A new exploration of ways in which the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists’ film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. An informed, personal view from a high profile author considering whether appreciation of nature’s aesthetics undermines commitment to ecology.
Contents:
Introduction - The semiotics of the view - Eco-critical practices - The indivisibility of the human subject and nature - The text - The parameters - Author’s note
The Terms of Engagement - Landscape, space and place - Inside and outside - The ethnographic eye and documentary: Negotiations of the real - The contested status of the real - Taking a step back – crossing over
The Invention of Landscape - Landscape, the antithesis of city life - The sublime, the spiritual and the indifference of nature - The picturesque and the pastoral - The return of the picturesque and the romantic sublime
The Social Construction of Landscape - National identity, society and history - Framing trauma in the landscape - Property, ownership, colonialism and class identity
Landscape Subjectivities - Do you see what I see? - The perceiving subject - A template for seeing, touching, hearing and feeling - Emotion, affect and sensation in nature
Painted Landscapes - The tools of the trade - Taking the eye for a walk – perspectives in painting - The great outdoors
Frames and Sequences - Photographing the view - Slide-tape: Landscape in series
Talking Pictures: Narrative, Time, Colour and Sound - ‘Nature caught in the act’ - Narrative film: Background and foreground - The time base - Colour and black-and-white - Sound and silence
Talking Pictures: Framing the View and the Spectator - Framing the view - Point of view: The restless eye - The spectator
Artists’ Moving Image - ‘Unmade Narratives’: Experimental film - Video: The travelling companion - Digital media: No man’s land - Photogénie and the entanglement of matter
Weather-Blown Film - River Yar (1971–72), William Raban and Chris Welsby - Theory: Clouds and clocks - Wind Vane (1972), Chris Welsby - Feedback: Cybernetics
Being-With: Rocks, Sea and Sky - La Région Centrale (1971), Michael Snow - Aspect (2004), Emily Richardson - Sea-changed film: R.V. Ramani and David Gatten - This Is My Land (2006), Ben Rivers - Dawn Burn (1975–76), Mary Lucier - Interwoven Motion (2004), Chris Meigh-Andrews - The wide blue yonder: Semiconductor, Susan Collins, James Turrell and James Benning
Getting the Shivers: Empathic Projection and the Elements - Jack Lauder and Lloyd Branson, Zacharias Kunuk, Oscar Muñoz, Bill Viola, Joan Jonas and William Raban
Anti-Terrain: Australasia and the ‘Vexed’ Question of Landscape - Preconceptions - The antipodean gaze - Refiguring landscapes - Imagining a future
Landscape and Identity Politics - Signatures - Slavery and the African Diaspora: The Black body in the landscape - Mother Earth - Queering the landscape - Fault lines – masculinity
Performing the Landscape - Acting out in Merrie England - Performing matter - Shifting the scenery
Animals - A pantomime of animals - Captive animals: A transaction of the gaze - ‘Companion animals’ - Cruelty to animals - Discreet courtship
About the Autor
Catherine Elwes as a practitioner was a key figure in the early phases of video art in the United Kingdom and, at the same time, worked as a curator and critic. Until her retirement, she was professor of moving image art at the University of the Arts London; she is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) and author of Video Art: A Guided Tour (2005) and Installation and the Moving Image (2015).
