Cinema and landscape: Reflections from a film programme
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2266
Recensione del film programme della Finnish Anthropological Society Conference (Landscapes, Sociality &amp; Materiality, Helsinki 21-22 October 2015).
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Cinema and landscape: reflections from a film programme
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                                             2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 365-373




                                                                                    VIDEO

Cinema and landscape: Reflections from a film programme
Carlo CUBERO
Tallinn University
Enrico BARONE
Baltic Film & Media School, Tallinn


Biennial conference of the Finish Anthropological Society ⎸Landscapes,
Sociality and Materiality, Helsinki, October 21-22, 2015.



Introduction
    In this piece we will offer some reflections that emerged from the experience of cur-
ating and presenting the Film Programme of the Finnish Anthropological Society Con-
ference in Helsinki from the 21st – 22nd October 2015. The theme of the conference,
Landscapes, Sociality, & Materiality, encouraged a discussion that thought of land-
scapes as «contextual social and cultural process defined by time, place and space
rather than as an image and an object of the visual gaze». The Film Programme aimed
to investigate different ways in which objects, landscapes, material properties, infra-
structures, and environments enable and restrict certain forms of creativity. In a nut-
shell, we sought submissions that considered – through their cinematic form or content
– different perceptions, mediations, and constructions of landscape.
    The programme was designed as an investigation of the idea of landscape through
the medium of an ethnographic film programme: How does the idea of landscape ap-
pear like when approached through cinematic tools? What is there to learn from nar-
rativising a film programme around the idea of landscape? What can the film pro-
gramme format contribute to understanding the experience of landscape?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Carlo Cubero, Enrico Barone
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 365-373.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2266
366                                  CARLO CUBERO, ENRICO BARONE ⎸CINEMA AND LANDSCAPE


    Neither of us consider ourselves experts in the field of landscape studies and were
approaching the programme from the perspective of visual anthropology and ethno-
graphic film-making in particular. Our initial references were ethnographic cinema
classics such as the works of Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, John Marshall, David Mac-
Dougall as well as narrative cinematic works such as Hollywood, Soviet, and European
Cinema, amongst others.
    Our initial conversations on the relationship between cinema and landscape pre-
sumed a relationship whereby film-makers relied on landscape as a tool through which
to tell their story. In hindsight, the way we discussed this approach presumed a relation-
ship where landscape is subordinate to the narrative. Examples that came to mind were
works like The Hunters where the Kalahari Desert can be seen as a backdrop, a sceno-
graphy, in front of which the action unfolds. We also thought of Nanook of the North,
where the Canadian tundra can be seen as a metaphoric character, perhaps the antag-
onist, of the film’s narrative. An early scene of To Live with Herds features a long unin-
terrupted take of Logoth, the main character, pointing out the imaginary geographical
features of the territory his community lives in – offering the spectator a map in which
the film will take place.
    This film viewing approach sees landscapes as a ‘space’, a natural given, onto which
human agency is mapped onto. The film-maker would ‘use’ the landscape as a means of
emplacement for the viewers to understand the terms of their relationship to the char-
acters. Another modality of this approach views a tension between proximity and dis-
tance, sensuous immersion, and detached observation (see Wylie 2007). Are cinematic
landscapes the world in which the characters live in? Are landscapes autonomous entit-
ies that structure the scenes? Do anthropologists have a role in constructing these entit-
ies? Or are the cinematic landscapes entities to be gazed at from a distance?
    As mentioned above, the abstract of the conference considered the context depend-
ent nature of landscape, rather than an object of the visual gaze. From the perspective
of anthropological cinema, we felt that the conference’s abstract did not really sort out
the tension for us. The craft of cinema, we felt, necessarily renders the landscape as a
visual gaze. The craft of anthropological cinema, we also felt, prioritises a methodology
of observance and humility towards the context filmed (the result of the combination of
observant participation and cultural relativism), rather than the result of an ego-centric
imposition of the film-maker. As such, landscapes can be seen as static, naturally given
environments into which characters relate with each other. The organiser’s choice of
keynote speakers, Philippe Descola and Anna Tsing, suggested to us a thematic com-
mitment to the Anthropocene and to opening a discussion on the transfigurative proper-
ties of landscape. However, we were concerned about how ideas associated to the An-
thropocene could inform the practise of film-making, other than informing the plot.
    As the submissions came in and we began the process of viewing the films and con-
sidering the order of the programme, we developed a sensitivity to a different under-
standing of the relationship between landscape and cinema. An approach that could,


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possibly, take into account the Anthropocene, the ever crescent process of landscapes,
and de-centre the “scopophilic” suggestions of landscape as methodological inspirations
for understanding ethnographic film practise and film viewing.
    In what follows, we will share with the readers three ideas that emerged in the pro-
cess of curating and producing this film programme. Our examples are tied to the films
and we acknowledge that there is a gap at stake if the readers are not familiar with
these films. Even though we will be unable to offer a full synopsis and explanation of
the films that were part of the programme, we hope that the ideas can offer a contribu-
tion to the ways in which film programmes can inform the discursive contours of an an-
thropological conference and encourage readers to look up the films.
    For us, the experience of cinema questions three assumptions and methodologies as-
sociated to “land” and “scape”. Three instances:
    1. In cinema, the landscape is not exclusively connected to vision (scape) but it is as
much a sonic experience as it is visual. This experience recalls ideas that the world is
not perceived through discrete sensory regimes, but that all perception entails a synae-
sthetic experience (Chion 2009).
    2. Cinematic practises requires the film-maker to be actively (corporeally) engaged
with the subject that is being filmed. This is necessary in order to create a convincing
and engaging narrative (Rouch 1975). The corporeal engagement of film-makers has
two effects:
    - the landscape is not surveyed from outside of it, but expanded upon from within.
All the films screened at the conference had an explicit participatory effect, where the
film-makers actively directed their scenes. Some relied on re-enactments, other direc-
tors provoked subjects to engage with specific features of the landscape others designed
sets for their informants, amongst other strategies.
    - the film-maker is part of the landscape that is being depicted. This means that the
film-makers is a constitutive element of the landscape. The film-maker perceives and
constitutes the landscape simultaneously.
    3. A third effect of cinema is that it recalls the mobility of the landscape. This
comes from the fact that cinema is a time-based and mobile methodology (Tarkovsky
1986). It directs our attention to the continuous unfolding process of the landscape. As
a time-based methodology, cinema requires film-makers and audiences to think of
landscape (or the world “out there”) as an event, an action-based activity that is consti-
tuted not just by the “land” but by objects, people, stories, the light, lenses, micro-
phones, wind, all relating together through a mobile constellation of circumstances that,
when filmed, manifest themselves in a unique configuration that frames and is framed
by the film-maker’s and the audience’s imagination, skill, and experience. This opens
up the possibilities of non-material landscapes.
    The Audiovisual Contract «[…] a kind of symbolic contract that the audio-viewer
enters into, agreeing to think of sound and image as forming a single entity» (Chion
1994: 216).


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    An immediate effect that cinema has on the understanding of landscape is to de-
centre the scopophilia that is suggested in classical approaches to landscape. While
cinema is technically composed of a simultaneity of the visual and the sonic, the pro-
cess of curating and producing this programme led us to consider that sound “works”
on a different level than the visual.
    Images, in the montage context, acquire meaning against each other, in a “clash of
relations” (see Eisenstein 1949) – a chain of segregated differences, images aligned wi-
thin the tunnelled vision of the lens. Images have a tactility, a materiality, a pigment,
which communicate a sense of space and shape when placed in relation and opposition
to each other. Sound, however, references events outside of the range of the field of vi-
sion. It is not organized according to visual codes of materiality but it is its own refe-
rence.
    Sound in cinema does not work through dialectical clashes, but are experienced cu-
mulatively, as a flow rather than through forms. The listener does not interpret through
semiotic differences and similarities, but through continuous flow of time – a non-
pulsed or durational time (the time of sound matter). Sound does not exist by way of
time, in time, or about time, but as time, unfolding temporality.
    What follows, in our view, is that the sonic experience of a cinematic landscape is
not registered at the same level of consciousness as images. Even though any particular
soundscape is made up of independent parts, the average spectator cannot easily sepa-
rate the sonic elements within a film. A good sound design is able to weave together
diegetic sound, non-diegetic sound, foley, and music into a sonic narrative whole.
Sound designs are the result of deliberate choices which are not limited to choice of
microphones, their placement, the recording equipment used, the mixing, added
sounds, speakers used during the screening, and acoustics of the screening room. This
constellation of circumstances are resources for film-makers to produce a sonic expe-
rience that would develop an emotional connection with the audience.
    To acknowledge the soundscape of a film as constitutive of its narrative is to ac-
knowledge that cinema goes beyond the events depicted in the screen and beyond itself.
The ephemeral experience of sound adds and takes away depth from the visual image,
its workings are mysterious for we are not supposed to know fully the origins of each
sound, we accept them as they are even though they do not correspond with what we
are seeing (Gunning 2010).

The Truth of CineScapes

      For me, then, the only way to film is to walk about with the camera, taking it to wherever
      it is the most effective, and improvising a ballet in which the camera itself becomes just as
      much alive as the people it is filming. (Rouch 1975: 89)

   A consistent theme through all the post-screening Q&As with the directors con-
cerned themselves with the technical and conceptual choices that the film-makers made


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when constructing their narratives. While content was discussed, often times, form
would take a significant amount of time during the discussion. The film Hearsay fea-
tured interviews with blind people who were encouraged to talk about their visual
fantasies. The film-maker, Eibe Maleen Krebs, then designed a studio space, offered
costumes to the informants, and filmed the way in which they re-enacted their ima-
gined selves. In Dead when I got Here, Mark Aitken arranges for the main character to
travel from Mexico to the United States to meet his estranged daughter. Katri Lassila’s
Chalk Circles is an atmospheric poetic reflection on the effects of global warming in the
Pacific. We can go on outlining the approach that the directors chose in their works.
The fact is that every film, regardless of the genre, cannot help but to have a position in
relation to the world. As such, these films are an opportunity to author and construct
the landscape.
    In their review of landscape art and its relationship to nature and the nature of
beauty, Kemal and Gaskell, reflect how landscape art theory places emphasis on the
artists’ creative genius, rather than on an attempt to document natural beauty. Land-
scape art highlights the ways in which human creation and nature are inextricably
linked in our understandings. As such, they make impossible the production of clear
conceptual distinctions between object and subject, human and nature, art and docu-
mentation. A more productive approach, they argue, would «deal with natural beauty
by showing the cluster of concepts that make up the parameters of our present under-
standing, without worrying about the metaphysical certainties that a determinate found-
ationalist schema promises» (Kemal, Gaskell 1995: 3).
    From a cinema theory perspective, this approach recalls Dziga Vertov’s case for
cinema’s capacity to produce a peculiar kind of truth, a cine-truth. He characterized his
work as a search for «creating a truly international language of cinema based on its ab-
solute separation from the language of theatre and literature» (Vertov 1929). For
Vertov, the “language” of cinema was predicated on the technological possibilities of
the medium – the unique effect of recording scenes that mimicked real-time move-
ment, which could then be re-arranged, sped up, slowed down, and double exposed
represented a novel examination of the visual world. A “truth” that is mediated through
the camera, editing equipment, and projector, which enabled a fresh perspective on
reality. In his films and writings, Vertov argues against non-fiction and dramatic con-
ventions in cinema because these conventions reproduce well known codes from literat-
ure and drama, hindering the revolutionary potential of cinema. Instead, Vertov’s films
are credited with having the intention of «capturing life unawares». Contemporary
readings of this approach may see this as a precursor to surveillance filming, of the
possibility of denying the presence of the camera and objectifying the people filmed.
Another reading, based on a different interpretation of the Russian term, would inter-
pret his intentions as «capturing life off-guard» as if by surprise and perhaps provoked
by the presence of the camera (Hicks 2007).
    In this interpretation, the effect that the camera has on people and on the context
filmed is constitutive of cine-truth. Observing social life as it unfolds in real-time, off-

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guard, does not suggest the denial of the camera’s presence because it is just not pos-
sible to hide the equipment, its position is apparent “on set”. Documentaries, and eth-
nographies in general, are necessarily the result of an intrusion into the situation under
study (Bruzzi 2000). The authenticity that Vertov is after is not a profilmic authenticity
but a cine-based ontological authenticity founded on the suggestion that cine-know-
ledge is produced with and through the film-making process.

Time-Based Ethnography
    La Frequenza Fantasma, a film by Chiara Ambrosio, opens with a 6-minute static
shot that tracks the sunrise in the village of Verbicaro in South Italy. While the camera
is static, the shot captures the sonic and visual transformation of the town from night to
day. Through the course of the narrative we learn that Verbicaro has been abandoned
for decades and yet, the town produces in and of itself powerful sonic and visual refer-
ences to be framed by Chiara’s camera. There are a series of complex simultaneities at
play here. For example, between the audiovisual resonance of the village and the ma-
nipulation of the images by the film-maker; between Verbicaro’s bustling past, its
empty present, and uncertain future. The film does not resolve this complexity.
Through the organisation of rhythm, respect to light, and attention to resonances, the
film-maker does not record the passing of time in Verbicaro, but rather a temporal ex-
perience is conceived by the film-maker. This approach recalls Walter Benajamin’s take
on the «dialectical image».
      It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the
      past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to
      form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the rela-
      tion of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-
      has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. –
      Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one
      encounters them is language. (Benjamin 1999: 462)

   A similar idea can be found in Deleuze’s ideas on time image where the temporal
structure of time-image goes beyond the simple and purely empirical succession of
time – past, present and future. It is rather a coexistence of distinct durations or of
levels of duration, a single event can belong to several levels, where the sheets of past
coexist in a non-chronological order (Deleuze 2013).
   In our view, the promise of audiovisual ethnography lies in its capacity to bring
these kind of tensions to the fore and can push the anthropological project in new dir-
ections. To maybe, consider the time-based dimension of the anthropological project,
that it is not a thing that you can draw a circle around. Where landscape can be seen as
a gathering that is in the process of becoming, rather through a set of hierarchical con-
cepts. Analogously, and from the perspective of anthropological cinema, the practise of
curating the programme also suggests that we cannot demarcate an anthropological film


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from broader cinematic practise. Where the programme of an anthropological film
festival is not the site where “anthropological films” are hierarchically placed in opposi-
tion to broader cinema practise.
   A film programme acknowledges the creative and generative effect of cinema and its
conventions references practises, scenes, methodologies, and conventions that come to-
gether in a stimulating programme.




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REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter, Rolf Tiedemann, 1999, The arcades project, Harvard University Press.
Bruzzi, Stella, 2000, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, London, New York, Rout-
      ledge.
Chion, Michel, 1994 [1990], Audiovision: Sound on Screen, New York, Columbia University
      Press.
Chion, Michel, 2009, Film, a sound art, New York, Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, 2013 , Cinema II: the time-image, London, New York, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Eisenstein, Sergei, 1949, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda, New
      York, London, Harvest – HBJ.
Gunning, Tom 2010, Landscape and the fantasy of moving pictures: Early cinema’s phantom
      rides, in Cinema and Landscape, Graeme Harper, Jonathan Rayner, eds, Chicago, Intel-
      lect Books: 31-70.
Hicks, Jeremy, 2007, Dziga Vertov: defining documentary film, London, New York, IB Tauris.
Kemal, Salim, Ivan Gaskell, eds, 1995, Landscape, natural beauty and the arts. Vol. 2. Cam-
      bridge University Press.
Rouch, Jean, 1975, The camera and man, in Principles of visual anthropology, Paul Hockings,
      ed, The Hauge, Mouton Publichers: 79-98.
Tarkovsky, Andrey, 1987, Kitty Hunter-Blair. Sculpting in time: reflections on the cinema. Uni-
      versity of Texas Press.
Wylie, John, 2007, Landscape, London, Routledge.


REFERENCED CONFERENCE
Barone, Enrico, Carlo Cubero, Klavs Sedlenieks, curators, 2015, Film Programme. Biennial
     Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society. Landscapes, sociality and material-
     ity, Helsinki, October 21–22, 2015. www.antropologinenseura.fi/en/events/anthropo-
     logy-conference-2015/films/


REFERENCED FILMS
Aitken, Mark, 2015. Dead when I got Here. UK, Mexico.
Ambrosio, Chiara, 2014, La frequenza Fantasma, Italy.
Flaherty, Robert, 1922, Nanook of the North, USA.
Lassila, Katri, 2015, Chalk Circles, Finland.
MacDougall, David, 1972, To Live with Herds, USA.
Maleen Krebs, Eibe, 2014, Hearsay, Germany.
Marshall, John, 1957, The Hunters, USA.
Vertov, Dziga, 1929. Man With a Movie Camera, USSR.




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FILM PROGRAMME

SESSION I: MATERIALITIES 1
Wednesday, Oct 21, 13:30-18:00
       13:30 – Mondo Banana. http://bananamovie.com/
SESSION II: MATERIALITIES 2
       15:15 – Cast in India. http://castinindia.com/
       15:55 – Obsolescence. http://www.obsolescencia.com.mx/
SESSION III: SPECIAL SCREENING: “SONIC LANDSCAPE”
       16:50 – On the Carrera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9RRlCLhnh4
SESSION IV: LANDSCAPES OF TIME
Thursday, Oct 22, 09:00-12:00
       09:00 – Por la Verea. http://porlaverea.blogspot.com.ee/
       10:00 – Chalk Circles. http://www.reelport.com/index.php?id=300&L=en
       10:35 – La Frequenza Fantasma. http://www.acuriousroom.com/LA_FF.html
SESSION V: INTERIORS
Thursday, Oct 22, 13:30-16:45
       13:30 – Hearsay. http://vom-hoeren-sagen.de/
       14:55 – Birthdates.




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