Landscape in Cinema: Images to Think Time through Space

Abstract

This text is an introduction to the special issue on ‘Landscape and Cinema’ published by Aniki. Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. It is composed of a brief state of the art, which anchors this work within the bibliography on the subject, and a synthetic description of the discourses developed by the six papers included in the issue: the first one addresses the historical and aesthetic evolution of the background in the Russian and Soviet cinema of the first decades of the twentieth century; the second discusses the representation of the Portuguese landscape in Manuel Guimarães’ films; the third identifies a few cinematic techniques that work as conventions of psychological landscape film, such as juxtaposition and superimposition; the fourth interprets the meaning of Brazilian urban landscapes showed in the feature film A Vida Provisória (Maurício Gomes Leite, 1968); the fifth deals with the corporeal and conceptual relations between body, memory and landscape through a sensory reading of the films Ten Skies (James Benning, 2004) and Sin Peso (Cao Guimarães, 2007); and finally, the sixth undertakes a comparative analysis of three South American non-fiction works that show several waterscapes as places of memory: El botón de nácar (Patricio Guzmán, 2015), Los durmientes (Enrique Ramírez, 2015) and Las aguas del olvido (Jonathan Perel, 2013). The aim of this preliminary text is therefore to introduce the main contents of the issue and some of its conclusions. In this sense, it is necessary to emphasise the open and polysemic nature of landscape, which works, inside and outside cinema, as a palimpsest in which multiple meanings come together. For this reason, those films that depict, create and intervene in landscape allow to perceive, among other things, the overlapping of historical and subjective times that takes place in certain spaces.