Landscapes and meaning in cinema

A new book on the important subject of the intersection of landscape and cinema titled 'Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Geography', has been published in London, and one of my essays on this topic is included in this volume.

The relationship between landscape and cinema is a complex and nuanced one, giving rise to a range of issues related to aesthetics of cinema as well as meaning in cinema. More and more film scholars are focusing their energies on this theme as a way of comprehending the deeper structures of films as sites of human engagement.

Very often, we tend to conceive of landscape in films as a provider of the requisite background for the understanding of the narrative and a generator of visual density and cogency.

This is indeed true so far as it goes; however, landscapes in cinema perform numerous other functions that are more subtle and complex and which serve to invest the filmic experience with intensities of meaning and significance.

There are some filmmakers such as David Lean and Andre Tarkovsky and Chen Kaige, who have, through their cinematic creations, earned a justifiable reputation as directors preoccupied with the power and value of landscape.

Films like "Dr Zhivago", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Yellow Earth" exemplify this fact. However, most talented filmmakers are interested in landscape as a way of contributing to, and enhancing, the intended meaning of the given film.

Landscapes can and do operate in manifold ways in imparting a greater depth of meaning and perception to the projected filmic experience as is evidenced in the work of such directors as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray.

The term landscape was originally employed to signify a picture of natural scenery associated with land, and later assumed the meanings of a bird's eye-view, a plan, a sketch, a map. It also came to mean the depiction of something in words. The study of landscape became popular, and even necessary, because of the growth of the arts of painting and photography, and later cinema.

The interesting developments in these fields of creative expression have had the salutary effect of compelling us to re-think and re-conceptualize landscape in novel ways. For example, in the case of painting, the critical writings of such commentators as John Berger, W.J.T. Mitchell has opened important new pathways to understanding landscape painting. Similarly, the exegetical writings on powers such as Wordsworth have in recent times uncovered productive approached to the study of landscape.

As we explore the growth of international cinema, we realize that landscape can function at different levels of representational significance.

Landscape helps in establishing a sense of place, time and mood; they serve to punctuate the narrative and invest it with variable rhythms; they can quicken the pictoriality of films; they, at times, enforce a sense of ironic disjunction by focusing on discrepancies between the depicted landscape and the ruling emotion; they can manipulate, and play on, our sense of spatial consciousness; they can question our ways of making sense of the perceived world; they can externalize various inner dramas of characters; thy can stand in as visual analogues for complex psychologies in the chosen characters. These, then, are some of the ways in which landscape functions in cinema.

Landscape, therefore, constitutes an important aspect of the representational strategies employed by film directors to give shape and meaning to filmic experiences. Let us, for example, consider the highly acclaimed and international award-winning film "Yellow Earth" by the distinguished Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige. It tells a simple story of peasant life.

A soldier arrives at a desolate mountain village with the aim of collecting traditional folk-songs that could be re-used for revolutionary purposes. He decides to live in a house where a young girl is married to an older man.

The soldier tells her how woman are now being treated under the communist regime in the capital of Yan'an. Her mind is filled with hope and desire. She sets out in search of this city of liberation; on the way, tragically, she drowns. Chen Kaige has converted this simple story into a moving work of cinematic art.

The landscape is central to the meaning of this film, as it foregrounds visual similes and allegories that open up interesting interpretive spaces.

The vast landscape in which human beings are located reminds one of classical Chinese paintings in which human beings are depicted against a background of expansive land and mountains.. Clearly, Chen Kaige is seeking to draw on traditional Chinese aesthetics to infuse his text with newer resonances.

But beyond this, one perceives how the director of the film is using landscape "the vast barren land, the rolling mountains, the miniscule human beings moving across it" to make a significant political statement.

What he is suggesting is that earlier, especially during the turbulent period of the Cultural Revolution, one did not have the luxury (or the freedom), of portraying landscapes in films as film directors were busy with depicting workers and party officials social reconstruction.

Now, after the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, and the dawn of a new era, filmmakers have the freedom to capture the beauties and sublimities of the landscape. In other words, the landscape in the film Yellow Earth carries a freight of political meaning.

Let us consider another highly acclaimed film, this time from India "Satyajit Ray's masterpiece The Song of the Little Road. (Pather Panchali). This film deals with the problems and hardships encountered by a Brahmin family living in a Bengali village at the urn of the twentieth century.

The father, Harihar, the head of the family, a poor priest and a poet who hardly earns enough money to support the family. The mother, Sarbojaya, is a typical peasant woman for whom life is an unending series of chores and privations.

The daughter, Durga, is playful and mischievous, and is depicted as a child of nature. Into this family, Apu is born, who is the protagonist of the trilogy that begins with this film.

Although this is not a film that displays grand vistas of landscapes, nonetheless, they play an integral role in the generation of cinematic meaning. One can, somewhat schematically, speak of natural landscape and cultural landscape.

Natural landscape refers to the natural settings mountains and valleys, rivers and forests. The term cultural landscape signifies the built environment of human beings where nature is transformed into culture.

Here natural spaces are turned into cultural spaces full of human meaning, What is interesting about Satyajit Ray's films, as indeed with films of Lester James Peries, is the complex ways in which the natural and cultural landscapes interact to deepen levels of human understanding.

One of the most memorable scenes in "The Song of the Little Road" is the one where Apu and Durga see a train speeding by for the first time in their life. An examination of the way in which Ray has constructed this sequence will illustrate the manifold ways in which landscape operates in cinema, infusing it with a multi-dimensionality of meaning.

Here the idea of landscape achieves its full power. In the distance, in a field full of "kaash" flowers, we see Durga wandering by herself as a telegraph pole stands tall against the sky in the afternoon light. One can almost hear the low hum of the telegraph wires; Durga looks up, turns her head, listened to the sound of the wires, walks away searching for the origins of the sound.

Far away, we see Apu wading through a patch of water; he walks towards Durga. By now, Durga has discovered that the sound is emanating from a telegraph pole. She places her ear against it and listens intently to the sound. Apu looks upwards, goes up to the telegraph pole, places his ear against it and runs after her sister.

All of a sudden, Durga places her hand over Apu's mouth, as if to silence him, listens inquiringly and says "train." The two children spring to their feet in a moment, and look around for the train. They see the top of an engine with clouds of smoke billowing over the spread of white flowers. Apu and Durga dart across the field.

The train is still some distance away; Apu races ahead. The train appears in its majesty. Apu runs closer towards the oncoming train. The engine comes into full view and we can see and hear the wheels moving noisily .Apu clambers up to higher ground and keenly observes the train as it disappears.

This sequence of events is important on a number of accounts related to the investigation of human meaning in the landscape. The arrival of the train in the field of vision of the two children is a signifier of the inevitability of modernization and its effects on the village of Nischindipur.

For the most part, the village is presented as an unfissured space. The train "a dominant symbol of modernity" will change everything. The train sequence also serves to underline the inevitability of social change.

This sequence is important for another reason as well; the way Ray has constructed the emotions connected to the sense of wonder; "chamathkara" or wonder, according to classical Indian aestheticians, is at the heart of aesthetic emotion (rasa). The sense of wonder is a defining emotion in the three films that constitute the Apu trilogy.

The interconnections between cinema and landscape are complex and many-sided, and by examining this relationship we would be in a better position to appreciate the complexities of the medium of cinema.