Graeme Harper is professor of creative writing and director of research at the University of Wales, Bangor. He is founding coeditor of the journal Studies in European Cinema and the associate founding editor of the Creative Industries Journal, both also published by Intellect.

Jonathan Rayner is a senior lecturer in English and film at the University of Sheffield. His previous books include The Naval War Film: Genre, History, National Cinema and Contemporary Australian Cinema.

Introduction – Cinema and Landscape

Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner

Photographs are not hand-made; they are manufactured. And what is manufactured is an image of the world.

Cartography

This book is a cinematic circumnavigation. Though extensive, it is not exhaustive. The journey's impetus here, in comparison to the treks of Arctic explorers, the voyages of ocean navigators or the conquests of mountaineers, is not concerned so much with physical exertion, or with the possession of tangible space, but with the examining of the evidence of cultural production – in this case, specifically, the cinema. This book provides a map. All maps involve stories, in which there is both a narrative and a discourse. All maps involve selection, inclusion, omission, observation and, on occasions, invention. Maps are predicated on the use of specific techniques and, therefore, specific technologies. Ptolemy's eight-volume Geography showed the Earth as flat, and disc-shaped. Medieval exploration offered alternate views of where, and how, land and sea, mountains and valleys, might be depicted, and raised questions about the notion of location, the place of the individual, in both the natural and constructed worlds. The earliest surviving terrestrial globe, a representation of the Earth in its true spherical form, was made by the German geographer Martin Behaim in 1492, and may well have directly reassured Christopher Columbus of the potential of his explorations.

European efforts to discover what became known as the 'New World' brought about new techniques in cartography. Maps exist in time, and they raise questions that are equally spatial and temporal. They have a shape and form, and suggest an order. Maps can be the product of an individual, or of many individuals working together, or sequentially, over time. In this way, map-making is analogous to the cinematic endeavour, where communal effort and singular vision often meet. The role of the film director could be seen as similar to the role of the individual map-maker; while the role of the actors and film crew could, indeed, be compared to the role of the ship's crew or mountaineering team. Both maps and films assume and position audiences, ideologically as well as geographically. The interaction between mapmakers/filmmakers and their audiences can be akin to a shared pilgrimage, in which the individual, or the group, or a culture, moves through a familiar or newly discovered landscape. This relationship with landscape, temporal and spatial as it is, can even form the basis of a rite of passage, in which the depth or breadth of what is known is enhanced or acquaintance made with that which was previously unknown. Landscape then – in a particularly useful application of the term – offers a cartographic receptacle to assist the acquisition of further human understanding.

Defining landscape

Landscape involves isolation of a certain spatial extent and a certain temporal length. That is, all notions of landscape are produced by human interpretation which, simply due to human physiology or due to political or cultural bias, is selective. Subsequent aesthetic treatments of landscape, whether in painting, photography or film, involve further selection, interpretation and omission, whether by an individual or group. Landscapes can be comforting or daunting, challenging or reassuring. The newly discovered landscapes found on the world journeys of European adventurers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often brought forth highly emotive texts, with discoverers engaging in personal as well as scientific recollection. But landscapes are not always discovered, they can also be created. Reproduced, or even invented landscapes, landscapes created largely in the imagination of painters or filmmakers, often initiate similar responses to the discovered or recorded landscapes of the real world. Landscapes, therefore, are not only selective but are never neutral in intention or reception. Depicted landscapes are often symbolic, and frequently contribute to social formation, impacting upon human associations and societal norms. In the sense of landscape as illusionistic space, in which invented features are foregrounded and the topographical is secondary to the evocative, the relationship between individual or group disposition and landscape depiction is even further heightened.

A definition of landscape, therefore, needs to acknowledge different kinds of environments, from the rural to the urban, from the macro-environment of expansive ecology to the micro-environment of human habitation. Depictions of landscapes can incorporate the manifestations of modernity or be entirely composed of occurrences of nature. While it is possible to narrow landscape definitions on the basis of human intervention, absence or presence of natural features or, indeed, the impact of conspicuous characteristics, the key point about landscapes is that they are composed of many elements and that these elements interact to create our...