical foundation for landscape allegory in the films of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as its earlier cinematic treatments. Although relatively few have explored the subject of landscape in cinema, countless scholars have considered the presence of landscape in both art and literature over the years. By surveying some of the more important of these studies, I hope to inform what I see specifically as the exploitation of natural landscape in cinema. Each study devotes attention to the treatment of natural landscape and how that treatment reflects the spiritual attitudes of the culture that produced these works of art. These studies affirm that pre–twentieth-century artistic and literary depictions of landscape negotiate religious ideology at some level, making it possible to detect a trajectory of faith across time. The larger implication of this cultural trajectory is a strong religious faith becoming increasingly abstract, eventually reaching a state of relative disillusionment in the twentieth century. Fortunately, the fluid presence of landscape in art leaves little room for the argumentative leaps one might otherwise be forced to make in affirming such an evolution. Within this cultural trajectory of spiritual disillusionment, landscape allegory can be understood through two basic conceptual parameters. First, there is a diminishing emphasis on anthropocentric (human-centered) themes in the pictorial representation of natural landscapes. Second, there is a contradictory relationship between realism and abstraction, and this relationship informs the increasing attention to landscape as an independent subject. In the depiction of landscape in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, for example, two seemingly divergent paths of realism and abstraction are traceable. But I prefer to see realism (or naturalism) as merely another form of abstraction in a larger context where these two cultural impulses are not so antithetical after all. That is, they are operating simultaneously. This sophisticated interplay between realism and abstraction in pre-cinematic depictions of landscape is just as relevant to the more photographic medium of cinema—and how natural landscapes may be similarly manipulated toward allegorical ends. Thus,

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the initial chapters of this study establish a historical context to the prolific appearance of landscape allegory in the 1960s and ’70s and how film-viewing audiences of this period were capable of reading such an encoded visual language. In other words, it is not enough to assume that filmmakers and their audiences arrive at the subject of landscape independent of its vast cultural heritage. At the same time, I would never insist any filmmaker observed or was influenced by a particular landscape example from the aesthetic past. Ultimately, the impact of yesterday’s culture on the present operates well beyond a conscious level. Though one might consider the earliest visual depictions of landscape in prehistoric art, I choose to begin with the painting of the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods according to their established sense of nationhood. In these periodic contexts of national identity, I trace a cultural trajectory of landscape depiction in painting through the two basic parameters of shifting subject emphasis and its corresponding relationship between realism and abstraction. As evidenced in the significant art museums of Europe (Louvre, Hermitage, British National Gallery, Prado, Alte Pinakothek, Rijksmuseum, and others), the majority of works across roughly 500 years is religious in content. In the Middle Ages, painting was typically a form of religious affirmation or a medium through which to propagate Christianity, but it also became something to be collected and commissioned by royalty, nobility, and other members of the aristocracy. In either context, the landscape is more than a simple backdrop for biblical characters. Rather, it is idealized according to religious ideology and dogma. Certain paintings and triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516), for example, demonstrate the medieval period’s tendency toward this manufactured universe of spiritualized landscapes. For example, in his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1504), the convoluted presence of mythical figures and fantastical creatures in this outdoor arena allows the natural landscape itself to become a living, breathing, thinking entity—a human phenomenon. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, I notice the advent and increasing presence of a nonreligious or secular landscape. Here, biblical themes are replaced with rural and agrarian scenes, and the landscape assumes a stronger role in the intended meaning of the work. Seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings are particularly suggestive of this shift in emphasis. For example, the painting Winter Landscape (1623) by Esaias van de Velde (1591–1630) depicts a familiar Dutch rural scene with peasants, a farmhouse, a river, and the

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countryside beyond. Ultimately, such paintings are no less spiritual in content—the allegory actually becomes more sophisticated in its potential to communicate through abstraction. This digression from anthropocentric biblical content to portrayals of everyday experience compels a different kind of interpretation. Now, the spectator must learn to read the landscape itself, independent of the persons included within it. This transformation is a reversal in emphasis: previously, the spectator absorbed the content in the foreground first and then proceeded to the background, but in this latter context, the spectator acknowledges the background first and then considers the less important details of the foreground. Besides Winter Landscape, many other seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings of everyday agrarian life demonstrate this reversal in emphasis. In the painting River Scene with Ruined Tower (1637) by Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), the crumbling edifice and people outside it in the foreground are treated vaguely enough to become merely elements in this painting’s composite perspective of landscape for its own sake. Even the titles of these paintings reinforce their artists’ new investment in the natural universe. Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the natural landscape reached a cultural pinnacle as an allegorical device in both European and American painting and literature. Specifically, the relationship between realism and abstraction in the treatment of landscape became more sophisticated than in previous periods. With the rise of German Romanticism, painters such as Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) conveyed the presence of God through expansive landscapes, seascapes, or other natural wonders. To associate faith with the natural landscape, Friedrich inserted a crucifix into some of his wilderness depictions, which was actually considered irreverent in his time. Also in Friedrich’s landscape depictions, the presence of a human onlooker invoked a notion of “sublime” realization. For example, in his Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (circa 1818), the observing wanderer has his back to us, and so emphasis is diverted to the grand spectacle in front of him—a significant departure from anthropocentric landscapes of the past. This inclusion of a subject seen from behind (referred to as a “Ruckenfigur”) was Friedrich’s way of overtly establishing a human psychological association with the natural landscape. Again and again, he and other Romantic painters presented this form of contemplation as a spiritual alternative to churchgoing traditions. American culture eventually assimilated European spiritualized visions of the natural landscape, but for Americans, the presence of

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the onlooker was secondary to capturing the essence of the nation’s uncharted wildernesses. In this latter context, the spiritual association with the landscape is retained, but the Ruckenfigur is less prominent or is merely implied by what would be an overseeing onlooker’s view of an expansive landscape. For example, in View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunder Storm (The Oxbow) (1836) by Thomas Cole (1801–1848), the hilltop perspective of the vast surrounding landscape suggests how this actual wilderness appeared to the naked eye from this exact spot—at least at that time. Beginning with the work of Cole, the Hudson River School of American landscape painters became a powerful force toward expansionism and spiritual destiny. Similarly, American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Herman Melville (1819–1891), and especially Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) experimented with the natural landscape’s allegorical potential. At the same time, these various attempts at landscape allegory were not always in favor of expansionism. For example, Cole’s The Course of Empire series (1834–1836), depicting the rise and fall of an idealized GrecoRoman civilization, was intended as a cautionary tale and so anticipates the “futureworld” landscape films discussed in chapter nine.

Landscape Allegory as an Avant-Garde Gesture Chapters three and four examine the practice of filming the natural landscape, both in early experiments with on-location shooting and in the subsequent exploitation of outdoor settings in the experimental, intellectual, and defeatist films of the 1960s and ’70s. In this context of mainstream filmmaking, the figurative use of natural landscapes suggests an unusual association with more peripheral avantgarde cinema and its subversive agenda. The term avant-garde implies a degree of resistance to mainstream commercial practices, and as Scott MacDonald affirms, the privileging of natural landscape in cinema was one such form of resistance: That late-twentieth-century independent filmmakers often share an interest in landscape with nineteenth-century artists and writers is less surprising than it may seem, once one considers the development of American independent film and the emergence of academic film studies

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema during the 1960s and 1970s. For a good many filmmakers coming to maturity during those decades, a broad and penetrating cultural critique was essential. This critique was often directed at the commercialism of Hollywood, which was seen as a particularly visible index of the increasingly rampant materialism of capitalist culture.8

But MacDonald does not explain the fundamental shift from painting to film as the preferred medium for landscape. As painting became increasingly abstract in the twentieth century, photography and filmmaking took over the role of depicting natural scenery as it appears to the common observer. In other words, because photographic technology seemed better suited to satisfy a larger cultural desire for realistic representation, painting was freed up (or compelled) to pursue other avenues. After one considers the synthetic interior and exterior sets in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), one can then acknowledge a range of cinematic settings that reaches its opposite end with the documentary mode—in films such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), also from the silent era. This latter film anticipates an increasingly popular desire for the semblance of authenticity, and it spawned a number of similarly contrived exotic landscape documentaries. In Nanook, the frozen tundra authenticates the world of the Eskimos with the same narrative impact that an oft-used landscape like Vasquez Rocks or the Alabama Hills provides in so many westerns. This privileging of authentic landscape locations, which first appeared in early European and American cinema and continued through the 1950s in Hollywood westerns, bridges the gap between nineteenth-century landscape painting and the avant-garde techniques of filming landscape in the 1960s and ’70s. Chapter four considers the narrative aspects of filming natural landscapes and the precise point at which outdoor cinematic spaces become allegorical. In the most fundamental sense, this point could be established by the framing of the landscape vis-à-vis the human characters depicted within it. However, even if a natural setting is predominant and the human figures appear as tiny or insignificant within it, this may not be allegorical. Otherwise, many westerns by Ford, Boetticher, and others would then seem to have allegorical intentions when they are really only harbingers of the more experimental films to come. Just as one can trace a trend of the western genre toward increasing authenticity, one can also trace the beginnings of experimentation with these natural settings toward a more psychological dimension. Anthony Mann’s westerns, in particular,

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reveal an allegorical intention behind rugged landscapes appearing in key moments of their protagonists’ inner conflicts. For example, in Winchester ’73 (1950) Lin McAdam (James Stewart) confronts his darker instinct for revenge both literally and figuratively through a final gunfight with the film’s antagonist in a rocky peripheral zone outside town. Because most of the film’s action takes place in familiar frontier-town settings, this remote wilderness landscape takes on a deeper significance. The protagonist must struggle within it—and within himself—in order to confront and overcome his villainous brother. In the context of narrative cinema, a featured landscape only becomes allegorical according to this clearly established psychological dimension to the film’s main characters. However, this is only an initial phase in the construction of landscape allegory. Filmmakers must also incorporate certain avant-garde techniques of framing, editing, and juxtaposition to fully confer a deeper meaning upon natural settings. When considering avant-garde films as opposed to mainstream, profit-driven films, it is important to remember that avant-garde filmmakers mostly eschew any pressure to conform to narrative conventions. It is in this climate of unchecked experimentation or selfindulgence that the attempt to attribute meaning to the natural landscape realizes its greatest potential. Two filmmakers who worked within the wider psychologically probing impulse of the postwar period were Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. Although these artists pursued different types of experimentation with the filmmaking process, they both recognized the natural landscape as fertile subject matter for their inner self-explorations. Like the positioned observer in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, these filmmakers insert themselves as the sole human presence within a rugged landscape. In the dynamic medium of film, of course, these solitary characters do not remain frozen in contemplation, but instead move across—and even struggle against—the landscape. This latter cinematic privilege of juxtaposing an active human presence with an inhospitable landscape, and then depicting the inherent struggle that ensues, became the most prominent device of landscape allegory to be assimilated by mainstream cinema in subsequent years. David Lean’s immensely successful 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia is an early example of this type of landscape allegory, and anticipates such big-budget Hollywood landscape allegories as John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

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Narrative Cinema’s Assimilation of Landscape Allegory Because the socially conscious, relatively pessimistic period of the 1960s and ’70s was so prolific in its filmic experimentation with natural landscape, I devote five chapters entirely to films of this era—keeping in mind that these films still abide by a more conventional, feature-length narrative format. It is important to acknowledge that this period’s tendency toward allegorical experimentation is a reflection of the culture at hand, and that both mainstream and underground cinemas are produced for an audience, whether it is popular or specialized. In other words, depending on the desires and tastes of the time, audiences may not be interested in interpreting a film beyond the literal surface of its narrative action. I characterize this period by an unusual confluence of mainstream and avant-garde practices. That is, I see a middle-ground cinema that engages in avantgarde practices while preserving a conventional storytelling agenda, and I also observe the use of similar experimentation in big-budget Hollywood films. It is not my intention to prove that Hollywood or other filmmakers actually sought out and viewed Deren’s or Brakhage’s underground film shorts. Rather, I would simply suggest that mainstream and other narrative cinemas experiment with landscape allegory—especially in the context of social critique—far more than in other periods. A productive way to understand how mainstream narrative film modes experiment increasingly with landscape allegory over time is by considering the evolution of the Hollywood western. As shooting on location rather than on studio back lots became technically more feasible, the trend toward an enhanced semblance of authenticity appeared—for example, in panoramic westerns such as John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). However, a more complex psychological dimension to the western narrative only becomes evident later when specific landscapes assume allegorical properties or, rather, become outward manifestations of characters’ inner moral conflicts. More precisely, a “duel in the sun” allegory, in which the protagonist must confront and overcome the antagonist’s personification of his darker side within a craggy landscape, can be found in several of Mann’s westerns, including the aforementioned Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and The Far Country (1954). This narrative approach anticipates a more sophisticated landscape allegory in existential westerns such as Monte Hellman’s

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1967 film The Shooting, in which the protagonist must confront his doppelgänger within a similar concentration of large rocks and boulders. Chapter five initiates a closer examination of the more experimental, intellectual, and defeatist cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. Here, I focus on various national cinemas to reveal how specific cultural conditions beget an idiosyncratic interpretation of landscape. Just as the emergence of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting reflects a cultural divergence in religious practices, the nineteenthcentury American assimilation of the European sublime depiction of landscape was tailored to American notions of westward expansionism. Italian cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, in particular, reflects a national sensibility of spiritual reevaluation and crisis. Italian filmmakers in this period show a strong inclination to transform various desert landscapes, not always indigenous to Italy, into psychological wastelands. I locate the appearance and proliferation of the spaghetti western within this cultural tendency because these films transform a specifically American film genre into yet another allegorical indictment of Italian modernization. Additionally, more experimental Italian filmmakers such as Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini feature desolate landscapes in their allegories of the modern psyche such as Teorema (1968), Porcile (1969), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (1975). Chapters five through nine also consider other feature film directors from Mexico, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia, among other nations, who experimented with landscape in similar ways while attempting to remain within conventional narrative bounds. These so-called art films constitute this marginalized middle ground between avant-garde films and big-budget Hollywood releases. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1969 film El Topo, for example, borrows heavily from Italian director Sergio Leone’s westerns, yet pushes the Mexican desert terrain beyond a notion of historical authenticity and into a realm of pure allegory, replete with references to Eastern mysticism and the occult. Where Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) establish conventional storylines, their aggressive handling of the Australian outback demands a deeper kind of engagement from audiences. It is useful to approach such films according to the type of landscape being allegorized, since the particularity of each landscape determines its specific cultural meaning. This study often categorizes landscape allegories according to their emphasis on deserts, mountains, rivers, jungles, seascapes, or outer space. For example, wasteland settings usually

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confer notions of existential futility and spiritual disillusionment, whereas a river odyssey connotes a psychological transformation of some kind. At the same time, all these natural outdoor settings have the potential to convey notions of otherworldliness or exoticism.

Mainstream Allegories of Imperialist Politics In chapters eight and nine, I focus on the consummate use of landscape allegory as a specific indictment of European, American, or, more generally, imperialist politics. Landscape allegories of this time typically critique modernization through portrayals of spiritual crisis. But this particular form of landscape allegory moves beyond a general notion of cultural disillusionment to offer a more pointed condemnation. Specifically, these films examine our historical inclination to conquer and exploit vulnerable “Third World” cultures (Middle Eastern, South American, African, and Asian) and their natural resources. The narrative juxtaposes a characteristically “Western” male protagonist with a harsh, exotic wilderness, and he eventually becomes engaged in some form of psychological struggle against the indigenous landscape itself. Through his megalomania, this character achieves a measure of influence over others who, for a time, see him as a god. According to this particular allegory, the indomitable landscape rebuffs this personification of empire through a series of natural obstacles, often leading to his demise. Rather than the indigenous folk associated with it, the natural landscape itself assumes the antagonist role in this allegory of occidental conceit. Audiences could read these hostile landscapes as the outward appearance of the protagonist’s struggling inner psyche, but this wilderness also behaves as an antagonist in the narrative as it lashes out against the megalomaniac and finally consumes him. The directors who experimented with this particular landscape allegory were usually independent filmmakers. Still, some directors found themselves in a position to command huge and unprecedented budgets for similar narratives. Accordingly, this allegory of imperialism becomes a useful link between middle-ground landscape allegories and major Hollywood productions of the 1960s and ’70s. Again, a seminal example of a big-budget landscape allegory is Lawrence of Arabia (1962), directed by David Lean, who generally strove for an allegorical handling of landscape in his films. This film’s historical

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depiction of T.E. Lawrence’s charismatic persona, combined with his spiritual connection to the landscape, anticipates subsequent Hollywood films wherein a similar character assumes control of indigenous military forces in order to realize his personal vision of power. Two further examples worth considering are John Huston’s 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1976 Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. Interestingly, both films are adaptations of turn-of-the-century narratives (although the latter relocates its megalomaniac character from the nineteenth-century Amazon jungle to the wartime jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia). Despite their obvious differences, these two films set up an identical allegory of imperialist politics and their consequences by way of a wilderness landscape that devours those attempting to play god within it. This landscape allegory of the “Western megalomaniac” pitted against an exotic wilderness and its native inhabitants can also be found a bit earlier in Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954), but it became prolific during the 1960s and ’70s with films such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), as well as John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Big-budget examples of this landscape allegory were relatively successful, seeming to strike a chord with popular audiences of the time. But these sorts of introspective films did not remain in vogue for long. The experimental handling of landscape settings faded from view as Hollywood filmmaking increasingly privileged special effects and shock value over introspective, allegorical narratives. I see this newer tendency as a larger transformation in audience tastes from an intellectually probing pessimism to an increasingly resigned mode of escapism. The simultaneous release in 1977 of William Friedkin’s existentialist film Sorcerer, which flopped, and George Lucas’ Star Wars, which remains a cultural phenomenon to this day, demonstrates this cultural breach. Nevertheless, Sorcerer shares many of the same narrative attributes as the more successful landscape allegories of the same period. In this film, the male protagonist, a former criminal, confronts a series of jungle obstacles in the attempt to deliver a truckload of nitroglycerin to a distant village—a task whose successful completion will win him a passport back to America. The surface-level adventure through this hostile wilderness becomes an inward allegorical journey into the protagonist’s troubled psyche as he makes a futile attempt to discover his larger purpose. At one point, for example, his inner struggle is depicted through an aggressive superimposition sequence in which scenes from the protagonist’s past

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appear against anthropomorphic rock formations. While this film has achieved an art-house appreciation in recent times, its box-office failure reflects a popular dearth of interest in being asked to interpret allegorical content, especially in such a heavy-handed and defeatist context.

Continuation of Landscape Allegory Landscape allegory may seem like a passing phase in conventional narrative cinema, but continued experimentation with natural landscape still appears in recent avant-garde films. This study’s conclusion considers landscape-oriented films that emerge from a tradition of filmmakers who produce noncommercial works for similar reasons as Deren or Brakhage. The work of James Benning in particular is worthy of consideration for his evolving attempts at allegorizing landscape without necessarily depending on the narrative presence of a human subject. In films such as El Valley Centro (2000), Sogobi (2001), and Los (2004), for example, Benning presents a series of various environmental scenes or glimpses, asking us to view each for an extended but equal amount of time. Here, we must contemplate the landscape beyond merely passive acknowledgment, and in this way I am reminded of seventeenth-century Dutch naturalistic landscapes and their potential to assume a complex allegorical dimension according to their specific cultural context. Benning’s work demonstrates a similar potential in his choice of using the camera to frame certain landscapes for an amount of time that compels us to read them—in ways only our present culture may recognize—for indications of our ongoing exploitation of natural resources. Even if landscape allegory has left the mainstream and returned to underground and nonnarrative modes of avant-garde film practice, it is useful to consider the historical trajectory of this cultural inclination and how it may inform future research. There are many branches of academic pursuit that could stem from affirming the emergence of the landscape allegory in cinema. This is only one among many potential inquiries into the function of setting or location in filmmaking. To this end, my study encourages an increased critical attention to this aspect of the medium in general. Because there is still so much room for deeper investigation, I intend this book as an introduction to landscape allegory in cinema. In the very least, I seek to abolish the assumption that manufactured indoor locations in Caligari or American film noir examples are antithetical to the

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natural outdoor settings in other films. As it turns out, the latter are just as psychological in their narrative agendas. Landscape allegory becomes an important proving ground through which scholars can learn to recognize the deeper psychological and allegorical levels in films of all genres.

Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646–1657) by Claude Lorrain

Chapter One Landscape Depiction before Cinema In the most general sense, pre-cinematic depictions of landscape nurture a closer awareness of how natural environments are framed or, rather, organized into specific ideas within a wider cultural context. Scholars such as A. Bartlett Giamatti, Svetlana Alpers, Barbara Novak, Malcolm Andrews, and Leo Marx have thoroughly explored the rich Western tradition of depicting natural landscapes in drawing, painting, tapestry, and other artistic media. In order to explore the nature of landscape allegory in cinema, this study considers this tradition and the cultural trajectories that led to its emergence. This and the next chapter examine the more prominent research on landscape depiction in specific periods and nations. These general groupings include seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European sublime, and the subsequent mid- to late nineteenth-century American sublime. There are also certain influential artists such as Hieronymus Bosch in the fifteenth century and Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century whose particular treatment of landscape is evident in subsequent periods. The nineteenth-century Romantic sublime movement in particular informs cinema’s assimilation of allegorical approaches to landscape, which, in turn, function as cultural propaganda. Even as far back as the Middle Ages, it is possible to trace an aesthetic trajectory of landscape allegory that culminates with spiritual disillusionment in the twentieth century. Within this larger trajectory of spiritual evolution, the depiction of landscape includes two sets of values that determine how natural landscapes, traditionally oriented around religious subjects, eventually became an alternative possibility for faith as well as a reflection of spiritual crisis. First, one must consider the basic relationship between human presence and the natural landscape. In this context, there is a fluctuation between human and landscape emphasis depending on the cultural context of the work in question. This complex relationship of subject emphasis in the aesthetic portrayal of outdoor space is ever shifting according to the meaning of specific landscapes for specific cultures. Any proliferation of works in which the landscape

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is featured in a recurrent manner reflects a larger cultural impulse beyond any single artist’s inspiration. For example, the general nineteenth-century American celebration of the wilderness underscored the national myth of Manifest Destiny, despite the distinguishing approaches of the Hudson River, Luminist, and other American schools of landscape painting in this period. Nevertheless, artists such as Claude Lorrain, who place an emphasis on landscape not typical of their own cultural context, should not be overlooked because it is their example that is emulated by subsequent artists working within the more prolific moments of landscape allegory. Next, there is the aesthetic relationship between realism and abstraction. Abstraction in landscape depiction could be interpreted as Modern based on its increased appearance in the twentieth century, but it isn’t quite so simple. Instead, this study approaches such a vast history by affirming the complex relationship of aesthetic values in which realism and abstraction cooperate to achieve certain ends. Where it may be tempting to ascribe a figurative component to more abstract representations of landscape, it is just as accurate to see the most realistic portrayals as symbolic, depending on their cultural context. For example, banal scenes of rural existence found in seventeenthcentury Dutch painting still offered deeper spiritual meanings to their intended audience. Ultimately, both human/landscape emphasis and the aesthetic approach to the landscape itself determine the particular allegory. These parameters of landscape representation, as they operate similarly in different national contexts, reveal how allegory functions across time up to and including the medium of cinema.

Anthropocentric Landscape in the Middle Ages Subject emphasis, as a manner of cultural affirmation, serves as a palpable through line by which to locate cultural trajectories in Western art across time. During the Middle Ages, visual art performed the basic religious function of propagating Christian belief. Wall paintings, tapestries, woodcarvings, and other forms of artistic decoration adorned the interior of cathedrals, abbeys, and churches in order to inspire incomers toward greater faith and dependence. More important, because most lay folk could not acquire a written Bible, let alone read one, the most significant portions of the New Testament were conveyed through visual means. We take this latter point for granted. If you visit the twelfth- to fifteenth- century

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religious houses of Europe today (Sistine Chapel, Scrovegni Chapel, and others) you will notice the same scenes from Christ’s life depicted: the Annunciation, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Ascension, along with chapters about Christian saints and martyrs such as St. John the Baptist. This emphasis is also apparent in the important museums containing European art of this period. The art of spiritual affirmation in the Middle Ages was not just an interior phenomenon—its greatest potential was realized through its exterior architectural grandeur. As the cathedral evolved from the Romanesque to the Gothic, its designers attempted to dominate the entire vicinity by creating the largest and tallest stone edifices. Initially, this inclination was a form of cultural conquest in which religion and politics came together as a unified force. Proceeding from this notion that religious conversion includes a “reinterpretation” of the landscape itself, John M. Howe argues: The Christianization of Europe meant that even the countryside was spiritually transformed, as the Christian God and His saints displaced the deities and spirits that had inhabited the previously pagan sacred space. Pagan sacred spaces could be transformed into Christian places of worship in the same way as some pagan religious practices could find their way into the liturgy.1

Intending to inspire and augment faith, the cathedral functioned like a billboard, serving as an outdoor beacon of the dominant culture. So it becomes crucial to understand the manipulation of space as both an interior representation of natural landscapes (in paintings, murals, tapestries, and so on), as well as an exterior transformation of actual landscapes through architecture and landscaping that indicated certain cultural presence and dominance. The medium of film, with its ability to portray landscape as it appears to the naked eye, is in a privileged position to operate within an interior and exterior aesthetic mode. In other words, cinema is able to capture a lifelike sense of grandeur as the camera pans across a vast landscape, while simultaneously containing these images within a predetermined frame. During the Middle Ages, the interior mode of aesthetic manipulation was primarily anthropocentric. That is, natural landscapes served only to distinguish between interior and exterior scenes wherein the emphasis was placed on human subjects. In order to underscore the religious nature of the subject matter, these landscape backgrounds were idealized and rarely sought to convey any degree of realism. The medieval landscape shows a characteristic lack of detail in illuminated

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manuscripts, stained glass windows, triptychs, and wall paintings. Of course, there are exceptions, and one worth noting is the work of Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516). Even today, his convoluted triptychs of a terrestrial hell, replete with nightmarish creatures and activities, make an indelible impression on the imagination. Unlike most religious works of the time, where the landscape background merely supports a limited array of personages in a privileged foreground, Bosch paintings such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1504) and The Last Judgment (1504) eschew any differentiation between foreground and background. Here, the vast exterior landscape of commotion becomes the foreground. Such an approach in painting is unusual, certainly for the time and perhaps in general, for the viewer must scrutinize details to ascertain the subject matter or be left with only a sense of chaos. Now, the landscape takes on a new, unfamiliar dimension—it is just as much the focus as the minutiae of characters within it. In other words, they become each other. In this way, Bosch’s work may be treated as a harbinger of landscape allegory to come. Bosch’s fantastical living landscapes anticipate psychological approaches to the depiction of landscape. At the same time, they are still basically anthropocentric. His unorthodox approach to familiar religious subjects called for an expansive landscape, but the landscape itself remains somewhat vague. In other words, his landscapes only become detailed with the convoluted presence of humans, demons, and other assorted creatures. Not dissimilar to typical religious painting of the time, the landscapes here exchange a realistic approach for a more idealized rendering that conforms to the subject matter. Bosch’s influence is felt most palpably in Surrealist painting of the 1930s and afterward. For example, Salvador Dalí’s bleak, nondescript landscapes serve merely to underscore his portrayal of a psychological wasteland. In the foreground of these landscapes, there are subjects out of context: giant, melting pocket watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931) and two anthropomorphic shapes at a table in Sun Table (1936). In the case of Surrealist René Magritte, landscapes approach the realistic only to be undermined by something acutely contrary to nature, such as the hovering castle atop a rock in his Castle of the Pyrenees (1959). This abstract approach to landscape also appears in the proto-Surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). As in The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913), his metaphysical townscapes become symbolic according to their deliberate departure from familiar perspectives. This common approach of Bosch and the Surrealists suggests the first of two apparently distinct cultural trajectories of landscape depiction. The first is a more ostensibly abstract strain

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where the landscape underscores an anthropocentric subject, and yet clearly takes on a psychological dimension in its closer association with that subject. This is achieved at the expense of realism. The second strain of landscape depiction, spanning from seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes to early naturalist photography, strives conversely after a realistic portrayal of landscape for its own sake with less focus on human presence.

Classical Landscape in the Renaissance Within the continued Christian tradition of anthropocentric subject matter in painting, the Renaissance period’s flowering of aesthetic activity encouraged new experimentation with the landscape’s potential to become allegorical. Much of this artistic transformation was the direct result of classical influence. Classical texts were mostly confined to monastic libraries during the Middle Ages, but Christianity eventually discovered useful ways to assimilate classicism without jeopardizing its own intentions. With respect to landscape, the JudeoChristian concept of Eden underwent significant transformation during the Renaissance period. A. Bartlett Giamatti’s seminal research traces the evolution of Eden as an “earthly paradise” or garden of repose, and he locates the root of this concept in the “Golden Age” notion of social harmony. Giamatti specifically cites the classical motif of “fortunate islands” as a concept assimilated by Christian ideology. He argues: The ancient image of an island, east or west, or of an Elysium; with perfect climate, perpetual springtime, a sweet west wind, fecund earth, shade and water; where under Cronos there was communal and personal harmony, bliss and ease—this image declined at times but never died. As Isidore feared, it had indeed infiltrated the Christian consciousness and helped to form the Christian image of the earthly paradise. 2

As in Titian’s The Death of Actaeon (after 1562), such paradise settings assumed an allegorical dimension only within the context of its featured human presence, mythological or otherwise. Having been transformed into an animal, Actaeon is shot down by the huntress Diana and engulfed by the lush surrounding landscape. Painters during the sixteenth century sought to portray an esoteric harmony between human figures and the natural landscape, especially with this assimilation of Ovidian subjects.

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Elysium is only one example of the many forms of “Edenic” continuity from pagan culture to Christian. Despite the variance in depiction, Giamatti sees a commonality in these idyllic settings: The place is remote in space or time (or both), and it involves some ideal of love or harmony. These twin themes, the first “external” and concerned with the place’s geography, the second “internal” and related to its way of life, are found in every account. It is a beautiful place because that is the best symbol for man’s inner need and desire for peace and harmony; it is lost or far away or fortified or, as we shall see, false, because that is the only way to convey man’s daily awareness of the impossibility of attaining this ideal. 3

Giamatti’s argument clarifies that the basic inclination to allegorize the natural landscape in the occident began with this concept of an idealized “earthly paradise.” Giamatti traces this notion of idealism into the Renaissance period, citing the epic writings of Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, and others. Though the concept of the unattainable earthly paradise varies with these authors, Giamatti affirms that the deliberate incorporation of allegorical gardens was intended to convey that “all deception is a matter of self-deception, and that no matter how strenuously we try to disagree, the final illusion is to think life would be at all bearable without illusions.”4 With the rising influence of classicism, the Renaissance fostered the first widespread visions of a moral landscape whose symbolic properties offered cautionary instruction toward a proper Christian existence. Giamatti goes on to consider how the Christian epics of Giangiorgio Trissino (1478–1550), Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), and others assimilated the notion of the “deceptive” garden to reflect Christian morality. This “false” garden offered the potential to symbolize the inner struggle between pleasure and duty. Giamatti traces this motif to Spenser’s “Bower of Bliss” (from The Faerie Queen), which is also a place of “beauty and vicious illusions” intended to reveal humankind’s ultimate corruption.5 Eventually, Giamatti locates the culmination of the earthly paradise tradition in Milton’s Paradise Lost, interpreting the Edenic garden here as yet another “version of the blissful Truth that man has always wanted and by which all other gardens are found wanting.”6 As in Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505–1510), which was painted when the High Renaissance had already commenced in Italy, the allegorical dimension to these landscapes derived from Adam and Eve, or some other clearly stated human presence. As mentioned earlier, the other strain of landscape depiction is a complete digression from anthropocentric subjects—at least

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apparently. Contrary to the anthropocentric approach, realism is sought through an emphasis on the natural landscape itself. Human presence or, rather, personification of human psychological phenomena, is not the focus of such pictures. Instead, the landscape assumes the role of subject, and human presence is demoted to the landscape’s supportive function. This is generally defined in historical terms as “landscape painting,” which in this context, could be referred to as landscape painting proper. Together, these strains reveal a dichotomy between realism and abstraction. This dichotomy inflects any discussion of landscape depiction, but a precise intersection of these approaches becomes crucial to understanding landscape allegory. In other words, the depicted landscape is actually a form of abstraction within the guise of realism—it achieves its allegorical dimension by way of an abstracted realism. This notion is critical in making the conceptual leap from pre-cinematic media to the medium of film.

Landscape as Subject in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting The first prolific digression from the anthropocentric mode, especially in terms of religious subjects, is seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. This national movement away from ecclesiastical emphasis was brought on by a break with Spanish (and Catholic) domination. After the Twelve Years Truce of 1609, seven northern provinces of the 17 constituting the Netherlands achieved their religious and political independence from King Philip II of Spain. As the other provinces continued under Spanish rule, eventually becoming modern Belgium, the new Dutch Republic (now modern Holland) was both democratic and Protestant, and so rejected religious images even in its churches. The clientele for art was no longer the church or aristocratic patronage, but Holland’s thriving merchant class, who preferred scenes of their own everyday experiences: ships and boats, streets and buildings, meat, fruit, and flowers, and of course, the characteristically Dutch countryside. The landscape itself, while receiving heightened attention in the early fifteenth-century miniature illuminations of the Limbourg brothers and the sixteenth-century panoramic settings of Jan Bruegel’s work, was now worthy of consideration as its own entity in this cultural context. Because the Dutch landscape could provide a new sense of national identity, it took on an allegorical dimension that it never had before. There are two strains of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape depiction that overlap in their allegorical intentions. The first is

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naturalistic—it attempts more topographic results in terms of accuracy and detail. While each city among the northern provinces spawned its own style, this emphasis on actual local landscapes is most associated with Haarlem. Gillis van Coninxloo (1544–1607) was perhaps the most instrumental painter in igniting the naturalistic approach to landscape particular to this region. His career can be treated as a microcosm for the larger cultural trajectory since his early landscapes still featured human subjects in the foreground, whereas his later landscapes placed much less emphasis on these figures. Other Dutch landscape painters influenced by Coninxloo included Roelandt Savery (1576–1639), David Vinckboons (1576–circa 1632), and more important, Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634), Hercules Seghers (1589/1590–circa 1635), and Esaias van de Velde (circa 1591–1630). Seghers is perhaps the most anticipatory of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Romanticism and the sublime. His sweeping, desolate landscapes, in which figures and buildings are totally subordinate, establish tension between reality and imagination. The opposite strain to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting pursued a more noticeably idealized vision of the classical Italian landscape and its coveted Mediterranean light, rather than the local landscapes seen in the work of naturalistic painters. This so-called Italianate impulse was a nostalgic longing for a more rustic, Roman way of life. This movement took varying influence from Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Domenichino (1581–1641), and Claude Lorrain (1600–1682). Where naturalistic landscapes are associated with Haarlem’s painters, the Italianate school emerged from the Catholic city of Utrecht, which was home to the prolific Abraham Bloemaert (1564–1651). Bloemaert’s pupils visited Italy in order to appreciate the sunny landscape—an artistic pilgrimage that anticipated England’s eighteenth-century Italian Grand Tours, also intended as ideal experience and edification. The most successful of these Italianate painters was Nicolaes Berchem (1620–1683), whose work eschewed a classical past in favor of Italian ruins, cows, and a more rustic sensibility. At the same time, Jan Both and Cornelius van Poelenburgh’s Landscape with the Judgment of Paris (circa 1645–1650) depicts a classical narrative within a naturalistic setting that resembles the local landscapes of the Haarlem painters. Naturalistic and Italianate strains of Dutch landscape painting affirm religious differences between Calvinism and Catholicism, but it is clear from this example that they can coexist, overlap, and ultimately become indistinguishable. Ultimately, these seemingly opposite aesthetic goals are just as idealistic, and equally capable of establishing allegory.

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Even the most naturalistic of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings were executed indoors, deriving more from the painter’s imagination than would appear. Recent scholars of the Golden Era of Dutch landscape painting support this notion of ambiguity. For example, in his introduction to a collection of essays entitled Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Peter Sutton describes this idealized naturalism: For all its inventory of fact and observation, Dutch landscape was neither a literal speculum naturae (mirror of reality) nor a topographically exact traveler’s journal. The Dutchman’s painterly imagination of a reformed nature, whether by conjuring up lunar remoteness as in Hercules Seghers’ fantasy landscapes or simply by rerouting a river or relocating a church spire as in the background of a country scene by Jan van Goyen or Salomon van Ruysdael. We no longer rest easy with uncomplicated notions of a naïve Dutch realism chronicling the countryside with the literalness of a camera lens.7

Sutton seeks to remedy long-held misconceptions that Dutch landscape painting was purely realistic. While his point pertains more to the naturalistic strain of Dutch landscapes, it applies to the Italianate strain as well. In other words, both the Dutch strain of idealizing a local setting and the opposite strain of naturalizing an ideal subject are forms of aesthetically manipulating the natural landscape. It serves this study better to move beyond any reductive notions of dichotomy between naturalism and idealism in order to address a more complex allegorical dimension to landscape depiction. Like Sutton, Josua Bruyn also pursues a notion of cultural misconceptions about Dutch landscape art, suggesting that we exist in a world replete with “meaningless images” and are unequipped to comprehend the complex allegories that were assembled in these paintings. He encapsulates his argument: The documentation supports the view that the landscape picture contained a message (without which the landscape in the seventeenth century would not have become a landscape picture!) that was accessible not only to a limited group of humanistically educated but also to a broad segment of the population, the faithful of various denominations. This was possible because both the structure and content of this message were determined, as in the sixteenth century, far more by long-standing conceptions than by denominational differences. The structure of this tradition consisted in the metaphorical use of biblical and other texts, its content in the strict moralistic views of a puritanical society.8

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Bruyn characterizes the Renaissance by its established presence of allegory, as opposed to the more literal depiction of biblical content in medieval artwork. Bruyn moves beyond limited notions of either a nationalistic celebration of the indigenous landscape or a popular nostalgia for a classical heritage, suggesting instead that the so-called Golden Era of Dutch landscape painting should be treated as a whole in terms of its culturally inherent allegorical thrust. Obviously, the Italianate strain and its idealized subject matter, whether it offers Roman scenes of everyday life or latter-day ruins, should be taken as a more literal form of allegory than naturalistic paintings depicting a recognizable local landscape. While these opposite strains of Dutch landscape painting are indistinguishable in terms of their basic allegorical intention, their differing subject matter cannot be overlooked, since the cultural trajectory of landscape depiction is so complex. Referring to the naturalistic strain, Sutton remarks that “antithetical to Dutch art, for example, is the nineteenth century’s romantic, anthropomorphized view of nature with its implicit projection of human emotion onto the landscape.”9 Sutton is correct in saying these paintings remained for the most part within the everyday realm of Dutch rural existence, and therefore were not overtly exaggerated in the same way as the landscapes that came into vogue later with the European and American sublime movements. At the same time, if one considers examples such as Seghers’ Landscape (circa 1630), with its artificial grandeur, or the great Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery (circa 1657), with its deliberate sense of melancholy, one cannot ignore the direct influence these Dutch landscapes had on the Romantic movement and beyond.

The Influential Sunscapes of Claude Lorrain Seventeenth-century Dutch naturalistic landscapes anticipated the nineteenth century’s cultural celebration of landscape more than Italianate landscapes. However, the latter tendency seemed to have had a wider cultural currency in Europe since its classicism reflected Enlightenment sensibilities. The Italian landscape vistas of Baroque classical painter Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), in particular, influenced not only the Dutch Italianate movement, but made an indelible impression on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics as well. Characteristic of Claude’s overtly idealized approach are his

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suns, portrayed as an all-pervading glow rather than simply a ball of light. In his study of Claude, Humphrey Wine correlates these sunlit landscapes to increasingly popular associations between nature and divinity. Wine mentions some of Claude’s contemporaries who invested the sun with similar meanings: More specifically relevant to Claude, who was particularly celebrated for his renderings of the rising and setting sun, are the numerous associations made by his contemporaries between the sun and divinity. The poet Saint-Amant (1594–1661) saw the sun as a reflection of the Creator, giving life to the universe and nature, and maintaining its order; Antoine Godeau (1605–1672), Bishop of Grasse and Vence, likened God to the sun which disperses shadows of the soul just as the actual sun disperses the shadows of night (Poésies chrétiennes, 1654); and the Jesuit Jean de Bussieres (1607–1678) wrote that the sinner should love God with the constancy and regularity of the sun’s course (Descriptions poétiques, 1649).10

Wine’s suggestion that these associations were common at the time corroborates the rise of landscape allegory that became so pronounced in nineteenth-century Europe and America. In general, the popularization of associations between nature and divinity, not to mention classical subjects borrowed from Ovid, are the early signs of spiritual transformation ultimately leading to crisis. This partial reversion to pre-Christian myths and ideas (the notion of sun-worship, for example, is reminiscent of Egyptian spiritual practices) presages a more widespread cultural craving for alternative spiritual avenues. Scholars usually associate Claude’s work with a more idealistic mode of landscape painting, especially in terms of its classical subjects. Nevertheless, his striking sense of naturalism—and how it is integrated into his idealism—influenced later painters such as Briton J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and American Thomas Cole (1801–1848) more noticeably. In particular, Claude’s depiction of trees conveys a sense of lush detail along with a natural sense of disharmony in the configuration of their branches and foliage. For example, in his Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646–1657), a small dead tree branch extends outward across the principal branch of a tall tree, interrupting its otherwise consistent sense of upward growth. Also worth noting is the tree’s dominance of the frame, which effectively marginalizes the human subjects in the foreground. Most of Claude’s trees, in fact, share both these qualities of lush, organic detail and a privileged position within the frame. Their collective darker presence set against a yellowish sky makes for an evocative sense of natural

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grandeur and spiritual serenity. In his Landscape with Narcissus and Echo (1644), the overarching trees and undergrowth take up three quarters of the frame while the Ovidian subjects are hardly noticeable. The remaining upper right quarter allows for a distant view of a golden sunlit sky whose juxtaposition with the rest of the painting creates a chiaroscuro effect. The bold contrast of this darker, lush detail in the foreground with the hazy, glowing light in the background compels the viewer to look inward for a deeper spiritual meaning. Here, realistic and idealistic forms of aesthetic depiction are able to coexist and play off of one another in order to convey the painting’s larger allegory.

Neoclassical Landscape as Subject in the Eighteenth Century Like Claude’s notable influence on both Turner and Cole, the Western cultural fascination with classicism and its emphasis on natural surroundings became more apparent across the subsequent century and beyond. Increasingly, the landscape was a topic worthy of consideration for its own sake. England, in particular, produced ample poetic and theoretical discourse on natural landscape and its manipulation toward ideological ends. One important reason for this was the appearance and success of the Grand Tour—an excursion of the sons and daughters of the noble and middle classes to Italy to appreciate classicism in its authentic setting. Expressing the ideal organization of landscape, the British poet Alexander Pope based his influential Epistle to Burlington on the garden creation of architect Richard Boyle (1694–1753), which featured extensive Greco-Roman influence taken from Boyle’s personal experience of the Grand Tour. With the rise of Neoclassicism in England, gardens symbolized a complex system of ideas reminiscent of Ovid’s world. In his chapter on Pope’s garden, Maynard Mack discusses the meanings invested in the garden in this cultural context: We may properly say “what it meant” because, as a number of recent studies have shown, gardens and the pursuits associated with them could at this period “mean” a great deal. They have been associated variously, during the hundred years from James I to George I, with the life of unspotted felicity, with ethical self-mastery, with “hortulan” saintship, with an innocent Epicureanism, and with physico-theological “O-altitudinizing.” Garden imagery and garden situations, in poems

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of all genres by poets of all persuasions—Johnson, Herrick, Herbert, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Vaughan, Marvell, Milton, to name only a few—had been made the vehicle for some of the deepest feelings of the age and some of its shrewdest comments on the human condition.11

Mack’s discussion of English garden aesthetics correlates to Giamatti’s arguments about the Western cultural heritage of the “earthly paradise,” since the concept of an idealized, moral landscape is fundamental to both. Mack argues that Pope’s garden allegory was intended to reflect the ideal order of the city-community. Accordingly, the late eighteenth century can be seen as a transition period between the advent of Giamatti’s optimistic earthly garden and the decline of this tradition in the nineteenth century. In other words, Pope’s association of an earthly paradise with the utopian city experience is an intermediary stage between the pastoral culture of the Renaissance and the dystopian culture of nineteenth-century London or Paris. While the eighteenth century may look like a period of transition, the ideological shift from Neoclassicism to Romanticism is complex, with little agreement on how to explain it. For one, Romanticism was never clearly constituted as one cohesive movement. Rather, it was vast and variegated in its cultural manifestations. Of course, certain seminal eighteenth-century figures can be identified, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in Germany, or William Blake (1757–1827) in Britain, yet their most influential work appears late in the period or early in the subsequent century. This makes a clear centenary designation of “nineteenth century” somewhat problematic. With respect to Romantic ideals of landscape, influential British writers such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), as well as British painters such as John Constable (1776– 1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), are more appropriately associated with the nineteenth century. Even in France, where the idealized classical landscapes of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and others had been the norm, a distinct category for landscape painting appeared only in 1817. Neoclassicism had treated the natural landscape as a serious academic subject or, rather, a science of “proper” interpretation. However, as Romantic values began to flower during this period, the natural landscape purged its heroic figures of Greco-Roman heritage and instead became a locus of individual experience and imagination. Like the naturalist strain of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the landscape could now convey allegory without a featured presence of human subjects.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich

Chapter Two Spiritualized Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century Western painting and literature in the nineteenth century is characterized by a close interaction between natural landscape and narrative. Thomas Weiskel refers to this Romantic sublime movement as “an attempt to revise the meaning of transcendence precisely when the traditional apparatus of sublimation—spiritual, ontological, and (one gathers) psychological and even perceptional—was failing to be exercised or understood.”1 Derived from Longinus’ original account of the sublime, Edmund Burke’s and Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic notions of the sublime and the beautiful motivated the various Romantic strains of landscape depiction to follow. Both Burke (1729–1797) and Kant (1724–1804) establish a dichotomy between these categories to explain how we are affected emotionally by the phenomenological world. Kant then redirects this dichotomy to the moral attributes of humans themselves. Essentially, the sublime denotes natural phenomena that inspire fear, awe, wonder, amazement, and similar emotions of astonishment, whereas the beautiful refers to what should be considered antithetical, namely phenomena that inspire love, comfort, and complacency. Utilizing this distinction, landscapes such as mountains and deserts (and even seascapes) that convey vastness and infinitude are thought to be sublime, while valleys, meadows, gardens, groves, and other Edenic landscapes invoke sensations of the beautiful. Notions of the sublime during both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were an attempt to correlate the processes of the human mind to the surrounding natural universe. In his examination of allegory, Angus Fletcher suggests that a turning point from the rigid scriptural traditions of medieval and Renaissance allegory toward a more modern mode is difficult to pinpoint. Nevertheless, increasingly subjective interpretations of nature, even as far back as Milton, were encouraging a new approach to allegory, one that reflected the inner workings of the mind through natural phenomena. Fletcher discusses this shift to the notion of an infinite universe: This subjectivism constitutes a deliberate bias toward the narrator as hero, which we see already forming in Paradise Lost. The romantic hero

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema is a perceiver, a dreamer, more importantly a responder and observer, a participator. His eye may be fixed to the eyepiece of the telescope, whereby the orb of the moon becomes a whole new world, comparable to the shield of Satan—and then we remember, to the shield of Achilles and to the shield of Aeneas. The hero learns at the same time an unaccustomed ability before his natural environment, from which he seeks to frame new cosmic systems. 2

The basic motif of a seeker pitted against an undiscovered natural universe became the “modern” springboard for landscape allegory in painting and literature of subsequent centuries. Increasingly, the observer or reader strove for a deeper understanding of our interior universe through an enhanced awareness of our exterior universe. Such a process was a form of transcendence for the participant, or at least seemed a more palpable attempt at spiritual realization than had previously been available. Across the nineteenth century, landscape painters attempted to capture spiritualized notions of the sublime. European landscape paintings during this period, especially in the first half of the century, have a tendency to include the presence of a human figure, whereas American landscape paintings of the middle to second half of the century tend to resist human presence. Edward Casey’s notion of space versus place suggests that the first approach allows the landscape to seem like an accessible place, while the latter approach restricts the landscape to a realm of uncharted space.3 In other words, landscape depiction without human presence refers more directly to a realm of imagination and mythmaking, which in the case of American culture was Manifest Destiny. Both approaches, even if they do not necessarily serve to distinguish European and American landscape painting, conveyed a larger Romantic allegory of personal introspection and ultimate transcendence. For Friedrich and others, a depicted observer established the allegorical intention of the painting more clearly, but landscape painters across the nineteenth century relied less on this device because such an observer was sufficiently implied. Invested with so much meaning, the landscape itself was compelling enough to be its own subject. These categorical approaches to the sublime also imply divergent cultural contexts. In the European context, the presence of a human figure in an awe-inspiring landscape connoted humankind’s ability to confront the divinity in nature’s most awe-inspiring manifestations. This was a significant digression from Christian tradition since it suggests that humankind can discover God through the contemplation of nature rather than through systematic penance and prayer.

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The American context was similar, but included notions of expansionism. For Americans, these uncharted landscape spaces were idealized, and yet these depictions were also specifically intended to inspire the common American who had yet to discover a wilderness that was not so imaginary after all. This call for expansionism was itself spiritualized—the contemplation of a sublime, beautiful, or yet-to-be-discovered landscape was a divine justification for expansionism. For Americans, Manifest Destiny was ordained by God. This inclination to spiritualize the surrounding landscape became a zeitgeist, especially in America. Painters and writers were compelled to transform the landscape by moving mountains, redirecting rivers, animating deserts, and so on. Artists rearranged these natural settings no less meticulously than Pope’s eighteenth-century English garden. Even the most authentically rendered wilderness was depicted according to an intention that went beyond authenticity. In this cultural context, landscapes took on human attributes. They were no longer a distant or indifferent spectacle, but living, breathing, thinking entities. Landscape allegory refers precisely to these idealized natural settings, with their ability to reflect our innermost subjective experience of the world. And to interpret landscape allegory was less a privileged intellectual enterprise than a collective cultural impulse, perhaps even a craving. People of this time took a pleasure in accessing remote wildernesses through painting and literature, and even basic depictions of the natural environment incorporated a narrative of transcendence. Eventually, as if anticipating the arrival of new era, this popular investment in landscape allegory faded toward the end of the nineteenth century.

European Sublime Landscape What is categorized as the European sublime is most notable in the works of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), whose attempts to spiritualize various natural landscapes included direct Christian references. For example, his Morning in the Riesengebirge (1811) portrays a vast mountainous landscape with a pronounced crag in the center from which emerges a crucifix, approached by a man and woman in middle-class attire. A bold departure from religious works of earlier periods, this painting’s Christian reference is subordinate to the surrounding landscape. Charles Sala discusses this shift in emphasis: The innovative and provocative feature of Friedrich’s picture resides essentially in the relationship that has been created between the couple

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema and the light-filled landscape, between the path of personal self and that of Christian asceticism. There is a feeling here of being in the presence of two different, artificially juxtaposed spaces, as in a dream: the realm of the ascetic-ascending couple standing on the rocky mass, and the realm of nature in the process of metamorphosis, fading into the distance, where the mountains lose both form and color to be transubstantiated into pure light. Air has become a sacred element, and we move imperceptibly from the tangible and the visible toward formless transcendence.4

Sala’s use of the term “artificial” confirms that these landscape visions are less directed at authenticity than the larger symbolic meanings imposed on them. Specifically, Friedrich engulfs this mountain landscape in mist to underscore the notion of spiritual transcendence, a motif in his work. The human presence within this painting is also common in Friedrich’s painting, serving to contextualize the relationship between God, Man, and Nature. In his Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), on the other hand, Christian references are eschewed. Here, the lone observer with his back to the viewer is sufficient to spiritualize the surrounding landscape that undulates from within the sea of fog before him. This painting is perhaps the clearest pictorial example of landscape allegory, or, more specifically, the process through which humankind and Nature appear to become one thinking entity. Friedrich’s Woman in Front of the Setting Sun (1818) is composed in exactly the same way, except there is a female contemplating a pastoral landscape. This parallel rendition of the same transcendental theme derives from a sense of the beautiful rather than the sublime. Friedrich’s aesthetic approach is both a critique of former religious sensibilities and an inspired project toward a renewed Christian faith, which calls for a deeper personal relationship with one’s natural surroundings. Sala confirms that the fountainhead of Friedrich’s larger message was Immanuel Kant’s disciple Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. His philosophy from the years 1802–1805 maintains that “lying hidden beneath the surface appearance of nature is a spirituality waiting to be revealed by the painter and poet.”5 Sala also points out that Goethe’s Color Theory (1810) echoed this sensibility by suggesting “all natural phenomena obey a general conception which the human mind can penetrate and decipher.”6 Philip Otto Runge (1777–1810), despite his short life, also influenced Friedrich a great deal. His 1809 painting Morning, for example, depicts what he intended as a “spiritual hieroglyph” or code of allegorical devices

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through which the spectator could interpret esoteric meanings in the natural landscape. In Sala’s words: The basic content of Runge’s work is the Romantic idea that divinity is an original force, ever-present and ever-renewed in the Cosmos, and that it is the painter’s task to decipher and reveal it. The work of art is therefore a symbolic expression of the organic unity which constitutes the totality of the divine power, from the smallest plant to the orbits of the planets.7

Predictably, popular tastes did not immediately welcome such a bold new perspective. During his lifetime, Friedrich’s work fomented its share of controversy and only later became more widely appreciated. Nevertheless, an evolution of Western religious sensibility is evident in this shift of emphasis away from spiritual personifications to the spiritualization of the landscape itself. As Enlightenment attitudes proliferated in the nineteenth century, aesthetic attempts at a renewed faith were overshadowed by a crisis of faith in general.

American Sublime Landscape The American sublime, which centered mostly on the Hudson River School, also sought to spiritualize the landscape. Specifically, this movement sought divinity within the uncharted American wilderness. Barbara Novak’s study Nature and Culture, which discusses American landscape and painting in the period of 1825–1875, asserts that, by the time Emerson wrote his Transcendentalist essay Nature in 1836, American religious sensibility, like Friedrich’s, could be characterized by the notion of Trinity: God, Man, and Nature.8 At the same time, the interpretation of a deified landscape varied. Martin Christadler attributes the divergence of interpretation to three seminal texts: Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia (1781), Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), and William Bartram’s Travels (1791). He summarizes their viewpoints: All three authors still worked through the ideological programs of the Enlightenment: physiocratic cultural theory, religious and scientific deism, natural history, the theory of the sublime; yet they distinctly announce the themes of the nineteenth-century landscape: Jefferson and Crèvecœur in the displacement of the wilderness and the reconciliation of nature and culture, of agrarian pastoral and the myth of the

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema garden; Bartram the concern with ritualizing and sacralizing the natural, with the melodrama of power and beauty, and, most important of all, with the flow and the pulsations of natura naturans, with fantasies about caves, orifices and subterranean water-courses— images of the earth as female body.9

Reminiscent of Friedrich’s pair of complementary masculine/sublime and feminine/beautiful landscape allegories, opposing allegories of a primordial wilderness and an Edenic garden evolved in America, eventually establishing a similar dichotomy of landscape depiction. Thomas Cole (1801–1848), Frederic Church (1826–1900), Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), and other painters negotiated this dichotomy in their own inspired ways. Despite their differences in approach, their paintings reflect a common spiritual intention: to reveal the mysteries of the self and divinity through idealized natural landscapes. Just as Friedrich’s landscape paintings conveyed aspects of German national identity, American landscape paintings of this period are a call for westward expansion. The work of Thomas Cole is a notable exception, since his paintings are not always a clear endorsement of expansionism. Unlike the steadfast purpose of his peers, his attitude seems to have been ambivalent. On one hand, in a dramatic landscape painting like The Oxbow (1836), Cole depicts what Albert Boime refers to as the “magisterial gaze” or profit-seeking attitude toward the American wilderness. Boime explains: It is the gaze of command, or commanding view—as it was so often termed in the nineteenth-century literature—that I will call the magisterial gaze, the perspective of the American on the heights searching for new worlds to conquer. It presupposes the spectator as sightseer on the ledge or crest subjugating the boundless reality to a disciplined scrutiny and simultaneously taking a reading from this orientation that is profoundly personal and ideological at the same time. The panoramic prospect becomes a metonymic image—that is, it embodies, like a microcosm.10

In the context of cinema, this approach translates to a deliberate sense of framing and adds a time dimension whereby the viewer is compelled to assume this magisterial gaze and maintain it for an extended duration. Boime also uses this notion of a forced perspective to characterize the difference between the European and American sublime: I use this term to distinguish it from the North European viewpoint, particularly as it is manifested in the work of the German painter Caspar

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David Friedrich. Friedrich’s landscape perspectives are generally organized from the opposing perspective that I call the reverential gaze. Typically, his point of view moves upward from the lower picture plane and culminates on or near a distant mountain peak. Often, the beholder is cued to this ascending trajectory by Ruckenfiguren, one or two figures seen from the rear with whom the beholder must identify. The reverential gaze signified the striving of vision toward a celestial goal in the heavens, starting from a wide, panoramic base. The convergence of the line of vision on the celestial focal point metaphorically implied the yearning for the unity of the German nation under God.11

This distinction between the earlier Northern European “reverential” and the latter-day American “magisterial” gaze affirms a general sense of cultural trajectory. In the latter-day American context, painters exploited the natural landscape beyond Friedrich’s spiritualized depictions to the point of spiritualizing American expansionism itself. Landscape painting celebrated Trinity of Man, God and Nature while also functioning as a political propaganda device. In other words, Americans decoded a message of Manifest Destiny in vistas of the indigenous wilderness itself through the direction of professional landscape interpreters like Cole and his followers. Boime asserts that Cole “contemplated the futurity of the nation from an imaginary height.”12 This is confirmed in Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery,” which says: “Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower— mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness.”13 Such rhapsodizing suggests that Cole shared the ideology of those who commissioned his work. One such patron and influence was James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), whose 1823 novel The Pioneers also epitomizes this sensibility. On the other hand, Cole could appear skeptical of Manifest Destiny. For example, his The Course of Empire cycle (1836) portrays the evolution of a classical civilization in five stages (savage, pastoral, consummate, destructive, and desolate). This series of landscape paintings narrates the rise and fall of the token empire, indicated by Greco-Roman architecture around an ocean inlet surrounded by hills and mountains. The surrounding landscape’s natural beauty is predominant in the first painting, but diminishes as the cycle progresses. In the series’ final painting, the landscape reclaims its former prominence as vines envelop a white marble column in the foreground. In this allegorical manner, Cole conveys a notion of futility in the American impulse to conquer its own wilderness.

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Pointing to Cole’s ambivalence toward American expansionism, Boime reflects: To decry the despoiling of the wilderness was to indict not just the bankers and land developers but his own imaginative projections and landscape paradigm. Hence the losing game played by the Americans: on the one hand, their conditions for success depended on the razing of the wilderness and the cultivation of a splendid civilization, while with each inch of cultivated soil a little piece of their innocence disappeared.14

The Course of Empire cycle, as Gene Edward Veith affirms, was Cole’s way of warning Americans not to emulate the tyrannical example set by Old World nations.15 Still, the majority of his landscape work contributed directly to westward momentum. As in his The Voyage of Life (1840) cycle, Cole’s paintings also reflect nineteenth-century American culture’s fundamental investment in Christianity, which served similarly as a premise for European nations’ earlier forms of imperialism around the globe.

Landscape Sketches of Edgar Allan Poe Many American writers in the nineteenth century also experimented with landscape allegory, among them Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Herman Melville (1819–1891), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and especially Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Like Thomas Cole, Poe demonstrates a tension between embracing and rejecting the notion of Manifest Destiny. On several occasions, Poe’s writing attempts to emulate the painterly aesthetics of the Hudson River School. Poe’s so-called landscape sketches, while mostly overlooked, are significant in their ability to reflect American culture’s popular investment in natural landscape depiction during this time. Even on their surface, these sketches’ devotion to wilderness landscapes in lieu of character development reflects this national sensation. On a deeper level, however, they are Poe’s attempts at the pronounced landscape allegories so characteristic of nineteenth-century American painting. The will to ascribe meaning upon the American wilderness, evident in Cole’s and many other paintings of this period, was a widespread cultural sensation that Poe and his contemporaries could not resist. This aesthetic mania attracted Poe, since, unlike his favored Gothic mode, it prescribed no restrictive traditions or boundaries.

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Poe embraced the freedom to experiment, though indecisiveness in his prose reveals itself when comparing these landscape sketches to his more polished works. This ambivalence becomes apparent in the number of modifications he made to these sketches. For example, “The Domain of Arnheim” (1850) was originally entitled “The Landscape Garden,” (1842) and was an essay on gardening aesthetics. Later, Poe took the main body of this piece, tightened the prose, and added an exemplary description of the ideally manipulated landscape. Another sketch, “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” (1844) was later renamed “The Elk” (1844), apparently to change the emphasis and implication of the piece. The clearest case of experimentation is Poe’s The Journal of Julius Rodman (1839–1840). This would-be narrative of a pioneer’s exploration through the Rocky Mountains is Poe’s most ambitious treatment of landscape, and its completion was apparently beyond his power or interest, since it was left unfinished. As it stands, Julius Rodman reveals a struggle to reconcile the divergent myths of the primordial wilderness and the Edenic garden. Ultimately, such an attempt is more successful in Poe’s sketches, where the narrators or landscape artists, unlike the frontiersman narrator of Rodman, reflect Poe’s ambiguous disposition—a departure from Cooper’s decidedly expansionist agenda. Poe’s participation in American frontier allegory is also evident in direct references to influential landscape painters of the past, as well as the work of his contemporaries. Just as Claude Lorrain’s seventeenth-century landscapes influenced nineteenth-century American painters like Cole, the narrator in Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim” actually refers to Claude, specifically his visual progressions into a sublime vortex of sunlight. The river progression of Poe’s narrative subsequently imitates and possibly even parodies Claude’s sunscapes, as the narrator heads into a similar “vortex” of sunlight. This climactic scene also includes a hovering castle of “semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture,” whose inspiration appears to be the Youth painting from Cole’s The Voyage of Life cycle. In a similar way, recurrent mirror-reflections of landscape in Poe’s sketches emulate American Luminist paintings of the same period. Even the most realistic of these, “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” plays with a Romantic portrayal of the wilderness. Here, the narrator’s dream vision of a “repining” elk dissipates with the arrival of humankind, domesticity, and utilitarianism. Having similar intentions, Poe and so many American painters were creating dreamscapes whose similar devices of landscape allegory obfuscated rather than clarified meaning. Inevitably, a sense

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of irony encroaches upon these idealized visions of landscape, akin to Giamatti’s notion of an inherent falsehood in medieval depictions of an earthly paradise or Elysium. Martin Christadler describes the rise of this aesthetic conflict in American painting: Increasingly, however, the language of symbolization became more ambiguous; we noticed the semantic violence on which both literary and visual artists came to rely in order to clarify their meanings: moral allegory in Thomas Cole, Christian emblematics in Frederick Church and, in much attenuated form, in Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade. The pressure of low-mimetic Realism undermined ChristianIdealistic semantics in favor of a code of materialistic Naturalism (which would fully emerge in Impressionism and Winslow Homer) or in favor of a code of the formalist aesthetic manifesting itself in Turner’s non-figurative use of color or in the Luminists’ formal constructivism. In Luminism, Romantic America kept a precarious balance between Idealism and Naturalism, trying to maintain the myth of a spiritually inhabited universe, but already deeply enmeshed in the loss of traditional religious meanings connected with the process of modernism.16

Poe also attempts this “precarious balance” in his landscape sketches by modifying the natural universe with human attributes. Poe’s “Arnheim” rationalizes this endeavor through Ellison: Mr. Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma—I mean the fact (which no one but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce.17

While there may be a hint of sarcasm in Poe’s reference to the “ignorant,” it is unlikely that he intended these sketches, so steeped in philosophical speculation, only as a hoax. Otherwise, his consummate philosophical treatise “Eureka” (1848) must also be tongue-in-cheek. Suspicious of the sketches, Kent Ljungquist responds to them by concluding: The result of this venture, evinced by the uncertain attempts to forge a bond with the spirit of the place in these tales, reflects the questionable genius of these narrators as much as the uncongeniality of the settings described. Poe remained an informed skeptic about the century’s crusade to localize theme and plot in America, but his aesthetic education in the sublime, the picturesque, and the beautiful attuned him to the challenge of this cultural project.18

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Ljungquist’s last statement affirms Poe’s conflicted disposition. In other words, Poe was a skeptic, but also felt “attuned” to American frontier mythmaking. Because his landscape sketches reflect pessimism and zealous philosophical engagement at different points, Poe was probably experimenting here, and so the results were unpredictable. Consequently, it becomes clear why Poe made alterations, additions, and deletions, and eventually abandoned this “cultural project” after discovering its limitations. The periodization of centuries is arbitrary, and so instead of assuming the twentieth century ushered in a new era of spiritual disillusionment, it is more accurate to note an ongoing progression toward modern and postmodern sensibility that was already well under way. Because Cole’s painting and Poe’s landscape sketches both affirm and question the ability to allegorize landscape, these ambivalent works anticipate the cultural pessimism to come. Just as landscape allegory emerged from a rising defiance toward religious tradition, an increasingly apparent mockery of landscape aesthetics indicated a triumph of this pessimism toward spirituality. In other words, landscape allegory eventually became, as in Cole and Poe’s works, a celebration of futility. Depictions of wilderness appear less Edenic and more malevolent. For example, the turn-of-the-century short story “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) and the novel The Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) depict the wilderness as a site of struggle for the characters attempting to penetrate it. Where it once encouraged alternatives for spiritual transcendence or advocated expansionism, the landscape assumed the more defiant role of antagonist in a new allegory of occidental conceit. As it turns out, this cultural shift in the intention of landscape allegory was concurrent with the advent of cinema and its own attempts to manipulate the meaning of our natural surroundings.

South Dome from Glacier Point, California (1875) by William H. Jackson

Chapter Three Advent of Filming Landscape Allegory The pre-cinematic heritage of landscape allegory in painting and literature establishes how we interpret landscape from a cultural perspective. In other words, individuals find difficulty in observing a misty mountain, secluded beach, or dense forest outside of their social context. In Nietzsche’s words: Man really mirrors himself in things, that which give him back his own reflection he considers beautiful: the judgment “beautiful” is his conceit of his species . . . For a tiny suspicion whispers into the skeptic’s ear: is the world actually made beautiful because man finds it so? Man has humanized the world: that is all.1

From this aesthetic heritage of depicting landscape, we have learned to frame our natural surroundings into a locus of human ideas, values, and emotions. Just as an American citizen of the nineteenth century perceived the wilderness as a component of national identity and a call for expansionism, the act of simply looking at a particular landscape manipulates it into a spiritual phenomenon. The arrival of camera technology promised to reflect our experience of landscape beyond the traditional limitations of aesthetic practice. Photography (and, subsequently, cinematography) offered a semblance of authenticity—the landscape as it appears to the naked eye. But the limited scope of the camera frame still restricted landscape to the realm of artistic deliberation. Even with the best intentions of documentary filmmaking, the choice of the camera’s subject matter is a manifestation of cultural influence. The framed landscape, even when devoid of human presence, is no less a socially constructed idea than in pre-photographic media. In correlating the aesthetic heritage of landscape depiction with the camera’s new promise of authenticity, one could emphasize realistic strains of landscape depiction in Western art and literature, proceeding

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accordingly from the naturalistic school of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting and delineating a cultural trajectory of authentic landscape portrayal through subsequent periods. As it turns out, however, the opposite strain—idealizing the landscape as something beyond what it appears—is not so antithetical to the perspective of the camera eye. Again, distinctions between realism and abstraction should be minimized when they obscure the inherent, overriding process of manipulation at work here. The naturalistic and Italianate schools of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting shared techniques for achieving both authenticity and idealization. Film is yet another artistic medium in which these seemingly opposite goals cooperate. The difference is the camera’s privilege (or limitation, depending on the filmmaker’s intentions) of proceeding from a static degree of realism. Unlike painting or writing, the apparatus itself records visual phenomena without the direct intervention of the artist. In this way, the camera is automatic. Filming the natural landscape to reflect human spiritual values nonetheless derives from a sophisticated interplay of realism and abstraction inherited from our aesthetic past.

Early Wilderness Photography Nineteenth-century American westward expansionism established a powerful link between the painting and photographing of natural landscapes. The popular tradition of encapsulating the yet-to-be discovered American wilderness within a single frame continued well after the early example of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School. The advent of photography toward the turn of the nineteenth century produced popular landscape photographers such as Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840–1882), William H. Jackson (1843–1942), and Carleton Watkins (1829–1916). The most significant of these was Ansel Adams (1902–1984), whose artistic idealization was no less profound than the American painters before him. By this time, however, such latter-day expansionists had to travel much farther west to capture their glimpses of an uncharted wilderness. Instead of the Adirondacks, Catskills, or Hudson River itself, photographers sought out locations such as Yosemite Valley and the Rocky Mountains. All the same, the legacies of Romanticism and the American myth of Manifest Destiny are evident in the almost painterly style of these black-and-white images. Albert Boime discusses this cultural

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continuity: “Indeed, the photographers often climbed out on the highest vantage points to take shots of the valley below in emulation of the magisterial gaze they had experienced in the work of the landscapists.”2 With this in mind, it is easy to see direct cultural links between Albert Bierstadt’s 1867 painting Domes of the Yosemite, Jackson’s 1875 photograph South Dome from Glacier Point, California, and Adams’ 1944 photograph Clearing Winter Storm. Despite their different mediums, both painted and photographed depictions of the same landscape attempt to conjure the “magisterial gaze,” and so reflect a continuing cultural sensibility. While painting would seem to be the more idealized medium to present an impression of Yosemite Valley, these photographs also attempt to capture their artists’ impressions of the area. Accordingly, both Jackson and Adams made similar choices about framing and angle, as well as lighting, weather, and other variables. Photographing landscape for its own sake would not have been so desirable if not for the rich heritage of landscape allegory in painting. Romantic landscape painting, culminating in nineteenth-century notions of the sublime, established a language of popularized meanings conferred upon the natural universe. Because landscape allegory had reached such an advanced state, it was not as difficult to transfer this language of natural phenomena to the medium of photography. The most dramatic landscapes, such as Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, were especially effective subjects for perpetuating the tradition of landscape painting. These grand vistas inspired the same feelings of American nationalism as earlier wildernesses had in the east. The resulting black-and-white images of these vistas became just as effective at preserving the American frontier myth. The simplified contrast of lighter and darker shades became a new form of idealism, now disguised as realism. Just like paintings, these framed landscapes were intended as allegories. For example, in Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm, the hard contrasts between the misty gray-and-white clouds against the black, snow-laden crags invoke emotions of awe and wonderment, and so, like a typical Hudson River School painting, this photograph reinforced popular American celebration of frontier myths. Ultimately, even the most sober color photograph of a natural landscape, intended to capture a simple notion of beauty or grandeur, is informed by the same culturally inflected desire for deeper meanings. Adams’ photography in the twentieth century suggests not only a continuation of the former century’s expansionist attitude toward

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wilderness, but also the increasing impact of modernization on American culture. Jonathan Spaulding’s biography of Adams describes a nostalgic association with the landscape: Americans in the twentieth century found themselves confronted by a new society and economy dominated by powerful corporations, impersonal cities, and warring factions of capital and labor, rich and poor. An urbanized industrial economy with its standardization and regulation of life and work seemed to offer little room for independence and self-motivation that had supposedly characterized American culture through the nineteenth century. As a replacement for lost freedoms, there arose what some historians have called a “therapeutic” orientation, in which individuals sought self-fulfillment through physical challenge and personal growth. With the continent thoroughly conquered, Americans increasingly viewed the wilderness not as an obstacle to be overcome but as a recreational and spiritual resource that allowed them to keep the “frontier” alive within themselves. 3

While the message of popular landscape depiction in American culture changed from expansionism to conservationism, the basic allegorical function of these latter-day photographic images remained. In other words, the spiritual or Romantic association with the American frontier did not dissipate. Instead, it shifted from an anticipatory sense of Manifest Destiny to a nostalgic sense of national cultural heritage. In the same way that Boime sees a continuation of the “magisterial gaze” in early landscape photography, Spaulding’s discussion of the naturalist John Muir’s influence on Adams affirms the perseverance of landscape allegory: Wilderness was to Muir, as was to Adams, a realm of liberation. Yet Muir, like Adams, had his Protestantism too well ingrained not to see the wilderness experience as something beyond immediate gratification. It became the great source of spiritual insight, its sermons in stone making the time spent among the mountains not sinful idleness but a pilgrimage to the font of wisdom.4

The camera apparatus itself attests to the rise in modernization, and yet its popularized application toward the natural landscape pursued the opposite—the possibility for a natural spiritual sanctuary within the industrialized urban sprawl. In this way, at least, photography perpetuated the legacy of landscape painting.

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Early Abstract Landscape Photography However automatic, the camera itself could also be manipulated to achieve more experimental or idealized results in depicting natural landscapes. Initially, the photographic impulse toward abstraction derived from Impressionist efforts to convey objective sensory experience on canvas. Like Claude Monet’s experiments with the diffusion of clarity in his pictorial “impressions” of the French countryside, the pinhole camera was used to diffuse an otherwise clear or focused image into a field of tonal values. For example, George Davison’s 1890 pinhole photograph The Onion Field forfeits realism in favor of a hazy sheen, similar in spirit to the emotional brushstrokes of Impressionist paintings. The depicted rural landscape, with its unassuming cluster of farm buildings in the midground, is also related to Naturalism and the French painters of the Barbizon School: JeanBaptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Jean-François Millet (1814– 1875), and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884). Beyond its emphasis on rural subjects, this movement was influential in its attempt to achieve a selective focus with special lenses so that only the main point of interest is clear and the rest of the image is slightly blurred. This effect was intended to emulate the imperfections of the naked eye. For example, Peter H. Emerson’s 1886 photograph Gathering WaterLilies depicts a boat-rowing couple in the foreground with sharp clarity while the field of lilies and landscape beyond are blurry. These manipulations of the camera apparatus were an attempt at personal expression beyond the mechanical perspective of photography. Photographers at the turn of the nineteenth century sought to idealize the natural landscape also under the influence of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement, which included such French painters as Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) and Odilon Redon (1840– 1916). Symbolism purported to “objectivize” the subjective or, in other words, externalize the ideal. Its goal appears to have been antithetical to the Impressionist notion of “subjectivizing” the objective or, rather, portraying the individual’s impression of nature. Moving beyond the depiction of sensory perceptions, the Symbolists strove to achieve bona fide spiritual presence in their paintings. For example, Moreau’s Galatea (1880) portrays Greek mythological subjects with an expressive sense of form and color to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Similarly, in The Cyclops (circa 1914), Redon sought to associate his fantastical subjects with the inner psyche through the use of brightly colored landscape settings. Rather than seeking to capture

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the emotional experience of natural environs, these painters offered their own idealized landscapes of the mind. Dalí and other Surrealists embraced a similar purpose in later years. Photographers seeking this idealization adopted the gumbichromate process, which allowed maximum control of the image’s varying tonalities. According to Symbolist theory, the aesthetic of Tonalism expressed the entire range of human emotions through contrasting colors. This abstract complexity of tonal contrast is evident in gum-bichromate pictures such as Robert Demachy’s Landscape (circa 1904) or Edward Steichen’s The Pond (1898). Steichen’s treatment of a small body of water was thematic in his work, just as it was for Symbolist painters in works like Fernand Khnopff’s The Pool at Menil (1890) or Alphonse Osbert’s Song of the Night (1896). Because these painter-photographers sought to convey intangible phenomena and spiritual manifestations in the natural world of real objects, the pool or pond became for them a psychic boundary between dreams and reality. These bodies of water, portrayed as both isolated and reflective, were already common in the painting of the nineteenth-century American Luminists as well as the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The novel disparity between the camera’s ability to capture clear, authentic perspectives of landscape and these various technical methods of abstraction (the pinhole camera, lens aberrations, the gum-bichromate process) unmasks the cultural desire to allegorize the landscape in ways not seen prior to the advent of photography.

Early Cinematic Depiction of Landscape From the onset of its development, the movie camera was also pointed at natural landscape in ways that complicate the ideological differentiation between realism and abstraction. As noted, photographers who were often painters themselves embraced the rising trend toward either establishing a spiritual relationship between humankind and natural environs or simply depicting inner psychological states by way of the landscape itself. Proceeding from the Impressionist, Naturalist, and Symbolist movements, such photographers achieved these ends using wilderness subjects, evocative weather conditions, and many other ways to manipulate the technical process. Inevitably, early cinema subsumed this ongoing cultural desire for landscape allegory contained within a succinct glimpse. At the same time, the movie camera pursued its own evolution of narrative tendency, capturing a more

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dynamic relationship between human presence and the natural landscape. Cinema added the dimensions of time and movement, offering an even more authentic possibility to see landscape as a reflection of mental processes. Most significantly, the natural landscape could now emulate the transformative nature of the inner psyche. French filmmakers of the 1920s portrayed this transformative aspect of the mind through their specific treatment of natural settings. Because these filmmakers attempted to depict their characters’ inner subjective states in literal ways, their style has been characterized as French Impressionism (at least by cinema scholar David Bordwell). This “impressionist” agenda was only a component of the larger purpose of telling a story that would entertain an audience. In this context, the use of natural landscapes was only one among many experiments attempting to portray psychological activity. For example, films such as Jean Epstein’s Couer fidèle (1923) superimpose images of characters’ thoughts and emotions over the character’s face or head so the audience could see what the character is thinking at a pivotal narrative moment. Outdoor location shooting allowed these filmmakers to manipulate natural settings toward similar ends. Jean Epstein’s avant-garde narrative La chute de la maison Usher (1928) adapts Poe’s Gothic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) by using a combination of stylized interior sets and specific outdoor locations. While the inside of Usher’s castle manor borrows from German Expressionist décor, reminiscent of Caligari’s contorted mise-en-scène, the outer grounds appear as in the tale, especially with the nearby wooded lake, or “tarn,” as Poe calls it. Instead of showing anyone around this body of water, Epstein’s film interpolates single shots of its gloomy surface and surrounding trees within the complex montage of the film’s progression. Poe’s tarns invariably behave as windows toward inner dream worlds. With his narrative as a foundation, the grainy quality of these landscape stills is an attempt at the same psychological connotation as the Symbolist-inspired photographs of Steichen or Osbert. Beyond its ability to mimic Symbolist landscape painting or photography, the movie camera’s temporal dimension provided previously undiscovered opportunity for landscape allegory. Positioned as if it were a human onlooker, the movie camera breathed life into the natural landscape with its seemingly unrestricted ability to scan or probe a landscape. Early experimental filmmakers used a stylized approach in which the frame’s narrower focus moves methodically across a particular landscape. This stylization is seen in Epstein’s film during the outdoor funeral procession sequence, which is a

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significant deviation from Poe’s tale. As the camera follows the characters, the filmmaker inserts a panning shot of the surrounding dead trees. The camera slowly follows the course of the dead tree’s trunk upward as it becomes a series of spiny, twisted branches. Here, the association between the funeral procession and a decaying landscape is more direct than that of a misty lake with subconscious realms. In this manner, the film takes full advantage of the camera’s ability to allegorize the landscape in ways Poe’s writing could not. The filmmaker’s decision to move the camera eye along the tree’s course in space—rather than simply to frame its entirety from a distance— reflects the emergence of landscape allegory in cinema. Such camera movement alone, however, is not necessarily all that is required. Rather, it is the complex relationship of character juxtaposition, editing, camera effects, and the film’s overall intention that establishes landscape allegory. Like seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, early cinematic landscape allegory incorporates both realistic and abstract aesthetic values deriving from seemingly separate naturalistic and idealistic strains. Where the early avant-garde or French Impressionist approach with the lake and dead tree in Epstein’s film is closer to a form of abstraction, other filmmakers of the time strove for a documentary semblance of realism. The relationship between realism and abstraction here parallels that of Adams’ and his predecessors’ naturalistic photography to the more abstract Symbolist approach, and is ultimately an ideological exchange between these divergent aesthetic values. That is, Adams’ photography of Yosemite Valley becomes his own subjective vision only after the authenticity of the landscape is established through the natural clarity and scope of his chosen perspectives. In observing such a photograph, we first interpret the landscape as if it were actually before us, and then we consider Adams’ choices of framing, light, and other variables only afterward. Opposite to Adams’ approach, however, Symbolist photographers and subsequent French Impressionist filmmakers set out to objectivize inner subjective states themselves through their overt manipulation of natural settings. In other words, while one approach embraces the landscape as it appears and then extracts deeper meanings from it, the other pursues human phenomena from the outset by making adjustments to the natural landscape accordingly. At the same time, both attempt to capture the experience of landscape according to a larger cultural vision, and both incorporate forms and degrees of realism and abstraction to achieve this end.

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The naturalistic or documentary strain of early cinema establishes landscape allegory through its exploitation of remote wildernesses and their native inhabitants. Just as the Hudson River School painters and early photographers used the American wilderness to convey notions of grandeur and spiritual destiny to their audience, early filmmakers pursued similar ends in more remote regions and undiscovered territories. For example, when Robert Flaherty brought a movie camera to the desolate Hudson Bay region in 1920 to shoot his film Nanook of the North (1922), he had a strong vision of what American audiences would respond to. Flaherty’s documentary impulse was less a desire to capture reality than a sense of exoticism with this remote and brutal environment—and the Eskimo culture that dared inhabit it. To this end, Flaherty contrived the entire scenario to look as primitive as possible. Although Nanook and his family were accustomed to modern amenities, Flaherty took great steps to depict them in a more idealized light. Instead of witnessing their communal lifestyle, the viewer observes this Eskimo and his family attempting to survive alone upon a vast, frozen landscape. Detained at one point by their riotous sled dogs and facing certain death, they are barely able to take refuge in an abandoned igloo before nightfall. This dramatic vision of humans struggling against an inhospitable wilderness had a strong impact on audiences of the time and became especially thematic in films a half century later. Like an Ansel Adams photograph, Flaherty’s portrayal of the wilderness deemphasizes any sense of aesthetic manipulation. At the same time, his films exploit the landscape’s potential to convey deeper meanings. In other words, his choice of landscape subject alone already carries enough cultural currency to play down the many other choices necessary to depict the wilderness and its indigenous folk in the most ideal manner. This is evident in Flaherty’s framing. In the first sequence, the camera captures a bleak, icy seascape with a hazy landmass beyond. No signs of life are apparent, and the only movement is that of the sea around the wayfaring vessel. In this way, the film positions the landscape as an independent subject since we do not meet the character of Nanook until later. When Nanook and his family venture out in search of food across the frozen terrain in their sled, their figures are kept miniscule within the frame to romanticize the cruel vastness of their environment. A corollary to this choice of landscape emphasis is Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809) in which the monk appears as a tiny figure standing on a coastline before a vast, stormy sky. Nature’s overwhelming power over humankind is also the subject of Turner’s painting Snow

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Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Ultimately, Flaherty’s exploitation of this hostile environment and its indigenous peoples embraces a Romantic sense of futility, which is prefaced by a disclosure of Nanook’s eventual starvation. As in previous years, audiences of this time responded to this allegory of mankind versus nature in which the wilderness prevails in the end. Implicit here is an overwhelming divine presence to which humans, both as individuals and en masse, must finally succumb. In its early stages, documentary filmmaking reflected preexisting ideological associations with the natural universe. The objective impulse to show real people and events is deceptive since many film projects were motivated by preconceived ideas about unfamiliar regions and their indigenous folk. With Nanook’s commercial success, Flaherty made Moana (1926), a similarly contrived depiction of Samoa and its inhabitants. Although this film did not meet with similar success, other idealized documentaries such as Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian Cooper’s Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) were popular with audiences of the time. Like Flaherty’s films, these latter filmmakers’ subsequent documentary Chang (1928), about a peasant family in the Siamese jungle, was also staged. Increasingly, this popular investment in exotic landscapes called for an accompanying fictional narrative. Two immensely successful films of this sort followed: in 1933, Schoedsack and Cooper released their jungle-fantasy epic King Kong, and in 1937, exoticized landscape fiction realized its fullest potential with the portrayal of the solipsistic Himalayan paradise “Shangri-La” in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. Landscape allegory in early twentieth-century filmmaking, whether in an abstract Impressionist mode or a naturalistic documentary mode, demonstrates a complex interaction between the era’s avant-garde practices and its popular narrative cinema. In French narrative cinema of the 1920s, it was acceptable to incorporate forms of visual experimentation established by Modernist painters and photographers. Jean Epstein’s experiments with landscape, for example, derived from his concept of “photogenie,” or the camera’s privileged ability to use visual rhythms in order to capture the emotional essence of its subjects, which included natural landscapes. At the same time, the success of Flaherty’s location shooting in remote areas of Alaska and Canada led to the popularization of exotic landscape narratives in the 1930s. As early twentieth-century mainstream cinemas subsumed these modes of landscape allegory,

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their ability to convey deeper meanings diminished. Audiences began to take symbolic dimension of landscape for granted. Eventually, Epstein declared Impressionist camera techniques to be clichéd, and Flaherty abandoned his interest in exotic landscapes for other documentary projects.

The “falling titan” sequence in Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man: Part 1 (1962)

Chapter Four Depiction of Landscape in Avant-Garde Films 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. In his 1970 study of the American avant-garde, P. Adams Sitney says, “The precise relationship of the avant-garde to American commercial film is one of radical otherness. They operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other.”1 Such a general claim bears closer examination. Sitney was writing about 1940s and ’50s avant-garde filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, but at the time of his study, mainstream film directors like Michelangelo Antonioni had already been experimenting with the treatment of space for some years. These were mostly European directors emerging from a similar cultural upheaval in their own national contexts. In Antonioni’s case, for example, postwar Italy’s massive urban expansion inspired his bleak allegories of modern existence. Subsequently, a number of American directors during the 1970s (e.g., Sam Peckinpah, Bob Rafelson, William Friedkin, and even John Huston) used unorthodox approaches to natural setting in their Hollywood productions. 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.

Brakhage’s Dog Star Man The incorporation of natural setting in Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde film opus Dog Star Man, made between 1961 and 1966, informs how landscape allegory links avant-garde and mainstream practices. Much of this film is a complex exploration of abstract imagery and superimposition, yet in an important segment, Brakhage himself appears,

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attempting to climb up a snowy embankment in the mountains, presumably near his isolated Colorado home. This footage is repeated several times consecutively, as if to suggest a larger meaning beyond simply the depiction of a man in the wilderness. Through its repetition, this sequence emphasizes the subject’s sense of struggle against the landscape itself. In his study of Brakhage’s work, R. Bruce Elder associates this particular image with Romanticism: This was the theme of countless Romantic paintings by German Romantic followers of Caspar David Friedrich. The Romantic character of the work is evident, too, in the shots that animate the mountainside, by shooting it either with a moving camera or with an anamorphic lens that Brakhage twisted while filming; such shots make it seem that a life force animates the mountain. 2

In other words, Brakhage establishes landscape allegory through a manipulated juxtaposition of human subject and landscape—as did many mainstream filmmakers of this period. Like Elder, Sitney interprets this sequence as “man’s struggle with nature” within the traditional rhetoric of Romanticism. More specifically, he sees it as a “struggle with the loss of the primal vision of childhood” and “a subsequent attempt to reconcile that loss with imagination in a new cosmological and epistemological epic.”3 Sitney asserts that since the subject slips and falls repeatedly down the hill, this is only a part of the larger metamorphosis in what he calls “the visual evocation of a fallen titan bearing the cosmic name of the Dog Star Man.”4 Brakhage himself explains that this film was an attempt to depict the history of man as a single day by way of “image material (e.g. trees become architecture for the whole history of religious monuments or violence becomes the development of war).”5 This larger allegory of Western civilization’s perpetual “fall” from grace is also the subject of Thomas Cole’s painting The Course of Empire (1836), which manipulates the natural landscape in order to convey a notion of culture’s cyclical destiny. Brakhage’s allegorical struggle with nature contains both an optimistic strain of Romanticism as well as seeds of a divergent strain toward defeatism—what both Andreas Huyssen and Richard Murphy refer to as the “historical” avant-garde. While Brakhage’s larger Dog Star Man project strives for an imaginative reawakening, the snowy landscape sequence on its own is a statement of futility. About this sequence, Sitney argues, “Although he is still defeated, the Dog Star Man is less a victim of nature than of his own or the filmmaker’s

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imagination.”6 Similarly, Elder asserts: But Romanticism isn’t all about enthusiasm; typically, there is as much skepticism in a Romantic work as there is enthusiasm. Romantic artists, even while celebrating the creative process of life and the imagination’s participation in this great élan vital, acknowledge too that the myths they construct will also pass away, and new myths, to be forged by artists to come will be required. Dog Star Man expounds its myth of cosmogenesis with an irony of a sort typical of Romantic works. It depicts the struggle as a desperate battle of a potent individual, driven by the life force, to thwart all that would deny him the energies of his being, but it also depicts the efforts as rather comic. The comic dimension emerges when Brakhage makes evident that the arduous ascent of the steep mountain slope is a trick, created by tilting the camera to increase the grade of the incline; and it expands as he includes his dog who delightfully frolics in the snow, appearing for all the world as if he was enjoying the best romp he had had in some time, though his master repeatedly stumbles and falls . . . Dog Star Man thus becomes a work that shows itself as being simultaneously created and destroyed.7

This manipulation of camera perspective establishes a deeper symbolism to the landscape here, but at the same time, the comic artificiality of this sequence functions within a larger allegory of futility. Because this film establishes its content as conceptual rather than real, it behaves more like a poem than a documentary or fictional narrative. In this particular segment, Brakhage’s cinematic “poem” both affirms and critiques itself as a characteristically Western cultural practice. As a critique, Dog Star Man’s “fallen titan” sequence renounces Romantic traditions of privileging the ego, precluding intimate contact with the natural world. As a filmmaker, Brakhage proceeded from Charles Olson’s theory of “Objectism” that eschews former attempts to structure reality according to a logical discourse. As an evolved mode of Romanticism, Brakhage’s films strove for what David James refers to as an “untutored vision” of reality. James describes Brakhage’s aesthetic: Rejection of the intending role of the humanist ego, and of ideas that refer to reality rather than embody it, is supposed to allow the poet to go beyond the imagination to unmediated perception, to that place where consciousness and nature are in direct contact.8

In other words, the “poet” filmmaker Brakhage avoids any tacit references to an objective reality and remains within an abstract visual realm achieved through various techniques of camera manipulation. When Dog Star Man returns briefly to tangible imagery in the “fallen

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titan” sequence, the character’s struggle against the landscape becomes a pointed comment on the futility of pitting human subjects against the natural universe in such an obvious manner. This particular segment “refers” to a connection between consciousness and nature, whereas most of this film’s imagery strives for an “embodiment” of it.

Confluence of Avant-Garde and Mainstream Cinema The continuity of Romantic ideals in avant-garde cinema can also be applied to more mainstream films appearing in the same period as Brakhage’s work. Sitney points out that even “the mythic inwardness” of Maya Deren’s early films set an example for the “Romanticist” avant-garde filmmakers to follow.9 Brakhage’s landscape allegory of the “fallen titan” appears in narrative films of the same period seeking to convey a similar notion of futility. These films incorporate their own “Dog Star” protagonists in order to critique Western cultural values—especially the conceits of Romanticism. By exploring the intentions of avant-garde filmmakers, Sitney, Elder, and James ultimately account for avant-garde practices within mainstream cinema. These scholars also locate Romanticism and other cultural legacies that informed such intentions in the first place. Beyond avant-garde and mainstream distinctions is a much larger middle ground of cinema that bridges the gap between experimental films like Deren’s or Brakhage’s and major Hollywood productions. On one hand, this middle ground of landscape-oriented cinema can be characterized by the small budget restrictions and experimental impulses associated with avant-garde practice. At the same time, such films abide by narrative conventions of mainstream feature-length format. For example, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film El Topo (1970), appearing at the same time as Sitney’s study of avant-garde films, incorporates both avant-garde and mainstream influences ranging from the French Surrealists to the Hollywood western. Outside any studio influence, Jodorowsky produced this film for about $300,000 and used mostly nonprofessional actors. Moreover, El Topo exploits a Mexican desert landscape to depict the inner spiritual struggle of the filmmaker himself, similar to Brakhage’s use of a snowy precipice in his “fallen titan” sequence. Like Brakhage, Jodorowsky claimed that the purpose of making this film was “to travel into the deepest areas of my being in order to reach enlightenment.”10 At the same time, this film adopts the “man with no name” persona and other trappings of popular westerns from this period. In these respects, El

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Topo becomes an amalgamation of avant-garde and mainstream film practices. Another sub-mainstream feature film of the time, Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1967), also appropriates the western genre in order to explore existential themes amidst a barren Utah landscape. In this film, the protagonist ultimately confronts his murderous twin brother—his doppelgänger—while struggling after him up a precipitous desert crag. These and other 1960s feature-length narrative films that incorporate the “Dog Star Man” landscape allegory of futility anticipate big-budget Hollywood productions such as Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977). These and similar landscape allegories are considered later in this study.

Enrico’s La rivière du hibou An excellent example of this middle ground of landscape-oriented cinema is Robert Enrico’s La rivière du hibou (1962). This film vacillates between avant-garde practices and mainstream narrative conventions in order to “narrativize” its wilderness settings. As in Dog Star Man, this film’s manipulation of camera perspective within the larger context of character and landscape juxtaposition establishes its deeper symbolic import. La rivière du hibou garnered several international awards, including the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962, the Grand Prize from the British Film Institute in 1963, and an Academy Award in 1964. Still, this 29-minute film short found widespread attention only when it was presented as an episode of the American television series The Twilight Zone. Despite being a French production, La rivière du hibou functioned well as a Twilight Zone episode with the short story’s original title “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Its length only needed minor trimming to fit the show’s half-hour format and, more important, its abrupt ironic conclusion conformed to the series’ characteristic twist endings. The film itself, however, departs from the conventions of the TV version in ways that more appropriately place it within the canon of avant-garde filmmaking alongside Brakhage’s and Deren’s work. For one, the film uses minimal dialogue, unlike The Twilight Zone’s typically verbose style. Also, its dramatic peaks and troughs are not dictated by the requisite patterns of ad placement, so its narrative flow is more linear and smooth, building steadily toward a dramatic climax. Most important, its director aggressively engages the cinematic vocabulary of the avant-garde to transform exterior settings into an introspective, psychological wonderland—a landscape of the mind.

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La rivière du hibou establishes an allegory wherein the protagonist progresses through and across the “landscape” of his psyche toward the deepest core of his being. The film is based on nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce’s story from 1890, which describes a condemned man’s extended odyssey through the wishful thinking of his last moment on Earth. In the story, the reader is led to believe that the hangman’s rope somehow breaks, allowing the Confederate conspirator to untie his bonds and make his escape down the very river intended as his execution site. The narrative hints that this world of renewed hope is unreliable: “Something awful in the disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them (his senses) that they made record of things never before perceived.”11 The protagonist manages to evade bullets and cannon fire as he floats downstream and runs through a dense forest toward his home. It is only upon reaching this house and embracing his wife that he feels “a stunning blow upon the back of the neck,” which signifies the actual moment of his death.12 Order and probability are instantly restored as the protagonist is returned to his rightful place within the swaying hangman’s noose. The climactic irony of this narrative suggests that our unconscious world is governed by an exaggerated sense of time and space—akin to the experience of dreaming, where so much duration and complexity seem to unfold within what is actually just a few seconds. Similar to Epstein’s film adaptation of Poe’s tale, Enrico’s film uses specific avant-garde techniques to adapt Bierce’s use of outdoor settings as a depiction of the unconscious. These experimental approaches are most apparent in the moments when the filmmaker ventures beyond the most literal attempts at replicating Bierce’s written page. There is an uncanny relationship between a particular passage from Bierce’s narrative and Germaine Dulac’s definition of the avant-garde impulse in cinema, which serves to clarify Enrico’s own allegorical intentions. Continuing with the description of the protagonist’s dreamland and “things never before perceived,” Bierce’s text reads: He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf—saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon-flies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat—all these made audible music.13

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Dulac’s 1932 article reads: We can use the term “avant-garde” for any film whose technique, employed with a view to a renewed expressiveness of image and sound, breaks with established traditions to search out, in the strictly visual and auditory realm, new emotional chords.14

This definition takes on further weight when considered in the context of the film: “We can use the term ‘avant-garde’ for any film (in this case, Enrico’s La rivière du hibou) whose technique, (slow motion, blurred focus, repeated shots, and other experimental approaches) employed with a view to a renewed expressiveness of image and sound, (or the cinematic view of the experience Bierce describes above) breaks (the hangman’s rope) with established traditions (or mainstream films depicting ‘conscious’ reality) to search out, (as the protagonist seeks his home) in the strictly visual and auditory realm, (the medium of film), new emotional chords (the ‘audible music’ described above).” The film even attempts to render the “audible music” in the form of a mock blues ballad in which the singer paraphrases Bierce’s text: “A living man, a living man, I wanna be a living man, in all the world, he moves around, he walks around, he turns around, I see each tree, I read each vein, I hear each bird, upon each leaf, the buzzing flies, the splashing fish, they moves around this living man, a living man, a living man, I wanna be a living man.” The ballad is quite effective in underscoring the protagonist’s newfound perspective on his surroundings or, rather, the externalization of his inner psyche. This correlation between Dulac’s definition of avant-garde and the adaptation La rivière du hibou is, of course, arbitrary. Its intention is to suggest that the protagonist’s imagined “break” with his constrictive reality along with his subsequent inward odyssey signify the fundamental purpose of avant-garde practice. More specifically, Dulac’s account of the avant-garde film’s “historic evolution” mentions the emergence of the psychological film and that “it seemed childish to put a character in a given situation without evoking the realm of his interior life, and so they added to his movements the perception of his thoughts, his feeling, his sensations.”15 The film goes even further by establishing the ultimate dominance of this interior life over the character. That is, the protagonist’s physical movement within his exterior environment actually is his “interior life.” The further he ventures outward from his point of origin into the wilderness, the deeper he probes the nether regions of his own psyche. Sitney’s concept of the “psychodrama” applies to this film’s emphasis on the “mediation

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of the dreamer” in a dreamworld where the director himself must become the protagonist/dreamer.16 An aesthetic trajectory of depicting psychological phenomena through natural landscape settings proceeds from the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, through Maya Deren’s work of the 1940s, and up to the burgeoning experimentation of the 1960s with films such as Dog Star Man and La rivière du hibou. Within this trajectory, Enrico’s film falls somewhere between the seminal surrealist film Un chien Andalou (1928) and Deren’s equally seminal avantgarde film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in that, according to Sitney, the former is a “mad voyeurism” into the horror and irrationality of the unconscious whereas the latter depicts an interior quest to reveal the “erotic mysteries of the self.”17 If taken to be closer to Surrealism, La rivière du hibou depicts the absurdity of the dying man’s fantasy of escape and homeward reconciliation. If the film is considered closer to Deren’s work, then the protagonist’s penultimate vision of his wife and the subsequent dream of embracing her could be the inner psychological manifestation of the penile erection that results when a man is hanged. In either case, this film transcends literal adaptation by embracing Bierce’s text as a would-be manifesto of the avant-garde impulse to defy, in Dulac’s terms, the “conscious reality” of constrictive narrative traditions. Like Epstein’s approach to Poe’s tale, Enrico’s film uses Bierce’s narrative of the unconscious mind as a springboard for visual experimentation within authentic natural settings.

La rivière du hibou’s River Progression La rivière du hibou’s allegory of psychological introspection conveys the fundamental project of avant-garde filmmaking both within and peripheral to mainstream cinematic practice. As in Maya Deren’s film At Land (1944), the protagonist encounters myriad landscapes before reaching the core, or “home,” of his interior quest. In this context, it is worthwhile to consider the original French title of the film, La rivière du hibou, which translates to “Creek of the Owl” or “Owl Creek.” Because Enrico’s title diverts emphasis from the “Owl Creek Bridge” mentioned in Bierce’s title, it seems the filmmaker had intentions beyond the closest possible adaptation of the story. Enrico highlights the river’s presence rather than the overarching bridge from which the protagonist is transported from one reality into the next. In this way, the narrative is transformed from conscious reality into the unconscious with the emphasis diverted from the “occurrence,”

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or hanging, at “Owl Creek Bridge,” to the river itself. Although the protagonist travels overland in order to return home, the river functions as the primary setting for the allegorical progression. For one, a river is the most convenient natural phenomenon available to convey the notion of inner transformation. Literary river allegories as well known as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or as little known as Poe’s landscape sketches “The Elk” (1844) and “The Domain of Arnheim” (1850) depict a larger spiritual transformation through their protagonists’ experiences along a river’s meandering course. Cole’s The Voyage of Life cycle of paintings, depicting four stages of life within the context of a river’s course, depicts a similar spiritual odyssey on canvas. Ultimately, these nineteenth-century examples of river allegory anticipate mainstream films of a similar purpose, which include Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Many of these characteristically pessimistic films focus on a megalomaniac who undergoes a spiritual transformation along a river of many obstacles. Beyond their literal contexts, the river settings in these films become a symbolic route toward an interior psychological or existential truth. On the surface, a river is simply a means of physical transportation. But their dynamic, fluid properties allow rivers to take on a deeper meaning. The dramatic instant when Enrico’s protagonist plunges into the river signifies the entrance into his inner psyche. Like a blood vessel, this river transports him toward the deeper recesses of his mind where his hidden desires reside. As if to reinforce the difficulty in breaking from conscious reality, Enrico puts great emphasis on the protagonist’s underwater struggle to untie his bonds—another textual moment worth embellishing on screen. Subsequently, the director provides a convincing series of river shots showing the protagonist swept underwater and through rapids before finally reaching an embankment of sand. Such an extended portrayal of a man floating down a river might otherwise seem gratuitous, but pacing becomes essential in portraying inner psychological processes. While the river in Deren’s allegorical film At Land does not “transport” the protagonist in the same way, it still becomes a site of personal metamorphosis as she wanders alongside it and clambers over its stones. Deren discusses this manipulation of time and space in her work and the effects she achieves: In my At Land, it has been the technique by which the dynamic of The Odyssey is reversed and the protagonist, instead of undertaking the

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Landscape Allegory in Cinema long voyage of search for adventure, finds instead that the universe itself had usurped the dynamic action which was once the prerogative of human will, and confronts her with a volatile and relentless metamorphosis in which her personal identity is the sole constancy.18

Here, Deren clarifies the allegorical intention found in her film as well as in La rivière du hibou. According to this intention, interior processes of human volition become externalized in the form of various natural landscapes. Such a “reversal” of narrative function is fundamental to the avant-garde mode as a response to mainstream conventions of storytelling. In other words, landscape allegory is inherently avant-garde.

La rivière du hibou’s Overland Segment The overland segment of the film’s allegory supplements the river progression in reflecting a “volatile and relentless metamorphosis” in which this fugitive protagonist is the “sole constancy.”19 Crucial to this transformation is a sequence of natural landscapes to be negotiated or, rather, realized by the subject. The elaborate river sequence of La rivière du hibou eventually gives way to a new segment wherein the protagonist finds himself washed up on a sandy embankment. Particularly poignant is the moment taken directly from Bierce’s text in which the nearly drowned fugitive throws sand over himself in ecstasy. Accordingly, the film adds an instrumental version of the blues ballad to reaffirm his heightened state of awareness. Here, his primal celebration with the sand becomes the consummate human affirmation of conscious reality. Moreover, this show of desperation implies that the protagonist’s connection to reality is tenuous at best. Such a moment is also evident in At Land when Deren’s self-portrayed protagonist emerges alone from the ocean and crawls methodically across a coastal landscape of beach, rocks, and driftwood. As if reborn, these characters arrive from water. Subsequently, their intimate embrace of these sandy locales establishes a primordial connection to the landscape beyond the conventional sense of mere backdrop. Here, the natural universe behaves as “Mother Nature,” conferring upon itself a living, thinking dimension that provides a mental universe for the protagonist. Nevertheless, these beach segments have short durations and end abruptly. Enrico’s protagonist is soon fleeing from cannon fire, and Deren’s protagonist suddenly finds herself in a new, interior banquet setting.

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The overland segment continues in La rivière du hibou with the protagonist’s extended dash through a woody forest terrain. The camera’s close surveillance of the running man sustains the dynamism previously expressed through the film’s variegation of landscape settings. The protagonist is no longer carried from one realm to the next. Now, he has recovered a degree of free will and becomes a dynamic entity himself. This is a departure from At Land where the female protagonist wanders from scene to scene with much less deliberation and stumbles into new settings with no governing sense of logic. Particularly effective in Enrico’s overland segment is the use of scoring to enhance this sense of dynamism. We hear only an aggressive snare drum battery as the protagonist dodges cannon fire within the increasingly dense woods and thicket. In order to reflect his frantic determination to reach home, the wilderness he dashes through becomes a landscaped row of trees along his route. As the surrounding landscape conforms to his monomaniacal will, its function as an obstacle transforms back into the same guiding force the river had been. In other words, the protagonist must first struggle in his new environment, whether he finds himself tied by ropes underwater or hindered by dense foliage. But eventually his natural universe conveys or guides him homeward. In this way, the film depicts his mental universe as a cycle of struggle and resolution, ultimately leading toward a deeper inward destination.

La rivière du hibou’s “Home” of the Avant-Garde The overland progression eventually returns the protagonist to his home, which, in the context of his mental universe, becomes the deepest core of the psyche. At the same time, the protagonist’s arrival brings the film to the purest ambition of the avant-garde, which is a domain of imagination totally impregnable by the outer influence of mainstream culture. This “home” of the avant-garde mode is the very fountainhead of genius. It is the definitive Romantic ideal of an immaculate conception devoid of any outside influence or artistic heritage. Any form of aesthetic experimentation is a leap of faith toward the imagined possibility of such an ideal—in defiance of conscious experience. Accordingly, the protagonist’s would-be arrival at his home is confirmed as imaginary when the iron gates in his path open by themselves to admit him. Here, the film adaptation departs from Bierce’s text where it is unable to emulate the literary hints of an unreliable universe. Instead, Enrico opts to suspend our disbelief until

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the protagonist is close to rejoining his wife. Such a choice is effective because, up to this point, the film’s depiction of his escape appears miraculous yet still somehow plausible. The protagonist’s final entry into the “home” of the avant-garde is established by the film’s most aggressive display of allegory. Specifically, a point-of-view shot of the protagonist’s movement through dense foliage indicates his penetration into a deeper psychological realm. Next, a series of cross-cut repeated shots unfolds, and an accelerated, climactic version of the blues ballad is heard. The protagonist reaches out his arms and hastens toward his smiling wife who glides in slow motion to meet him in front of their elegant home. In a deliberate way, their long-anticipated embrace is suspended as these two approaching sequences are repeated several times. The film finally allows them to come together in a climactic shot. Without its ironic intention, such a narrative technique would be farcically melodramatic in the same way as Elder sees Dog Star Man’s falling sequence as comical. For example, the same repetition of an approaching sequence appears in the satirical film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) when an attacking knight “employs” this technique in order to surprise a watchful guard. Of course, La rivière du hibou has a decided advantage over the Bierce text in this climactic instant. Seeing the protagonist suddenly jerk upright before reaching his wife and in the very next frame resume his place in the hangman’s noose provides much greater shock value than merely reading the final short description of what actually transpired. Another example of this shock ending appears in the acclaimed 1983 film El Norte when the dejected protagonist suddenly recalls in the closing frame his father’s severed head hanging from a rope by its hair. Such forms of aggressive editing serve to associate the images in question with larger, more abstract ideas as opposed to simply what they are. The abrupt, unexpected conclusion of Enrico’s landscape allegory becomes the climax of realization for the avant-garde mode. The protagonist’s progression through and across the landscape of his unconscious mind is suddenly halted by the cessation of his life functions, while the aesthetic quest for an immaculate conception arrives at its own inevitable futility. No work of art can be executed without the influence of its cultural heritage, and so any work of so-called artistic genius is ultimately “hanged” by its influences. The protagonist’s monomaniacal will, expressed through this landscape odyssey, is the fundamental avant-garde impulse toward the purest possible originality. In the context of experimentation, a rigorous renunciation of mainstream aesthetic values acts as a springboard. At the same time, a denial of mainstream culture is still an affirmation of its values,

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and so the avant-garde impulse carried to its extreme becomes a statement of futility. Deren’s films may reveal the process of introspection, but no absolute identity is ever established. Even as it suggests a sense of futility, Enrico’s film identifies the process of self-realization as an essential inner struggle that sustains humankind regardless of its unreachable goal. The avant-garde impulse, especially within the tradition of Romanticism, strives for a new experience through which one’s unconscious mental universe can be realized—and in all its disturbing beauty. According to Albert Camus’ philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1940), this striving for striving’s sake is the only available redemption for an otherwise meaningless existence. Camus embraces the Greek mythological image of a man condemned to push a boulder up a precipitous mountainside after it rolls back down again and again. That is, the struggle of life itself is sufficient to provide a sense of purpose. Most apparent in Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, this allegory of perpetual human struggle against a resistant universe is the most definitive form of landscape allegory found in cinema. Obviously, many narrative films incorporate natural landscape obstacles within the context of a protagonist’s attempt to reach a certain destination or overcome antagonists. However, only in an avant-garde context of depicting an introspective process by way of an outward progression through natural wilderness surroundings does such a struggle become allegorical. There is a complex array of techniques for alerting the audience to an allegorical intention: a privileging or foregrounding of natural settings as an independent subject; distorted or magnified perspectives on natural phenomena associated with outdoor environments; manipulated juxtaposition of characters to landscape via aggressive forms of montage; and most important, a clear psychological premise of inner struggle or transformation. While mainstream directors may not seek out experimental shorts in order to discover these techniques, narrative experimentation with landscape in avant-garde films (Deren’s At Land, Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, Enrico’s La rivière du hibou, as well as early films such as La chute de la maison Usher and Nanook of the North) points to the ways in which natural settings function beyond their supportive function as backdrop. Locating landscape allegory in both avant-garde and mainstream contexts establishes important connections between these seemingly antithetical modes of cinematic endeavor. As it turns out, the experimental practice of landscape allegory, normally the domain of experimental impulses, had already appeared in mainstream films prior to its appearance in avant-garde films.

“Squaw’s Head Rock” from David O’Selznick’s production of Duel in the Sun (1946)

Chapter Five Spiritual Wasteland Films La rivière du hibou’s transformation into an episode of The Twilight Zone suggests that its avant-garde approach to outdoor settings was deemed acceptable for mainstream consumption. In the relatively experimental context of the 1960s and ’70s, many narrative films pursued landscape allegory, some of them in a big-budget Hollywood context. The Sisyphus allegory of human struggle against the natural landscape became paradigmatic for many feature films in North America, Europe, and Australia. As a statement of futility, this landscape allegory achieved its peak of cultural currency during this roughly 20-year experimental, intellectual, and pessimistic period of commercial filmmaking. In a larger sense, the mass cultural upheaval in the postwar period fostered a need for self-examination. This need encouraged experimentation in the mass media through an assimilation of peripheral avant-garde practices. Of course, such assimilation does not imply all mainstream filmmakers were aware of avant-garde films or their specific approach to natural settings. The overall experimental impulse of this period was enough to encourage landscape allegory in narrative cinema.

The Western’s “Duel in the Sun” Allegory While there was a general emergence of landscape allegory in cinema of the 1960s, it evolved more steadily within the western genre, where films are inherently landscape-oriented. Philip French’s study of westerns discusses the crucial role of natural landscape settings: “The location of the westerner in his landscape is a matter of paramount importance, and there are relatively few movies which do not begin with the single man or group of men riding through the countryside.”1 In the context of Hollywood production, the western genre developed around the narrative subject matter of a harsh and lawless society with a remoteness that took on mythological proportions. The notions of savage Indian tribes and ruthless gunfighters provided sufficient narrative material for scores of Hollywood studio back-lot productions.

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A realistic studio frontier town and a few Los Angeles County foothill locations were all that was necessary to establish a convincing environment for the typical narrative of “good” law-abiding citizens triumphing over “evil” Indians or gunmen. In Scott Simmon’s words: When early filmmakers arrived in the desert West, the disquietingly empty space seems itself to have suggested a plot line new to the movies but with a historical heritage: a plot line that sets two races, Indian and white, both depicted as equally nomadic, on horses or in wagons, contending for the open space. Political discourse by this time made it evident to all but the “weaklings” that even empty space was not strictly there for the taking but would require “fighting.”2

The landscape itself in these films contributed to the mythology of the American frontier, akin to the idealized photography of Ansel Adams and predecessors like Carleton Watkins, as well as to western paintings like those of Frederic Remington. The seminal western, which effectively raised the bar for the use of authentic locations in westerns to follow, is John Ford’s 1939 film Stagecoach. Vast panoramic views of Monument Valley enhance the drama of a Native American attack against a lone stagecoach pressing westward. Like Adams’ photographed visions of Yosemite Valley, these framed landscapes invoked a Romantic sense of nostalgia for a wilderness that had long since been conquered and civilized. As an organic component to the American frontier mythology, natural landscapes became increasingly integral to the western genre. French states: This contrast between open land and the town, between the illusion of freedom and the necessity of compromise, between a relaxed association with nature and a tense accommodation to society, lies at the roots of the genre. Certainly the mood of a western is established at the outset by the way directors place their protagonists in relationship to their surroundings, and over the past twenty-odd years (the ’50s and after) the approach to the question has become increasingly self-conscious.3

Still, this increasing investment in landscape did not decisively take it beyond its conventional role as backdrop. While the framed expanse of Monument Valley certainly enhances the action sequence in Stagecoach, the viewer does not associate this sense of grandeur with the mindset of the characters. Even though French refers to this landscape as Ford’s characteristic “moral universe,”4 and David Lusted calls this film an “allegorical tale,”5 the authentic desert location is not clearly associated with the inner psychology of any protagonist. In other words, the filmmaker’s incentive for incorporating realistic frontier settings for their own sake supersedes any specific allegorical purpose to the narrative here.

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Subsequent landmark westerns such as Shane (1953) and The Searchers (1956) also pursued this heightened sense of authenticity in their rugged locations, but these films are not overtly allegorical either. In the typical landscape allegory, there is a clearly established psychological component to the narrative. Beyond the surface-level narrative of a “good” protagonist pitted against an “evil” antagonist found in so many westerns, the central character reveals an inner conflict or psychological struggle between right and wrong, or between selfish and selfless courses of action. The character eventually struggles against the landscape itself in a dramatic manner, similar to the allegory of futility in both Dog Star Man and La rivière du hibou. In Shane, the central character does engage in a personal struggle with his violent past, which is reawakened in order to save his upright citizen friends, but he never really comes into conflict with the dramatic landscape itself. A similar psychological struggle reveals itself in John Wayne’s character in The Searchers. Although Ethan battles with the desire to murder his niece after she joins an Indian tribe, the many evocative landscapes he passes through amidst his search for her never behave as obstacles. The frontier landscape could be read as the exterior visualization of his interior “quest” for justice, but a direct indication of struggle with the landscape itself is absent. In this way, the presence of landscape allegory in these two films is more ambiguous, especially when compared to westerns of the 1960s and ’70s. In the typical narrative of good versus evil, principal characters assume only a simplistic moral disposition. For a conventional narrative film to establish landscape allegory, both a complex character and a physical struggle against the landscape should be apparent. In the context of the western genre, an early example is Duel in the Sun (1946), producer David O. Selznick’s attempted follow-up to Gone with the Wind (1939). In his discussion of this film, Lusted points to the allegorical aspect of so-called epic westerns: “The multiple characters and relationships in epic westerns encourage audience identification, not only with the individuals, but also with groups and the abstractions they represent (such as authority, justice, the future, et cetera).”6 Brought up in unethical conditions, the female protagonist Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) pits her desire to become proper (white) against her instinct for violence (her “Indian” side). This inner conflict is ultimately resolved within the confines of a rocky mountainside where she engages in a shootout with her male lover/adversary Lewton McCanles (Gregory Peck), who has always encouraged the darker side of her psyche. Here, the rugged, craggy landscape becomes the ideal manifestation of inner psychological turmoil. The intended symbolism is most apparent in its wide-shot depiction as

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an anthropomorphic “Squaw’s Head” crag. Behaving more like an idealized frontier landscape painting, this still frame is actually just a painted matte drop. In the closer shots of this region during the film’s finale, Pearl struggles against the rough terrain upward toward her foe. This extended sequence eventually unites the two lovers in death, and the camera perspective slowly pans backward to once again reveal the definitive “Squaw’s Head Rock” landscape, which had seemed earlier to serve simply as the film’s title page. This “duel in the sun” allegory, in which protagonist and antagonist ultimately confront each other within an isolated rocky landscape, appears in many subsequent westerns. Director Anthony Mann is recognized for his psychological use of natural landscape, and his 1950 release Winchester ’73 is a good example of his approach to the genre. As in Duel in the Sun, the protagonist Lin McAdam (James Stewart) and antagonist Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) engage in their final showdown amidst a similar landscape. Like most westerns that came before, these two characters clearly establish the dichotomy of good and evil, yet the protagonist’s degree of inner conflict is enhanced by the fact that his adversary is also his brother. While the essential struggle against the landscape is not as obvious as in the previous film, a sense of upward resistance is clearly established when the “noble” gunman is ambushed from a higher vantage point by his “heartless” brother. In R. Philip Loy’s words: The climactic rifle battle between Stewart and McNally also distinguishes Winchester ’73 from westerns of the 1930s and 1940s. Not only is the fight itself well staged and entertaining, its conclusion is strikingly different . . . McNally is physically dead, but maybe Stewart, having finished the task of killing McNally, a task that burned deep in his psyche, is emotionally dead.7

Climactic duels usually take place in a frontier-town setting such as in High Noon (1952) and so many other westerns. The incorporation of this specific landscape for these scenes in Winchester ’73 and Duel in the Sun reveals a deeper allegorical purpose to this atypical choice of setting. Despite Winchester ’73’s effective juxtaposition of the frontier town’s law and order with the lawlessness of the peripheral desert wilderness, even bolder attempts at landscape allegory appear in Anthony Mann’s later films. These films include Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and Man of the West (1958). The psychological complexity in these films derives from their protagonists’ personal struggles with their pasts. In these Mann westerns, the protagonists

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attempt to cleanse themselves of a dark past, but they are forced to confront it again when nefarious male characters reemerge from this past to test their moral disposition. The female characters in these films behave as agents of uprightness attempting to guide the male characters toward the proper course of action. Within this psychological framework, the wilderness landscapes become a series of obstacles to be overcome through the course of these films, particularly Bend of the River. All of these films reach their dramatic climax with an evocative landscape duel between the male protagonist and his past as personified by the principal antagonist. Bend of the River’s final duel occurs within an actual river, as if to affirm the title’s allegorical component. The other two films include the familiar craggy domain in which the protagonist’s adversary ambushes him from a higher position among the rocks. In the latter case, the simultaneous uphill struggle with both the antagonist and the landscape itself in this climactic moment allows the landscape to merge with this personification of the protagonist’s darker half and become one living entity. These landscapes move beyond their former role in westerns as authentic backdrops and become infused with a specific psychological dimension. Wilderness landscapes serve well to allegorize the dramatic conclusion to narratives of psychological struggle, and yet this evolving approach to the western genre merely anticipated the larger allegory of futility more properly associated with the 1960s and ’70s cinema to come. With the exception of Duel in the Sun, which suggests that overcoming one’s darker instincts is fatal, the protagonists of these psychological westerns emerge from their struggle with a sense of having overcome the darker aspects of their psyche. With the rise of pessimistic attitudes, the optimistic endings of these films became less meaningful to audiences. In this context, the continued evolution of the western genre’s treatment of landscape is particularly evident in Monte Hellman’s 1967 film The Shooting. As in previous psychological westerns, The Shooting reaches its narrative climax in a rocky zone of the frontier wilderness. Again, the male protagonist’s pursued adversary is confronted at gunpoint, but, in this film, the allegory of the protagonist’s inner struggle is even more literalized. In a sudden flash, Gashade (Warren Oates) sees and shoots at a man who resembles himself, positioned above him on an uphill slope. Although Gashade pronounces his brother’s name in this moment, as if the scenario were the same as Winchester ’73, their resemblance moves beyond a mere suggestion that this brother actually personifies the darker half of his own psyche. Here, the protagonist actually faces off with his own evil twin. (The doppelgänger has a tradition of its own. For example, Poe’s 1839 tale “William Wilson” involves the protagonist slaying

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his malignant double, killing himself in the process.) This particular “duel in the sun” sequence speaks to the more pessimistic allegory of futility in which the allegorical struggle against the landscape ends in defeat. In the context of this period’s larger cultural self-examination, this western becomes more existential than its predecessors. In the defeatist cultural climate of the 1960s, the western became an ideal narrative vehicle for social critique and spiritual disillusionment. Instead of reflecting a former investment in the American frontier heritage, this latter version of the western film exploits the allegorical potential of its characteristic wastelands. Through landscape allegory, the western genre adapted itself to contemporary levels of social consciousness and reevaluation. With The Shooting, the climactic duel among the rocks and other definitively western motifs now served to allegorize a more modern sensibility of existential and spiritual crisis. To achieve such an end, this film finally eschews the plausible sense of reality its predecessors depend on. When The Shooting’s protagonist confronts his double among the crags, the viewer is decisively removed from a realistic world and placed into the figurative realm of allegory. In hindsight, the film’s extended trek across the barren desert prior to the eventual duel becomes the outer manifestation of the protagonist’s inner psychological condition—one with which audiences of the time could empathize. In this capacity, filmmakers were no longer required to be American to explore the allegorical potential of the western genre’s frontier locales.

The Wasteland Informed by Space/Place Theory Beyond the western genre, wildernesses and wastelands proved effective for a more complex allegory of spiritual crisis in the pessimistic context of the 1960s and ’70s. This relatively aggressive form of landscape allegory is best approached through applicable theories of space and place. Because it makes generalized claims about the human experience of space and place, Yi-Fu Tuan’s study Space and Place clarifies how specific cultural meanings are derived from these landscapes. Tuan begins with a simple way of distinguishing between space and place. He posits, “If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.”8 In other words, “space” is a more abstract phenomenon that is only allowed to become a “place” when experienced long enough to be endowed with personal meaning. Space must be familiarized in some way to become a place. It is important to

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think of this distinction in terms of degrees rather than absolutes. For example, driving across a desert landscape at a high speed is much less an experience of “place” than a brief stop to observe its terrain. For Tuan, the basic notion of human “experience” is crucial to his entire project. In his chapter “Experiential Perspective,” he states: Experience is compounded of feeling and thought . . . . It is a common tendency to regard feeling and thought as opposed, the one registering subjective states, the other reporting on objective reality. In fact, they lie near the two ends of an experiential continuum, and both are ways of knowing.9

In other words, the experience of place should be thought of as a complex network of impulses derived from intertwining emotional and intellectual capacities. Tuan argues that the experience of place for adults is more reflective compared to children, since they have accumulated so many previous experiences and memories. As a result, adults are more inclined to associate places with certain ideas and moods. Tuan’s concept of a space becoming a place by way of experience can be applied to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). In the film, the young female protagonist and her new male companion decide to pause their trek across the desert to frolic within the Death Valley area known as “Zabriskie Point.” Whereas a middle-aged tourist couple stops only briefly to read the historical information and enjoy the view from a concrete platform, the young lovers actually venture into the vicinity to have a more immersive experience. The tourists’ cursory visit may be enough to transform this vast space into a place, but the young couple’s protracted, interactive encounter with the landscape achieves a higher degree of authenticity. Based on Tuan’s idea about adults and children, the age discrepancy between these couples suggests that adulthood extended over a sufficient period of time tends to jade one’s ability to experience space as place. This notion applies even more to Nicolas Roeg’s film Walkabout (1971), in which a young boy seems able to absorb and appreciate the Australian outback landscape while his older sister seems impatient to return to their world of modern amenities. These two films are considered later as they relate to Edward S. Casey’s historical notions of space/place. Tuan develops his space/place theory further with the idea that human geographies are established through a fundamental orientation of the body to its surrounding space. He points out that this basic orientation is responsible for our conceptual distinctions of us/them, here/there, and this/that. Tuan suggests that space is necessary for

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survival, but that the specific amount of “necessary” space varies and is ultimately a cultural construct. “Crowding,” according to Tuan, is the negative experience of insufficient space, which also varies with specific conditions. Cultures may be distinguished by their different approaches to navigating and organizing space according to the environment. For example, Tuan suggests that Eskimos are more challenged by the unstructured space of the vast frozen tundra than are the Temne people whose land is covered by vegetation. Hence, Eskimos have a more sophisticated method of organizing the landscape. Tuan goes on to discuss how various cultures mythologize space: Two principal kinds of mythical space may be distinguished. In the one, mythical space is a fuzzy area of defective knowledge surrounding the empirically known; it frames pragmatic space. In the other it is the spatial component of a worldview, a conception of localized values within which people carry on their practical activities. Both kinds of space, well described by scholars for illiterate and traditional societies, persist in the modern world. They persist because for individuals as well as for groups there will always be areas of the hazily known and of the unknown, and because it is likely that some people will always be driven to understand man’s place in nature in a holistic way.10

Wilderness landscapes have the potential to accommodate both kinds of myths simultaneously and are therefore effective for inspiring a given culture. An uncharted, inhospitable landscape may initially foster myths of superstition and dread, yet if this landscape is absorbed into a vision of future development and progress, suddenly it is no longer malevolent. This wilderness dichotomy becomes more significant when the space/place theories of Edward S. Casey and Simon Schama are considered subsequently. Wilderness landscapes accommodate both types of myths as explained by Tuan. Two basic categories of wilderness should be recognized here: the harsh, barren wasteland and the “uncivilized” jungle or forest. The desert and similar wasteland topographies remain in the domain of myth because they are so resistant to prolonged human presence. That is, they do not so easily become places by Tuan’s definition. On the other hand, jungles, forests, and other regions of dense foliage are only tenuously inhospitable—they are more vulnerable to the presence of humankind. Of course, as Tuan would agree, this sort of evaluation depends on the culture in question, since both deserts and jungles are familiar environments to many societies. In any case, these landscapes are mythologized with a notion of progress and opportunity by cultures that have yet to experience them. Such myths are short-lived when outsiders exploit these landscapes and trample over their indigenous folk in the process.

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Jodorowsky’s El Topo Wasteland allegory can be found in many defeatist films of the 1960s and ’70s wherein a crisis or renegotiation of spirituality is at stake. A fertile example is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970). On the surface, this Mexican production appears to be a typical western: gunslingers, innocent townsfolk, and an expansive desert setting. But the landscape allegory becomes apparent when unfamiliar, surreal elements are juxtaposed with the landscape, and the film becomes decidedly atypical. Early in El Topo, a male voice narrates the following: “The mole (‘el topo’) is an animal that digs tunnels underground searching for the sun. Sometimes his journey leads him to the surface. When he looks at the sun, he is blinded.” When confronted with this inaccuracy in an interview, the director simply retorted: “In the last analysis, moles are blinded because I say they’re blinded in the film. It’s my principle.”11 His subjective sense of reality drives the entire film as it portrays a complex psychological universe of spiritual introspection. The protagonist, played by Jodorowsky himself, becomes “the mole” searching for enlightenment. This film’s Mexican desert location, replete with vast dunes, barren hills, and evocative rock formations, becomes an allegorical arena for the director’s soul-searching odyssey. This overt landscape allegory is divided into four episodes. In the first two episodes, the protagonist and a handful of eccentric personages are juxtaposed with the wasteland in a way that reflects the protagonist’s inner spiritual quest. The first episode begins like a spaghetti western, with the appearance of a leather-clad “man with no name” gunslinger. With his naked seven-year-old son behind him, this would-be avenging angel rides across the desert, seeking out the perpetrators of a bloody massacre marked by dangling corpses and disemboweled burros. An early indication of the film’s allegorical purpose comes after the protagonist guns down a number of bandits, castrates their leader, and declares: “I am God.” While the first episode remains somewhat faithful to the western genre, the second episode decisively transforms the barren landscape into a universe of spiritual struggle. Here, the film depicts the protagonist’s confrontation with “four master gunfighters of the desert,” a scenario more reminiscent of a Chinese martial arts film. Encouraged by a new female companion, Jodorowsky’s character leaves his son with a group of Franciscan monks and sets off to challenge the gunfighters one by one. Unlike familiar gunfighters, these masters are more like gurus where each one personifies a higher state of spiritual enlightenment. Each one awaits the protagonist within his own remote portion of the desert, and the surrounding barren landscape

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becomes the topography of the protagonist’s struggling inner psyche. The fourth master’s “defeat” is only achieved when he takes his own life, and the protagonist experiences the disintegration of his ego in a cathartic fit of rage. As an allegorical climax to this episode, his female companion’s lesbian suitor guns him down with five “stigmata” shots as if to announce his Christ-like destiny. Although the protagonist’s spiritual odyssey comes to an end, the next two episodes continue the landscape allegory through the juxtaposition of the wasteland with increasingly bizarre characters and events. The third episode of the film places the now-reborn protagonist deep inside a subterranean world, the home of a community of misfits akin to those found in Todd Browning’s historic cult film Freaks (1932). At this point, the film suggests he has spent several years here in a suspended lotus position. According to the continuing landscape allegory, this hollowed-out mountain represents the core of his psyche. Within this inner realm, the protagonist shaves his head and prepares to reenter the outer world in order to liberate his new family of outcasts from their tomblike prison. The fourth and final episode returns the narrative to the familiar western frontier town, yet unfamiliar characters and events once again maintain the narrative’s abstract allegorical mode. As an enlightened being, the protagonist and his female dwarf companion confront hedonistic cross-dressers and Russian Roulette–playing cult-worshippers. To emphasize the esoteric aspect of this outdoor setting, the director places symbols depicting a Masonic eye-and-pyramid motif throughout this town. When the protagonist finally frees his deformed family of rejects, they parade through the town, only to be massacred in the street by the gun-toting townsfolk. After he guns down all the townsfolk, the avenging protagonist pours kerosene over his head and immolates himself in the middle of the street. His son, now grown up and a priest, bedecks himself in his father’s black leather and rides into the sunset with his father’s dwarf widow and her newborn child. In the context of this film’s landscape allegory, the mole-protagonist “reaches the sun” or, rather, finds enlightenment at the end of the third episode. But an indifferent society ultimately “blinds” him in the end. Nevertheless, what looks to be the same defeatist parable found in the films of Antonioni and Pasolini is better understood as one filmmaker’s self-indulgent attempt at personal introspection. The driving force of the allegory in this film is the juxtaposition of abstract elements with a heightened sense of realism, substantiated by the film’s authentic landscape settings. Like Italian westerns, El Topo features a variety of bleak desert landscapes: vast dunes, barren

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mountain ranges, endless plains dotted with strange rock formations, even dilapidated towns and rotten bridges. Spaghetti westerns were the result of an effort to reduce production costs by shooting outside the United States, mainly in Spain. Even though he had something more abstract in mind, Jodorowsky may also have chosen the western genre because of its economical advantages. Amidst these desert settings, the director insisted on a documentary approach to framing his bizarre characters and objects. In this way, his filmmaking behaves like a Dalí or Magritte painting, wherein a sense of objective reality emerges through the depiction of settings and objects, which are manipulated or simply removed from their familiar contexts. As a result, the real becomes surreal, the physical becomes metaphysical, and the quotidian becomes existential. For example, actors with missing limbs, portraying a legless character and an armless character, are placed one on top of the other to form a “double man” sentry for the first master gunfighter in the desert. In this way, these characters are taken out of context and transformed into something more abstract. Their appearance near a solitary stone tower in the middle of a barren wasteland, in turn, underscores the film’s landscape allegory. In other words, by inserting this motley array of abstract figures, Jodorowsky converts this space of the Mexican desert into the place of his spiritual introspection. El Topo engages the landscape allegory of futility wherein the protagonist struggles against the landscape itself only to meet his own spiritual demise or some other form of existential defeat. In his subsequent film The Holy Mountain (1973), Jodorowsky sets up a similar allegory. After depicting an elaborate spiritual quest to a mountaintop, this film announces self-reflexively that it is “only a film” and so cannot offer any ultimate truth. While this film is less landscape-oriented than the films considered so far, it incorporates an indictment of cultural imperialism—in this case, the Spanish impact on Mexico’s indigenous peoples. This history is allegorized in a graphic sequence with hundreds of real toads dressed in Spanish and Aztecan costumes. The toads crawl about on a large model of Aztecan pyramids, which is then exploded, sending the poor creatures flying in every direction. Films considered in this and the next chapter address issues of cultural transformation and disillusion, but, unlike The Holy Mountain, they do not address one culture’s impact on another. Instead, their various attempts at social critique remain within the context of a single national culture. Chapter seven focuses on landscape allegories that critique cultural exploitation, specifically in the context of the Australian outback.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968)

Chapter Six Italian Wasteland Allegory Desert landscapes figure prominently in Italian cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. Accordingly, this culture effectively demonstrates how the wasteland is mythologized both in its specific and larger Western contexts. Several prominent Italian directors from this period such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Sergio Leone incorporate landscapes of desolation, shot on location, in order to reflect a larger spiritual crisis symptomatic of the increasingly urban, “technologized” climate of an expanding middle class. Like the western genre’s evolving “duel in the sun” allegory and its assimilation into the larger pessimistic allegory of futility, the resulting films challenge narrative conventions by requiring closer intellectual involvement. The spectator must acknowledge that such landscapes are no longer mere backdrops, but characters in their own right. Desolate landscapes have always been accessible to filmmakers, and yet only during the post–World War II expansion of urban culture did these wastelands begin to suggest alienation experienced within the densely populated cityscape. In Italy, the process of modernization was particularly abrupt. What had been a steady appearance of modern amenities such as electricity, telephones, automobiles, and television in other European countries was sluggish within the traditional rural lifestyle of the villages dotting the Italian peninsula. But after the war, the increased economic hardship made larger cities such as Rome, Milan, and Turin more attractive to the Italian citizen. An explosion of manufacturing in these cities encouraged farmers to migrate to the cities and become factory workers. At the same time, the belated influx of mass-produced automobiles in Italy created a complex network among even the smaller villages, bringing modernization to places once defined by their rustic sensibility. As the urban and rural spaces began changing, so did the individual’s perception of them as places. In his study of space and place, Edward Relph describes this experience as “existential outsideness” or a “selfconscious and reflective uninvolvement, an alienation from people and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world, and

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of not belonging.”1 He continues: “From such a perspective, places cannot be significant centers of existence, but are at best backgrounds to activities that are without sense, mere chimeras, and at worst are voids.”2 The emergence of Neorealist films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948) and Umberto D (1952) reflected this new and profound alienation of Italian cityfolk. The rapidly modernizing urban space, with its vertically oriented office buildings and housing development projects, served only to diminish a sense of community. Individuals became increasingly aware of their isolation within the aggressive compartmentalization of space that characterizes the urban experience of place, akin to Tuan’s notion of crowding. In this cultural context, peripheral landscapes of desolation became the outer representation of this inner experience of isolation. Spiritual disillusionment in the Western world also contributed to the spatial correlation between the urban experience of personal isolation and the notion of a vast, remote wasteland. Beyond Italian culture, the transformation of religious sensibility through the nineteenth century also privileged the psyche of individuals. Although this emphasis on the mind of the subject reaches as far back as Saint Augustine’s Confessions (A.D. 397), Edward S. Casey’s study The Fate of Place points specifically to the impact of Immanuel Kant’s work at the end of the eighteenth century, which he says “internalized the very spatial infinity that had been located either in God or in the natural world in the twelve hundred years that proceeded his work.”3 Casey maintains that this “inpsychicalization” was “no less insistent on the infinity.”4 That is, the former vision of the universe as vast and boundless was now taken as figurative for the expansive recesses of the human mind. Perceptions of a spiritual universe shifted from outward, as in Dante’s seven clear-cut “degrees” of Heaven, to inward—an internalized, psychological notion of divinity and transcendence. Casey argues that ancient Greek notions of a cosmos governed by “placial finitude” expanded to Roman and eventually Christian perceptions of a universe defined by “spatial infinity.”5 This conceptual transition from place to space, he says, marks the shift from ancient to modern thinking in the Western world. Casey’s arguments suggest that the spatial sensibility that characterizes “modern” thinking can be traced back to Roman or pre-Christian culture. Within the larger context of Christianity’s evolution, the abrupt modernization of Italian culture after the Second World War suggests an ideological trajectory from place to space—and back to place again. During the nineteenth century, popular culture invested expansive natural landscapes with the ability to reflect the spiritual

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infinitude of the human psyche. However, the spiritual aspect of this allegorical impulse eventually evaporated into a kind of existential disillusion. In other words, faith had diminished enough at this point to make room for pessimism and doubt. Because the notion of divinity had already been projected inward, the fundamental question of divinity was also internalized, becoming a form of self-doubt. At this point, landscape allegory transformed into an ideological “wasteland” where it had previously been a bountiful paradise. This oncefertile landscape of the mind “dried up” and became an inhospitable desert, populated only by the “rubble” of traditional cultural values. The historically intimate involvement of Italian culture with the natural landscape accounts for its greater sensitivity to desolate landscapes both within the Italian peninsula and elsewhere. Again, Italy’s postwar period of modernization allowed these settings to take on a new meaning. As places to be experienced, they came to resemble the alienating effects of urban life. Like Relph’s association of the term “voids” with urban experience, desolate landscapes were analogous to cityscapes. Such locales became the places of infinite space, yet with the negative connotation of an inner existential wasteland.

Antonioni’s Island Allegories While natural landscape plays a significant role in early postwar Italian cinema in examples such as Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), Stromboli (1950), and Voyage to Italy (1953), Antonioni’s 1960 film L’avventura signals the advent of a more overt, psychological approach to landscape allegory, especially in the pessimistic context of the postwar era. This film is seminal for its use of landscape, which allows the narrative to diverge radically from established conventions of storytelling. In this way, it is an important harbinger of the landscapeoriented films that proliferated over the next two decades. Prior to making this film, Antonioni had already explored the symbolic potentiality of natural settings in Il grido (1957), in which the lovelorn protagonist has a series of female encounters amidst his trek along the Po River. In his comprehensive study of Antonioni, Seymour Chatman argues that this film’s use of landscape is mostly supportive: Antonioni’s treatment of the setting is still relatively traditional in its symbolism. The landscape is still largely illustrative. It remains for L’avventura and the later films to evoke the neutral, contingent environment, the surface of the world for its own sake.6

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At the same time, Marcia Landy’s analysis of Italian cinema identifies a continuity of Neorealism in these films, stating: In their abandonment of conventional modes of narration, begun by Zavattini/De Sica and Rossellini, the films probed changing relations between character and milieu in a context appropriate to the farreaching cultural and social transformations wrought by industrialization and the “economic miracle.”7

Italian cinema experimented with narrative strategy for many years before L’avventura, but this film was unprecedented in its incorporation of landscape allegory. L’avventura sets a trend with its use of Italy’s most indigenous type of desolate landscape: the peripheral deserted islands of the Mediterranean. The film’s title refers to “the adventure” undertaken by a group of bourgeois couples to the Lipari Islands where they land at the barren island of Lisca Bianca. This adventure abruptly changes to debacle when the film’s protagonist, the neurotic Anna (Lea Massari), disappears from the small island. The film allows a 30-minute duration to depict the other characters in different parts of the craggy island as they look for her. Discussing this part of the film, Harry Trosman points out, “The emptiness of the island highlights the isolation of the figures; the lack of success in the search for Anna reflects the difficulty in finding fulfillment in the lives of the people.”8 David Forgacs, in his essay on Antonioni’s manipulation of space, describes the narrative conventions that are broken here: This kind of cinema (read: “conventional”) was anthropomorphic in the simple sense that it could not tolerate for long the absence of a human body. This seems to be consistent with Casey’s views about space and place, namely that place is defined by the presence, or even just the thinkable presence, of humans; without this presence it is frighteningly vacuous and threatens to turn back into abstract empty space.9

As individuals move in and out of the frame in L’avventura, the barren terrain remains omnipresent, constantly reasserting itself with rocky hollows, sparse windswept shrubs, and a solitary fisherman’s shack. In this way, a tension arises between space and place. As the island comes to represent Anna’s absence, the notion of adventure takes on an existential dimension. That is, Anna pursues her own existential “adventure.” She also embroils her best friend who assumes Anna’s protagonist role subsequently by starting a relationship with Anna’s unfaithful boyfriend.

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Much like the landscapes in Mann’s westerns, L’avventura’s desert island becomes allegorical when juxtaposed with the main character’s clearly established inner struggle. Through this juxtaposition, a remote space is converted to a place of meaning, and the desolate rocky island becomes the externalized appearance of Anna’s troubled psyche. Fraught with a sense of alienation and ambivalence toward middle-class values, Anna’s character is an exemplar of the modern persona. On the island, she declares to her lover that she wants to be away from him while at the same time admitting to herself that she would be devastated to lose him. This contradiction reflects her larger crisis of spirituality. When her father arrives to join the search and notices that her Bible was left behind on the boat, it suggests that she has abandoned traditional religious faith as well. Ultimately, the island portrays Anna’s experience of arriving at the “place” of her innermost being. First, she feels alienated from her world in the same sense that the island is remote from the mainland. Second, her faith, along with her sense of moral obligation to herself and others, has become as threadbare as the island’s desolate terrain. Anna’s disappearance also forces the other characters to confront this space as a meaningful place instead of only a brief curiosity. Recognizing the common theme of existential boredom or noia in postwar literature, Peter Bondanella argues in his in-depth history of Italian cinema: The visualization of the subjective, often irrational states of mind by representational means—what one film historian has aptly termed “objective correlatives, visual embodiments of pervasive mood and specific psychological states”—becomes, with Antonioni, an original approach to cinematic expression.10

More specifically, T.S. Eliot’s term applies to the use of landscape allegory in this film. That is, the deserted island becomes an objective correlative for Anna’s psyche insofar as it is imbued with a sense of place. The film achieves this by intermittently affirming human presence and absence amidst its desolate terrain. After the success of L’avventura, the allegorical deserted island appeared in several Italian films of the 1960s and ’70s as if it were a recurring character. Antonioni himself returned to this specific landscape in the fourth film of what Chatman refers to as Antonioni’s “great tetralogy.”11 These films are: L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Il deserto rosso (1964). Like the previous three films, Il deserto rosso focuses on characteristically modern relationships in which individuals are marked either by neurosis

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or apathy. The deserted island in this film becomes allegorical again according to Antonioni’s consistent theme of what Chatman calls “existential anxiety.”12 At the same time, this island functions differently than in L’avventura. The modern architectural cityscape found in other films of the time is less pronounced in this film. Instead, it depicts an almost surreal industrial landscape of polychrome factories with spewing pipes and smokestacks, giant radio towers, and commercial shipping canals. The film then immerses this entire mechanistic universe in a dense white fog, as if this kind of weather were inevitable in such an environment. According to Chatman, the various industrial objects should not be interpreted as “metaphors” for the psychological state of the neurotic female protagonist Giuliana (Monica Vitti) but as objective correlatives or “metonyms.”13 In other words, these objects are not purely representative of the character’s inner struggle, but only related in some way. Chatman maintains: “The dump, the pulsing smokestack, the ship—these do not stand for Giuliana’s feelings; they are there, and they exacerbate them, but they remain stubbornly themselves, brute realities of our powerful world.”14 If these surroundings are taken to be the place of modernity’s “brute reality” as established by Giuliana’s perambulations within the frame, then the deserted island appearing briefly in a later part of the film becomes the place of fantasy. This differs from the metaphoric and metonymic use of the island in L’avventura, where the landscape reflects Anna’s psyche as well as becoming the actual catalyst for her disappearance. The island locale Giuliana describes to her temporarily paralyzed son is not only a setting for fantasy—it is the fantasy. The actual events that happen there are hardly as significant as the place itself. Again, the sense of place is established by the insertion of human presence. On this island, it is a young girl who prefers to be away from other people. Besides the passing of a mysterious sailboat, the only event is the young girl’s encounter with the island’s singing anthropomorphic rock formations, akin to those found in Peter Weir’s 1975 Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock. The singing rocks serve to animate the landscape so that it behaves as a character itself. They also imbue this place with a mythical aspect, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In this way, the film inverts the notion of desolation so that the landscape would no longer seem desolate. Unlike Anna’s island in L’avventura, which is bleak and inhospitable, Giuliana’s island becomes a sanctuary, an organic domain where even the rocks have a melodious voice, as opposed to the harsh, grating sounds of the factories. Whereas an encroaching storm frames the island in L’avventura, pure sunlight covers the island

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in this film. Because a ubiquitous fog engulfs Giuliana’s real world, the fair weather here underscores the notion of fantasy. According to the landscape allegory of Il deserto rosso, desolation becomes tranquility. In other words, this film portrays a benevolent, rather than malevolent, sense of alienation. Nevertheless, like Lisca Bianca in L’avventura, this island is an objective correlative for the protagonist’s psyche. Rather than reflecting the “brute reality” of the modern psyche, the deserted island here becomes the tranquil dream necessary for Giuliana’s perseverance. For Bondanella, “her dream of a magic, desert island—with its clear, natural colors, wild animals, clean water, and pink sand— represents for Antonioni a pathetic romantic nightmare that is out of step with the modern world.”15 This deserted island fantasy is less an obsolete vision than an essential survival tactic. In the context of a congested, “technologized” culture, fantasies of a solipsistic paradise serve to ease the pressures of daily existence. Even within her newfound optimism, Giuliana would probably dream of her island again.

Pasolini’s Mountain Allegories Along with Italy’s readily available deserted islands, the barren mountainscapes in Italian films of this period also proved effective as onlocation depictions of the troubled modern psyche. Pasolini’s use of the arid, dark-brown slopes of Mount Etna become poignant according to his vitriolic indictments of Italian middle-class culture. Appearing in two consecutive films, Teorema (1968) and Porcile (1969), as well as the earlier Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), this landscape conveys a greater sense of expansive space than the deserted island. Its steep volcanic terrain is clearly more inhospitable than the often flat, easily navigable terrain of an island. And this region shows little or no signs of organic life, unlike a typical Mediterranean island, which may contain some trees, plants, and shrubs. Aside from their incorporation of an extremely hostile landscape, these films achieve their allegorical force through Pasolini’s assemblage of caricatures (as opposed to the more plausible characters found in Antonioni’s tetralogy, for example). Maurizio Viano’s examination of Pasolini asserts that the director’s bourgeois caricatures represent “signs-in-crisis”16 or, rather, our middle-class culture’s increasing inability to understand ourselves within the world we have created. Pasolini seeks to achieve “a certain realism”17 unavailable in everyday experience by allowing his characters (and, by extension, the audience) to discover their existential function within modern society.

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The filmmaker achieves this through the incorporation of Mount Etna’s desolate landscape, which appears intermittently to encroach upon the complacent middle-class locales. Of course, these films do not establish landscape allegory merely through the presence of both a desolate landscape and an assemblage of caricatures. Instead, Teorema and Porcile allegorize the barren slopes of Mount Etna by juxtaposing and crosscutting the landscape with these caricatures. But there are important differences between these two films. In Teorema, the landscape appears without a single human presence and so is theoretically less a place than a mere space. This unchanging glimpse of desolation appears again and again in the midst of the narrative proper, especially in the moments when each of the five characters (maid, son, mother, daughter, and father) “sexistentially” discovers his/her social function by having intercourse with the enigmatic god/devil guest. To a degree, the intruding shot of the volcanic terrain anticipates what Chatman refers to as their “spiritual vacuity,”18 but the landscape mostly evades interpretation until the film’s finale. In this final scene, the middle-class family’s patriarch (Massimo Girotti) decides amidst his self-realization to strip himself of all material possessions. In a dramatic frenzy, he relinquishes his large factory to the workers and then strips off all his clothing. Subsequently, the film depicts his would-be existential crisis by introducing the naked patriarch into the empty volcanic landscape. As this character flees from his factory, the film cuts abruptly to the now-familiar slopes of Mount Etna where we see the same man stumbling blindly across the slope with a dust cloud in his wake. His presence allows this barren space to become the place of spiritual vacuity. Through the allegorical juxtaposition of this character with the landscape, the film depicts the core of the modern psyche. Horrified by the surrounding desolation, the patriarch then launches into a fit of screaming, bringing the film to a close. In Porcile, the same desolate landscape becomes the setting for its own self-contained narrative, which the film crosscuts with a seemingly unrelated postwar middle-class scenario. The landscape narrative is a fifteenth-century depiction of a young outlaw (Pierre Clementi) who has a series of misadventures amidst the volcanic region of Mount Etna, culminating in his execution upon the slope. The other narrative is a portrayal of Julian (Jean-Pierre Leaud), the scion of a powerful postwar German family who prefers to remain, as Viano puts it, “disengaged from historical responsibilities,” neither “obediently” pursuing his father’s role nor “disobediently” joining the youth rebellion.19 Viano argues that the fifteenth-century protagonist’s

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perverse actions in his “world of desolation” correlate to Julian’s “unconscious” or inner psyche, especially with respect to the Freudian interpretations of his patricide, cannibalism, and overarching amoral hedonism associated with the student protests abounding at the time of the film’s conception.20 Functioning as a corollary to this narrative, the landscape narrative depicts these three psychological concepts literally. The film affirms cannibalism, for example, when the outlaw shoots another man and devours his corpse upon the mountain. In this way, the desolate landscape setting becomes the outer “Dorian Gray” reflection of Julian’s inner universe. Like the island Lisca Bianca for Anna in L’avventura, the barren slopes of Mount Etna become for Julian the place of his troubled psyche. In this idealized setting, the metahistorical version of his spiritual vacuity is played out. In the landscape narrative, dogs devour the young rebel after he is pinned down to the landscape. In the parallel narrative, pigs devour Julian, signifying the impotence of his young middle-class identity, especially as a potential student revolutionary. The two narratives are most obviously correlated (or, as Viano says, “sutured”21) through the mutual presence of an innocent bystander who witnesses the deaths of both the cannibal youth and Julian. Whereas Teorema’s treatment of Mount Etna preserves an abstract notion of space until the end of the film, Porcile maintains an allegorical correlation between the desolate landscape and the film’s bourgeois caricatures throughout. Only in their conclusions do these films clearly establish this wasteland setting as the place of the modern psyche, and so retroactively justify their crosscutting approach.

Desert Allegories: From Spaghetti Westerns to Zabriskie Point It seems that the utter bleakness of Mount Etna’s monotonous terrain could be replicated only by using desolate landscapes existing outside Italy. This on-location impetus compelled certain Italian filmmakers to pursue runaway productions in countries where similarly evocative terrains could be found. The expansive desert landscapes of both Spain and the American West were ideal for Italian directors who sought to allegorize modern living conditions. Because of its inevitable association with the mythological wasteland, the wellestablished genre of the Hollywood western was an especially attractive narrative canvas. Also applicable to modern Italian culture was the western’s abundance of mercilessly self-serving, opportunistic,

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and gold-starved gunslingers who displayed a familiar homosocial politic. Despite its American historical context, the western genre’s association between desolate landscapes and obsessive materialism made for a perfectly relevant allegory of modern life in Italy. Landy comments that the Italian western’s reliance on “a certain dry and dusty landscape” provided “an arena of open space for action.”22 Gunfighters situated in the desert made these expansive spaces into a place of deeper meaning in the same way as inserted human presence on Mediterranean deserted islands or slopes of Mount Etna. Italian westerns of the 1960s and ’70s were an aggressive departure from the American westerns that came before them. These spaghetti westerns, in turn, inspired later American westerns like The Shooting, which pursues an existential narrative mode according to the pessimistic sensibility of the time. An example of the Italian western’s exploitation of the desert landscape is Sergio Leone’s 1966 western epic Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly). Bondanella describes Leone’s work as portraying “a violent and cynical world far removed from that of Howard Hawks or John Ford.”23 Shot on location in Spain and starring the emblematic Clint Eastwood, Leone’s third western features a boundless desert wasteland in two segments: first, when gunslinger Blondie (Eastwood) abandons his partner Tuco (Eli Wallach) in the desert to fend for himself without horse or water, and second, when Tuco avenges himself by forcing Blondie to do the same. The second of these desert sequences persists for an evocative duration with Eastwood’s character limping along aimlessly in the scorching sun to the oppressive melody of Ennio Morricone’s orchestral score. Tuco’s would-be poetic justice is derailed when a runaway wagon’s only surviving passenger confides the location of a goldfilled grave to Blondie, which compels Tuco to keep his victim alive. Here, Tuco capitulates to an environment in which selfish opportunism supersedes justice. Within this allegorical context (announced by the film’s title), this “brute reality,” as Chatman would describe it, is revealed only at the core of the modern psyche. The characters’ presence in the frame transforms this sand-dune continuum into the place of infinite space, which, in this context, becomes a morally bankrupt universe or existential wasteland. Because these two characters encounter the runaway wagon unintentionally, the momentary site of this haphazard intersection also firmly establishes the surrounding landscape as an externalized depiction of Tuco’s contaminated values. The next scene’s portrayal of Tuco’s confrontational meeting with his brother, a priest, suggests that Tuco’s renunciation of Christian

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morality is compulsory for survival in this harsh environment, akin to the notion of spiritual adaptation in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso. As with Antonioni’s films, the spaghetti western’s emphasis on desert wastelands is more accurately understood as a realist’s affirmation of modern society rather than a condemnation. The expansive desert landscape featured in the Italian western became poignant in other cinematic contexts of Italian cinema. Regardless of its historical context, the desert is arguably the most ideal place of infinite space, since it is accessible enough while being the most desolate, unforgiving, and inhospitable of outdoor settings. Although arctic terrains and ocean expanses are just as extreme, they are far less practical as film locations. Antonioni, for example, inevitably revisited his motif of the desolate landscape, this time in the form of the desert wasteland. Both Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975) incorporate allegorical desertscape sequences, shot far away from Italian and even European soil, in order to critique modern life. Though widely considered a flawed work, the first film contains an orgiastic love-in sequence with several couples amidst the scenic, albeit vastly inhospitable Zabriskie Valley, the lowest point of California’s Death Valley. This footage is the extended fantasy that the young female protagonist Daria (Daria Halprin) derives from her actual sexual encounter there with her young male lover Mark (Mark Frechette). Chatman is right in observing that, “In a way, the scene is a fulfillment of Giuliana’s fantasy in Il deserto rosso.”24 That is, both fantasies become forms of psychological evasion. Chatman affirms that this theme of escape is “virtually obsessive” in Antonioni’s later films. 25 Underscored by environments antithetical to crowded urban existence, these escapist dreams or fantasies are suggested as an essential survival tactic in the modern world, but they can serve only as temporary diversions from the noise, congestion, structure, and rigid architecture of urban experience. In Zabriskie Point, the sense of escapism is exaggerated to the point where the young man’s flagrant use of a stolen airplane seems self-defeating, if not suicidal. Similarly, the young woman’s spectacular fantasies of both the desert love-in and the protracted explosion of her employer’s desert estate are incompatible with her shallow persona. Despite Zabriskie Point’s weaknesses, the desert fantasy sequence is a telling example of Italian cinema’s obsession with desolate landscapes during the 1960s and ’70s. The film takes its title from the scenic highway turnout designated as “Zabriskie Point” where the young couple embarks to explore and eventually have sexual relations in the desert. As in earlier examples, the expansive wasteland becomes the place

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of infinite space when the two lovers transform it into a primordial Eden. But their arrival at this momentary “place” is not haphazard like in Leone’s western. Rather, the manmade designation of “Zabriskie Point” already establishes it as a destination. In his historical examination of space/place theory, Casey discusses how Kant perceived both the terms “point” and “site” as merely relative and insubstantial notions of place. He quotes Kant as saying: “For what you speak of as several places are only parts of the same boundless space related to one another by a fixed position.”26 Casey goes on to elaborate: Yet site does not situate. Space in the modernist conception ends by failing to locate things or events in any sense other than that of pinpointing positions on a planiform geometric or cartographic grid. Place, on the other hand, situates, and it does so richly and diversely. It locates things in regions whose most complete expression is neither geometric nor cartographic. And if this is indeed the case, we are impelled to ask, how can we restore to place something like the interest and respect it enjoyed in mythic accounts, in early Greek and late Hellenistic and Neoplatonic philosophy, in long stretches of medieval thought—not to mention its abiding recognition in non-Western cultures? How, faced with the hegemony of Space, can we rediscover the special non-metric properties and un-sited virtues of Place?27

Casey suggests that scientific and technological advancement, according to the Enlightenment’s thirst for empirical knowledge, only stifles spirituality, like a sort of existential price tag. In the modern universe, peripheral landscapes of desolation become the only remaining regions that offer this mythic notion of place. Like L’avventura’s “adventure” to the deserted island of Lisca Bianca, Zabriskie Point suggests that such regions can be experienced only temporarily, if at all. Initially, the film defines the highway turnout “Zabriskie Point” as merely a photographic stopping “point” for elderly, overweight, and frivolous tourists. As such, it provides only an inauthentic experience of this space as place. Unlike the tourists, the young couple personifies an unconditioned sensibility. Consequently, these two are inclined to scramble over the precarious manmade wall and encounter the landscape more intimately by running down its slopes, yelling for fun, and eventually making love in the sand. In this context, only the younger generation is in a position to make this wasteland space into a bona fide place. And when this experience expands into fantasy, it allegorizes the adaptive inner psyche of modernity’s new generation only further. Again, the younger generation’s demonstrated ability to experience

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space as place corroborates Tuan’s differentiation between adults and children. By the same token, through their social conditioning, the elderly couple has learned to not stray from the pre-established zones of urban existence. Despite the reappearance of allegorical wastelands in Italian films of the 1960s, the motif became sparse in the late 1970s, and all but vanished in the 1980s. At one point, Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger places Jack Nicholson in the Sahara Desert to portray his character’s existential angst and to anticipate his eventual identity switch with a dead man, but the director dispenses with such terrains in his subsequent films. As late as 1990, Bertolucci makes spectacular use of African desert locations in his film The Sheltering Sky. While its use of desert landscape underscores the female protagonist’s search for identity, the film’s “sexistential” narrative does not, as Casey would say, “implace”28 these inhabited spaces with the same allegorical impact as the previous films. Toward the end of the 1970s and thereafter, Italian cinema had conformed to the increasing escapist tendencies of American cinema. In this way, allegories of adaptive fantasies in films like Il deserto rosso or Zabriskie Point have since regressed into purely escapist narratives. What had been interpolated fantasy sequences become the films themselves. On a larger cultural level, this evolution is a shift from a pessimistic sensibility to a nonintellectual, pasteurized sensibility. The evolution of Antonioni’s landscape allegories implies a larger cultural trajectory. First, as a seemingly incurable neurotic, L’avventura’s Anna portrays a decidedly pessimistic notion of spirituality in crisis. Just as neurotic at first, Il deserto rosso’s Giuliana eventually adapts to her cold, industrial environment. Zabriskie Point’s Daria, with her ability to imagine an alternative universe, seems more self-assured in her spiritually vacuous world. (Positioned as adaptively amoral opportunists, Leone’s western characters are closest to this latter category.) Apparently, Antonioni’s The Passenger returns to a pessimistic view when the attempt of the protagonist David Locke (Nicholson) to realize an alternate existence leads to his demise. However, The Passenger only confirms the difference between Zabriskie Point’s two youth characters. Daria negotiates modernity by escaping through intermittent fantasy and perseveres, while her lover Mark attempts an actual form of escape and, like Locke in The Passenger, dies for it. Within this transformation from defeatism to survivalism, the allegorical wasteland confers a sense of either heaven or hell, depending on whose “modern” psyche is portrayed.

Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Chapter Seven Australian Outback Allegory Italian cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, along with specific cases like El Topo, demonstrate how wasteland landscapes reflect the larger spiritual crisis of the time. Other national cinemas from the same period associate this spiritual crisis with one culture’s exploitation of another, in both environmental and cultural contexts. In these films, landscape allegory emerges similarly by way of peripheral wilderness locations. Simon Schama’s ideas about landscape inform this mode of film allegory. In his study Landscape and Memory, Schama asserts: For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.1

This notion relates to Tuan’s discussion of experience and how space is a function of both individual and cultural memory. That is, individual memory negotiates a sense of place while cultural memory negotiates a larger sense of myth. Once any culture mythologizes a wilderness so as to confer notions of development or progress, this landscape is already exploited. And the myth perishes when the land is colonized, cultivated, or simply cleared. Schama’s study traces the mythological aspects of landscape to show how Western culture has perpetuated itself at the expense of the natural environment. He states: But though environmental history offers some of the most original and challenging history now being written, it inevitably tells the same dismal tale: of land taken, exploited, exhausted; of traditional cultures said to have lived in a relation of sacred reverence with the soil displaced by the reckless individualist, the capitalist aggressor. And while the mood of these histories is understandably penitential, they differ as to when the Western fall from grace took place. For some historians it was the Renaissance and the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that doomed the earth to be treated by the West as a machine that would never break, however hard it was used

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and abused. For Lynn White, Jr., it was the invention in the seventh century A.D. of a fixed-harness plow that sealed the earth’s fate. The “knife” of the new implement “attacked the land;” farming became an ecological war. “Formerly man had been a part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature.”2

Schama’s chapter “The Verdant Cross” discusses how Christianity assimilated pagan traditions and then adjusted its iconography over time, culminating in a complete transference of religious sensibility to the domain of nature itself. Schama echoes other scholars of American nineteenth-century landscape painting when he observes that spirituality and American expansion were organically linked so that the two were inseparable cultural projects.3 Unlike the spiritual affirmation of nineteenth-century American expansionism, the eventual crisis of spirituality corresponded to a critique of Western expansionism and its ideological implications. Like the wasteland terrains in so many Italian films of the 1960s and ’70s, the vast Australian outback became an evocative locus of meaning for filmmakers at this time. Allowing the outback to function as a character in the narrative, these directors’ films focus on the Australian national myth deriving from environmental and cultural exploitation. Two films in particular, British director Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Australian director Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), address Schama’s notion of cultural memory as it relates to the exploitation of indigenous cultures and environments by outside imperialist forces. In both films, Australia’s marginalized wilderness situates a pointed critique of exploitation as the central characters pass through them. According to the defeatist allegory of futility, these characters not only pass through the landscape, they struggle against it. Beyond the wider critique of “technologization,” industrialization, or spiritual crisis evident in Italian films and El Topo, these films point to the repercussions of one culture’s attempts to dominate another. Moreover, these films reveal how the indigenous landscape becomes an outer reflection of inner consciousness for both cultures.

Roeg’s Walkabout The British production Walkabout explores the marginalization of Australian Aborigine culture by way of two middle-class youths’ accidental trek through the outback’s hostile terrain. By focusing on a small set of representative characters, this film strives for a more overt

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allegory than other landscape-oriented films of the time. The adolescent female typifies a conditioned member of the Australian middle class whose values and prejudices have been sufficiently instilled to ensure her assimilation into the modernized, technological society of her parents. Her younger brother, on the other hand, demonstrates a more universal degree of childhood innocence or tabula rasa with respect to cultural assumptions and behavioral expectations. Where preconceived notions of proper behavior hamper the near-adult character, the naïve boy is able to learn from the environment, getting them out of various predicaments and ultimately sustaining their survival in the wilderness. When they come across an adolescent Aborigine male, the boy’s ability and eagerness to learn the Aborigine’s language, paralleled by his older sister’s total inability and unwillingness to acknowledge the Aborigine’s affection for her, offers a larger comment on the effects of Western cultural conditioning. Walkabout defines the allegorical roles of these characters through their confrontation with the obstacles inherent to this wilderness landscape: its oppressive heat, its scarcity of food and water, and the sheer difficulty of navigating its vastness. Within this allegorical arena, the film uses an aggressive editing style to conjure up key moments of what Schama would refer to as “cultural memory.” For example, early in their journey across the desert, the young boy has a vision of historical Australian trekkers on the backs of camels, underscoring his role as an unconditioned explorer of a yet-to-be colonized domain. Conversely, the adolescent Aborigine, when attempting to kill a cow for food, witnesses Australian hunters effortlessly shoot down a large indigenous bull for commercial use. While his experience isn’t exactly a memory to be associated with the landscape, it is a key reflection on the difference, as Schama would put it, between being a part of nature’s ecosystem and merely an exploiter of natural resources. All such moments derive from the wilderness itself as manifestations of these characters’ psychological makeup within the narrative’s larger allegorical critique. In addition to the Aborigine’s cultural epiphany when witnessing the dominant culture’s exploitation of natural resources, Walkabout’s odyssey through the outback features a series of more direct encounters with cultural and environmental exploitation. When the trio arrives at a lush, hospitable area, the Aborigine departs briefly to visit a ranch house where other Aborigines are painting cheap ceramic souvenirs for their patronizing white employer. An unfortunate communication gap prevents the Aborigine from taking his two traveling companions to the very haven of civilization they seek. Instead, he

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leaves them to wait beyond a nearby hill. After the adolescent girl misunderstands his marital intentions and rejects him, the Aborigine commits a ritualistic suicide. Leaving him behind, the girl and her brother finally arrive at the partly civilized remnants of an industrial mining operation. Their exploration of the abandoned mining site nearby completes the film’s display of exploitation in its various forms. In the final moment of cultural memory, the female character, now a suburban housewife in the same seaside apartment building where she grew up, briefly recalls a moment of Edenic bliss. With the Aborigine swimming nearby, she and her brother sit naked upon a tiny island in the sun. This vision turns out to be only a fleeting distraction when her businessman husband calls her back to adult reality. Like the female character in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso, Walkabout’s female protagonist becomes an exemplar of modern middle-class existence who can only fantasize nostalgically about this “place” of childlike innocence. In this latter context, such an unrecoverable domain also represents an organic acceptance of other cultures as equals. The idiosyncratic disposition of each of the three characters toward the wilderness landscape is crucial to the allegorical intention of this film. But also crucial is the notion of struggle. Prior to their encounter with the Aborigine, the two Australian siblings flee the scene of a remote picnic site where their businessman father had attempted to kill them before killing himself as a reaction to his unfulfilling, pressured existence. Taking a small radio with them, which serves as a constant reassurance of the Western civilization from where they originated and to where they wish to return, they head straight into the outback. Initially, they must climb up and through various rocky foothills and mountains, and then make their way across vast, barren sand dunes. Even the boy’s resourcefulness reaches an impasse when the tiny oasis they find appears to be depleted of its fruit and water. But after an Aborigine male hunting nearby provides them with food and water and consents to navigate the outback for them, their sense of struggle subsides. According to the allegory at hand, their inability to survive without societal provisions, compared to the Aborigine’s self-reliance and keen understanding of the Australian wilderness, demonstrates the Western fallacy of cultural superiority. The characters’ dream associations with the natural landscape also allegorize the wilderness landscape in Walkabout, akin to Sala’s interpretation of Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, as well as in Enrico’s avant-garde film La rivière du hibou. Amid its initial scenes of struggle, the film depicts the two characters sleeping in order to suggest that, through their dreams, their psyches become

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increasingly tied to the landscape itself. Unlike other allegorical landscape narratives, this film incorporates many shots of the landscape for its own sake, moving beyond mere establishing shots and ostensibly probing the landscape for extended durations. Just as Jean Epstein’s camera in La chute de la maison Usher frames the misty lake and pans up the tree trunk during the funeral procession, Roeg’s camera in Walkabout first frames and then follows the contours of mountain crags. The film even superimposes this footage on separate shots of the sleeping youths. This latter technique of superimposition occurs throughout the film, and it is perhaps the clearest available technique of associating characters’ personas and inner psychological states with the landscape.

Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock Possibly influenced by Walkabout, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock correlates an indigenous landscape with certain characters’ dream states, this time conjuring a sense of Australia’s collective cultural unconsciousness. This film establishes and maintains a narrative equivocation between dream states and wakefulness more obviously than Walkabout. As a result, the viewer can never rely on the camera’s shifting perspectives. In the beginning of Picnic at Hanging Rock, just after the film’s title appears inscribed in cursive across a wide shot of a craggy, mist-enshrouded landscape, a young woman’s voice declares: “What we see and what we seem are but a dream—a dream within a dream.” As Michael Bliss observes in his study of Weir’s films, this modification of Poe’s poem “A Dream Within a Dream” (1849) suggests the speaker’s willful acceptance of a “doubly abstracted” universe.4 The film establishes this notion through its open sense of visual poetic license, similar to what Pasolini refers to as the “cinema of poetry.” Gerard Genette’s discussion of poetic language is applicable here: Of poetic language in this sense, which it might be better to call language in the poetic state, or the poetic state of language, one could say without pushing the metaphor too far, that it is a language in a state of dreaming, and we know that the relation between dreaming and wakefulness is not one of a gap, but on the contrary—but how can we say what the contrary of a gap is? In fact what allows itself to be most accurately defined by the gap, as gap, is not poetic language but prose, the oratio soluta, disjointed speech, language itself as a gap and

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disjunction between signifiers and signifieds, signifier and signified. In which case, poetry would certainly be, as Cohen says (but in a different sense, or rather in the opposite direction), antiprose and reduction of the gap: gap from the gap, negation, rejection, oblivion, effacement of the gap, of the gap that makes language; illusion, dream, the necessary and absurd utopia of a language without gap, without hiatus— without shortcomings. 5

Insofar as the medium of film can be treated as a kind of language, Picnic’s narrative mode can be understood as “in a state of dreaming” and therefore strives to depict this sense of “utopia.” Crucial to this utopia is the exoticized wilderness region of Hanging Rock. Unlike in Walkabout, however, the bush landscape in this film appears only in certain segments. To maintain its degree of poetic license throughout, Picnic establishes a notion of what can be termed “retrospective dynamism” where the viewer is constantly asked to look back and reflect on what had previously been unclear. A good example is the introductory voiceover, which belongs to the character Miranda (Anne Lambert), the most beautiful and charismatic of the schoolgirl characters in the film. When we witness her emerging from sleep in the next shot, we can only assume she is the speaker until we actually see her speaking with the same voice in a subsequent shot. Later, we are called upon to recollect her poetic phrase in light of similar musings she offers within the Hanging Rock vicinity such as, “Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.” The association of these more distant statements with her introductory musing contributes to the narrative’s retrospective dynamism. Another example occurs when Miranda’s roommate Sara (Margaret Nelson) calls out for “Bertie,” later identified as her similarly orphaned brother. The notion of retrospective dynamism here resembles the human mind’s ability to “narrativize” a dream into a coherent story. Memory becomes crucial as it functions within the procession of a dream’s events. Otherwise, the dream is recalled only as a vague array of fragments. Picnic’s narrative equivocation, or what Bliss would call its “doubly abstracted” universe, is also achieved through its literalized depictions of dreaming and how it corresponds to reality. In his study of dreaming, J. Allan Hobson discusses the realistic aspect of the dream experience: “The cardinal features of all dreaming—detailed sensory imagery, the illusion of reality, illogical thinking, intensification of emotion, and unreliable memory—constitute its form, as opposed to and irrespective of the content of a particular dream.”6 According

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to this definition, Picnic’s technique of retrospective dynamism, not to mention its use of cross-cutting and slow motion, can be read as “dream form,” whereas what we see is “dream content.” This first glimpse of the Hanging Rock landscape and its ethereal mist could be the content of Miranda’s dream, announced through her version of Poe’s poem. In turn, this dream would be a premonition of that afternoon’s picnic and schoolgirls’ disappearance, corroborating Miranda’s gifted insight. Once on the Rock, Miranda and the rest of her small expedition suddenly collapse together upon a hard stone plateau beneath a number of phallic spires to enjoy what appears to be a brief nap. However, three of the girls awaken in an irreversible trance and continue their methodical, upward advance. Later in the film, the young Englishman Michael (Dominic Guard), smitten with Miranda, recounts a recurring nightmare to his Australian mate Albert (John Jarratt) of the Rock and its stranded young victims. These cold-sweat nightmares finally compel Michael to attempt his own search for the missing girls even after the bloodhounds fail. The most significant depiction of dreaming occurs when Michael reaches the same rocky plateau where the four girls had napped. Here, he slumbers himself and hears Miranda’s and other characters’ prophetic lines from earlier in the film. Michael’s catatonic dream state divulges information that he could never have known otherwise, allowing for the mind’s transcendence of time and space, at least in this unconscious state. Like the protagonist of Dog Star Man, this character then attempts ineffectively to ascend the rocky incline further while calling out Miranda’s name. Eventually, Albert discovers him lying against the rock with a blank stare, as if to suggest that his mental activity was a waking dream or conscious experience. Later, even the skeptical Albert recounts a dream about his sister Sara coming to visit him. This corresponds to a prior scene where Sara commits suicide by jumping from her bedroom window the same night the dream occurred. In this way, the film portrays a world where dreams and reality are never far removed, are intertwined, and may even influence each other, to the point of becoming indistinguishable. Positioned as peripheral to the civilized world, Hanging Rock becomes the specific place where consciousness and unconsciousness overlap. Ultimately, Hanging Rock’s role as a dreamscape moves beyond individual realms to the larger purpose of national mythmaking and how cultural imperialism manifests itself in the Australian context. Picnic’s social critique points to repression both in terms of British cultural dominance over Australians and the patriarchal dominance

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of Australian men over women. Contrary to Walkabout, this film all but ignores the marginalized Aboriginal people. Kay Schaffer’s study Women in the Bush effectively identifies the Australian cultural discourse that informed both Joan Lindsay’s original novel of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Weir’s film adaptation of it. She asserts: The discourse maintains the authoritarian influence of the British parent culture through a particular form of neo-colonialism. It constructs the land as a particularly raw, harsh, and unforgiving other which cannot be mastered. The “real” Australian is caught within this system of representations.7

This film frames the craggy region of Hanging Rock as a landscape of otherness located well outside the early twentieth-century Australian establishments depicted here. As in Walkabout, landscape allegory in this film emerges through the juxtaposition of the narrative’s representative characters with its peripheral wilderness setting. These characters are personifications of a mythologized past where the year 1900 functions emblematically. Like the protagonists of Antonioni and Pasolini’s wasteland allegories, they function as allegorical avatars or, rather, manipulated representations of social, cultural, and historical concepts and issues. Moreover, these characters are dream-beings. That is, they are realized through a larger cultural unconsciousness, which takes them beyond the confines of usual character construction. In accordance with Schaffer’s explanation of Australian bush mythology, the forms of cultural repression revealed in Picnic at Hanging Rock are inherent to settings involving both British and Australian characters. The array of characters here becomes a network of cultural binaries: British/ Australian, upper/lower class, male/female, adolescent/adult, brother/ sister. The film portrays the disparity between British and Australian most obviously through the characters of Michael and Albert. Well groomed, elegantly dressed, and showing delicately refined manners, Michael epitomizes middle-class English decorum. At the same time, he is prone to having daydreams and visions powerful enough to compel him irrationally back to Hanging Rock to search for the missing schoolgirls. As a typical Romantic, Michael personifies Victorian culture, which the film treats as an outdated sensibility. Conversely, Albert is a common, lower-class stable boy, or what Schaffer refers to as an Australian “native son.”8 He is rough and shabbily dressed, with coarse manners. In a telling example, Albert encapsulates their cultural disparity when he says: “I say the crude things—you just think

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‘em.” Like the dynamic between the sister and brother in Walkabout, Michael is culturally conditioned, while Albert uses common sense. Their respective social roles within the narrative are the most illustrative in the sense that Albert works for Michael’s wealthy aunt and uncle. The two men only become acquainted through circumstantial proximity and Michael’s willing condescension. In addition to the clear dichotomy of Michael and Albert, Picnic’s female characters serve to personify Australia’s forms of cultural repression, especially in their attraction to the forbidden domain of Hanging Rock. Together, the schoolgirls demonstrate their desire for freedom and passion, which they experience early in the film when they treat St. Valentine’s Day like a pagan ritual by holding the statuette of the saint above their heads. Individually, the schoolgirls personify a specific societal characteristic. Leading the four-member expedition to the Rock, Miranda embodies a need for existential freedom, especially with respect to love. Marion (Jane Vallis), the schoolgirl version of the elder geometry teacher Miss McGraw (Vivean Gray), embodies the need for intellectual freedom. Irma (Karen Robson) demonstrates charity through her kindness to the implacable Edith (Christine Schuler). And Edith resembles the complacent homemaker. In his analysis of Weir’s films, Jonathan Rayner distinguishes between the members of the expedition: “Those females displaying qualities that cannot be accommodated within this society (thirst for knowledge and intellectual growth, universal and healing love—both attempts at spiritual transcendence rather than suppression of humanity) will not return from the Rock.”9 Accordingly, Miranda, Marion, and Miss McGraw are consumed by the Rock. Edith, on the other hand, is immune to Hanging Rock’s forces since she refuses to take part in the other girls’ ritualistic removal of their socks and shoes. Her companions’ behavior also corresponds to her later account of Miss McGraw ascending the region without her skirt on. Irma, while enraptured at first, remains behind to be rescued. Her values are too grounded in her present social conditioning of womanhood. Sara is the most repressed character of all. She and her brother Albert had been orphans, and Sara recounts her sadistic punishment after expressing a liberating ambition to be a circus rider. In this way, she personifies Australia itself as the “orphaned child” of the British Empire. At one point, the headmistress Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) singles Sara out when her guardian neglects to pay her tuition. As the film focuses on Sara’s personal plight from the beginning, she becomes a scapegoat for Mrs. Appleyard, who personifies the Empire’s weakening attempts to retain Victorian values in a divergent

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culture. Rayner affirms this idea: “Mutability is the unthinkable disaster that results in the collapse of the College, the headmistress, and the Empire.”10 Mrs. Appleyard’s decision to send Sara back to the orphanage, along with Sara’s subsequent suicide, allegorizes the British subjugation of Australian culture and identity. Because Sara is barred from the picnic, she never has the chance to “appeal” to the Rock like the others, and so death becomes her only alternative. As a characteristic victim of cultural repression, the larger implication of Sara’s suicide is equivalent to that of the Aborigine male in Walkabout. Like the outback in Walkabout, the peripheral vicinity of Hanging Rock is essential to Picnic’s allegory in terms of how cultural repression functions within the national unconsciousness. Initially, the film “narrativizes” the Australian bush myth when Mrs. Appleyard warns the picnickers that: “the region is renowned for its venomous snakes and poisonous ants.” Schaffer’s study offers insight on the Rock’s significance with respect to its heritage as an Australian “bush” region: “In terms of an imaginary fantasy for Australian viewers, Picnic imagines the bush as the most powerful and mysterious object of the film. The bush obstructs man’s possession and mastery of the girls, of logical narrative meaning and a coherent self-identity.”11 According to Schaffer, the repression of the female in Australian culture derives from the insecure Australian male who has been emasculated over time by British political and cultural dominance. Schaffer brings in Freudian theory to suggest that Australians perceived Britain as the oppressive Father’s Law, and the only recourse toward their own national identity, at least in patriarchal terms, was to correlate feminine otherness with the strange and vastly inhospitable Australian wilderness.12 Eventually, Schaffer identifies a contradiction in the Australian bush myth: “The film Picnic at Hanging Rock illustrates the paradox that the bush is both ‘no place for a woman’ and, at the same time, the place of Woman with reference to a Western symbolic order as it locates the feminine.”13 This notion applies to the Aboriginal people as well. This paradox is depicted not only in the bush myth, but also in the narrative’s inherent tension between subjective/dream and objective/conscious realities. Schaffer argues that Australia’s female authors contribute to the perpetuation of the bush myth. Author Lindsay’s attitudes about Hanging Rock may actually have been purely tongue-in-cheek, not unlike Poe’s intention in “Eureka.” Otherwise, she would not seem immune to the cultural forces at work. Schaffer says ultimately that “women are not the land” and “the land is not a mother—either barbaric or nurturing.”14 In other words, Australians must learn to debunk the bush myth if

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their cultural identity is to recover from its own repressive heritage. In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the filmmaker first invokes the national dream before attempting to expose its frailties. The various forms of landscape allegory considered in this and previous chapters reveal a range of cultural issues in European, American, Australian, and other national contexts during the 1960s and ’70s. According to the sociopolitical climate of the time, an overall sense of disillusionment presides over these other issues. The American western’s duel in the sun allegory reflects a larger postwar psychological struggle and a reevaluation of basic ethical principles. The Italian wasteland allegory also found in El Topo explores the spiritual crisis that derived from modern socioeconomic conditions: capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. The Australian bush allegory probes the repressive effects of cultural exploitation. In all these films, the principal characters become avatars of certain abstract ideas. These avatars, in turn, struggle against an inhospitable landscape, striving to exist harmoniously within it toward some greater attempt at an improved reality. In this context, conscious and unconscious states intertwine and overlap, making for an unusually complex narrative progression that undermines any sense of objective reality. Most of these films end on a sour note, as if to suggest that no solutions are available or that present circumstances will only become worse. The association of desolate landscapes and existential futility was a cultural phenomenon powerful enough to communicate a universal message to international film-going audiences of the time, even when it was striking a chord on an unconscious level. Just as idealized landscapes connoting alternative spiritual optimism found popular appeal in the nineteenth century, these cinematically manipulated landscapes of desolation reflected a rising pessimism in the twentieth century.

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Chapter Eight Landscape Allegory in Hollywood Previous chapters consider many films that incorporate wastelands into their allegories of existential, spiritual, or cultural disillusionment. These feature-length narratives range from big-budget Hollywood productions, such as the epic western Duel in the Sun, to the independent low-budget productions made in less affluent national conditions, as was the case with El Topo. Chapter seven explored two major film examples of the Australian bush allegory, but unlike the previous films cited, Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock focus on forms of cultural exploitation. Where the concept of a wilderness is involved, this latter form of landscape allegory is the most aggressive, because it reveals the marginalization of a weaker culture both literally and figuratively through its emphasis on a peripheral zone or wilderness. Typically, the dominant culture forces the weaker culture to exist farther into these less inhabitable and even brutal environments, while the dominant culture develops its urban centers around the most fertile and economically viable regions. The sequestration of American Indians to barren desert reservations is a good example of this cultural phenomenon, as is the marginalization of the Aboriginal people in the Australian outback. In the post–World War II context of mass cultural reevaluation, especially during the experimental, intellectual, and pessimistic 1960s and ’70s, even mainstream cinema questioned the historical patterns of Western nations and the evils of their imperialistic past. European and American involvement in conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam further encouraged, and sometimes inspired, many defeatist films of this nature. Hollywood recognized the profitability of even the most virulent critiques leveled against the United States, especially when mediated through an allegorical approach. Such allegories circumvent direct reference to the present by exploiting historical contexts from the distant past or an imagined future. These narratives involve some form of cultural exploitation wherein a characteristically “Western” body of outsiders invades, conquers, or manipulates a nation or indigenous culture. Furthermore, the landscape of the invaded culture is both an incentive and a hindrance. That is, it promises its invaders

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an untapped wealth of natural resources while proving not so easy to conquer in its wilderness state. In these films, the natural settings go beyond the conventional function of narrative backdrop and become characters themselves within this allegorical context.

The Western Megalomaniac versus the Third World Landscape As in the films already considered, allegorical narratives directed at Western politics derive their potency from a narrow assemblage of personifications, caricatures, exemplars, or avatars. A clear-cut protagonist may not be as essential in other landscape allegories, but these films clearly position the protagonist as male, charismatic, ambitious, idealistic, and so on. This character is best understood as a definitive megalomaniac—obsessed with power and his own ability to dominate and rule over others. Because the film must pit this megalomaniac against some force of resistance, his presence as the protagonist implies the correlative inclusion of an antagonist. However, unlike conventional narratives that feature a human antagonist, the adversary here is the indigenous landscape itself. Human presence associated with this landscape becomes only another factor in what makes this wilderness indomitable by outsiders. The native inhabitants of these invaded landscapes function in the same way as the incidental rural folk appearing in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. They merely contribute to the collective essence of the natural landscape or, in this case, the concept of a wilderness. The megalomaniac, personifying the larger pattern of Western politics, ventures deep into a realm of both untapped natural resources and undeveloped territories, which is simply a microcosm for the historical perception of the “Third World.” On an even deeper allegorical level, this protagonist’s attempt to conquer a particular wilderness is an inward odyssey toward the core of his own psyche wherein the “error” of his self-importance and will to power becomes increasingly apparent. Films such as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) make sundry associations between wilderness landscapes and the protagonist’s degenerating psychological condition. Such narratives typically build to a climactic exposition of psychological defeat in the form of madness or death. As in other defeatist landscape allegories, the sense of futility is crucial to the narrative’s intended social critique and its condemnation of a

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larger social phenomenon. As in Dog Star Man and many other films of this period, the protagonist struggles against the landscape itself in an effort to conquer everything that derives from it. Ultimately, these narratives chastise the imperialist impulse when this character is effectively consumed by the landscape or, rather, by his own obsessive psyche. This allegory points also to the more pervasive futility of attempting to understand humankind’s place in the universe. In other words, this megalomaniac character associates himself with the gods—the consummate manifestation of cultural conceit.

Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia A seminal example of this specific landscape allegory is David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia. Just as Antonioni’s L’avventura wasn’t necessarily the first Italian wasteland allegory, Lawrence of Arabia was not the first allegory of its kind. Nevertheless, its lasting cultural impact is still evident today. The megalomaniac character is based on the actual British historical figure T.E. Lawrence, which lends this film’s allegory greater poignancy. The film begins its account of an eccentric individual’s legacy atypically with his accidental death by motorcycle crash in his British homeland. But the narrative then jumps back in time to Lawrence’s military campaigns in Arabia during the First World War. It is here that the film quickly establishes Lawrence’s extraordinary charisma, which the British government exploits for its own political agenda. The film enhances this sense of charisma through its casting of Peter O’Toole in the role of Lawrence. O’Toole’s uncommonly piercing blue eyes and glowing blonde hair underscore his status as a Western invader. The film progresses through a series of desert encounters in which Lawrence impresses, charms, and even enchants various Arabian figures of prominence. He eventually inspires the nomadic desert tribes to assemble a substantial force against the occupying Turkish army. Lawrence becomes instrumental in disrupting the historical pattern of outside dominance in Arabia—all under the supervision of the encroaching British Empire. Lawrence of Arabia offers a steady influx of clues about Lawrence’s uncommon persona, which appears to take its strength from the landscape itself. The film establishes the uniqueness of his personality and then associates it with the wilderness through the sheer force of will he exerts in overcoming the hostile Arabian desert. His peers affirm his “madness” when, while performing petty office duties in Cairo, Lawrence allows a lit match to burn out between his two fingers.

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Later, in the Arabian desert, Prince Feisal questions what authority Lawrence is ultimately serving, implying that Lawrence is really only chasing his own narcissistic obsession rather than any larger political cause. Nevertheless, he becomes something of a prophet in this “exoticized” cultural environment, and once Lawrence has proved himself a worthy leader and strategist, he begins to make self-ascribed references to Moses. This occurs when he proposes crossing the Sinai “like Moses” and later, during the crossing, when he compares a nearby dust storm to a “pillar of fire.” Eventually, his confidence reaches the characteristic proportions of a true megalomaniac. After sustaining a minor bullet wound, he remarks that only a “golden bullet” can kill him. Later, he pompously rebukes Sherif Ali by exclaiming, “Do you think I’m just anybody?” Throughout the film, Lawrence’s personal obsession drives his ability to inspire others to follow his ambitions, which seem to derive almost arbitrarily from the oft-proclaimed “impossibility” of conquering vast distances across the brutal Arabian landscape. Lawrence of Arabia features various extended sequences of Lawrence’s treks across the harsh and barren Arabian desert. Still, the most significant association between the indigenous landscape and Lawrence’s psychological transformation occurs when he removes himself from the others to contemplate the predicament of the warring tribes’ inability to unite and overcome the Turks. In this scene, Lawrence ventures out alone across a windswept dune and sits against the side of a sandy basin with his back to the viewer—apparently transfixed by his obsession of “needing a miracle” to defeat the Turks. The movie camera’s framing of his meditative solitude within this desert wilderness firmly establishes this protagonist’s psychological connection to the indigenous landscape itself, akin to Caspar David Friedrich’s Ruckenfigur motif of a figure seen from behind, contemplating a landscape. Through this film’s technique of extended juxtaposition in this and other sequences, Lawrence’s psyche and the landscape become one and the same. For Lawrence, his subsequent inspiration to cross the “impassible” Nefud desert and attack the Turkish stronghold of Akaba from the rear is merely an externalized opportunity to conquer the inner mysteries of his existence. His newly discovered charisma becomes a personal obsession, and Lawrence’s glowing self-importance serves to captivate the Arab guerillas as well as the overseeing British politicians. The allegory of futility emerges when Lawrence experiences a critical break with his path toward godliness. While temporarily imprisoned, he is humiliated by the lashings of a Turkish whip. At

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this point, he decides he is “only a man” and subsequently assumes the disposition of a bloodthirsty warlord. Hereafter, he eschews any sense of ethical responsibility or mercy toward the enemy, almost as if to protest the failure of his existential quest. In the chaotic wake of the Arab victory and expulsion of the Turks, Lawrence becomes only more disillusioned with himself and his once seemingly higher destiny. While Prince Feisal and the British government negotiate for control over the new Arab state, Lawrence departs feeling defeated and unfulfilled. Returned to his mundane life in the British countryside, he attempts to relive the thrill of his Arabian experience by speeding on his motorbike, and so what had seemed in the beginning to be mere recklessness becomes poignant in hindsight. In the end, the realization that his charismatic degree of vision is empty of any larger meaning or destiny is more than Lawrence can bear. This film’s allegory of existential futility is a direct attack on Western politics. Though a pariah among his fellow countrymen, Lawrence not only characterizes the British Empire’s self-importance and willingness to exploit Arabia for its own gain, but also the historic disposition of the occident toward the so-called Third World. Lawrence’s seemingly well-intended promise to “give” Arabia her freedom so the British government could move in more easily is a larger reflection of Western politics. Such politics are just as applicable to Korea, Vietnam, and other manipulated conflicts of the film’s time, as well as to similar situations in the present. When Lawrence’s vanity becomes his sole motivating force, it serves to represent the larger “vanity” of the occident. Western sensibility derives mostly from superior technology, since it has long been the principal means of martial manipulation and dominance. Early in the film, Lawrence’s proud resolve to brave the desert alone with the help of his military compass reflects this attitude. In the end, the well-established urban technologies in Damascus prove too difficult for the invading Arab forces to assume control over, and many of them simply return to their former desert inhabitance. The British, too, eventually leave—an outcome anticipated by Lawrence’s own anticlimactic departure. More than any attempt at allegory, this major studio release sought mass audience appeal through its on-location exoticism and military action sequences. Nonetheless, its particular attention to landscape settings became a model for subsequent films. And while the underlying narrative of one man’s personal obsession with his extraordinary breadth of vision was not the selling point of the picture, its immense box-office success and critical acclaim informed the decision to try the same narrative formula a second time. Only three years

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later, the same studio released Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim (1965), in which another characteristically “Western” megalomaniac ventures into the exotic indigenous landscape of a “Third World” culture, only to become its temporary ruler. This film also stars Peter O’Toole in the role of a military renegade who pursues a personal obsession both literally and figuratively into the “Third World wilderness” of his own psyche. The essential presence of exoticism trades the Arabian desert for the jungle landscape of a secluded Southeast Asian island. After hesitating to act in a moment of crisis at sea, this protagonist becomes a drifter and eventually discovers a similar ability to impress the members of a “primitive” island culture. This “Lord Jim” leads them against their foreign oppressors, but later commits an infraction against the tribe. Acting with egotistic resolve and not wanting to flee from his responsibility again, he willingly submits to a death sentence. As with Lawrence of Arabia, the landscape allegory of this film condemns the Western inclination to confer upon itself a “manifest destiny” to control foreign lands and their native inhabitants.

Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King Yet another big-budget Hollywood adaptation of a turn-of-thecentury narrative appeared about a decade later that, once again, incorporated a Lawrence/Lord Jim protagonist into its imperialist allegory of futility. Based on Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 short story, John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975) tells the story of two British confidence men, former soldiers in India, attempting to trick their way into becoming rulers of an inhospitable region of warring tribes near Afghanistan. Like in Arabia during World War I, the presence of the British Empire is keenly felt and not always appreciated by the local cultures here. At the same time, a lack of political unity makes these peoples vulnerable to foreign political interests. Unlike in Lawrence of Arabia and Lord Jim, two characters assume the protagonist role in this film. They are co-conspirators motivated more by sheer greed and opportunism than by any personal obsession or inward psychological probing. They have little stake in helping the local “heathens” beyond manipulating circumstances for their own profit, which makes the tone of the narrative’s larger social critique more virulent than in the previous two films. Despite their selfish, renegade attitude, the pair still dons their British uniforms, literally and figuratively personifying the British Empire to the film’s conclusion. Ultimately, this conspiratorial duo and their unabashed

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desire for material gain confer a notion of seediness upon Western politics. Like Lawrence of Arabia, this film incorporates an extended wilderness sequence, in which the landscape presents itself to the traveling protagonists as an impassible obstacle, assuming the antagonist role in the narrative’s allegorical assemblage. First, as they head through the Khyber Pass, the pair must confront a predictably harsh desert terrain similar to the one found in Lean’s film. They then contend with a difficult river obstructing their path. Eventually, they reach a snowbound universe of precipitous mountains and bottomless chasms, the final test of their ambition to rule over an exotic culture in a faraway region. With a montage of wide vista shots, the film exploits the mountainous landscape for its potential to suggest impending doom for the two adventurers. No human characters are depicted in this array of landscape views, and only dramatic scoring helps to place these snowy mountains into a more abstract allegorical context. These glimpses are similar to a consecutive display of Ansel Adams’ photographs of the Yosemite Valley in the wintertime, which were intended to inspire the viewer with a sense of wonderment. The exaggerated degree of struggle ensues when the two men barely find shelter from an enormous avalanche. A specious feeling of destiny reveals itself in the character of Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery) when he recalls this experience amidst his subsequent psychological transformation into a megalomaniac. What begins as a simple tale of two characteristically “Western” petty thieves transforms into an allegory of the familiar megalomaniac when the rogue Danny, through a fortuitous accident, finds himself in a position of great reverence. Once the two men reach the distant northerly region of Kafiristan, they use their superior military technology and rifles to impress the indigenous cultures. After their identities as British soldiers are recognized, Danny asserts their definitive cause as “bringing enlightenment to the darker regions of the earth.” Mistaken for a god by the local tribes, Danny is eventually brought before the high priest of the presiding holy city. Again, fortuitous circumstances elevate Danny to the status of absolute ruler. Like Lawrence, he cannot help but indulge the notion that it is his destiny to be king, despite the sound advice of his companion Peachy (Michael Caine) to get out while their “luck is good.” Ignoring the admonitions of the priests and the oath of celibacy the two men had taken back in India, this would-be king/god attempts to take a wife from one of the native tribes. During the wedding ceremony, she bites him on the cheek, revealing his mortal blood and exposing the British

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pair’s charade. In a display of retribution, the monks force Danny out onto the same bridge he had ordered to be built to the holy city. When the bridge is finally cut down, Danny falls to this death. More than in the previous examples of the same allegory, this film correlates the doom of the megalomaniac character to the natural landscape itself. His spiraling descent from the bridge into a deep chasm allows the surrounding “Third World wilderness” to function as the ultimate antagonist in this allegory of Western politics—the landscape “devours” its foreign invader. The suspension bridge becomes the final manifestation of Western technology, and, by extension, reflects the conceit of the megalomaniac seeking to “enlighten” this distant culture. As such, it is both literally and figuratively cut down by the indigenous folk. When the film returns to the scene of Peachy narrating these events, his account of Danny’s execution underscores the larger allegory when he attests to Danny’s falling “twenty thousand miles” for “a half hour” before hitting the rocks below. This exaggerated account reveals the narrative’s allegorical exploitation of its natural settings. Here, the landscape itself becomes the executioner in a trial of occidental conceit—in this case, the notion that the West is destined to conquer the rest of the world. Peachy, too, is punished by the natural surroundings when the holy men crucify him between two pine trees. However, for being only an accomplice in their original plan to steal treasure, he is left alive to pass on the parable to others.

Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Lord Jim’s jungle allegory of the “Peter O’Toole” megalomaniac did not have the impact of its desert predecessor Lawrence of Arabia. Nevertheless, its particular approach anticipates the consummate mainstream landscape allegory—Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which appeared four years after The Man Who Would Be King. Like Lord Jim, Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of a turn-of-the-century Joseph Conrad story about “Third World” exploitation and the characteristically “Western” psyche. In both narratives, the protagonist journeys along a river that takes him deeper and deeper into a jungle landscape where he ultimately confronts the darker truth of his cultural sensibility. Unlike the former film adaptation of a Conrad novel, however, Coppola redirects the historical allegory—the British Empire’s exploitation of Amazonian resources in South America becomes America’s military involvement in Vietnam. Such an adaptation embraces the source material’s attempt at a

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universal message more emphatically than portraying a megalomaniac of the past whose story could be meaningful later, as with Lawrence of Arabia or The Man Who Would Be King. Audiences who recognize this film as an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness further appreciate that the essential subject matter is a reflection of not only one nation’s politics but of Western sensibility as a whole. Apocalypse Now also departs from its allegorical predecessors in its treatment of the main character. Like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and Lord Jim, the typical protagonist in this allegory develops an increasing megalomania as he ventures deeper into a wilderness setting where he eventually confronts the futility of his characteristically “Western” nature. In this film, however, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) must seek out and destroy a pre-established megalomaniac, the mysterious and elusive Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). As Willard pursues the serpentine course of a river leading to Kurtz’s indigenous stronghold in Cambodia, he gathers more information about Kurtz’s godlike persona. Willard ultimately develops an admiration for his quarry and appreciates the reasons for Kurtz’s defection from the U.S. military. At the same time, military encounters along the river only serve to disillusion Willard, pushing him further toward becoming the heir apparent to Kurtz’s jungle empire. Like the protagonist in The Shooting, Willard eventually confronts a personification of his darker nature in a climax of violence and death. Jungle allegories like Apocalypse Now usually incorporate a river, which becomes the characters’ best means of navigating the dense terrain. In this context, the notion of psychological introspection derives from the river’s course, which begins in a safe, civilized zone, but travels deeper into an uncharted wilderness or jungle interior. Such a circuitous, inward progression is ideally suited to emulate the protagonist’s personal journey toward the core of his own psyche. In Robert Enrico’s avant-garde film La rivière du hibou, the protagonist escapes from his execution down the “river” of his own brain patterns, only to discover the reality of his demise when he finally reaches his home in the woods. Captain Willard similarly travels this serpentine river through various jungle obstacles until he reaches the “heart” of the landscape or, rather, the core of his inner psychological universe. By using the same exploitative camera techniques found in Enrico’s experimental short film, Coppola’s big-budget narrative film manipulates the jungle settings toward an allegorical dimension. The clearest example of this manipulation is the film’s depiction of Willard’s boat moving very slowly along the river, straight into a layer of mist

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emanating from the surrounding jungle foliage. Of course, the cultural currency of such misty landscape scenes is traceable back to Friedrich’s paintings and the larger Romantic sublime movements. Invariably, such scenes convey an ethereal otherworldliness, suggesting the mysteries of the mind’s deeper recesses. While Friedrich’s painting is simply a frozen image of the observer overlooking the misty landscape, Coppola’s camera brings the onlooker progressively deeper into it, creating a dynamic visual corollary to the act of introspection. In other words, the static medium of painting can only imply a notion of contemplation through the “framing” of an idealized landscape, while the dynamic medium of film is better suited to portray this process of psychological transformation. (An exception is Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life cycle, which also attempts to capture the progressive nature of river allegory, albeit in a series of static frames.) As long as character interaction is maintained, river allegory is able to transcend an avant-garde context and become accessible enough for mainstream consumption. In this context, the protagonist struggles against a landscape that is also home to an indigenous culture. Enrico’s film spends its duration developing the notion of its protagonist’s inward progression amidst a solitary wilderness. But Apocalypse Now assumes a more conventional narrative format by establishing a series of encounters with various persons along an otherwise similar river odyssey. In this latter context, the indigenous “Third World” characters become obstacles in their own right, increasing the setting’s potential to become meaningful for its own sake. In the allegory of the “Western megalomaniac,” these peoples are positioned as those who “should” be conquered, yet it is the surrounding landscape that behaves as the ultimate arbiter. Toward the end of Apocalypse Now, Willard acknowledges that Kurtz “takes his orders” from the jungle itself as if to echo the film’s initial reference to Willard’s own obsession with the jungle. In this way, the landscape becomes the outer reflection of both men’s corrupted souls. For Kurtz, Lawrence, and “Lord” Jim, any attempt to assume a divine role within a “Third World” culture is actually the struggle, however futile, to overcome one’s own earthbound limitations. In the context of landscape allegory, these definitively human limits become the indomitable wilderness itself. Apocalypse Now’s allegorical comment on American politics should have been enough to convey a universal message. In recent years, however, the director decided to release a Redux version with previously excluded footage. The added segments serve only to lighten the otherwise heavy tone of the narrative. One segment in particular, rather than underscoring Willard’s introspective river odyssey, behaves as a

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diversion from the allegory. Pausing to bury one of his fellow crewmembers near a French plantation along the river, Willard and the other men accept an invitation from the plantation owner to have a meal and stay the night. During the dinner conversation, their French hosts point out that America “has yet to learn its lesson”—the same political lesson that the French have already learned from their own colonial pursuits. This blatantly literalized statement of the film’s larger message only undermines the subtler allegorical dimension to the narrative, discouraging any incentive on the part of the audience to determine the meaning of the film for itself. The French plantation sequence also includes an incidental sexual encounter between Willard and a beautiful French woman, as if to suggest that the film’s allegorical mode could not engage mainstream audiences without the inclusion of some form of romance or other conventional narrative content. Coppola’s arguably questionable decision to insert this and other lighter scenes into an otherwise acclaimed and respected cinematic work is a manifestation of Hollywood’s leaning toward more escapist tastes. In other words, whereas the director’s original version embraces a probing sense of pessimism about Western politics and humanity in general, the Redux offers a more escapist mode of narration—perhaps less heavy-handed, but at the expense of the film’s allegorical intentions.

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

Chapter Nine River/Jungle and Other Imperialist Allegories Just as Peter O’Toole was an ideal choice for the protagonist role in two mainstream attempts at the landscape allegory of the Western politics, the volatile actor Klaus Kinski was cast to play the megalomaniac in two river/jungle allegories released in this defeatist period of cinema. German director Werner Herzog ventured into the Peruvian jungle with Kinski to shoot Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), and then Fitzcarraldo (1982) some years later. Like Lawrence of Arabia, these films contain characters at least partly based on actual historical figures, and with plots involving a characteristically “Western” male whose personal obsession takes him deep into a “Third World” jungle wilderness. Within this natural setting, he pursues an impossible goal and ultimately confronts the futility of his vision. Struggling with the surrounding jungle landscape, this protagonist travels along an unpredictable river’s course toward an unknown destiny. In both films, indigenous peoples emerge from the landscape and become targets for domination. It is the landscape itself that ultimately passes judgment upon these two egoists, becoming the allegorical climax of this cultural indictment.

Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God Aguirre: The Wrath of God incorporates landscape allegory within a historical context to critique present politics. German cinema at the time was deeply invested in a reevaluation of national identity, and the parallels between this film’s Spanish protagonist and Hitler are abundant. By ascribing the conquistadors to a modern context, Herzog suggests that Hitler was no historical fluke but a recurrent symptom of Western sensibilities. Predating Coppola’s film by seven years, Aguirre: The Wrath of God establishes a more virulent social critique by making its protagonist’s uncommon degree of charisma

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less attractive and more fearsome, like Hitler’s. However, the radiant blonde hair and penetrating blue eyes of the Peter O’Toole characters remain. Again, these physical features underscore the personification of Western culture within this “Third World” environment. Based on the actual historical figure Lope de Aguirre, the film’s narrative offers an account of Pizarro’s sixteenth-century conquistadors in South America as they search for the mythical city of El Dorado. Aguirre quickly assumes control of his isolated party of soldiers and announces his intention to defect from the Spanish crown in order to reach El Dorado on his own. Aguirre is increasingly obsessed with the notion that he himself is the “wrath of god.” As such, he feels ordained to conquer South America and begin a “master race” by coupling with his own daughter. In the end, his madness becomes his own punishment as he finds himself in complete denial of the loss of his comrades. Though produced on a shoestring budget, Aguirre: The Wrath of God quickly gained international notoriety and helped to affirm the New German Cinema movement, as well as Kinski’s reputation as a world-class actor. As in the previous films, Aguirre: The Wrath of God establishes its critique of Western politics through the psychological juxtaposition of its Western characters with a hostile “Third World” landscape. The protagonist’s descent into madness, reflected by the growing belief that he is destined for greatness, is proportional to the steadfast resistance of the river and the jungle against all attempts at being conquered. From the onset, the landscape asserts itself as a dangerous obstacle. Using the precipitous vicinity of Machu Picchu as a location, Herzog depicts the group of explorers moving slowly downward along a steep mountain trail toward the Urubamba River basin below. In his documentary My Best Fiend (1999) about his working relationship with Kinsky, Herzog mentions that while the actor had called for a wide vista or Hollywood-like postcard perspective for this particular sequence, the director opted for a much tighter shot of the characters moving among the rocky crags in order to capture the “human qualities” of the landscape itself. Still, this deliberately close juxtaposition of human characters with a natural setting can be pushed further. For example, an even more pronounced exploitation of a rocky landscape’s anthropomorphic qualities appears in Picnic at Hanging Rock, where several interpolated shots of the towering crags look ostensibly like human faces. Herzog’s film also begins with the framed image of a mountain landscape enshrouded

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in a dense, early morning fog, akin to Picnic. Like the misty river in Apocalypse Now, this image conjures an aura of the sublime, affirming its cultural legacy in the modern medium of cinema. In Aguirre: The Wrath of God’s opening mountain descent sequence, no clear protagonist is identified amid the general depiction of struggle. In this way, the film confers a basic premise of foolhardiness upon this wilderness expedition. The river in Aguirre: The Wrath of God becomes more than simply the best mode of transportation through the jungle’s difficult terrain. Unlike in the previous river allegories, this river functions as the primary obstacle. Aguirre himself acknowledges this from the onset when he declares to Pizarro: “No one can get down that river alive,” and then predicts: “We’re all going to go under.” (His attitude changes after he takes over the expedition and allows his megalomania to run rampant.) Later, after the jungle’s impassible terrain proves too much for the Spanish and their Indian slaves to navigate, a smaller expedition is dispatched down the river to continue the search for El Dorado without Pizarro. The river asserts its deadliness to the entire group when an eddy traps one of the rafts, spins it helplessly in circles, and keeps it too far from the others to be rescued. After rising 15 feet during the night, the river demonstrates its unpredictable power once again when the remaining rafts are swept away. Finally, the river becomes almost sedate but, at the same time, does not allow for safe landing since it has flooded the surrounding jungle. Confounding Aguirre’s obsessive determination at every turn, the river becomes his personal nemesis. In the end, he is the only one left standing on the raft, condemned to remain alone with his madness. As in Robert Enrico’s avant-garde film La rivière du hibou, the river becomes the primary allegorical conduit toward the core of the protagonist’s psyche wherein an ultimate sense of futility is found. Unlike the protagonist of the short film, however, Aguirre cannot escape from the river and is finally consumed by it. As in Apocalypse Now, the indigenous folk in Aguirre: The Wrath of God are inherently tied to the natural landscape’s role as antagonist in the narrative’s allegorical assemblage. Rarely seen in the flesh, this “enemy” only presents itself in the aftermath of surprise attacks or deadly jungle traps. For example, after the river imprisons the one raft overnight, the rest of the expedition discovers only slaughtered soldiers left on top of it the next morning. Later, the party discovers that their enemies are cannibals who wait on the river’s edge for

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opportune moments to send volleys of arrows toward the vulnerable rafts. Because these assailants seldom show themselves, they seem to emanate from the jungle itself. That is, they become an extension of the surrounding landscape and not simply a hostile indigenous culture waiting to be conquered by invading Spanish forces. Though the marauding actions of these natives are responsible for most of the casualties, it is their keen understanding of the river and its surrounding terrain that provides them with the decisive advantage over Aguirre’s forces, despite the Spaniards’ possession of cannons, guns, and other forms of Western technology. Apocalypse Now offers the same reflection of technological futility when a spear suddenly impales a crewman of Willard’s boat. As he dies, the American soldier greets this event as tragically incomprehensible in the context of modern warfare. Ultimately, it is not the arrows or spears that kill these better-equipped invaders, but the ability of the river and jungle to make these outsiders vulnerable to attack by primitive weapons. According to this landscape allegory of a “Western megalomaniac,” the wilderness itself becomes the real enemy and always triumphs in the end.

Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo Like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo pits a “Western megalomaniac” against a “Third World” jungle in order to critique Western politics. Essentially, this film is a remake of the former. The historical context is much later, however, occurring in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context of South American rubber exploitation. Nevertheless, this latter film once again depicts the attempts of a European protagonist to overcome the obstacles of the Peruvian wilderness toward the realization of his own private obsessions. Aguirre: The Wrath of God’s emphasis on historical violence is replaced here with a more subtle form of latter-day cultural imperialism and the steady exploitation of natural resources. For example, where Aguirre: The Wrath of God allegorizes a Spanish insistence on Christian conversion through the accompanying priest’s attempts to impress a Bible on two peaceful Indians, Fitzcarraldo’s narrative uses opera as a reflection of Western inclinations to proselytize other nations. And instead of the Spanish search for El Dorado in the former film, Fitzcarraldo depicts the industrial reality of rubber barons and their discovery of an alternative “gold” in the South American

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jungle. This seemingly peaceful aftermath of imperial conquest is a colonized “Third World,” where Western presence has been tenuously established within the wilderness. Nevertheless, the harsh lesson of Western politics, communicated so literally to Willard by the French plantation owners in Coppola’s Redux, still has relevance in this latter-day context. The main character’s initial display of an obsessive psyche is crucial to the allegory of his confrontation with the indigenous landscape. For the same reasons Peter O’Toole was chosen to play the protagonists in Lawrence of Arabia and Lord Jim, Herzog again selected Klaus Kinski to play the protagonist Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known by the natives as “Fitzcarraldo.” This character’s mad determination to bring grand opera to the isolated jungle village of Iquitos compels him to invest in uncharted territories upriver where highly profitable rubber trees are known to exist. Originally, Herzog cast the more subdued Jason Robards to play this protagonist, with Mick Jagger as his cohort. But after Robards took ill, the director summoned Kinski to replace him. According to his original choice, the director may not have had any intention of pursuing the same allegorical narrative as Aguirre: The Wrath of God, which depends so much on the presence of a megalomaniac. But Kinski’s eventual casting allowed for the “Aguirre” character to reappear and reestablish the previous film’s allegory. The difference between Robards’ restrained approach and Kinski’s inherent inclination to play the megalomaniac is apparent in their respective interpretations of the same scene. In this sequence, Fitzcarraldo locks himself in the village church, climbs up to the bell tower, and announces his intention to bring opera to Iquitos. Robards and Jagger portray this determination with a convincing degree of enthusiasm. Kinski, on the other hand, raves frantically, ringing the bell in a maniacal way. Thus, he becomes another Aguirre—alone with his madness. Like its predecessor, Fitzcarraldo portrays a dynamic sense of struggle against the river and its surrounding jungle landscape. These brutal wilderness obstacles act as Scylla and Charybdis for the human protagonist. Unfortunately for Fitzcarraldo, an impassible section of the river prevents him from reaching his rubber-tree destination by boat. Like the willful protagonist of Lawrence of Arabia, he dares to “dream the impossible.” In order to get to the land of riches that awaits him, Fitzcarraldo devises a way to transport his steamboat over a small mountain to a calmer river beyond. The depiction of a steamboat dragged methodically uphill toward its destination on the other side makes for a powerful representation of a Sisyphean

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struggle. Herzog concedes this accomplishment in his Kinski documentary, even if he does not appear to understand the precise meaning of his so-called metaphor. However inspired the director may have been to pursue larger meanings, this sequence bears a meaningful similarity to Brakhage’s uphill climb sequence in Dog Star Man as a larger reflection of Western ambition. Departing only momentarily from the usual sense of futility, this film allows its protagonist to experience a brief feeling of victory when the boat finally reaches the alternative river—only to meet its eventual doom in the rapids downstream. In his overland attempt to avoid the river’s impassable section of rapids, Fitzcarraldo simply hastens the inevitable confrontation. The river becomes his ultimate nemesis, finally returning him to his place of origin, empty-handed, broke, and humbled. As in Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the indigenous people of this film underscore the sense of futility in the megalomaniac’s attempt to conquer the “Third World” wilderness. While these natives are not as resistant as in the previous examples, they similarly emanate from the landscape itself, becoming merely another aspect to insurmountable power. Taking advantage of this remote Indian culture’s myth of an anticipated “white god,” Fitzcarraldo broadcasts his beloved opera from a phonograph atop the steamboat to impress them. The natives emerge in canoes to greet him and the remaining members of his crew, eventually agreeing to create a path through the jungle and over the mountain to a calmer river on the other side. With a tremendous Indian labor force at his command, Fitzcarraldo achieves his mad purpose by assuming the identity of their anticipated “white god.” Yet the natives ultimately decide to send the “divine” ship back downstream in order to “soothe the evil spirits” of the Pongo rapids. In this way, their spiritual ties to the landscape itself allow for the “punishment” of invading megalomaniac and his obsessions. The protagonist’s anticlimactic staging of an opera atop the battered boat as it returns to Iquitos is only a pitiful attempt at self-consolation.

Boorman’s Deliverance Like the protagonist roles in The Man Who Would Be King, the personification of Western politics is divided among a group of male adventurers in two further landscape allegories: John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) and William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977). Taking

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place entirely on American soil, Deliverance is a departure from the usual context of a “Third World” landscape and its indigenous culture. Nevertheless, the film establishes a similar notion: a peripheral wilderness inhabited by a rustic culture that does not abide by urban lifestyles associated with Western society. Instead of inserting one clear-cut protagonist into this environment, Deliverance assembles a group of four Southern businessmen seeking a canoe adventure in the Appalachian Mountains. Each of these men function differently according to the film’s allegorical purpose. Inspiring the rest of them to challenge the wilderness, the egoist Lewis (Burt Reynolds) closely resembles the characteristic megalomaniac. Clumsy and vulnerable, the character of Bobby (Ned Beatty) connotes an ignorance of marginalized cultures and their disparate customs. The film encapsulates Bobby’s disposition when a local old man declares simply, “You don’ know nuthin.’ ” A reflection of social conditioning, Drew (Ronny Cox) is the exemplary lawabiding citizen who is nonetheless unprepared to cope in a cultural environment where his laws do not apply. Closest to an everyman character, Ed (Jon Voight) undergoes a psychological transformation that parallels the audience’s own experience in the course of the film’s narrative progression. The combination of these four men make up the definitive “Western” persona: arrogant, ignorant, conditioned, logical—and, in this context, ultimately incapable of conquering the wilderness. Again, the river and its surrounding landscape in Deliverance are the true antagonists and they become the primary obstacles for the main characters. With the same intention as Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, this film portrays the Chahulawassee River and its surrounding wilderness as a threatened region—encroached upon by latter-day industrialists who want to exploit its natural resources. With the area’s imminent commercial development motivating the group’s river adventure in the first place, these men seek to enjoy the unspoiled domain that their own society is about to wipe out. But at every point in the film’s progression, the river and its dense surroundings seem to protest their presence. Initially, the film conveys this notion when Lewis’ blind confidence proves insufficient to bring the group to the river’s edge, and they must rely on the guidance of locals in another vehicle. Once on the river in their two canoes, the men encounter their first series of rapids. An exciting challenge at first, the rapids become less forgiving, eventually capsizing both canoes and leaving the adventurous Lewis totally incapacitated with a serious leg injury.

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Later, when Ed is forced to dispatch an assailant on the cliff above them, he must prove himself by climbing up a very sheer cliff. This is the film’s most extended sequence of personal struggle against the landscape, akin to Dog Star Man, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and other allegories containing these uphill scenes. To reach their final destination, the survivors of the group must tackle yet another series of difficult rapids in their only remaining canoe. Ultimately, this Appalachian wilderness reflects the same degree of futility for these outsiders as the “Third World” regions for the protagonists of the other films. Like the Indian cultures in Herzog’s Peruvian allegories, the mountain men encountered in Deliverance are an extension of the natural landscape itself. The group’s first confrontation with this marginalized culture reflects urban society’s fundamental misunderstanding of these people. Plucking his acoustic guitar, the amiable Drew courts a spontaneous duet with a local banjo-playing lad. When he attempts to shake the boy’s hand afterward, the youth turns away abruptly. Later, after Bobby is raped at gunpoint by one of the local men near the river’s edge, Lewis kills Bobby’s assailant with a modern huntingbow. Despite Drew’s compulsion to do the right thing by reporting the murder to the authorities, the four agree to bury the body in the woods. After an unidentified sniper shoots Drew from above, Ed must pursue him with his own archery weapon. As in Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the unseen threat of this region’s peoples confers a further notion of hostility upon the wilderness. Arrows, spears, and bullets appear to emanate from the landscape itself. In Ed’s final nightmare recollection of the experience, a human hand emerges from the river’s surface, as if the river were reaching out to haunt his conscience or, rather, the “guilty conscience” of Western politics. In this way, the film’s title “Deliverance” refers literally to his removal from danger but also figuratively to a larger indictment of Western sensibility.

Friedkin’s Sorcerer Five years after the release of Boorman’s film, William Friedkin released the ambitious Sorcerer (1977). This film’s landscape allegory of Western politics also places four men in the protagonist role and pits them collectively against a hostile wilderness. As in the previous film, the notion of commercial exploitation is firmly established. This time, a corporate American oil refinery invades a

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South American jungle and its indigenous inhabitants. After one of company’s oil wells bursts into flames, killing several of the native workers, explosives are sought to extinguish the flames and salvage the oil-drilling operation. In order to come out of hiding and return to their homelands with new passports, four “Western” criminals (a terrorist, an assassin, an embezzler, and an armed robber) consent to a perilous task: they must deliver a supply of nitroglycerin to the drill site by transporting it in two trucks across a treacherous jungle landscape. According to the same allegory of futility, the jungle’s series of obstacles wipe out these men one by one, save for the robber who meets his own doom shortly thereafter. Allegorized here as retribution, the jungle wilderness resists exploitation long enough to triumph momentarily. The film suggests, however, that American exploitation of this “Third World” landscape and its peoples will inevitably resume. More closely associated with a sense of malevolence than the group in Deliverance, the characters of Sorcerer must answer for their own “Western” crimes, and so face their own form of deliverance. In order to make a larger comment on Western exploitation of other nations, Friedkin appropriates the basic narrative from director Henri Clouzot’s 1952 film adaptation of the Georges Arnaud novel The Wages of Fear (also 1952). However, Friedkin’s version of this story departs significantly from Clouzot’s film in its depiction of the jungle as an independent character. The four men in Sorcerer act as a single protagonist, and the jungle becomes their shared antagonist. Even the guerrillas who bring about the deaths of Manzon (Bruno Cremer), Kassem (Amidou), and Nilo (Francisco Rabal) are simply another hazard indigenous to the jungle itself. In Clouzot’s earlier film version, the mostly mountainous terrain that the trucks encounter is never presented as the “Third World wilderness” found in Sorcerer. Moreover, Clouzot’s film builds its suspense around obstacles deriving from the manmade road rather than the surrounding landscape. Sorcerer also incorporates road obstructions (such as a fallen tree instead of the earlier film’s large boulder), but this film clearly establishes the surrounding jungle as the source of these obstacles. The rotten rope-and-log bridge and the huge fallen tree, both unique to Friedkin’s film, are byproducts of the jungle wilderness just as the stone demon head, the mocking Indian in the road, the “loco” sage, the monitoring bird of prey, and the desperate guerrillas all emanate from the landscape itself. Beyond its many depictions of struggle against the jungle itself, this film also associates the troubled psyche of Scanlon (Roy Scheider)

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with the exotic setting through an atypical superimposition sequence. As the sole survivor of the jungle trek, Scanlon reaches his culminating moment of self-examination just as the jungle landscape transforms into a high desert terrain with huge, pillar-like rock formations. Superimposed upon this imagery is Scanlon driving his truck, along with glimpses of his violent past: the New Jersey robbery’s car crash, Manzon’s flowing blood and gold watch among the other truck’s wreckage, his companion Nilo holding his bloody chest in agony. Throughout this sequence, Scanlon calls out repeatedly, “Where am I going?” This query is clearly intended beyond any literal reference to the truck’s route or final destination. In what becomes the climax of Friedkin’s landscape allegory, psychological introspection and the notion of fate become intertwined—to know oneself is to discover one’s own destiny. After finally delivering a single case of nitroglycerin on foot, Scanlon believes he has achieved his redemption and returns triumphant to the village for a final celebration. Nevertheless, the film suggests he is marked for death all along as the arrival of a hit man in the closing scene reaffirms the jungle’s message of futility.

Futureworld Landscapes: Planet of the Apes, Zardoz, and 2001: A Space Odyssey A number of other 1960s and ’70s films establish their allegories of Western imperialism through the landscape of a distant but possible future. The previous films use either a semi-historical past or a fictional present to assemble a critique of expansionism and exploitation. Alternatively, films such as Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968), John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) use natural settings, including outer space, to create cautionary tales of what could happen if Western civilization continues on its present course. Planet of the Apes places a group of male American astronauts on a seemingly unfamiliar planet. After a difficult landing, the ship’s survivors embark on an extended journey through a harsh desert terrain. They eventually come to a more hospitable and idyllic area populated by peaceful humans, only to encounter a race of invading humanoid apes who round up the humans for enslavement. The narrative ends up focusing on the character of Taylor (Charlton Heston), the only astronaut to escape either death or lobotomy. Like Peter O’Toole as Lawrence,

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Heston’s blonde hair and blue eyes help this protagonist to characterize the “Western” hero—strong, intelligent, and unwilling to succumb to outside domination. Unlike previous allegories of the “Western megalomaniac,” however, Taylor never inspires a representative body of indigenous “Third World” peoples. Except for two sympathetic chimpanzees, he remains an unwanted outsider occupied with the task of his own survival. After Taylor discovers that this ape society descended from human civilization, he ignores warnings not to venture back into the desolate “forbidden zone” from where he originated. When he witnesses the remains of the Statue of Liberty on an uninhabited shoreline, Taylor realizes that he is still on Earth, and this world is simply the aftermath of his own culture’s nuclear self-destruction. In Planet of the Apes’ allegorical context, the marginalized “forbidden zone” is the domain of the protagonist’s psyche. Splashing down in a desert lake, Taylor emerges from this landscape, as if to suggest the experience of birth. His eventual journey back to this region becomes his own introspective quest for the truth of his existence or, rather, what the presiding orangutan calls “his destiny.” Accordingly, the camera’s wide perspective reduces Taylor and his female companion to an insignificant detail or, rather, only another aspect of the landscape itself. By presuming the inferiority of both the primitive humans (“If this is the best they have to offer, we’ll be running this planet in six months”) and the advanced ape culture (“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”), Taylor personifies the occident’s historic disposition toward the “Third World.” Because he is a representative member of this strange and horrible planet’s past, his personal “destiny” is the larger fate of Western civilization. It takes an accidental journey through time and space for Taylor to realize this fate for himself, but by revealing the truth of his identity, the film offers a cautionary tale for popular audiences. In Planet of the Apes’ sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Taylor continues into the “forbidden zone,” attempting unsuccessfully to prevent an underground mutant race of humans from detonating a leftover nuclear warhead—and so this allegorical cautionary tale of Western politics achieves its ultimate fruition. Like the previous film, Zardoz depicts a heroic “Western” figure within a bizarre futuristic setting: an enclosed, utopian culture existing within a mountainous landscape. Played by Sean Connery (the titular “would-be” king in Huston’s film), this protagonist also

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searches for “the truth” of his existence and how he enters this insular paradise from the segregated “outlands.” Like Taylor in Planet of the Apes, Zed is strong, intelligent, and displays an instinct for violence. After arriving from the sky in the giant stone head of his worshiped divinity, he encounters the members of this seemingly evolved society. Through a mind-reading apparatus, he divulges glimpses of his past and how “Zardoz” at first commanded him to kill wandering peasants in the outlands and later ordered him to make the peasants grow wheat. Zed soon discovers that his god is merely a trick conceived by one of the utopians as a means to control the outlands. Consequently, he has a final confrontation with the utopia’s brain center, which is contained within a diamond-shaped crystal. As a result of his victory, the outer protective shield vanishes, and his comrades ride in to massacre all its inhabitants with a final stroke of “revenge.” Zed finally hides in a cave with Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), one of the utopia’s few survivors. With their offspring, they establish a renewed hope for the human race. The surrounding “outlands” in this film become the allegorical domain of a marginalized culture, especially in a “Third World” sense. Accordingly, the force field around the so-called vortex maintains its privileged position upon the planet and underscores its larger representation of “civilized” Western society. At one point, the film offers a literal portrayal of Zed’s own cerebral “vortex” wherein all the accumulated knowledge and technological development of Western culture is placed. However, unlike Planet of the Apes’ Taylor, who merely discovers the destiny of Western culture within his own psychological “forbidden zone,” Zed becomes the vindicator for Western culture’s exploitation of the outlands, or, rather, a “Third World wilderness” and its indigenous folk. Like Willard in Apocalypse Now, Zed pursues an allegorical journey into the core of his own psyche to vanquish any presumptions of godliness to be found there. In this sense, he is dispatched by the landscape itself as its final agent of retribution. Behaving as another cautionary tale, this film warns against the futility of scientific and technological advancement—the characteristically Western impulse to control the universe. More abstract than the previous two examples, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey treats the region of outer space as another undiscovered wilderness to be navigated and controlled through human technology. In its first segment, the film sets up its narrative premise that humankind acquired its superior intelligence from a large black monolith of

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unknown origin. Surrounding the object, a tribe of apes discovers how to employ large animal bones as weapons to defeat its enemies. Later, in the context of an imagined future, the American space program investigates a similar monolith buried beneath the surface of the moon. A manned space probe is sent out to pursue the source of transmissions being sent to this monolith from farther out in space. Along this journey, the ship’s artificially intelligent, sentient computer, equipped with human attributes, becomes paranoid and begins killing the astronauts aboard. The last man, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), manages to shut down the computer and must venture onward alone. Bowman soon confronts another monolith adrift in space and undergoes a complete physiological transformation, finally appearing as if reborn inside an orbiting womb. Rather than manipulate terrestrial settings, this science-fiction allegory portrays its introspective progression as an outward voyage into deep space. Along the way, the film warns against the ultimate inefficacy of Western technology and its potential to turn against humankind when depended upon too heavily. Though the remaining protagonist does not display the heroic attributes of either Taylor or Zed, he again personifies Western ambition and the determination to realize undiscovered domains. In this context, the farthest reaches of outer space become analogous to the core of Bowman’s psyche. Instead of signifying an alien intelligence, the monolith represents for him something closer to self-realization or, rather, the Western pursuit of godliness. Amidst the protagonist’s final confrontation with the object, the film depicts the “landscape” of his mind in a very literal manner through an extended sequence of rugged desert topography. Appearing in an abstracted negative print form, this terrestrial footage is tantamount to Sorcerer’s superimposition of an exotic landscape with Scanlon’s character in his defining moment of existential crisis. Once again, the protagonist’s psychological transformation is portrayed visually through a direct association with an evocative wilderness landscape. Nevertheless, 2001: A Space Odyssey, like Zardoz, offers a more optimistic notion of a rebirth or a second chance for humankind.

Reversal of Landscape Allegory To establish the allegory of the characteristically “Western” megalomaniac within a hostile “Third World” wilderness, Lean, Huston,

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Coppola, Herzog, Boorman, Friedkin, and other filmmakers appropriate the nineteenth-century American myth of Manifest Destiny and similar cultural conceits of dominance. Subsequently, they turn these myths upside-down through the same allegorical heritage meant to encourage expansionism in the first place. During the nineteenth century, aesthetic representations of the American wilderness were an affirmative form of propaganda. A century later, however, a similar manipulation of landscape in mainstream films of the 1960s and ’70s renounces this sensibility, akin to Thomas Cole’s atypically cautionary The Course of Empire series of paintings. These films confer a sense of malevolence upon their wilderness settings so that, like wastelands, they resist exploitation. If audiences sympathize with these landscapes and their native inhabitants, then they assume the protagonist role, forcing the megalomaniac character to play the antagonist in the narrative. According to space/place theory, these landscapes reclaim their spatial dimension by refusing to become a “place” for human activity. Again, the implied sense of alienation also characterizes modern, “technologized” existence, but unlike the desert wonderland in Zabriskie Point, these films’ landscapes also refuse to offer even the adaptive fantasy of authentic experience. (For the moment, the problem of coping with modern conditions appears to have been answered by the purely escapist fantasy films of more recent decades.) This is why landscape theorists like Tuan, Casey, and Schama propose ways to rediscover a poignant sense of place, arguing that it cannot be found within any natural landscape, but only within oneself. Sorcerer’s complete box office failure, paralleled with the release of Star Wars the same year, represents a crossroads for mainstream Hollywood sensibility. As a purely visceral form of entertainment, George Lucas’s grand display of special effects and imagination were a refreshing change for popular audiences. Moviegoers were becoming less interested in intellectual films with allegorical subtexts that, once decoded, offered only a bleak, heavy-handed outlook on the world. The film industry responded with a wave of lighthearted escapist narratives such as Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), along with their many sequels and similar blockbuster fare spawned by the success of these films. Pessimistic landscape allegories of the “Western megalomaniac,” like Peter Weir’s Mosquito Coast (1986), surfaced occasionally in the 1980s, but such

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films never carried the same impact, and the cultural impulse of the previous two decades mostly subsided. At least with mainstream cinema, the lesson of Western politics appears to have become clichéd. For the most part, natural settings have returned to their conventional role of backdrop.

Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971)

Chapter Ten Landscape Allegory in Other Narrative Contexts This study has pursued occidental trajectories of landscape allegory chronologically from early appearances in painting and literature up to the profusion of pessimistic cinema in the 1960s and ’70s. With the transition to cinema as the preferred narrative medium, cultural investment in natural terrains as sites of meaning increased. Eventually, such investment adjusted to a major paradigm shift in the myths that had propelled national identity for so long. Generally speaking, an unexplored wilderness of potential self-realization transformed itself into a spiritual wasteland. In other words, across the twentieth century, the topography of transcendentalism began to look like nihilism. Within this larger evolution, Western popular culture began to question its own historic patterns of imperialist politics, with allegories of expansionism becoming indictments instead. The new myth of defeatism has since become less appealing with age, and audiences mostly prefer more lighthearted forms of entertainment to heavy-handed “course of empire” allegories. Accordingly, Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 release Inglourious Basterds, which involves Hitler being assassinated by avenging Jews, assumes a popular need for an even more aggressive form of denial—revisionist histories of Western culture’s darkest moments. Of course, this isn’t the only possible account of landscape allegory, and scholars may trace many cultural trajectories of spatial depiction. It merely sets up an understanding of landscape allegory as an evolved mode of critical discourse. Whether affirmative or condemnatory, natural settings have the potential to communicate a message beyond merely authenticating narratives of human presence and interaction. The study of cinema has yet to fully embrace this potential and allow it to inform its multivalent approaches to interpreting the work of filmmakers. For example, a raised awareness of natural setting enhances the consideration of film genre in general, and new subgenres of “landscape films” come to light as a result. Affirming the presence of landscape allegory actually serves to substantiate the

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integrity of any genre categorization, whether it derives from narrative content or national context. Rather than accounting for the presence of a specific allegory across a number of seemingly unrelated films, this chapter explores the potential to revisit established groupings of cinema through a fundamental understanding of landscape allegory as a narrative mode.

Landscape in Noir Films While it may seem easy enough to spot, film noir is unlike other established American film genres in the sense that filmmakers were less conscious of specific film noir aspects that were later deemed to be trappings of the genre. This explains why the keen attention of French film critics was required to notice certain approaches Hollywood directors adhered to without necessarily being aware of it—in contrast to directors consciously abiding by established conventions when they made westerns, comedies, or melodramas. What typically characterizes this genre of films is an added psychological complexity to male protagonists in urban crime scenarios, which in larger sense derived from wartime angst and postwar trauma in the 1940s and ’50s. Not surprisingly, the most exemplary noir films incorporate a German Expressionist attention to lighting contrasts. The black-and-white shadow of a venetian blind cast upon the main character in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), for example, connotes psychological tension in the same way as the contorted sets of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (Of course, Lang brought his Expressionist techniques with him from Germany.) Nevertheless, in a typical noir film such as Double Indemnity (1944) or Out of the Past (1947), in which a male protagonist with the best of intentions turns criminal, the more psychological use of settings became even an unconscious choice. In short, noir films are postwar urban crime dramas usually involving a likeable “everyman” protagonist who must eventually succumb to a malevolent, paranoid universe where no can be trusted and murder becomes the final arbiter of survival. Akin to Caligari, the cityscape itself turns nightmarish in this context. Thus, the familiar metropolis is less a sign of progress than a representation of civilization gone awry, and natural spaces, in turn, become places—destinations for individuals who want to escape from the pervading sense of corruption. Mostly, however, these characters never escape from the city and die in the attempt. Once again, their inner struggles are reflected

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through these films’ aggressive use of settings, which are typically urban interiors. But certain films from the same era derive the same psychological tension from the incorporation of natural outdoor locations. Two particularly good examples of this latter approach are Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) and John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Both starring Humphrey Bogart, these films retain their “noir” aspects by trading the presence of dark rooms and contorted shadows for peripheral wilderness settings in order to allegorize the protagonist’s steady capitulation to his own inner corruption. Taken together, they suggest a subgenre of “landscape noir” films, which would include Pursued (1947), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), Border Incident (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Inferno (1953), and others.

High Sierra Co-written by John Huston, High Sierra complicates the usual heist narrative with its development of the character Roy Earle (Bogart), an ex-con who renounces his former criminal existence. He is pulled back into the crime world when his accomplices return and corner him into planning another heist. This establishment of an inner conflict between the two opposing identities of “law-abiding citizen” and “gangster” confers a very human degree of psychological complexity upon the protagonist, evoking the sympathy of the viewer. This key aspect differentiates noir films of the 1940s from the typical Hollywood gangster film of the 1930s. With the premise of Earle’s inner struggle in place, the rest of the film becomes a series of encounters with characters and settings reflecting either normal or fugitive lifestyles. For example, Earle attempts to win the love of the young and innocent Velma (Joan Leslie) who personifies an honest, law-abiding existence. After she rejects his marriage proposal, Earle must finally give in to the advances of Marie (Ida Lupino) who is more appropriate as his female counterpart or, rather, a moll. High Sierra’s real source of tension in this film is the protagonist’s mounting desperation to reestablish himself into a society that offers him no redemption from the mistakes of his past. Rather than scorning his criminal past, the audience can sympathize with Earle’s role as an outcast. According to the film’s relentless emphasis on the experience of social alienation, setting takes on a more poignant dimension. The film’s title itself refers to the peripheral zone of mountain wilderness

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outside Los Angeles where Earle initially resides to maintain a low profile. Eventually, when Earle discovers he cannot reenter the city without being recognized as a criminal, he is forced to return to this outer region. Unfortunately, even his former sanctuary of highway cabins proves unsafe, and he must finally venture directly into the hostile mountain landscape to escape law enforcement personnel. As a location for the final showdown between the police and Earle, the film uses a steep incline of crags and perilous cliffs in the Sierras, anticipating the rocky locations featured for the same purpose at the end of several Anthony Mann westerns. The wilderness itself becomes Earle’s only available haven, and, in this way, the film’s sense of alienation is brought to a dramatic climax. At the same time, Earle struggles against the landscape itself to achieve a vantage point over his pursuers, as if to suggest that the wilderness cannot accommodate him either. After receiving a sniper’s bullet from above, he cascades down the mountainside to his final resting place. This specific use of landscape reflects both the protagonist’s inner struggle and the futility in overcoming it. Thus, High Sierra anticipates the western’s “duel in the sun” allegory that appears in subsequent years, as well as the allegory of futility that surfaces later in so many defeatist films of the 1960s and ’70s.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre Though released in the fertile postwar period of noir films, Treasure of the Sierra Madre wouldn’t seem to fit into the genre at first glance. The film focuses on the character of Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart), a down-and-out American looking for work in Mexico during the post-revolution 1920s. The contemporary urban jungle is absent here, and the vast majority of the film occurs in natural outdoor settings, making this film look more like a western. Nevertheless, the definitive “noir” narrative drives the film as Bogart’s character undergoes a psychological transformation from a likeable man of principles to a paranoid, murderous villain. Treasure of the Sierra Madre pushes the notion of an internal struggle to an even greater extreme as it nurtures the same sympathy for its protagonist, only to slowly reverse the process toward a feeling of antipathy. Where most noir films preserve their sympathy for the main character throughout, Huston’s film allows its charismatic protagonist to eventually become the principal antagonist of the narrative. After he and his two companions discover gold in remote mountains, Dobbs turns greedy and decides he must kill his friends or be killed himself for

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possession of the yield. Audience sympathy abruptly shifts from Dobbs to Curtin (Tim Holt) and Howard (Walter Huston). This film’s use of actual Mexican desert locations might otherwise function as authentic backdrop. However, the protagonist’s internal struggle with paranoia and greed juxtaposed against an increasingly hostile wilderness allows the landscape to behave as an independent character. Moreover, the desert becomes the arbiter of justice. The film establishes this notion when the elder Howard, whose experience as a prospector facilitates the entire enterprise, insists that each of the three men “thank” the mountain for allowing them to extract its precious metal. Later, Howard agrees to aid nearby villagers, while Dobbs and Curtin continue heading back to civilization on their own. After Dobbs turns against Curtin, shoots him, and continues on alone, the desert terrain becomes increasingly hostile, as if to punish Dobbs for his selfish malevolence. In a final stroke of irony, the landscape “repossesses” the treasure when a windstorm carries away the gold dust left behind in opened sacks. Laughing at this spectacle, Howard and Curtin exemplify the proper attitude to take toward such twists of fate. Dobbs, on the other hand, meets with a violent end at the hand of the same bandits they had encountered earlier. Akin to the jungle cultures of Herzog’s films, the native inhabitants of the Mexican desert in this film also become a component of the landscape itself. While Dobbs confronts the same bandits during his desperate overland trek, Howard is led to a hidden oasis where the villagers set him up like a king after he resuscitates a drowned boy. In this way, both the bandits and the villagers become agents of the landscape, punishing Dobbs’ greed while rewarding Howard’s respect for others and for the natural universe itself. Although this film appeared years earlier, its indictment of exploiting the natural resources of foreign countries conforms to that of imperialist allegories in the 1960s and ’70s. Dobbs assumes the role of the “Western megalomaniac,” and 1920s Mexico resembles the characteristic “Third World” nation. Like Aguirre in Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Dobbs becomes this film’s antagonist after handing over his protagonist role to the landscape itself. Once the film captures the viewer’s sympathy for the American characters, it makes an example of each of them through its allegorical approach to the desert, in which all other characters are simply another component to this setting. Despite its emphasis on landscape, this film pursues the same allegory of post–World War II paranoia as so many other noir films of its time, and, furthermore, by placing this narrative in a historical Mexican context, it also becomes a harbinger of imperialist allegories to come.

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Landscape in Hitchcock Films For a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock, who invests so much energy into creating psychological tension, the allegorical use of setting is almost inevitable. In his choice of outdoor locations such as Mount Rushmore for North by Northwest (1959) or Bodega Bay for The Birds (1963), Hitchcock actually based his narrative material around settings for their own sake. That is, certain locations attracted him before any script existed, as if their innate poignancy was sufficient to dictate a suspenseful situation to him. In this way, so many of Hitchcock’s films demonstrate his talent for transforming space into place. Such an approach to filmmaking transfers the viewer’s access to a narrative’s central purpose from plot to setting, where the supportive function is now reversed. Especially in the case of natural outdoor settings, characters now serve the location instead of the other way around. A good example is North by Northwest’s final scene of struggle upon the precipitous slopes of Mount Rushmore between the American “everyman” Thornhill (Cary Grant), his new spy-girlfriend (Eva Marie Saint), and the political assassin (Martin Landau), where the grand spectacle of the landscape itself transcends the unfolding events. It is no coincidence that Hitchcock pursued a narrative of mistaken and shifting identities from the springboard of Mount Rushmore’s anthropomorphic topography. In the film’s dramatic finale, the battle for restored national security or, rather, male identity is meted out upon the “face” of American consciousness. Such allegories of American cold war xenophobia characterize the late period of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Where North by Northwest offers a more direct narrative of espionage and political threat, akin to Torn Curtain (1966) or Topaz (1969), The Birds suggests a larger threat from abroad or, more specifically, the skies above, in the form of common birds attacking the rural community of Bodega Bay in Northern California. In this latter suggestive approach, the face of American consciousness is presented again through the landscape itself, wherein the characters and their everyday interactions act merely as supportive devices. Nevertheless, Hitchcock established his gifted ability to correlate natural landscape to the human psyche in earlier films. Two noteworthy examples are Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), both of which focus on male protagonists with clinically unbalanced mental conditions. These films derive their tension from a premise of a protagonist’s guilty conscience, which unravels through due process to arrive at the darker truth of his recent crime’s actual culprit.

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In this context, specific natural settings reveal themselves to be the topography of a troubled psyche, and the characters must revisit these locations within an allegorical narrative of rehabilitation. Landscape allegory may be less politically oriented here, but these films nonetheless fit into the postwar emphasis on a crisis of male identity in popular culture, another important characteristic of film noir.

Spellbound More than any other Hitchcock film, Spellbound constructs its narrative around the ability of psychoanalysis to decode the subconscious mind. Its assemblage of psychiatrists includes the Freud-like Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov) who, at one point, methodically breaks down a dream of the male protagonist John Ballantine (Gregory Peck) into its constituent units of meaning. At the same time, the film makes a direct correlation between this inner universe and an actual mountain landscape in an attempt to discover the truth of a murder attributed wrongfully to the patient. As in other Hitchcock films, the narrative’s eventual reestablishment of social order is a function of restoring male identity, as well as achieving some token of romantic coupling. In this case, both purposes become one and the same after Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) makes Peck’s character into her pet project, falling in love with him in the process. According to this film’s larger postwar allegory, this female character assumes a maternal role of reorienting the shaken American male psyche into a normal, peaceful society. In this context, psychoanalysis connotes a more literal reorientation with leisure-oriented environments for couples. The film establishes its psychoanalytic link between an unbalanced male psyche and the natural landscape through the protagonist’s obsession with lines over white surfaces, which ultimately refer to his recent downhill skiing experience. The visual depiction of his recurring dream, designed by Salvador Dalí, includes a figure running down a sloping surface with the image of wings following behind him. The two notions of running downhill and flying, taken together, cryptically suggest the physical act of skiing down a mountain. Earlier in the dream sequence, an abstract landscape appears with the twisting shape of a man’s head emerging from the surface of the wasteland background. While the activity here centers around a rooftop in the foreground, Dalí’s landscape closely resembles his most famous paintings, including The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which melting

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pocket watches appear against a barren, rocky landscape. Thus, in addition to the dream sequence’s reference to downhill skiing, Dalí includes his familiar landscape of the mind, underscoring the larger vision of the subconscious with decidedly anthropomorphic rock formations. Later in the film, Dr. Petersen brings her patient back to the mountain resort where he had been skiing. While the two of them ski together, Ballantine finally recollects both his real name and the actual circumstances of the murder he did not commit. Through this direct engagement with the landscape itself, the protagonist reclaims his identity. In this way, the film’s allegory of a postwar guilt complex promises redemption in the return to native soil.

Vertigo Appearing over a decade later, Vertigo sets up a similar psychological premise of a male protagonist’s unstable mental condition. As in Spellbound, the main character harbors a guilt complex for an accidental death. Chasing a fugitive on the rooftop of a tall building, police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) slips on the roof and hangs from a rain gutter, only to watch another policeman fall to his death in his attempt to rescue Ferguson. From this experience, Ferguson discovers he has acrophobia, which brings on extreme dizziness, or vertigo. And, again, a diabolical outside party exploits the protagonist’s pre-established vulnerability by planning a murder around it so that Ferguson will prove incapable of denying responsibility for the death. Specifically, a wealthy college acquaintance Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) hires Ferguson to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) and monitor her alleged identity crisis. This culminates in her apparently fatal leap from a bell tower, which the detective could not prevent in his dizzy condition on the stairs below. After the protagonist enters into an even more profound guilt complex, the remainder of the film focuses on his attempts to reconstruct Madeleine’s identity through the impersonator of Elster’s murdered wife. Even when Ferguson manages to conquer his fear of heights in their return to the crime scene, he unintentionally positions his reclaimed mate to fall out of the tower again—this time accidentally. Unlike the previous film where psychoanalysis and love serve together to break the guilt complex of the protagonist, this film ruthlessly allows it to become a vicious, never-ending cycle. More than any other Hitchcock film, Vertigo is a narrative adventure through both interior and exterior spaces, reflecting inner

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psychological states of the protagonist, as well as the female object of his obsession. Accordingly, San Francisco and its environs become a place to be struggled against in order to unravel deeper truths of identity. Winding downtown streets become a mental labyrinth; the Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum offers windows into the self; and various Bay Area landscapes provide a visualization of a troubled psyche. The film’s scene at Muir Woods National Monument, in particular, effectively underscores the point where Ferguson and Elster’s wife agree to “wander” together. Novak’s character suddenly heads off alone into the heavily shaded woods, suggesting an inward progression toward the deeper truth of her suicidal disposition. When Ferguson finds her leaning against a tree, he begins a direct attempt to repair her vague sense of identity. Later, at Cypress Point in Pebble Beach, he continues interrogating her, and as they embrace, the waves crash against the rocks in the background, as if to echo their dramatic union. When the two of them finally arrive at the Mission of San Juan Bautista, it becomes clear that Madeleine is a merely an extension of the protagonist’s efforts to reconstruct his own sense of sanity. After successfully persuading Madeleine’s impersonator to reassume her former appearance down to the exact clothing and hairstyle, Ferguson overcomes his vertigo by forcing her to return to the mission’s bell tower. Ironically, this only paves the way for his guilt complex to reemerge when this beloved persona dies a second time. In this film, the postwar American allegory of male psychological trauma becomes more pessimistic, akin to the spiritual wasteland films appearing soon after. Replacing Bergman’s character in the previous film, the maternal would-be wife figure Midge (Barbara Belle Geddes) is unsuccessful in helping the protagonist reclaim his identity in this characteristic urban society. He rejects her and instead pursues the female counterpart of his own “wandering” lack of purpose. The film affirms this sense of co-identity in its own dream sequence wherein Ferguson sees himself falling from the bell tower. When he learns that this seemingly unbalanced female is actually a well-adjusted human being—a department-store employee from the Midwest—he cannot accept her true identity and compels her to reconstruct her former self. This proves to be an exercise in futility since it returns him to the same state of inner strife he was trying to overcome. Rather than a specific comment on postwar trauma, this film also implicates modernization as a source of disillusion. For example, when Ferguson notices a landscape painting of the city’s pre-urbanized appearance, Elster confirms his distaste for what San Francisco is “becoming.” In this way, Vertigo departs from

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Spellbound’s sense of hope for the modern male psyche, and presages the defeatism that mainstream films embraced in subsequent years. While its focus on setting as a narrative device is less devoted to natural locations, this film also anticipates the aggressive use of landscape allegory in the 1960s and ’70s.

Landscape in Road Films As a genre, “road films” encompass just about any episodic narrative that uses automotive travel from one location to another as its organizational through-line. Such films proliferated in the wake of World War II with the surge of the American automobile industry. Road films, in particular, became associated with the baby-boomer culture’s teenage and young-adult stages in so many hot rod and biker films. Depending on the film’s intended audience, an example such as Hot Rods to Hell (1967) paints the youth culture as a violent threat to middle-class families, while the seminal road film Easy Rider (1969) positions young bikers as the victims of a prejudiced society. In either case, the main character is, again, typically male and comes to some form of larger realization about himself and his place in the world by the film’s conclusion. The road and its natural surroundings take on a psychological dimension according to a notion of struggle and the landscape’s larger function as a space to be passed through. In the road films of the 1960s and ’70s, protagonists dwell precariously between the American establishment of the past and the counterculture of the future, using the nation’s highways as an attempt at self-realization. Traveled upon at high speeds, the open road across expansive landscapes never offers any satisfying resolution and, in the most extreme sense, leads these characters to their own tragic demise. Akin to the allegory of futility in many landscape-oriented films of the same era, these films convey a larger existential crisis through an accelerated passage across a vast topography that denies limits, boundaries, or even a final destination. In this context, the notion of a direct struggle with the landscape transforms into an accelerated, albeit futile attempt at spiritual transmigration. Unlike other landscape allegories where natural outdoor spaces are transformed into places of meaning, the existential road film establishes a different tension between space and place. Here, space refuses to become a place, and this resistance reflects the protagonists’ inability to achieve any psychological grounding. Even the places of infinite space that appear in so many spiritual wasteland films do not exist here since the

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human characters never really maintain any physical or metaphysical connection with them. As in Vertigo, protagonists of these defeatist narratives perpetually “wander” in their cars or motorcycles, heading only toward some abrupt climax of futility.

Easy Rider While a pair of stereotypical leather- and boot-clad motorcyclists assume the protagonist role in Easy Rider, the film departs from the usual biker narrative in that these two men scarcely ever demonstrate violent or anarchic tendencies. Rather, they share the seemingly harmless purpose of riding their motorcycles from the West Coast to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The duo personifies late-’60s youth culture’s larger suspicion of American values amidst the tension of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and other profound events of the era. Even the cocaine they smuggle over the Mexican border in order to finance their excursion, as well as the marijuana and LSD they consume during the trip, represent alternatives to the traditional alcoholic lifestyle of previous generations. These young men seek a new consciousness oriented around a fundamental premise of freedom and mutual tolerance. At the same time, each male character conveys a different attitude toward the potential for a new society. With a large American-flag patch on the back of his jacket, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) reveals a more trusting, optimistic nature, whereas Billy (Dennis Hopper) is suspicious of others and expresses a more pessimistic attitude toward an alternative existence. Despite their personal differences, the film’s tension derives from their progressive inability to fit into either the “old” culture where, at one point, local bigots compare them to “blacks” for their otherness, or the “new” communal culture that seems too primitive and desperate. In the same way that opposing attitudes between its two protagonists becomes thematic, this film’s emphasis on the highway’s natural surroundings sets up a dichotomy of the American landscape. It is both a representation of open possibility and an expansive space of resistance, refusing to become a final destination. The first half of the film often behaves like a travelogue with extended panoramic shots of the Southwest, intending these vistas as the bikers’ perspective from atop their motorcycles. At one point, the riders even stop along the shoulder to admire the vast desert terrain. After they are turned away from a roadside motel, they continue a pattern of camping overnight in the highway’s peripheral wilderness as if to suggest their unusual

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connection to the land itself. At the same time, the landscape never provides the realization of freedom they seek. In the last camping scene, their opposing attitudes seem to have switched. While Billy feels their drug-dealing, itinerant approach to life has been a success, Wyatt renounces his former optimism by declaring, “We blew it.” Presumably the following day, two Southern men in a farm truck shoot the bikers down in cold blood, and the camera slowly pans out above the landscape. With this final shot of a burning motorcycle becoming a tiny detail in the larger surrounding wilderness, the film suggests that the American landscape’s seeming promise of a new consciousness was only illusory, and, instead, it consumes them in death. In an allegory of psychological struggle between optimistic and pessimistic attitudes toward the future of American culture, the indigenous landscape itself becomes the final arbiter.

Vanishing Point Released only three years later, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971) borrows many narrative elements directly from Easy Rider. Again, the film establishes a destination to be reached within a limited time frame, and it includes the same countercultural references to bikers, marginalized desert communes, and a drug-oriented lifestyle. This time, the antiestablishment allegory is exaggerated beyond the Easy Rider’s modest sense of plausibility. The male protagonist Kowalski (Barry Newman) personifies the “former” model American hero: a Vietnam veteran and policeman, but also a car and motorcycle racer. The film establishes its psychological premise through Kowalski’s series of flashbacks, one of which depicts him saving a young girl from being raped by his partner in law enforcement. Additionally, his stopping along the highway to make sure his police pursuers haven’t come to any harm when they crash behind him reinforces the notion of his uncommon humanity. Where the bikers in Easy Rider are only briefly likened to a minority culture in a diner scene, this film sets up a parallel narrative of a radio station run by two black men who attempt to aid Kowalski’s evasion of the police. After a gang of white off-duty cops vandalizes the radio station and assaults the two blacks, Kowalski becomes a martyr figure for all forms of American repression. The function of natural setting is also more aggressive in this film. Unlike the previous film, Vanishing Point rarely ever interrupts its protagonist’s monomaniacal progression down the highway, which is

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often surrounded by an expansive Nevada wasteland. In this context, speed connotes freedom, not only in the sense of Kowalski’s racing experience combined with his souped-up Dodge Challenger, but also the drug he covets to maintain his psychological manumission. As in Easy Rider, this film’s broad shots of the desert landscape seem initially to connote only freedom. Eventually, Kowalski forces his vehicle over the difficult surface of the desert itself, and the landscape assumes a clearer antagonist role as the purest obstacle to his progress. After the DJ “Super Soul” (Cleavon Little) warns him that while he may evade law enforcement, he cannot “beat the desert,” the protagonist draws an enormous “x” in the landscape with his car, as if protesting the larger universe’s repression of his identity. His knowing smile as he drives full speed toward a bulldozer roadblock indicates his final capitulation to the fatal crucible of freedom. As an extension of Easy Rider, the allegory of antiestablishment values is subsumed into a larger existential allegory of futility.

Landscape Allegory as a Critical Discourse Beyond locating some of the more prevalent landscape allegories in cinema, this study intends an increased awareness of natural setting in general. Exploring the difference between narratives featuring authentic outdoor settings and those having a more complex psychological juxtaposition with the landscape informs the larger language of film. By learning to recognize landscape allegory in so many narrative contexts, one can sense the larger presence of allegory in cinema. Of course, the number of landscape allegories appearing through the years is not limited to the films examined here. For example, besides identifying L’Avventura as the springboard for so many pessimistic landscape allegories in the 1960s and ’70s, this study could just as soon mention Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), especially in its direct influence on gothic landscape films like Leslie Stevens’ Incubus (1965). Beyond Hitchcock’s films, landscape also figures prominently in the work of such auteur filmmakers as Theo Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky. And natural setting inflects the narrative progression in many other genres not considered here. For example, Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) behave as “landscape melodramas” in their conflation of romantic coupling, criminal psychology, and landscape. Finally, landscape allegory reorients well-established theoretical approaches

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to films. In the case of feminist theory, for example, films appearing through the decades, such as William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Jack Cardiff’s The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), reflect notions of female repression through their emphasis on natural outdoor settings. Essentially, the study of landscape allegory reverses the viewer’s orientation: understanding characters through setting, as opposed to the other way around. Even when films do not establish a complex psychological dimension to their protagonists and subsequently juxtapose them with any particular landscape, they can still reveal deeper cultural implications through our increased attention to location for its own sake. In other words, determining whether or not any film becomes a definitive landscape allegory, or even if its narrative behaves allegorically in the first place, is not as important as developing a keener awareness of space and how it is manipulated by filmmakers with a larger governing purpose. Determining new landscape categories and subcategories of cinema is not necessarily as productive as simply paying more attention to natural backdrops for their own sake—and noticing if these locations contribute to the narrative in ways the viewer tends to overlook. Like a landscape painting, the movie camera sets up its narrative according to foreground, midground, and background, each representing a creative decision of the filmmaker. Even those filmmakers who focus more on their human characters in the foreground are subject to visual choices made by others who, together, make up a larger culture. As a critical discourse, landscape allegory, whether present or not in any film, expands our insight into these cultural mechanisms of meaning.

Conclusion Landscape Allegory into the Future The presence of landscape allegory in cinema derives from a long-held aesthetic tradition of correlating our inner spiritual and psychological universe to the outer experience of natural environments. The pre-cinematic media of painting and literature nurtured a cultural readiness to interpret the landscape beyond its supportive function as backdrop. The complex heritage of landscape painting demonstrates the potential of natural settings to be their own visual subjects. As such, they take on deeper meanings and become figurative wonderlands mirroring our collective psyche. Their shared approaches allow these works to communicate overarching cultural myths to their intended audience. In other words, as a part of larger movement, each painting succinctly allegorizes the mindset of a particular nation. While literature can only visualize with descriptive language, it has the ability to “narrativize” landscapes across time. In this context, natural settings behave as independent characters, reflecting a protagonist’s steady psychological transformation. Whether based on historical fact or an imagined past, present, or future, these tales offer a more dynamic portrayal of an individual metamorphosis whose implications have a universal currency. With a series of landscape paintings, such as Cole’s The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life cycles, the synchronic narrative mode of painting emulates the diachronic narrative mode of literature. In this way, such “cycles” anticipate cinema and its privileged ability to assimilate both of these earlier modes of landscape allegory. In the context of cinema, landscape allegory appears alternately as a succinct glimpse of a surrounding space and as a domain to be progressively traveled through. In Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, for example, several postcard mountain perspectives preface the eventual trek through these mountains. The latter sequence depicts the two British confidence men struggling to cross this hostile region, while the initial still-shots function as landscape paintings in the sublime tradition of Caspar David Friedrich. Behaving as inserted paintings, these stills establish a similar sense of astonishment before

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the literary mode of the narrative resumes its course. This technique of an allegorical establishing shot also appears in Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God when an extended, fixed camera image of the Peruvian river and its violent rapids signals the arrival of the Spanish expedition to the jungle’s river basin—and foreshadows their ultimate doom. An important difference, however, is the film’s ability to capture a sense of the rapids’ dynamism, which a painting can only suggest with swirling brush strokes of white paint. In the cinematic context, neither the pictorial nor literary mode of landscape allegory necessarily depends on the other. Rather, they complement each other to the point of becoming a complex language that is simultaneously synchronic and diachronic. Together, these modes constitute the privilege of the cinematic medium over its narrative predecessors.

Landscape Allegory Returns to Avant-Garde Origins With the popularization of escapist adventure films in the 1980s and ’90s (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Terminator, and others), malevolent natural settings have become relatively anomalous in mainstream cinema. American audiences, at least, are less interested in intellectual films, and the established techniques of landscape allegory have been mostly confined once again to the peripheral practice of experimental cinema. One such underground filmmaker, James Benning, draws upon the same aesthetic heritage of landscape allegory, continuing its tradition of communicating a universal message through natural landscapes. The three films of his California Trilogy (1999–2001), for example, present a series of 30 individual landscape scenes through a fixed camera perspective lasting 2½ minutes each, akin to the extended shot of rapids in Aguirre: The Wrath of God. While Benning’s are nonnarrative films in the conventional sense, the atypical duration of each landscape vignette of the environment (or the human impact on it) compels the viewer to read beyond the surface of the image for deeper implications. The experience of these films is like strolling through an art museum and pausing for a few minutes in front of each painting. The crucial difference here, however, is that one cannot choose an amount of time necessary to absorb each landscape according to normal curiosity. Instead, Benning’s landscapes insist on a specific, unusually long duration of attention for each one. In this way, they demand a more intimate participation on the part of the audience. A mininarrative emerges from each landscape, with a

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governing narrative unfolding eventually, which contextualizes all 30 landscapes into the larger allegorical intention of the filmmaker. Like the defeatist landscape allegories of 1960s and ’70s mainstream cinema, Benning’s approach to landscape allegory is an aggressive form of social critique. In the trilogy’s El Valley Centro (2000), each landscape vignette of California’s Central Valley includes manifestations of industrial exploitation. For example, the filmmaker intends his extended view of a massive water pipeline and other operations upon the otherwise unspoiled and beautiful landscape to raise our awareness of civilization’s increasingly self-destructive path. Benning’s message corresponds to the allegorical climax of a failed mining operation in Roeg’s Walkabout, as well as the establishing shot of dam construction in Boorman’s Deliverance. Unlike these sequences, however, El Valley Centro also includes views of regions where indications of human presence are absent. Because the same forces of industrialization apparent in Benning’s other vignettes threaten these landscapes as well, they also communicate his message. For example, in the third film, Sogobi (2001), an expansive view of land in the Mojave Desert includes a billboard reading “Available” to indicate the imminent development of this region as well. Invariably, Benning expects his audience not merely to observe these landscapes, but to “read” them. These images reflect a collective ambition to exploit peripheral wildernesses toward the perpetuation of urban culture (in this case, the city of Los Angeles). Thus, Benning maintains a larger critique of Western sensibility through his own methodical approach to the landscape allegory. Just as the appearance of landscape allegory in early photography and cinema derives from the aesthetic heritage of painting and literature, Benning’s extreme attention to landscape harkens back to similar experimentation in mainstream cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. The larger social critique emanating from his technique of fixed and extended landscape vignettes would not be apparent without the audience’s culturally inherited ability to confer meaning upon the landscape itself. For the purposes of allegory, a film’s narrative need not be imposed upon any particular setting. Rather, when a film asks us to consider a landscape for its own sake, a narrative emanates from the landscape itself. Again, such an emphasis derives from framing the landscape in certain ways within the general context of what audiences ultimately see. Herzog’s close-camera depiction of the Spanish expedition against the crags in Aguirre: The Wrath of God and the various tight shots of rock formations in both Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock are choices made according

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to a larger purpose. The decision to include such perspectives must always be weighed against a decision not to include them. Such is the same choice a landscape painter must make. In this way, Benning’s work subsumes the synchronic aspect of painting and applies it to the diachronic medium of cinema, bringing landscape allegory full circle. The absence of active human characters in Benning’s films affirms the landscape’s potential to convey meaning independent of literary conventions. In other words, landscape is inherently “framed” as meaningful well before the insertion of humans “narrativizes” it into a form of social critique. Benning achieves this predetermined sense of an idealized wilderness or wasteland specifically through his extended shots of landscape. Again, this is a conscious choice intended to communicate a larger meaning already established by the surrounding culture in question. In an occidental context, for example, landscape allegory stems from nineteenth-century notions of alternative spirituality and, by extension, expansionism. In a narrative mode, inserted glimpses of natural landscape succinctly “frame” the allegory of futility, which becomes more pronounced as the film pits an assemblage of human characters against the landscape. Benning’s work simply removes the ensuing narrative, offering instead the portrait of either a soon-to-be developed wilderness or an already exploited wasteland.

Landscape Allegory in Recent Hollywood Films Occasionally, a landscape-oriented film appears that seems to draw on the allegorical framework of films appearing in the 1960s and ’70s. However, in the present cultural climate, audiences are less receptive to encoded terrains. Nowadays, mainstream moviegoers tend to prefer raw, violent action to any contemplative juxtaposition of characters with a wilderness or wasteland. In a film industry in which so many older releases are remade, perhaps this explains why no remakes of the more notable landscape allegories have emerged. Still, more ambitious or experimental auteur directors who find themselves in a position to take such liberties have attempted landscape narratives. For example, successful and controversial filmmaker Gus Van Sant, after directing such acclaimed films as Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Good Will Hunting (1997), and Finding Forrester (2000), made the unconventional film Gerry (2002) about two young men named “Gerry” (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) who become lost

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in the desert. The film takes some validation from being based on the actual event of a man killing his friend in similarly desperate circumstances. At the same time, its attempt to squeeze a deeper meaning out of its beautifully varied desert vistas proves impotent in a narrative of such superficial protagonists. Their implausible foolhardiness when inexplicably venturing into unknown terrain instead of simply retracing their steps undermines the film’s credibility. Like Zabriskie Point, this film demonstrates an ineffective juxtaposition of psychological struggle with a scenic but inhospitable wasteland. Where Van Sant’s attempt at landscape allegory has quickly faded into obscurity, another recent landscape-oriented release has struck a chord with popular audiences and critics alike. Winning the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men weaves a good deal of its narrative around an expansive desert location in an attempt to confer a human dimension upon it. As in the conventional western, this remote West Texas landscape could simply serve to authenticate this film’s narrative of the violent aftermath of an attempted Mexican border drug deal. However, the film develops a more complex psychology around its assemblage of principal characters than the typical action film of this nature. The film positions audience sympathies with both sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and local hunter Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who together set up a conflict between circumspective nonaggression and reckless opportunism. Both are pitted against the hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), whose ruthless code of execution based on coin tosses takes his character beyond the usual antagonist role and closer to a personification for death itself. Unlike so many landscape allegories that associate the troubled psyche of a protagonist with a surrounding wilderness, this film correlates its antagonist’s inhuman attitude toward fate to the hostile indifference of the original crime scene’s desert setting. This former space becomes a specific site of dust and corpses—the place of death’s mindset. Although the latter half of the narrative behaves more as a highaction road film, it attempts to bring its earlier moment of landscape allegory full circle through Sheriff Bell’s recollection of his dream about being in the mountains with his father. The snowy mountain pass where his father waits for him connotes his own approaching demise. Unfortunately, such an ending is inconsistent with the film’s more prevalent emphasis on suspense and violence, which ultimately overwhelms any larger allegory. If the film’s title is intended to suggest that America’s violent culture makes it “no country for old men,” the message is lost in the film’s own celebration of gunplay. In other words,

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this film does not allow its desert settings to remain fluid enough throughout its duration, nor does it spend enough time with the aging sheriff’s psychological struggle to make sense of the amoral universe he sees unfolding around him. In this way, it is closer to the escapist form of entertainment found in most current Hollywood releases than the heavy-handed landscape allegories of the past. Released in the same year, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) tells the story of Christopher McCandless’ failed attempt to survive alone in the Alaskan wilderness for several months, interpreting the true events toward a universal message of socialization and forgiveness. As a series of factual circumstances leading up to McCandless’ death by starvation, this young man’s attempt to renounce his middle-class upbringing, and society altogether, reflects only naïve idealism and recklessness. Yet, as an allegory, his life becomes an existential quest for wisdom, which proves successful in his final vision of reconciliation with his parents just before he dies. Mirroring Cole’s The Voyage of Life cycle, the film divides McCandless’ experiences after leaving his family into five stages: “My Own Birth,” “Adolescence,” “Manhood,” “Family,” and “Getting of Wisdom.” Additionally, the film depicts its protagonist reading or quoting Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, and other authors, as well as presenting onscreen text of McCandless’ own written reflections. Penn’s overtly literal approach annunciates its allegorical intentions throughout, conferring a certain heroism upon McCandless’ impulsiveness. While the film spends much of its duration in societal contexts prior to McCandless’ exodus into inhospitable Alaskan terrains, Penn incorporates natural settings to underscore key moments of the youth’s psychological transformation. For example, in the “Getting of Wisdom” chapter of the narrative, McCandless (Emile Hirsch) challenges his elderly companion Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook) to climb up a desert foothill where he awaits above. The camera frames the diagonal slope of the landscape from a distance, allowing one character’s ascent toward the other to take on a larger metaphorical dimension, akin to Dog Star Man’s “falling titan” sequence, the mountainside steamboat in Fitzcarraldo, and other Sisyphean moments. After the old man reaches the top, he offers his truism that God’s light shines on those who forgive their loved ones, just as sunlight breaks through the clouds, illuminating them both. In his solitude, McCandless eventually realizes that happiness is possible only when shared with others, and decides to return to society. At first, the river obstructing his path would seem to position the wilderness as his nemesis,

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but then his own human frailty in mistaking a poisonous plant for food finally accelerates his starvation. Thus, unlike past landscape allegories of futility, this film suggests that the wilderness, as a site of both literal and figurative struggle, can be a medium through which to achieve deeper spiritual realization.

Landscape Allegory in Asian Cinema This study of landscape allegory remains within a general occidental context. The vast cultural heritage of natural landscape portrayal in Asian nations warrants a separate program of research, with the results of such efforts easily comprising their own studies. And in general terms of landscape or allegory, an overarching “Asian” category would not prove to have the same integrity as a body of nations deriving from a European, Judeo-Christian heritage. Rather, the varying religious contexts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other eastern sects inform natural settings in their own ways. Thus, a book-length study could organize itself around the most prominent Asian national cinemas: Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and so on. This approach would essentially frame the concept of national allegory around a specific emphasis on landscape. Typically, landscape allegories in this context assemble a body of characters where each personifies different aspects of a larger political struggle for national identity. The film then juxtaposes this human assemblage against an indigenous natural setting. Thus, the landscape itself becomes invested with the concept of national identity, and, at the same time, may reflect a psychological struggle in maintaining this sense of identity (Picnic at Hanging Rock being an example of an allegorical study on Australian national identity). At the same time, the concept of national identity may not be at stake in any particular Asian film as much as a more universal human condition. This latter orientation characterizes the work of “international” Asian directors such as Akira Kurosawa or Satyajit Ray. Kurosawa’s seminal Japanese film Rashomon (1950), for example, is an allegory on the subjectivity of human perception in which four differing accounts of a murder within a peripheral forest are depicted. Here, a dark hollow of the forest takes on a psychological dimension, becoming the core of the human psyche where, as the narrative would have it, truth is manufactured for selfish ends. The film’s humanist message of optimism derives from an old peasant’s resolve

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after hearing these testimonies—he renounces his own selfishness by looking after an abandoned infant. By the same token, Ray’s Indian production of Pather Panchali (1955) transcended its national context in its universal sense of social realism and attention to human perseverance. The film’s sensitive portrayal of an impoverished family in the rural countryside of Bengal features an intimate connection between the characters and their natural surroundings. In so many of the film’s shots, Apu (Subir Banerjee), his sister (Kanu Banerjee), and other characters emerge from or disappear into dense forests, vast plains, and other indigenous locations, as if to suggest that their peasant existence makes them subordinate to the landscape itself. While Ray’s films may not reflect the overt psychological approach found in occidental landscape allegories, their landscapes still compel a deeper reading than authentication. Because their landscape-oriented films brought Asian cinema to the attention of Western audiences, Kurosawa and Ray are pivotal toward entering such a potentially vast area of research. Like these, most films in a general “Eastern” context complicate the interpretation of landscape allegory according to national identity as well as the larger human condition. This is also true of “Western” cinema, but, again, the sense of cultural identity in the Eastern context tends to be more applicable to specific countries rather than a larger body politic. Where Hollywood and other mainstream cinemas of the occident have mostly veered away from landscape allegory in recent decades, a general rise in Asian film production and distribution seems to coincide with an increasing interest in landscape allegory in various national contexts. China, for example, has produced a handful of noteworthy landscape allegories in recent years. One of these is Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), which depicts the story of a peasant girl (Bai Xue) who attempts to defy her traditional existence by leaving to join the rapidly spreading communist party. The vast barren terrain plays a central role by not only dictating the protagonist’s desperate existence, but also by ultimately drowning her in the river coursing through it. This natural setting, in turn, establishes a larger political allegory that points to communism’s inability to improve the lives of China’s rural farmers. At the same time, like Pather Panchali, this film portrays a more universal condition of poverty and peasant life, which speaks to audiences outside China. This and many other recent Asian films should be considered within the specific context of landscape allegory. This study merely suggests the potential to do so.

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The Human Mind as Macroscopic Space Approaching cinema through a basic awareness of landscape allegory, even when natural settings are not featured, increases the viewer’s larger understanding of space and its narrative potential to externalize the internal. A heightened awareness of landscape allegory in specific films trains the viewer to appreciate the more subtle relationship between the inner psychological dimension of human characters and macroscopic outer reflections of this interior universe. This is not to imply that space is always allegorical in films, but, rather, that space is always manipulated in some way toward the filmmaker’s intended message. If landscape allegory can be taken as the most extreme form of manipulation in this sense, then it becomes easier to move backward to the most conventional portrayal of natural space in order to affirm just how unnatural it really is. Becoming more attuned to the techniques of landscape allegory will serve to reveal the psychological dimensions of the cinematic medium in general, and how films are able to dictate our attitudes according to their larger agendas. Like paintings and books, films assemble space in such a way that complicates and ultimately collapses distinctions between inner and outer experience, revealing the cinematic landscape between imagination and the real world.

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Appendix Chronology of Landscape Allegory Note: This chronology covers paintings, literary works, photographs, and films mentioned in the course of this study. At the end of each entry, in parentheses, is the chapter in which it is mentioned. It is not intended to be comprehensive or even definitive. Rather, it is only one among infinite versions of such a vast cultural legacy. 8 ad: Ovid’s Metamorphoses With its conflation of human beings and natural phenomena, GrecoRoman mythology set a complex precedent for landscape allegory. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, human characters transform into trees, stones, or other features of the landscape. (Introduction) circa 1237: Roman de la Rose A primary example of medieval allegory, revealing a sophisticated system of figurative innuendoes borrowed from the natural universe. In its depiction of garden scenes, this poem uses the image of a rosebud to refer to love and sexual copulation. (Introduction) 1321: Dante’s Inferno The consummate political allegory wherein the author encounters individuals from his political life in a subterranean landscape of torment and penance. (Introduction) 1383: Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer This later example of medieval allegory portrays an array of birds seeking idealized mates within a garden scene, akin to Roman de la Rose. (Introduction) circa 1504: The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch Bosch’s fantastical living topographies, like this one, anticipate psychological approaches to the depiction of landscape. At the same time, they are still basically anthropocentric. (Chapter one)

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1562: The Death of Actaeon by Titian Painters during the sixteenth century sought to portray an esoteric harmony between human figures and the natural landscape, especially with the assimilation of Ovidian subjects as in this painting. (Chapter one) 1590: The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser Christian epics of Giangiorgio Trissino (1478–1550), Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), and others assimilated the notion of the “deceptive” garden to reflect Christian morality, which can be traced to Spenser’s “Bower of Bliss” appearing in this work. (Chapter one) 1623: Winter Landscape by Esaias van de Velde This work exemplifies the naturalistic (as opposed to the Italianate) strain of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. The digression from anthropocentric biblical content to portrayals of everyday experience compels a different kind of interpretation. The viewer must learn to read the landscape itself, independent of the persons included within it. (Introduction) 1630: Landscape by Hercules Seghers Anticipatory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism and the sublime, Seghers’ sweeping, desolate landscapes, in which figures and buildings are totally subordinate, establish tension between reality and imagination. (Chapter one) 1637: River Scene with Ruined Tower by Jan van Goyen The crumbling edifice and people outside it in the foreground are treated vaguely enough to become merely elements in this painting’s composite perspective of landscape for its own sake. Its title reinforces the artist’s new investment in the natural universe. (Introduction) 1644: Landscape with Narcissus and Echo by Claude Lorrain His overtly idealized approach to landscape, especially his “sunscapes,” influenced nineteenth-century Romantic painting. In this painting, the overarching trees and undergrowth take up three quarters of the frame while the Ovidian subjects are hardly noticeable. (Chapter one)

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1645–1650: Landscape with the Judgment of Paris by Both and Poelenburgh This painting depicts a classical narrative within a naturalistic setting that resembles the local landscapes of the Haarlem painters. Naturalistic and Italianate strains of Dutch landscape painting affirm religious differences between Calvinism and Catholicism, but it is clear from this example that they can coexist, overlap, and ultimately become indistinguishable. (Chapter one) 1646–1657: Landscape with Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain In this painting, a small dead tree branch extends outward across the principal branch of a tall tree, interrupting its otherwise consistent sense of upward growth. Also worth noting is the tree’s dominance of the frame, which effectively marginalizes the human subjects in the foreground. (Chapter one) circa 1657: Jewish Cemetery by Jacob van Ruisdael With its contrived sense of melancholy, this painting exemplifies the direct influence Dutch landscapes likely had on the Romantic movements and beyond. (Chapter one) 1667: Paradise Lost by John Milton This poem represents the culmination of the earthly paradise tradition, in which the Edenic garden allegorizes the human pursuit of philosophical truth and wisdom. (Chapter one) 1731: Epistle to Burlington by Alexander Pope Pope based this influential poem on the garden creation of architect Richard Boyle (1694–1753), which featured extensive Greco-Roman influence taken from Boyle’s personal experience of the Grand Tour. With the rise of Neoclassicism in England, gardens symbolized a complex system of ideas reminiscent of Ovid’s world. (Chapter one) 1759: Candide by Voltaire His virulent attacks on oppressive political systems and religious attitudes of the time attempted to escape censorship with the use of an indirect, allegorical mode of fiction still accessible enough to reach a wide audience. Voltaire intended this allegory as an indictment of contemporary Enlightenment thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), who argued that the world must be perfect since God created it. (Introduction)

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1809: Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich In the context of the nineteenth-century European sublime, landscape is emphasized where the monk is a tiny figure standing on a coastline before a vast, stormy sky. Similar emphasis can be found in Flaherty’s docudrama Nanook of the North (1922). (Chapter three) 1809: Morning by Philip Otto Runge A profound influence on Caspar David Friedrich, this painting depicts what Runge intended as a “spiritual hieroglyph” or code of allegorical devices through which the spectator could interpret esoteric meanings in the natural landscape. (Chapter two) 1811: Morning in the Riesengebirge by Caspar David Friedrich Friedrich’s attempts to spiritualize various natural landscapes often included direct Christian reference. This painting portrays a vast mountainous landscape with a pronounced crag in the center from which emerges a crucifix, approached by a man and woman in middleclass attire. A bold departure from religious works of earlier periods, this painting’s Christian reference is subordinate to the surrounding landscape. (Chapter two) 1812: Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps by J.M.W. Turner Like Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809), this work portrays nature’s overwhelming power over humankind, anticipating Flaherty’s exploitation of a hostile environment and its indigenous peoples in Nanook of the North (1922), according to a persevering Romantic sense of futility. (Chapter three) 1818: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich The lone observer with his back to the viewer is sufficient to spiritualize the surrounding landscape that undulates from within the sea of fog before him. This painting is perhaps the clearest pictorial example of landscape allegory, or, more specifically, the process through which humankind and nature appear to become one thinking entity. (Chapter two) 1818: Woman in Front of the Setting Sun by Caspar David Friedrich This painting is composed in exactly the same way as Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, except there is a female contemplating a

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pastoral landscape. This parallel rendition of the same transcendental theme derives from a sense of the beautiful rather than the sublime. (Chapter three) 1834–1836: The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole This work portrays the evolution of a classical civilization in five stages (savage, pastoral, consummate, destructive, and desolate). In this allegorical manner, Cole conveys a notion of futility in the American impulse to conquer its own wilderness. (Chapter two) 1836: The Oxbow by Thomas Cole This work depicts what Albert Boime refers to as the “magisterial gaze” or profit-seeking attitude toward the American wilderness. (Chapter two) 1839–1840: The Journal of Julius Rodman by Edgar Allan Poe This would-be narrative of a pioneer’s exploration through the Rocky Mountains is Poe’s most ambitious treatment of landscape, and its completion was apparently beyond his power or interest, since it was left unfinished. As it stands, Julius Rodman reveals a struggle to reconcile the divergent myths of the primordial wilderness and the Edenic garden. (Chapter two) 1840: The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole Cole allegorizes the four stages of human life—childhood, youth, manhood, and old age—in four paintings. The cycle reflects nineteenthcentury American culture’s fundamental investment in Christianity. (Chapter two) 1844: “Morning on the Wissahiccon” by Edgar Allan Poe Although it is the most realistic of Poe’s sketches, this sketch plays with a Romantic portrayal of the wilderness. The narrator’s dream vision of a “repining” elk dissipates with the arrival of humankind, domesticity, and utilitarianism. (Chapter two) 1850: “The Domain of Arnheim” by Edgar Allan Poe The river-progression of this allegorical narrative subsequently imitates and possibly even parodies Claude’s sunscapes, as the narrator heads into a similar “vortex” of sunlight. This climactic scene also includes a hovering castle of “semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture” whose inspiration appears to be the Youth painting from Cole’s The Voyage of Life cycle. (Chapter two)

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1867: Domes of the Yosemite by Albert Bierdstadt Bierdstadt was a key figure from the Hudson River School of painting, founded by Thomas Cole. Despite their differing mediums, both painted and photographed depictions of this same Yosemite Valley landscape attempt to conjure the American myth of Manifest Destiny, reflecting a continuing cultural sensibility. (Chapter two) 1875: South Dome from Glacier Point, California by William H. Jackson Although painting would seem to be the more idealized medium to present an impression of Yosemite Valley, this photograph also attempts to capture its artist’s impression of the area. (Chapter two) 1884: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Literary river allegories as well known as this novel, or as little known as Poe’s landscape sketches “The Elk” (1844) and “The Domain of Arnheim” (1850), depict a larger spiritual transformation through their protagonists’ experiences along a river’s meandering course. (Chapter four) 1886: Gathering Water-Lilies by Peter H. Emerson This early landscape photograph depicts a boat-rowing couple in the foreground with sharp clarity while the field of lilies and landscape beyond are blurry. These manipulations of the camera apparatus were an attempt at personal expression beyond the mechanical perspective of photography. (Chapter three) 1888: “The Man Who Would Be King” by Rudyard Kipling This short story is an allegorical indictment of British imperialism, which narrates the experience of two British confidence men, former soldiers in India, attempting to trick their way into becoming rulers of an inhospitable region of warring tribes above Afghanistan. An adaptation of this story was made into a major Hollywood film of the same title by John Huston in 1975. (Chapter eight) 1890: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce This American writer’s short story describes a condemned man’s extended river/overland odyssey through the wishful thinking of his last moment on Earth. It was adapted into an avant-garde short film La rivière du hibou (1962) by Robert Enrico. (Chapter four)

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1890: The Onion Field by George Davison This pinhole photograph forfeits realism in favor of a hazy sheen, similar in spirit to the emotional brushstrokes of Impressionist paintings. Like Claude Monet’s experiments with the diffusion of clarity in his pictorial “impressions” of the French countryside, the pinhole camera was used to diffuse an otherwise clear or focused image into a field of tonal values. (Chapter three) 1890: The Pool at Menil by Fernand Khnopff This picture exemplifies Tonalism in early landscape photography. These painter-photographers sought to convey intangible phenomena and spiritual manifestations in the natural world of real objects, and the pool or pond became for them a psychic boundary between dreams and reality. (Chapter three) 1896: Song of the Night by Alphonse Osbert This picture is another example of Tonalism in early photography. These bodies of water, portrayed as both isolated and reflective, were already common in the painting of the nineteenth-century American Luminists as well as the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. (Chapter three) 1898: The Pond by Edward Steichen Here is another example of early photography based on Symbolist landscape painting. Steichen’s treatment of a small body of water here was thematic in his work. (Chapter three) 1902: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad This turn-of-the-century novel concerned “Third World” exploitation and the characteristically “Western” psyche. The story was adapted to the context of the Vietnam conflict by Francis Ford Coppola in his film Apocalypse Now (1979). In both narratives, the protagonist journeys along a river that takes him deep into a jungle landscape where he ultimately confronts the darker truth of his cultural sensibility. (Chapter eight) 1904: Landscape by Robert Demachy Photographers seeking idealized landscapes adopted the gum-bichromate process, which allowed maximum control of the image’s varying tonalities. According to Symbolist theory, the aesthetic of Tonalism expressed the entire range of human emotions through contrasting colors. This abstract complexity of tonal contrast is evident in gum-bichromate pictures like this one. (Chapter three)

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1913: The Uncertainty of the Poet by Giorgio de Chirico An abstract, psychological approach to landscape appears in the proto-Surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978). In this example, his metaphysical townscapes become symbolic according to their deliberate departure from familiar perspectives. (Chapter one) circa 1914: The Cyclops by Odilon Redon A key figure from the Symbolist movement of landscape painters and painter-photographers. Redon sought to associate his fantastical subjects with the inner psyche through the use of brightly colored landscape settings as seen in this painting. (Chapter three) 1920: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari In the same way that Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist film suggests its narrator’s insanity through contorted interior sets, certain films use outdoor locations to express their protagonists’ internal conflicts. (Introduction) 1922: Nanook of the North Robert Flaherty’s early documentary reflects a popular American taste for exoticism with his attention to this remote and brutal environment, and the Eskimo culture that dared inhabit it. To this end, Flaherty contrived the entire scenario to look as primitive as possible. (Chapter three) 1925: Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life Filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack attempted to capitalize on the success of Nanook by pursuing the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (modern-day Iran) as they made their seasonal trek through difficult mountains with their herds. This film is another example of a contrived ethnographic documentary, exoticizing remote landscape and their indigenous cultures. (Chapter three) 1926: Moana After Nanook’s commercial success, Flaherty made this ethnographic documentary, a similarly contrived depiction of Samoa and its inhabitants. (Chapter three) 1928: Chang Like Flaherty’s films, Cooper and Schoedsack’s subsequent documentary Chang (1928), about a peasant family in the Siamese jungle, was also staged. (Chapter three)

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1928: La chute de la maison Usher Jean Epstein’s avant-garde film adapts Poe’s Gothic tale “The Fall of the House of User” (1839) by using a combination of stylized interior sets and specific outdoor locations. With Poe’s narrative as a foundation, the grainy quality of the film’s landscape stills is an attempt at the same psychological connotation as the Symbolist-inspired photographs of Steichen or Osbert. (Chapter three) 1931: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí Dalí’s bleak, nondescript landscapes serve merely to underscore his portrayal of a psychological wasteland. In the foreground of this landscape, for example, there are subjects out of context: giant, melting pocket watches. Dalí also constructed the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound (1945). (Chapters one and ten) 1933: King Kong Increasingly, American popular investment in exotic landscapes called for an accompanying fictional narrative. After the success of their ethnographic documentaries, Schoedsack and Cooper released this jungle-fantasy epic. (Chapter three) 1937: Lost Horizon The exoticized landscape fiction realized its fullest potential with the portrayal of the solipsistic Himalayan paradise “Shangri-La” in this Hollywood film, directed by Frank Capra. (Chapter three) 1939: Wuthering Heights William Wyler’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel (1847) features a craggy section of the moors, which the film positions as the catalyst for the union of Heathcliff and Catherine. According to the two lovers’ lower-class status and “gypsy” heritage, this wilderness landscape underscores their marginalization from English social hierarchy. Since Catherine must forfeit her relationship with Heathcliff in order to improve her class status, this film also becomes a feminist allegory of social repression. (Chapter ten) 1941: High Sierra This film exploits wilderness locations to underscore the psychological tension of the characteristic film noir narrative. As a location for the final showdown between the police and the protagonist, this film uses a steep incline of crags and perilous cliffs in the Sierras, anticipating the use of rocky locations in the climax of several Anthony Mann westerns. (Chapter ten)

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1944: At Land Maya Deren’s avant-garde film uses natural landscape to depict an inward psychological odyssey. A river becomes a site of personal metamorphosis as the female protagonist (Deren) wanders alongside it and clambers over its stones. This film anticipates not only Enrico’s avant-garde film La rivière du hibou (1962), but several 1960s and ’70s mainstream river allegories of psychological transformation. (Chapter four) 1944: Clearing Winter Storm by Ansel Adams This later photograph can be linked culturally to both Albert Bierstadt’s 1867 painting Domes of the Yosemite and Jackson’s 1875 photograph South Dome from Glacier Point, California. The hard contrasts between the misty gray and white clouds against the black, snow-laden crags invoke emotions of awe and wonderment, and, like a typical Hudson River School painting, this photograph reinforced popular American celebration of frontier myths. (Chapter three) 1945: Spellbound More than any other Hitchcock film, Spellbound constructs its narrative around the ability of psychoanalysis to decode the subconscious mind. In addition to the dream sequence’s reference to downhill skiing, Dalí includes his familiar landscape of the mind, underscoring the larger vision of the subconscious with decidedly anthropomorphic rock formations. (Chapter ten) 1946: Duel in the Sun The rugged, craggy landscape becomes the ideal manifestation of the female half-white/half-Native American protagonist’s inner psychological turmoil. The intended symbolism is most apparent in its wideshot depiction of an anthropomorphic “Squaw’s Head Rock,” which is actually just a painted matte drop. (Chapter five) 1948: Treasure of the Sierra Madre This film’s use of actual Mexican desert locations might otherwise function as authentic backdrop. However, the protagonist’s internal struggle with paranoia and greed juxtaposed against an increasingly hostile wilderness allows the landscape to behave as an independent character. (Chapter ten)

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1950: Rashomon Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Japanese film is an allegory on the subjectivity of human perception in which four differing accounts of a murder within a peripheral forest are depicted. Here, a dark hollow of the forest takes on a psychological dimension, becoming the core of the human psyche where truth is manufactured for selfish ends. (Conclusion) 1950: Winchester ’73 Director Anthony Mann is recognized for his psychological use of natural landscape, and this 1950 release is a good example of his approach to the western genre. As in Duel in the Sun, the protagonist and antagonist engage in their final showdown alone amidst a similar landscape. (Chapter five) 1952: Bend of the River Within a psychological framework, the wilderness landscapes become a series of obstacles to be overcome through the course of Mann’s westerns, particularly this film. These films reach their dramatic climax with an evocative landscape duel between the male protagonist and his past, personified by the principal antagonist. Bend of the River’s final duel occurs within an actual river, as if to affirm the title’s allegorical component. (Chapter five) 1954: Robinson Crusoe The landscape allegory of the “Western megalomaniac” pitted against an exotic wilderness and its native inhabitants can be found in Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of the Daniel Defoe novel (1719), but it really became prolific during the 1960s and ’70s with films such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), as well as John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). (Introduction) 1955: Pather Panchali Satyajit Ray’s Indian production transcended its national context in its universal sense of social realism and attention to human perseverance. The film’s sensitive portrayal of an impoverished family in the rural countryside of Bengal features an intimate connection between the characters and their natural surroundings. (Conclusion) 1957: The Seventh Seal Ingmar Bergman’s medieval allegory of faith, in which a knight returning from the Crusades challenges “Death” to a game of chess,

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features a series of natural settings, reflecting the inner struggle of the protagonist to affirm a divine presence in the universe. (Chapter ten) 1958: Vertigo More than any other Hitchcock film, Vertigo is a narrative adventure through both interior and exterior spaces, reflecting inner psychological states of the protagonist as well as the female object of his obsession. In this film, the postwar American allegory of male psychological trauma becomes more pessimistic, akin to the spiritual wasteland films appearing soon after. (Chapter ten) 1959: Castle of the Pyrenees by René Magritte In the case of Surrealist René Magritte, landscapes approach realism only to be undermined by something acutely contrary to nature, such as the hovering castle atop a rock in this painting. (Chapter one) 1959: North by Northwest It is no coincidence that Hitchcock pursued a narrative of mistaken and shifting identities from a springboard of Mount Rushmore’s anthropomorphic topography. In the film’s dramatic finale, the battle for restored national security or, rather, male identity is meted out upon the “face” of American consciousness. (Chapter ten) 1960: L’avventura This film, directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni, signals the advent of a more overt, psychological approach to landscape allegory in cinema, especially in the pessimistic context of the postwar era. This film is seminal for its use of landscape, which allows the narrative to diverge radically from established conventions of storytelling. (Chapter six) 1962: Dog Star Man The incorporation of natural setting in Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde film opus informs how landscape allegory links avant-garde and mainstream practices. Brakhage establishes landscape allegory through a manipulated juxtaposition of human subject and landscape—as did many mainstream filmmakers of this period. (Chapter four) 1962: La rivière du hibou Robert Enrico’s adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” vacillates between avant-garde practices and mainstream narrative conventions in order to “narrativize” its wilderness settings. As in Dog Star Man, the manipulation

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of camera perspective within the larger context of character and landscape juxtaposition in this film establishes its deeper symbolic import. (Chapter four) 1962: Lawrence of Arabia David Lean’s seminal mainstream allegory of the characteristically “Western” megalomaniac pitted against a “Third World” landscape and its native inhabitants. As in Dog Star Man and many other films of this period, the protagonist struggles against the landscape itself in an effort to conquer everything that derives from it. These narratives chastise the imperialist impulse when this character is effectively consumed by the landscape or, rather, by his own obsessive psyche. (Chapter eight) 1963: The Birds Hitchcock’s film suggests a larger threat from abroad or, more specifically, the skies above, in the form of common birds attacking the rural community of Bodega Bay in Northern California. In this latter suggestive approach, the face of American consciousness is presented through the landscape itself wherein the characters and their everyday interactions acting merely as supportive devices. (Chapter ten) 1964: Il deserto rosso Like Lisca Bianca in L’avventura, the island setting in this later film by Antonioni is an objective correlative for the protagonist’s psyche. Rather than reflecting the “brute reality” of the modern psyche, the deserted island here becomes the tranquil dream necessary for the female protagonist’s perseverance. (Chapter six) 1965: Incubus Taking direct influence from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1959), Leslie Stevens’ gothic landscape film features an aggressive use of natural settings to underscore the attempts at proselytizing an unknowing individual to the “God of Darkness.” (Chapter 10) 1965: Lord Jim Only three years after Lawrence of Arabia, Columbia released Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim, in which another characteristically “Western” megalomaniac ventures into the exotic indigenous landscape of a “Third World” culture, only to become its temporary ruler. This film also stars Peter O’Toole in the role of a military renegade who pursues a personal obsession both literally and figuratively into the “Third World wilderness” of his own psyche. (Chapter eight)

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1966: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Italian westerns of the 1960s and ’70s are an aggressive departure from the American westerns that came before. As with Antonioni’s films, Sergio Leone’s emphasis on desert wastelands is more accurately understood as a realist’s affirmation of modern society rather than a condemnation. (Chapter six) 1967: The Shooting In the defeatist cultural climate of the 1960s, the western became an ideal narrative vehicle for social critique and spiritual disillusionment. In this Monte Hellman film, the climactic duel among the rocks and other definitively western motifs serves to allegorize a more modern sensibility of existential and spiritual crisis. (Chapter five) 1968: The Girl on a Motorcycle Predating Easy Rider, Jack Cardiff’s film correlates the psychological universe of a female protagonist to accelerated movement through natural space, according to a larger allegory of existential futility. It exemplifies a potential genre of “feminist landscape” films. (Chapter ten) 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick’s seminal science-fiction film treats the region of outer space as another undiscovered wilderness to be navigated and controlled through human technology. Rather than manipulate terrestrial settings, this science-fiction allegory portrays its introspective progression as an outward voyage into deep space. (Chapter nine) 1968: Planet of the Apes Where other landscape allegories use either a semi-historical past or a fictional present to assemble a critique of expansionism and exploitation, this Franklin J. Schaffner film, along with John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), uses natural settings, including outer space, to create cautionary tales of what could happen if Western civilization continues on its present course. (Chapter nine) 1968: Teorema Pier Paolo Pasolini’s use of the arid, dark-brown slopes of Mount Etna become poignant according to his vitriolic indictments of Italian middle-class culture. Aside from their incorporation of an extremely hostile landscape, his films achieve their allegorical force through

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Pasolini’s assemblage of caricatures (e.g., as opposed to the more plausible characters found in Antonioni’s films). (Chapter six) 1969: Easy Rider In the same way that opposing attitudes between its two protagonists becomes thematic, this film’s emphasis on the highway’s natural surroundings sets up a dichotomy of the American landscape. It is both a representation of open possibility and an expansive space of resistance, refusing to become a final destination. In an allegory of psychological struggle between optimistic and pessimistic attitudes toward the future of American culture, the indigenous landscape itself becomes the final arbiter. (Chapter ten) 1969: Porcile Whereas Teorema’s treatment of Mount Etna preserves an abstract notion of space until the end of the film, Porcile maintains an allegorical correlation between the desolate landscape and the film’s bourgeois caricatures throughout. Only in their conclusions do these Pasolini films clearly establish this wasteland setting as the place of the modern psyche, and so retroactively justify their crosscutting approach. (Chapter six) 1970: El Topo On the surface, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Mexican production appears to be a typical western: gunslingers, innocent townsfolk, and an expansive desert setting. But the landscape allegory becomes apparent when unfamiliar, surreal elements are juxtaposed with the landscape, resulting in a decidedly atypical film. (Chapter five) 1970: Zabriskie Point This film’s desert fantasy sequence is a telling example of Italian cinema’s obsession with desolate landscapes during the 1960s and ’70s. Like L’avventura’s “adventure” to the deserted island of Lisca Bianca, this later Antonioni film suggests that such regions can be experienced only temporarily, if at all. (Chapter six) 1971: Vanishing Point Released only three years later, Richard C. Sarafian’s film borrows many narrative elements directly from Easy Rider. As an extension of the previous film, the allegory of anti-establishment values is subsumed into a larger existential allegory of futility. (Chapter ten)

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1971: Walkabout Nicolas Roeg’s British production explores the marginalization of Australian Aborigine culture by way of two middle-class youths’ accidental trek through the outback’s hostile terrain. By focusing on a small set of representative characters, this film strives for a more overt allegory than other landscape-oriented films of the time. (Chapter seven) 1972: Aguirre: The Wrath of God Like Lawrence of Arabia, Werner Herzog’s film contains characters at least partly based on actual historical figures, and with plots involving a characteristically “Western” male whose personal obsession takes him deep into a “Third World” jungle wilderness. The protagonist’s descent into madness, reflected by the growing belief that he is destined for greatness, is proportional to the steadfast resistance of the river and the jungle against all attempts at being conquered. (Chapter nine) 1972: Deliverance Taking place entirely on American soil, this John Boorman film is a departure from the usual context of a “Third World” landscape and its indigenous culture. Nevertheless, it establishes a similar notion: a peripheral wilderness inhabited by a rustic culture that does not abide by urban lifestyles associated with Western society. (Chapter nine) 1973: Badlands A combination of road film and melodrama, this Terrence Malick film uses natural settings to reinforce an allegory of counterculture struggle with an unsympathetic establishment. (Chapter ten) 1973: The Holy Mountain After depicting an elaborate spiritual quest to a mountaintop, this Alejandro Jodorowsky film announces that it is “only a film” and so cannot offer any ultimate truth. Although less landscape- oriented, this film incorporates an indictment of cultural imperialism—in this case, the Spanish impact on Mexico’s indigenous peoples. (Chapter five) 1974: Zardoz This John Boorman film depicts a heroic “Western” figure within a bizarre futuristic setting: an enclosed, utopian culture existing within a mountainous landscape. The surrounding “outlands” in this film

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become the allegorical domain of a marginalized culture, especially in a “Third World” sense. (Chapter nine) 1975: Picnic at Hanging Rock Possibly influenced by Walkabout, Peter Weir’s film correlates an indigenous landscape with certain characters’ dream states, this time conjuring a sense of Australia’s collective cultural unconsciousness. The titular Hanging Rock’s role as a dreamscape moves beyond individual realms to the larger purpose of national mythmaking and how cultural imperialism manifests itself in the Australian context. (Chapter seven) 1975: The Man Who Would Be King This film is John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s turn-of-the-century indictment of British imperialist politics. Like Lawrence of Arabia, this film incorporates an extended wilderness sequence, in which the landscape presents itself to the traveling protagonists as an impassible obstacle, assuming the antagonist role in the narrative’s allegorical assemblage. (Chapter eight) 1977: Sorcerer As in Deliverance, this William Friedkin film’s landscape allegory of Western politics places four men in the protagonist role and pits them collectively against a hostile wilderness. Beyond its many depictions of struggle against the jungle itself, this film also associates the troubled psyche of its protagonist with the exotic setting through an atypical superimposition sequence. (Chapter nine) 1978: Days of Heaven Terrence Malick’s film interpolates extended shots of indigenous American landscape into its love-triangle narrative, suggesting a potential genre of “landscape melodrama” films. Its emerging sense of futility echoes Malick’s earlier film Badlands, as well as so many other landscape allegories of this period. (Chapter ten) 1979: Apocalypse Now Like Lord Jim, Francis Ford Coppola’s major Hollywood production is an adaptation of a turn-of-the-century Joseph Conrad story about “Third World” exploitation and the characteristically “Western” psyche. This film’s protagonist navigates a serpentine river through various jungle obstacles until he reaches the “heart” of the landscape or, rather, the core of his inner psychological universe. (Chapter eight)

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1982: Fitzcarraldo Essentially a remake of Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this later Herzog film pits a “Western megalomaniac” against a “Third World” jungle in order to critique Western politics. The historical setting is much later, however, occurring in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context of South American rubber exploitation. (Chapter nine) 1984: Yellow Earth Chen Kaige’s film depicts the story of a peasant girl who attempts to defy her traditional existence by leaving to join the rapidly spreading communist party. The vast barren terrain plays a central role by not only dictating the protagonist’s desperate existence, but also by ultimately drowning her in the river coursing through it. This natural setting, in turn, establishes a larger political allegory that points to communism’s inability to improve the lives of China’s rural farmers. (Conclusion) 1985: Vagabond This Agnès Varda film reflects notions of female repression through its juxtaposition of a homeless female protagonist with desolate French rural landscapes. This is another example of a “feminist landscape” film. (Chapter ten) 1986: Mosquito Coast Pessimistic landscape allegories of the “Western megalomaniac,” like this Peter Weir film, surfaced occasionally in the 1980s, but such films never carried the same impact, and the cultural impulse of the previous two decades mostly subsided. This film depicts an American family attempting to exist in a jungle, where the patriarch assumes an imperialist function by exploiting native laborers to construct a massive icemaker. (Chapter nine) 1990: The Sheltering Sky Bernardo Bertolucci makes spectacular use of African desert locations in this film. While its use of desert landscape underscores the female protagonist’s search for identity, the film’s “sexistential” narrative does not mobilize these inhabited spaces with the same allegorical impact as previous films. (Chapter six) 2000: El Valley Centro The underground filmmaker James Benning draws upon the same aesthetic heritage of landscape allegory in his work, continuing its tradition of communicating a universal message through natural

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landscapes. In this film trilogy, each 2½-minute landscape vignette of California’s Central Valley includes manifestations of industrial exploitation. (Conclusion) 2002: Gerry Occasionally, a landscape-oriented film still appears in the mainstream context, which seems to draw on the allegorical framework of films from the 1960s and ’70s. However, this Gus Van Sant film, like Zabriskie Point, demonstrates an ineffective juxtaposition of psychological struggle with a scenic but inhospitable wasteland. (Conclusion) 2007: Into the Wild Sean Penn’s film exploits the true account of Christopher McCandless‘s failed attempt to survive alone in the Alaskan wilderness for several months—toward a universal message of socialization and forgiveness. While the film spends much of its duration in societal contexts before McCandless’s exodus into inhospitable Alaskan terrains, Penn incorporates natural settings to underscore key moments of the youth’s psychological transformation. (Conclusion) 2007: No Country for Old Men This Coen Brothers film weaves a good deal of its narrative around an expansive desert location to confer a human dimension upon it. However, it does not allow its desert settings to remain fluid enough throughout its duration, nor does it spend enough time with the aging sheriff’s psychological struggle to make sense of the amoral universe he sees unfolding around him. In this way, it is closer to the escapist form of entertainment found in most Hollywood releases of its time than the heavy-handed landscape allegories of the 1960s and ’70s. (Conclusion)

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Notes Introduction Defining Landscape Allegory 1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 204. 2. Donald Meinig, Interpretations of the Ordinary Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 6. 3. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 2. 4. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October, 12 (Spring 1980): 67–86. 5. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 22. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. xi. 7. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 1–54. 8. Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 4.

One Landscape Depiction before Cinema 1. John M. Howe, “The Conversion of the Physical World: The Creation of a Christian Landscape,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 63–78. 2. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 32. 3. Ibid., p. 84. 4. Ibid., p. 164. 5. Ibid., p. 351. 6. Ibid. 7. Peter Sutton, Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 1.

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Notes

8. Josua Bruyn, “Toward a Scriptural Reading of Seventeenth Century Dutch Landscape Paintings” in Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting, ed. Sutton, p. 100. 9. Peter Sutton, Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 1. 10. Humphrey Wine, Claude: The Poetic Landscape (London: National Gallery Publications, 1994), pp. 36–37. 11. Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 21.

Two Spiritualized Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century 1. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 4. 2. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 243. 3. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 3. 4. Charles Sala, Caspar David Friedrich: The Spirit of Romantic Painting (Paris: Baya Presse S.A., 1994), p. 133. 5. Ibid., p. 79. 6. Ibid., p. 80. 7. Ibid., p. 81. 8. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 22. 9. Martin Christadler, “American Romanticism and the Meanings of Landscape” in Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature, ed. Dieter Meindl and Friedrich W. Horlacher (Erlangen: Universitatsbund, 1985), p. 72. 10. Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and the American Landscape Painting (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1991), pp. 21–22. 11. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 12. Ibid., p. 8. 13. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836): 1–12. 14. Boime, The Magisterial Gaze, p. 8. 15. Gene Edward Veith, Painters of Faith: The Spiritual Landscape in Nineteenth Century America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishers, 2001), p. 17. 16. Martin Christadler, “American Romanticism and the Meanings of Landscape” in Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature, ed. Meindl and Horlacher, p. 98.

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17. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Domain of Arnheim” in The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, ed. Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 7. 18. Kent Ljungquist, The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 1984), p. 139.

Three Advent of Filming Landscape Allegory 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 89. 2. Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and the American Landscape Painting, 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1991), p. 151. 3. Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 26–27. 4. Ibid., p. 50.

Four

Depiction of Landscape in Avant-Garde Films

1. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American-Garde, 1943–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xii. 2. R. Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), p. 144. 3. Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 190. 4. Ibid., p. 190. 5. Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision/by Brakhage,” Film Culture 30 (Autumn 1963, reprinted 1976), p. 5. 6. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American-Garde, 1943–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 190. 7. Elder, Films of Stan Brakhage, p. 144. 8. David James, Allegories of Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 40. 9. Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 41. 10. Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo: A Book of the Film (London: Calder & Boyars, 1974), p. 97. 11. Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004), p. 13. 12. Ibid., p. 16. 13. Ibid., p. 13.

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14. Germaine Dulac, “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea,” The Avant-Garde Film (New York: New York University Press, 1978), p. 43. 15. Ibid., p. 45. 16. Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 14. 17. Ibid., p. 11. 18. Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 1: The Visual Arts Today (Winter 1960): 150–167. 19. Ibid.

Five Spiritual Wasteland Films 1. Philip French, Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 106. 2. Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 53. 3. French, Westerns, p. 107. 4. Ibid., p. 104. 5. David Lusted, The Western (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2003), p. 153. 6. Ibid., p. 126. 7. R. Philip Loy, Westerns in a Changing America, 1955–2000 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), pp. 40–41. 8. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 6. 9. Ibid., p. 10. 10. Ibid., p. 86. 11. Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo: A Book of the Film (London: Calder & Boyars, 1974), p. 130.

Six Italian Wasteland Allegory 1. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976), p. 22. 2. Ibid., p. 23. 3. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 78. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 46–47. 7. Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 296.

Notes

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8. Harry Trosman, “L’avventura and the Presentation of Emptiness” in Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Masterworks of Art and Film (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 135. 9. David Forgacs, “Antonioni, Space, Sexuality” in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantarakos (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), p. 104. 10. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum International, 2001), p. 212. 11. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 51. 12. Ibid., p. 55. 13. Ibid., pp. 90–91. 14. Ibid., p. 90. 15. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, p. 221. 16. Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 205. 17. Ibid., pp. 201–206. 18. Chatman, Antonioni, p. 55. 19. Viano, A Certain Realism, p. 224. 20. Ibid., p. 234. 21. Ibid., p. 217. 22. Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 188. 23. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, p. 255. 24. Chatman, Antonioni, p. 164. 25. Ibid., p. 166. 26. Casey, The Fate of Place, p. 182. 27. Ibid., p. 201. 28. Ibid., p. 207.

Seven

Australian Outback Allegory

1. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Bath: Harper Collins, 1976), pp. 6–7. 2. Ibid., p. 13. 3. Ibid., p. 191. 4. Michael Bliss, Dreams within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 57. 5. Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 96–97. 6. J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 230.

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Notes

7. Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 49. 8. Ibid., p. 55. 9. Jonathan Rayner, The Films of Peter Weir (London: Cassell, 1998), p. 69. 10. Ibid., p. 71. 11. Schaffer, Women and the Bush, p. 55. 12. Ibid., p. 52. 13. Ibid., p. 56. 14. Ibid., p. 110.

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Index Academy Award, 63, 157 Adams, Ansel, 48–50, 54–55, 74, 117, 172 Clearing Winter Storm, 49, 172 Adorno, Theodor W., 6 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 67, 168 Affleck, Casey, 156 Aguirre, Lope de, 124 Aguirre: The Wrath of God, 7, 17, 67, 112, 122–128, 130, 143, 154–155, 173, 178, 180 Alabama Hills, 12 Allegory, 3–7, 8, 10, 13–17, 22, 28, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 43, 44, 47, 56, 61, 64, 66–68, 70–71, 73, 77–78, 81–82, 85, 87–97, 99–109, 111, 113–121, 127, 131, 135, 140, 142–148, 150–151, 156–159, 163, 165, 171, 173–178, 180 Landscape, 1–5, 7–19, 21–22, 24, 26–28, 30–32, 36–38, 40, 42, 44–60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70–71, 73–76, 78, 80–83, 86–87, 111–121, 123–124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134–136, 139–161, 163–181 Alpers, Svetlana, 21 Alte Pinakothek, 9 Amidou, 131 Andrews, Malcolm, 21 Angelopoulos, Theo, 151 Anger, Kenneth, 59 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 5–6, 15, 59, 79, 82, 85, 87–91, 95, 97, 102, 106, 113, 174–177 Il deserto rosso, 89, 91, 95, 97, 102, 175

Il grido, 87 L’avventura, 5, 87–91, 93, 96–97, 113, 151, 174–175, 177 L’eclisse, 89 La notte, 89 Passenger, The, 15, 95, 97 Zabriskie Point, 15, 79, 93, 95–97, 136, 157, 177, 181 Apocalypse Now, 7, 13, 17, 67, 112, 118–120, 125–126, 128, 130, 134, 169, 179 Apocalypse Now Redux, 120–121, 127 Argenti, Filippo, 4 Ariosto, 26 Arnaud, Georges, 131 Wages of Fear, The, 131 At Land, 66–69, 71, 172 Augustine, Saint, 86 Avercamp, Hendrick, 28 Badlands, 151, 178–179 Banerjee, Kanu, 160 Banerjee, Subir, 160 Barbizon School, 51 Bardem, Javier, 157 Bartram, William, 39–40 Travels, 39 Bastien–Lepage, Jules, 51 Beatty, Ned, 129 Ben Hur, 1 Bend of the River, 14, 76–77, 173 Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 133 Benning, James, 18, 154–156, 180 California Trilogy, 154 El Valley Centro, 18, 155, 180 Los, 18 Sogobi, 18, 155 Berchem, Nicolaes, 28

198

Index

Bergman, Ingmar, 151, 175 Seventh Seal, The, 151, 173, 175 Bergman, Ingrid, 145, 147 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 97, 152, 180 Sheltering Sky, The, 97, 152, 180 Bierce, Ambrose, 64–66, 68–70, 168, 174 “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An,” 63, 66–67, 168 Bierstadt, Albert, 40, 49, 172 Domes of the Yosemite, 49, 168, 172 Birds, The, 144, 175 Blake, William, 33 Bliss, Michael, 103–104 Bloemaert, Abraham, 28 Bodega Bay, 144, 175 Boetticher, Burt, 2, 12 Tall T, The, 2 Bogart, Humphrey, 141–142 Boime, Albert, 40–42, 48, 50, 167 Bondanella, Peter, 89, 91, 94 Boorman, John, 17, 67, 128, 132, 136, 173, 176, 178 Deliverance, 17, 67, 128–131, 155, 173, 178–179 Zardoz, 132–135, 176, 178 Border Incident, 141 Bordwell, David, 53 Bosch, Hieronymus, 9, 21, 24, 26, 163 Garden of Earthly Delights, The, 9, 24, 26, 163 Last Judgment, The, 24 Both, Jan, 28, 165 Landscape with the Judgment of Paris, 28 “Bower of Bliss,” 26, 164 Boyle, Richard, 32, 165 Brakhage, Stan, 13–14, 18, 58–63, 71, 128, 174 Dog Star Man: Part 1, 58–61, 63, 66, 70–71, 75, 105, 113, 128, 130, 158, 174–175 Brando, Marlon, 119

British National Gallery, 9 Brolin, Josh, 157 Brooks, Richard, 7, 116 Lord Jim, 7, 116, 118–119, 127, 175, 179 Brown, Charles Brockden, 42 Browning, Todd, 82 Freaks, 82 Bruegel, Jan, 27 Bruyn, Josua, 29, 30 Buñuel, Luis, 7, 17 Robinson Crusoe, 7, 17, 173 Burke, Edmund, 35 Bussieres, Jean de, 31 Descriptions poétiques, 31 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 1, 12, 18, 53, 140, 170 Caine, Michael, 117 California Trilogy, 154 Cameron, James, 136 Terminator, The, 136, 154 Camus, Albert, 71 The Myth of Sisyphus, 71 Cannes Film Festival, 63 Palme d’Or, 63 Capra, Frank, 56 Lost Horizon, 56, 171 Cardiff, Jack, 152, 176 Girl on a Motorcycle, The, 152, 176 Carracci, Annibale, 28 Casey, Edward S., 36, 79, 80, 86, 88, 96–97, 136 Fate of Place, The, 86 Castle of the Pyrenees, 24, 174 Chahulawassee River, 129 Chang, 56, 170 Chatman, Seymour, 87, 89–90, 92, 94–95 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 4, 163 Parliament of Fowls, 4, 163 Chekhov, Michael, 145 Christadler, Martin, 39, 44

Index Christianity, 4, 6, 9, 22, 23, 25, 26, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 59, 86, 94, 100, 126, 164, 166, 167 Church, Frederic, 40 Clearing Winter Storm, 49, 172 Clementi, Pierre, 92 Clouzot, Henri, 131 Wages of Fear, The, 131 Coen, Ethan, 157 Coen, Joel, 157 Coen, Joel and Ethan, 157 No Country for Old Men, 157, 181 Cole, Thomas, 11, 31–32, 40–45, 48, 60, 67, 120, 136, 153, 158, 167–168 Course of Empire, The, 11, 41–42, 60, 136, 153, 167 “Essay on American Scenery,” 41 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunder Storm (The Oxbow), 11, 40, 167 Voyage of Life, The, 42–43, 67, 120, 153, 158, 167 Youth, 43, 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 33 Confessions, 86 Coninxloo, Gillis van, 28 Connery, Sean, 117, 133 Conrad, Joseph, 45, 118–119, 169, 179 Heart of Darkness, The, 45, 119, 169 Constable, John, 33 Cooper, James Fenimore, 41–43 Pioneers, The, 41 Cooper, Merian C., 56, 170–171 Chang, 56, 170 Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, 56, 170 King Kong, 56, 171

199

Coppola, Francis Ford, 7, 13, 17, 67, 112, 118–121, 123, 127, 136, 169, 179 Apocalypse Now, 7, 13, 17, 67, 112, 118–20, 125–126, 128, 130, 134, 169, 179 Apocalypse Now Redux, 120–121, 127 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 51 Couer fidèle, 53 Course of Empire, The, 11, 41–42, 60, 136, 153, 167 Cox, Ronny, 129 Cremer, Bruno, 131 Cyclops, The, 51, 170 Dalí, Salvador, 24, 52, 83, 145–146, 171–172 Persistence of Memory, The, 24, 145, 171 Sun Table, 24 Damon, Matt, 156 Dante, 86, 163 Inferno, 4, 163 Davison, George, 51, 169 Onion Field, The, 51, 169 Days of Heaven, 151, 179 De Chirico, Giorgio, 24, 170 Uncertainty of the Poet, The, 24, 170 De Crèvecœur, Hector St. John, 39 Letters from an American Farmer, 39 De Meun, Jean, 4 Roman de la Rose, 4, 163 De Sica, Vittorio, 86, 88 Ladri di biciclette, 86 Umberto D, 86 Death of Actaeon, The, 25, 164 Death Valley, 6, 79, 95 Defoe, Daniel, 173 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 5–6 Deliverance, 17, 67, 128–131, 155, 173, 178–179

200

Index

Demachy, Robert, 52, 169 Landscape, 52, 169 Deren, Maya, 13–14, 18, 59, 62–63, 66–68, 71, 172 At Land, 66–69, 71, 172 Meshes of the Afternoon, 66 Descriptions poétiques, 31 Dog Star Man: Part 1, 58–61, 63, 66, 70–71, 75, 105, 113, 128, 130, 158, 174–175 “Domain of Arnheim, The,” 43–44, 67, 167–168 Domenichino, 28 Domes of the Yosemite, 49, 168, 172 Double Indemnity, 140 “Dream within a Dream, A,” 103 Duel in the Sun, 72–73, 75–77, 111, 172–173 Dulac, Germaine, 64–66 Dullea, Keir, 135 E .T.: The Extraterrestrial, 136 Easy Rider, 148–151, 176–177 El Norte, 70 El Topo, 15, 62–63, 81, 83, 99–100, 109, 111, 177 El Valley Centro, 18, 155, 180 Elder, R. Bruce, 60–62, 70 Eliot, T.S., 89 “Elk, The,” 43, 67, 168 Elysium, 25, 26, 44 Emerson, Peter H., 51, 168 Gathering Water-Lilies, 51, 168 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11, 39, 42 Nature, 39 Enrico, Robert, 63–71, 102, 119–120, 125, 168, 172, 174 La rivière du hibou, 63–66, 68–71, 73, 75, 102, 119, 125, 168, 172, 174 Epistle to Burlington, 32, 165 Epstein, Jean, 53–54, 56–57, 64, 66, 103, 171 Couer fidèle, 53

La chute de la maison Usher, 53, 71, 103, 171 “Essay on American Scenery,” 41 “Eureka,” 44, 108 Expressionism, 140 German, 1, 53, 140, 170 Far Country, The, 14 Fate of Place, The, 86 Fitzcarraldo, 7, 17, 67, 123, 126–129, 158, 173, 180 Flaherty, Robert, 3, 12, 55–57, 166, 170 Moana, 56, 170 Nanook of the North, 3, 12, 55–56, 71, 166, 170 Fleischer, Richard, 1 Vikings, The, 1 Fletcher, Angus, 3, 4, 35 Fonda, Peter, 149 Ford, John, 2, 12, 14, 74, 94 Searchers, The, 75 Stagecoach, 2, 14, 74 Forgacs, David, 88 Frankfurt School, 6 Freaks, 82 Frechette, Mark, 95 French, Philip, 73–74 Friedkin, William, 17, 59, 128, 130–132, 136, 179 Sorcerer, 17, 63, 128, 130–131, 135–136, 179 Friedrich, Caspar David, 10, 13, 34, 36–41, 55, 60, 102, 114, 120, 153, 166 Monk by the Sea, 55, 166 Morning in the Riesengebirge, 37, 166 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 10, 13, 34, 38, 102, 166 Woman in Front of the Setting Sun, 38, 166 Galatea, 51 Garden of Earthly Delights, The, 9, 24, 26, 163

Index Gathering Water-Lilies, 51, 168 Geddes, Barbara Belle, 147 Genette, Gerard, 103 Genghis Khan, 1 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 21, 25–26, 33, 44 Girl on a Motorcycle, The, 152, 176 Girotti, Massimo, 92 Godeau, Antoine, 31 Poésies chrétiennes, 31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 33, 38 Gone with the Wind, 75 Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The, 4, 94, 176 Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, 56, 170 Grand Tour, The, 28, 32, 165 Gray, Vivean, 107 Guard, Dominic, 105 Haarlem, 28, 165 Halprin, Daria, 95 Hawks, Howard, 94 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 11, 42 Heade, Martin Johnson, 44 Heart of Darkness, The, 45, 119, 169 Hellman, Monte, 14, 63, 77, 176 Shooting, The, 15, 63, 77–78, 94, 119, 176 Helmore, Tom, 146 Hermitage, The, 9 Herzog, Werner, 7, 17, 67, 112, 122–124, 126–130, 136, 143, 154–155, 173, 178, 180 Aguirre: The Wrath of God, 7, 17, 67, 112, 122–128, 130, 143, 154–155, 173, 178, 180 Fitzcarraldo, 7, 17, 67, 123, 126–129, 158, 173, 180 My Best Fiend, 124 Heston, Charlton, 132, 133 High Noon, 76 High Sierra, 141, 142, 171 Hirsch, Emile, 158

201

Hitchcock, Alfred, 144–146, 151, 171, 172, 174–175 Birds, The, 144, 175 North by Northwest, 144, 174 Spellbound, 144–46, 148, 171–172 Vertigo, 144, 146–147, 149, 174 Hitch-Hiker, The, 141 Hobson, J. Allan, 104 Holbrook, Hal, 158 Holy Mountain, The, 83, 178 Homer, Winslow, 44 Hopper, Dennis, 149 Easy Rider, 148–151, 176, 177 Horkheimer, Max, 6 Hudson River School, 11, 22, 39, 42, 48–49, 55, 168, 172 Huston, John, 7, 13, 17, 59, 116, 133, 135, 141, 168 Man Who Would Be King, The, 7, 13, 17, 63, 116–119, 128, 153, 179 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 141–142 Huyssen, Andreas, 5, 60 Idealism, 11, 44 Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, see Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Il deserto rosso, 89, 91, 95, 97, 102, 175 Il grido, 87 Il vangelo secondo Matteo, 91 Impressionism, 44, 51–53, 56–57, 169 French, 54 Incubus, 151, 175 Indiana Jones, 154 Inferno, 141 Inglourious Basterds, 139 Interpretations of the Ordinary Landscape, 2 Into the Wild, 158, 181 Italianate School, 28–30, 48, 164–165

202

Index

Jackson, J.B., 2 Jackson, William H., 46, 48–49, 168, 172 South Dome from Glacier Point, California, 46, 49, 168, 172 Jagger, Mick, 127 James, David, 61–62 Jameson, Fredric, 5–6 Jarratt, John, 105 Jefferson, Thomas, 39 Notes on Virginia, 39 Jewish Cemetery, 30, 165 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 15, 62, 81, 83, 177, 178 El Topo, 15, 62–63, 81, 83, 99–100, 109, 111, 177 Holy Mountain, The, 83, 178 Jones, Jennifer, 75 Jones, Tommy Lee, 157 Journal of Julius Rodman, The, 43, 167 Kaige, Chen, 160, 180 Yellow Earth, 160, 180 Kant, Immanuel, 35, 38, 86, 96 Khnopff, Fernand, 52, 169 Pool at Menil, The, 52, 169 King Kong, 56, 171 Kinski, Klaus, 123–124, 127–128 Kipling, Rudyard, 45, 116, 168, 179 Man Who Would Be King, The, 45, 116, 168, 179 Kubrick, Stanley, 132, 134, 176 2001: A Space Odyssey, 132, 134–135, 176 Kurosawa, Akira, 159–160, 173 Rashomon, 159, 173 L’avventura, 5, 87–91, 93, 96–97, 113, 151, 174–175, 177 La chute de la maison Usher, 53, 71, 103, 171 La notte, 89 La rivière du hibou, 63–66, 68–71, 73, 75, 102, 119, 125, 168, 172, 174

Ladri di biciclette, 86 Lambert, Anne, 104 Landau, Martin, 144 Landscape, 30, 52, 164, 169 Landscape and Memory, 99 Landscape Garden, The, 43 Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, 20, 31, 165 Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 32, 164 Landscape with the Judgment of Paris, 28 Landy, Marcia, 88, 94 Lane, Fitz Hugh, 44 Lang, Fritz, 140 Woman in the Window, The, 140 Lawrence of Arabia, 7, 13, 16, 110, 112–114, 116–119, 123, 127, 175, 178–179 Lawrence, T.E., 17, 113 Lean, David, 7, 13, 16, 110, 112–113, 117, 135, 175 Lawrence of Arabia, 7, 13, 16, 110, 112–114, 116–119, 123, 127, 175, 178–179 Leaud, Jean-Pierre, 92 L’eclisse, 89 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 5 Leone, Sergio, 4, 15, 85, 94, 96–97, 176 Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The, 4, 94, 176 Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 94 Leslie, Joan, 141 Letters from an American Farmer, 39 Levin, Henry, 1 Genghis Khan, 1 Lindsay, Joan, 106, 108 Picnic at Hanging Rock, 106 Lisca Bianca, 88, 91, 93, 96, 175, 177 Little, Cleavon, 151 Ljungquist, Kent, 44–45 London, Jack, 158 Lord Jim, 7, 116, 118–119, 127, 175, 179

Index Lorrain, Claude, 20–22, 28, 30–32, 43, 51, 164–165, 167, 169 Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, 20, 31, 165 Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, 32, 164 Los, 18 Lost Horizon, 56, 171 Louvre, The, 9 Loy, R. Philip, 76 Lucas, George, 17, 136 Star Wars, 17, 154 Luminism, 22, 44, 43, 52, 169 Lupino, Ida, 141 Lusted, David, 74, 75 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 5 MacDonald, Scott, 11, 12 Mack, Maynard, 32–33 Magritte, René, 24, 83, 174 Castle of the Pyrenees, 24, 174 Malick, Terrence, 151, 178 Badlands, 151, 178–179 Days of Heaven, 151, 179 Man of the West, 76 Man Who Would Be King, The, 7, 13, 17, 45, 63, 116, 118–119, 128, 153, 168, 179 Manifest Destiny, 22, 36, 37, 41–42, 48, 50, 136, 168 Mann, Anthony, 12, 14, 76, 89, 142, 171, 173 Bend of the River, 14, 76, 77, 173 Far Country, The, 14 Man of the West, 76 Naked Spur, The, 14, 76 Winchester ‘73, 13, 14, 76–77, 173 Marx, Leo, 21 McCandless, Christopher, 158, 181 McNally, Stephen, 76 Meinig, Donald, 2 Interpretations of the Ordinary Landscape, 2 Melville, Herman, 11, 42 Meshes of the Afternoon, 66

203

Metamorphoses, 4, 90, 163 Millet, Jean-Francis, 51 Milton, John, 26, 33, 35, 165 Paradise Lost, 26, 35, 165 Moana, 56, 170 Modernism, 5, 44, 56, 96 Monk by the Sea, 55, 166 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 70 Monument Valley, 74 Moreau, Gustave, 51 Galatea, 51 Morning, 38, 166 Morning in the Riesengebirge, 37, 166 “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” 43, 167 Morricone, Ennio, 94 Mosquito Coast, 136, 180 Mount Etna, 91–94, 176, 177 Mount Rushmore, 144, 174 Muir, John, 50 Muir Woods National Monument, 147 Murphy, Richard, 5, 60 My Best Fiend, 124 Naked Spur, The, 14, 76 Nanook of the North, 3, 12, 55–56, 71, 166, 170 Myth of Sisyphus, The, 71 Naturalism, 8, 25, 30, 31, 44, 50–51, 54–56, 59, 164, 165 Dutch, 18, 28–30, 33, 48, 165 Nature, 39 Nature and Culture, 39 Nefud desert, 114 Nelson, Margaret, 104 Neoclassicism, 32–33, 165 Neorealism, 86, 88 Newman, Barry, 150 Nicholson, Jack, 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47 No Country for Old Men, 157, 181 North by Northwest, 144, 174 Notes on Virginia, 39

204

Index

Novak, Barbara, 21, 39 Nature and Culture, 39 Novak, Kim, 146 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 48 O’Toole, Peter, 113, 116, 118–119, 123–124, 127, 132, 175 Oates, Warren, 77 Objectism, 61 “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, An,” 63, 66–67, 168 Odyssey, The, 67 Olson, Charles, 61 On Dangerous Ground, 141 Onion Field, The, 51, 169 Osbert, Alphonse, 52, 53, 169, 171 Song of the Night, 52, 169 Out of the Past, 140 Ovid, 4, 25, 31–32, 90, 163–165 Metamorphoses, 4, 90, 163 Paisan, 87 Paradise Lost, 26, 35, 165 Parliament of Fowls, 4, 163 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 15, 82, 84–85, 91, 103, 106, 176–177 Porcile, 15, 91–93, 177 Teorema, 15, 84, 91–93, 176–177 Passenger, The, 15, 95, 97 Pather Panchali, 160, 173 Peck, Gregory, 75, 145 Peckinpah, Sam, 59 Penn, Sean, 158, 181 Into the Wild, 158, 181 Persistence of Memory, The, 24, 145, 171 Petrarch, 26 Picnic at Hanging Rock, 15, 90, 98, 100, 103–109, 111, 124–125, 130, 155, 159, 179 Pinhole Camera, 51, 52, 169 Pioneers, The, 41 Planet of the Apes, 132–134, 176 Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 42–45, 52–54, 64, 66–67, 77, 103, 105, 108, 167–169, 171

“Domain of Arnheim, The,” 43–44, 67, 167–168 “Dream within a Dream, A,” 103 “Elk, The,” 43, 67, 168 “Eureka,” 44, 108 “Fall of the House of Usher, The,” 53, 171 Journal of Julius Rodman, The, 43, 167 “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” 43, 167 “William Wilson,” 77 Poelenburgh, Cornelius van, 28, 165 Landscape with the Judgment of Paris, 28 Poésies chrétiennes, 31 Poliziano, 26 Pond, The, 52, 169 Pool at Menil, The 52, 169 Pope, Alexander, 32–33, 37, 165 Epistle to Burlington, 32, 165 Porcile, 15, 91–93, 177 Postmodernism, 5, 45 Poussin, Nicolas, 33 Prado, The, 9 Pursued, 141 Rabal, Francisco, 131 Rafelson, Bob, 59 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 136 Rampling, Charlotte, 134 Rashomon, 159, 173 Ray, Satyajit, 159–160 Pather Panchali, 160, 173 Rayner, Jonathan, 107–108 Redon, Odilon, 51, 170 Cyclops, The, 51, 170 Relph, Edward, 85, 87 Remington, Frederic, 74 Reynolds, Burt, 129 Ride the Pink Horse, 141 Rijksmuseum, 9 River Scene with Ruined Tower, 10, 164 Robards, Jason, 127

Index Robinson Crusoe, 7, 17, 173 Robson, Karen, 107 Roeg, Nicolas, 15, 79, 100, 103, 155, 178 Walkabout, 15, 79, 100–104, 106–108, 111, 155, 178–179 Roman de la Rose, 4, 163 Romanticism, 7, 28, 33, 48, 60–62, 71, 164 American, 44 German, 10, 60 Rossellini, Roberto, 5, 87, 88 Paisan, 87 Stromboli, 5, 87 Voyage to Italy, 87 Ruckenfigur, 10, 11, 41, 114 Ruisdael, Jacob van, 30, 165 Jewish Cemetery, 30, 165 Runge, Philip Otto, 38–39, 166 Morning, 38, 166 Ruysdael, Salomon van, 29 Sahara Desert, 6, 97 Saint-Amant, 31 Sala, Charles, 37–39, 102 Sarafian, Richard C., 138, 150, 177 Vanishing Point, 138, 150, 177 Savery, Roelandt, 28 Schaffer, Kay, 106, 108 Women in the Bush, 106 Schaffner, Franklin J., 132, 176 Planet of the Apes, 132–134, 176 Schama, Simon, 80, 99–101, 136 Landscape and Memory, 99 Scheider, Roy, 132 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 38 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 56, 170–171 Chang, 56, 170 Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, 56, 170 King Kong, 56, 171 Schuler, Christine, 107 Scrovegni Chapel, 23 Searchers, The, 75 Seghers, Hercules, 28–30, 164

205

Landscape, 30, 164 Selznick, David O., 72, 75 Duel in the Sun, 72–73, 75–77, 111, 172–173 Gone with the Wind, 75 Seventh Seal, The, 151, 173, 175 Shane, 75 Sheen, Martin, 119 Sheltering Sky, The, 97, 152, 180 Shooting, The, 15, 63, 77–78, 94, 119, 176 Simmon, Scott, 74 Sistine Chapel, The, 23 Sitney, P. Adams, 59, 60, 62, 65–66 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 56, 166 Sogobi, 18, 155 Song of the Night, 52, 169 Sorcerer, 17, 63, 128, 130–131, 135–136, 179 South Dome from Glacier Point, California, 46, 49, 168, 172 Space and Place, 78 Spaulding, Jonathan, 50 Spellbound, 144–146, 148, 171–172 Spenser, Edmund, 26, 164 “Bower of Bliss,” 26, 164 Faerie Queen, The 26, 164 Spielberg, Steven, 136 E. T.: The Extraterrestrial, 136 Indiana Jones, 154 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 136 Stagecoach, 2, 14, 74 Star Wars, 17, 136, 154 Steichen, Edward, 52–53, 169, 171 Pond, The, 52, 169 Stevens, Leslie, 151 Incubus, 151, 175 Stewart, James, 13, 76, 146 Stromboli, 5, 87 Sublime, The, 10, 28, 35–40, 43–44, 49, 125, 153, 164, 167 American, 21, 30, 39–40 European, 15, 21, 37, 40, 166

206

Index

Sublime—Continued Romantic, 21, 35, 120 Sun Table, 24 Surrealism, 24, 52, 62, 66, 170, 174 Sutton, Peter, 29, 30 Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting, 29 Symbolism, 51–54, 169, 170–171 Tall T, The, 2 Tarantino, Quentin, 139 Inglourious Basterds, 139 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 151 Tasso, Torquato, 26, 164 Teorema, 15, 84, 91–93, 176–177 Terminator, The, 136, 154 Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 42, 158 Titian, 25, 164 Death of Actaeon, The, 25, 164 Tonalism, 52, 169 Topaz, 144 Torn Curtain, 144 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 141–142, 172 Trissino, Giangiorgio, 26, 164 Trosman, Harry, 88 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 2, 78–80, 86, 97, 99, 136 Space and Place, 78 Turner, J.M.W., 31–33, 44, 55, 166 Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 56, 166 Twain, Mark, 67 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 67, 168 Twilight Zone, The, 63, 73 2001: A Space Odyssey, 132–135, 176 Umberto D, 86 Un chien Andalou, 66 Uncertainty of the Poet, The, 24, 170 Urubamba River, 124 Utrecht, 28

Vagabond, 152, 180 Vallis, Jane, 107 Van de Velde, Esaias, 9, 28, 164 Van Goyen, Jan, 10, 29, 164 River Scene with Ruined Tower, 10, 164 Van Sant, Gus, 156–157, 181 Drugstore Cowboy, 156 Finding Forrester, 156 Gerry, 156, 196 Good Will Hunting, 156 Vanishing Point, 138, 150, 177 Varda, Agnès, 152 Vagabond, 152, 180 Vasquez Rocks, 12 Veith, Gene Edward, 42 Vertigo, 144, 146–147, 149, 174 Viano, Maurizio, 91–93 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunder Storm (The Oxbow), 11, 40, 167 Vikings, The, 1 Vinckboons, David, 28 Vitti, Monica, 90 Voight, Jon, 129 Voltaire, 5 Candide, 5 Zadig, 5 Voyage of Life, The, 42–43, 67, 120, 153, 158, 167 Voyage to Italy, 87 Wages of Fear, The, 131 Walkabout, 15, 79, 100–104, 106–108, 111, 155, 178–179 Wallach, Eli, 94 Walsh, Raoul, 141 High Sierra, 141, 142, 171 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 10, 13, 34, 38, 102, 166 Watkins, Carleton, 48, 74 Weir, Peter, 15, 90, 98, 100, 103, 136, 179, 180 Mosquito Coast, 136, 180

Index Picnic at Hanging Rock, 15, 90, 98, 100, 103–109, 111, 124–125, 130, 155, 159, 179 Weiskel, Thomas, 35 Wiene, Robert, 1, 170 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 1, 12, 18, 53, 140, 170 “William Wilson,” 77 Winchester ‘73, 13–14, 76–77, 173 Wine, Humphrey, 31 Winter Landscape, 9, 10, 164 Woman in Front of the Setting Sun, 38, 166 Woman in the Window, The, 140 Women in the Bush, 106 Wordsworth, William, 33

207

Wuthering Heights, 152, 171 Wyler, William, 1, 152, 171 Ben Hur, 1 Wuthering Heights, 152, 171 Xue, Bai, 160 Yellow Earth, 160, 180 Yosemite Valley, 48, 49, 54, 74, 117, 168 Youth, 43, 167 Zabriskie Point, 15, 79, 93, 95–97, 136, 157, 177 Zadig, 5 Zardoz, 132–135, 176, 178