Landscape x Film. Between image and sound, geography and history.

• Applicant: Philip Widmann
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548656230

Landscape “seems to have nothing to do with cinema,” and yet “in many ways one can say that the history of cinema begins with landscape,” writes film scholar Benoît Turquety. Following on from this idea, Landscape x Film develops the thesis that films have been concerned with landscapes from the very beginning of cinema, participating in non-filmic landscape discourses and thereby updating questions that had already been formulated in relation to earlier media and technologies of landscape such as painting, photography and the railway. At the latest with the development of elaborate camera and montage techniques as well as film sound, landscape becomes a problem of constitution for the cinema. In the consolidation of a film as a self-contained unit, the forms of movement and the sounds of the cinema accentuate and transcend the framing and the distanced views constitutive of landscape. Pre-cinematic and cinematographic aspects put each other under tension, concealing and revealing the functions of their respective counterpart. Close readings of films by Masao Adachi (A.K.A. Serial Killer), Gerhard Friedl (Knittelfeld - Town Without History and Did Wolff von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offences?), Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Too Early, Too Late) examine how this tension is turned into a formal principle and what critical potential is activated in the process. Documentary views are juxtaposed with off-screen voices speaking about people and events from the past that remain unseen in these images. With this dissolution of the material and spatial unity of the sound film, the films each enable unexpected new connections of actuality and history, of horizontality and verticality as the spatio-temporal axes of artistic and scientific imagination and everyday orientation. In the films, landscape is at once problem and potential, as it short-circuits media history with history as a politicalcultural construct and the state of the material world with the power functions of its representations. Landscape x Film uncovers connections between the films' widely divergent historical and geographical points of reference and shows how closely these are interwoven by the coloniality and commodification of the landscape gaze. The formal similarities between the films of Adachi, Friedl, Huillet and Straub have occasionally been noted. Here, for the first time, they are put in relation to each other in detail – as singular films, as well as objects and protagonists in discourses that think landscape, power and film together. Methodologically, Landscape x Film follows a descriptive and hermeneutic approach that develops at the interface of film practices and discursive settings; by examining the interactions at this interface, the book apprehends film studies as a transdisciplinary task.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants