Communicational approach to landscapes and its use in filmic landscape depictions

Riin Magnus

The understanding of landscape based on view, as a visually observable phenomenon, would suit well with the basic devices of filmic representations. The medium, although setting limits to the appearance of outside spatial relations, is however itself placed into a circle of social actions and can reveal in its images the idea of activity-based comprehension of landscape. Both, the view and the activity, correspond to certain ways of communication. In my talk I am going to argue about the functions two broad ways acquire in documentary films, how they are combined and divided proceeding from the dominant space production and control practices and in which ways the film-landscapes in turn become parts of the wider perspective about the role of landscapes (either on transnational, national or local level). Special attention has to be paid to the creation of associations available only to film — concerning the specific interconnections between different landscapes on the one hand and the relating modes of individual or society with landscape on the other.

Landscapes of habit and landscapes of contest will be the examples of inherent social dynamics, where one location can take on either spatially (e.g., the contesting identity groups) or temporally (e.g., potentiality demonstrations via projections of future visions into percepts of present) variable meanings. Most often the division and determination of the filmed landscape borders are organized according to the needs of formulating the subject in focus. But whether included in this case as a setting or as thematic elements, providing separations or allowing unification, they can be seen as devices spreading light on the position of the film as well as on the context the film message should be considered as belonging to.