The Aesthetic and Material Force of Landscape in Cinema

Abstract

This essay explores the aesthetic and material force of landscape in cinema, an entity that has long been considered an index of localized climates. I adopt a transmedial and triangulated approach to cinematic landscape as filmed image, as circulating imaginary, and as the physical ground of film production. I argue that cinema reveals, in the scene of production, a mutual exertion of spatial influence and the co-production of aesthetic-material meaning by multiple human and nonhuman actants. The polyphonous relationship of landscape and cinema allows me to complicate climate and Anthropocene abstractions with situated histories of desire, dispossession, circulation, and collaboration.