AVANCA | CINEMA 2015
Viewing Memory – The Photographic Nature of Landscape in Film
Katri Lassila
Aalto University, Finland
Abstract
My paper treats the image of landscape in cinema
and photography with respect to memory. I will briefly
present the shared history of the two art forms in
relation to the image of landscape and reflect on how
they depict memory. I shall point out some concrete
examples of landscape imaging in moving and still
pictures that relate to my artistic dissertation.
The image of landscape forms an interesting link
between cinema and photography; a link connecting
the passage of time, experiencing the passing of time
and memory. The image of landscape as part of the
long tradition of landscape painting has been one of
the fundamental images of cinema and photography
since their conception. In cinema, however, landscape
is different from other images due to its immobility and
connotations in art history.
Many theorists have analysed the relation of
photography to memory. Chris Marker has dealt
with the relation of memory and cinema in his work.
The image of landscape in cinema resembles, in my
opinion, a photograph: something that has already
taken place at another time, some time different to that
of the present in the rest of the film.
Therefore, I argue that the image of landscape
creates a time bridge between cinema and
photography, forming a temporal connection between
them and rising above other types of image both
philosophically and psychologically.
Keywords: Film, Photography, Landscape, Time
Introduction
Photography and film are related not only by their
history and technique but they also share a more
philosophical connection. Despite of their evident
similarity, film and photography were experienced quite
differently already early on in their history, the most
important source of divergence being their relation to time.
The need to record and document - to preserve in
memory - the surrounding reality and human experience
of it can be projected as at least one of the fundamental
human tendencies to orientate towards such cultural
forms as art and history. It can also quite easily be
seen as the predominant urge leading to development
of both photography and film from arcane forms of
camera lucida. However, the difference in which this
preservation of memory takes form respectively in
photography and film is intriguing. As many similarities
they may possess, there are also important features
which separate them from each other. One, easily
recognizable is their relation to time. But as David
Campany points out, the question of time in film and
photography may not be as simple as it would seem at
first (Campany 2007, 10–17). The two art forms have
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shared more than their light sensitive emulsion. There
are several bridges between them but the one that has
a special interest for me is the bridge of time, which
builds up between film and photography through one
type of image. I speak of image of landscape.
Historical Notes
Photography was a dream, shared by many for a
long time, as states Roland Barthes. He considers for
example Charles Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche, who
wrote about the dream of photography already in 1760
in his science fiction novel. A character, the prefect of
the Giphantine island described in the text a canvas
that showed an image and preserved it when it was
taken in a dark place after the exposure. “In one hour
the delicate surface dries and you have a picture, even
more valuable as art cannot copy it neither can time
harm it.” (Barthes 1986, 12–13).
Camera lucida was used early in the 1900th century
by artists sketching landscapes outdoors and camera
obscura tents were used as drawing aid. The basic
optics of portable camera obscura were described in
1700th century and it was also used by for example
scientist Johannes Kepler (Frizot 1998, 18), but there’s
no evidence that any functioning lucida or obscura
would have been actually constructed.
One of the pioneers of photography, William Henry
Fox Talbot, described using camera lucida on his
honeymoon in Italy in 1833 and was disappointed in
its results, hoping that he could develop an apparatus
which would preserve the pictures (Honour&Fleming
2001, 665). Photography answered to some need
of recording the world objectively. The painting
was always an artist’s vision but photograph was
considered more real or true, as it was recorded by
an objective mechanical apparatus. But who made the
apparatus work but a human being? And even though
within the photorealistic painting tradition photographic
style has been widely copied, photography’s superior
debt to painting is evident. The first and even still the
most popular subjects of photography are the ones that
have dominated the western painting tradition for so
long: portrait and landscape.
Landscape in Painting
The meaning and value of landscape has changed
during the history of art and mirrored the changes in
society at large. Renaissance landscapes depicted
often a pastoral idyll. Landscape was rarely depicted
without people or habitation. Especially Italian
landscape was a popular subject also amongst artists
of Northern Europe. 19th century has been, on the
other hand, called the century of the landscape. For
instance in Romantic painting tradition landscape
was in so dominating position that it affected the way

people conceived their surroundings and the value of
landscape in larger scale. In the culminating aspect of
Romanticism is its interest in sublime, which contains
elements of pain, terror, majesty and above all awe in
the face of the unknown (Hartt 1989, 798).
The Romantic landscape painting tradition is the
best known for its grand views. Nature was God’s
manifestation, far greater than a human being.
Experiencing nature was thus experiencing God, a
profoundly a mystical or spiritual experience. Henry
David Thoreau (1817-1862), traveller, writer and a
pioneer of ecological research wrote widely about
nature as something majestic and admirable (for
example in Walden, 1854). One of the best known
symbols of Romantic landscape painting is Caspar
David Friedrich’s The Wanderer (1817-18). In the
painting, a man in old fashioned long coat stands on a
high mountain cliff. He has been depicted from behind,
gazing at the landscape before him as a classic
“Rückenfigur” (back figure). The valley in front of him
is filled with fog, the landscape is sublime. We are not
meant to watch the person in the painting, but in taking
his position see and experience the landscape as he
does, seizing the feeling of smallness as part of the
nature’s big play (Eco 2004, 296).
The Wanderer is an image of a Faustian
personality, according to Oswald Spengler. The idea of
neverending space and longing towards the distance
and infinity are central to the Faustian (or Occidental)
civilisation’s conception of world (Spengler 2002,155).
The gaze of a human being gives the landscape its
meaning and crops it forward. At the same time, the
object of the gaze stays hidden in the fog. The Faustian
longing towards horizon and unknown future is typical
for Friedrich’s work. The often presented Rückenfigur
is a comment to Romantic experience of nature. The
world can be experienced momentarily, by a fleeting
gaze, never in its true self in all its grandeur. The
spectator of the painting is able to share the landscape
with the person in the painting. At the same time it
also detaches the viewer from the landscape itself and
underlines their difference.
Friedrich is considered as a master of stillness.
The moments he depicts embalm in themselves the
themes of infinity and endlessness (Wolf 2012, 92–
93). In 1830 the heir to the imperial throne of Russia,
Alexander I ordered from Friedrich a series of four
opaque paintings. The paintings were illuminated
from behind and were presented in a dark room
accompanied by music. Rightly illuminated, the other
side of the painting presented the same landscape
in night light and the other side in day time. These
paintings are considered to be the predecessors of
cinema, together with panoramic paintings (Ibid., 88–
89). Thus the link with Friedrich and cinema is even
clearer than it seems on at first. Friedrich was able to
imagine and repeat in painting the change happening
in a landscape according to its changing lighting
conditions – a feature later on presented again and
again in the art of moving images.
At the same time when the invention of photography
was made, the Romantic landscape painting was one
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of the most popular traditions in Western Europe.
It is not surprising that the subject of landscape was
transferred to the new art. Photography wasn’t entirely
considered as a form of art in its early stages, but it
soon replaced for instance topographical drawings as
the recording aid for the landscape’s special features.
What happened in the course of the century? Romantic
tradition yielded and stillness changed to movement. At
the dawn of the new century, in the time of the invention
of cinema, the Europe was in turmoil. Impressionism,
the art of the moment, preceded the invention of
cinema. The movement of film was similar to the
movement and light of Impressionism, very much in
the same fashion as Romantic painting had offered a
fundament to photography’s meditative nature.
Film as Life, Photography as Death
From the beginning, film and photography were
experienced differently, the most important difference
being their relation to time. Whereas photograph
“petrified, preserved and embalmed” film “recreated,
doubled and made alive”. Many theoreticians have
combined photography with death and film with life.
French writer and critic André Bazin associates the
idea of photography to the culture of the ancient Egypt.
Embalming a loved one in a picture preserves them
from the second, spiritual death, which is forgetting
(Bazin 2013, 9–10). At the same time the preserved
image however reaches out for the same thing it tries
to avoid. Susan Sontag calls a photograph a reminder
of the mortality of everything (Sontag 1977, 15–-16).
Christian Metz connects photography with death in
many ways. For example the act of photographing
takes its subject to another world as does death itself
but film moves its subjects to a time continuum which
resembles life. It pushes moments to the oblivion as a
life lived but a photograph petrifies them (Metz 1988,
60–63). Raymond Bellour describes film as something
here, a fleeing image which at the same time still
reaches us but a photograph as something somewhere
away from us, impossible to obtain. A film doubles life,
in photography time is returned to us but touched by
death (Bellour 2007, 119).
Still, as I see it, life in film is an illusion as well
as death is illusion in a photograph. Perhaps there
appears some fundamental human disgust towards
something that looks so alive but lies completely still as
a human being does only in death.
Chronicles of Memories
Memory and time were the recurring subject for
the artist Chris Marker¹. From 1952 Marker realized
25 films, their length varying from six minutes to three
hours. His speciality was so called compilation film,
where he combined his own material to archive films
and photography. Video works and multimedia were
also part of his body of work. For example CD-rom
Immemory (1998) is an ambitious attempt to trace
the mechanics of human memory. In the opening
picture Alfred Hitchcock and Marcel Proust are
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pictured side by side. Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and
the construction of time in the movie grows towards
Proust’s masterpiece In the Search of Lost Time
(1913–1927). Marker’s works return over and over
again to the question of memory and seek to track the
threads it is made of. Au fond de l’air est rouge (1977)
sketches us the history of socialism by using wide
selection of archive materials. The collective memory
of human race is present in most of Marker’s works.
How the memory works, what does it preserve, how
does it tie people together or separate them from each
other seem to be the recurring questions to Marker.
The continuing movement of time from present to past
and towards future is also the theme of his most known
work, La Jetée (1962). It has been thoroughly analyzed
and admired by many writers, for example Stanley
Cavell states in the World Viewed (1979) that “The
most beautiful declaration I have seen of the difference
between motionless and moving depiction occurs in a
sciencefiction film by Chris Marker [...]” (Cavell 1979,
142–143). La Jetée consists solely of black and white
photographs except one short sequence of moving
images. The photographs are the images of the past,
present and future. The moving sequence depicts a
woman opening her eyes and waking up from a dream.
This short movement underlines the act of waking
up, the life here and now, which is only momentarily
reached to be soon lost again (Marker 2008).
Stillness of Landscape
What about a landscape image then? A viewpoint
from afar and the horizon are important features of
landscape. Without person in the picture, landscape
seems still, whatever the surroundings are. In a
landscape image, an image of a human being (or any
other being) is not in the main focus, so the distinction
between stillness or movement becomes more
difficult to perceive. In a film, a pure landscape can be
recognised as a moving image often because of the
film material or changing light, not because something
in the image itself would move. Because of this, a
landscape image in a film is extremely interesting. It
halts the movement and detaches the viewer from the
stream of appearing and disappearing images.
According to philosopher and film theoretician Gilles
Deleuze, in a film the illusion of movement and the
shifting of moments is similar to the nature of reality.
How we perceive reality and form memory of it reminds
our experience of the cinema. An experience in life or
in a film gives us a virtual image which incessantly is
replaced by a new image (Deleuze 2005, 79). At the
same time this new experience changes our experience
and memory also of the past. Every moment lived or
experienced recreates not only our present but also
our past and our future. Our understanding of life itself
changes by every moment because of this shifting. So
does our understanding and experience of a story in
film, as every new image forms us new paths to follow.
When in a still photograph the present is always a
time lost, a time already lived and experienced and
now presented us as a trace of a memory, in cinematic
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narrative the illusion of presentness dominates our
experience. We understand that the images have been
taken long before they reach our eyes, but the illusion
created by movement deceives us to experience
them as something happening right now in front of us.
The strong emotional impact that movie gives to its
audience leads to this same direction. It is as if real
life had been laid before us, and we react on it as
we would react on life: we get agitated, we laugh, feel
sorrow, compassion, disgust.
The stillness and link to the history of art make an
image of landscape different from otherwise present
flow of time before us. It easily draws us nearer the
past than the present and breaks the illusion of the
cinematic presentness. It is more a memory or a
landscape of past than something happening right now
before us.
Film theoretician and researcher Martin Lefebvre
calls a landscape in a film “space freed from
eventhood” (Lefebvre 2006, 22). Often in experimental
films seen painting-like landscape is according to
him popular also in traditional fiction films. Lefebvre
writes that contemplation of the setting frees it from
its narrative function (Ibid., 29). This contemplation
enables a view, which creates aesthetic experiences
instead of narrative ones. Thus a landscape in a
film can enable a “spectacular mode” of spectatorial
activity (Ibid., 29). Stella Hockenhull analyzes further
the spectacular character of landscape in relation
to the modern day ecological change (Hockenhull
2013, 106–120). Lefebvre’s notion ties together the
landscapes of painting, photography and film tradition.
The viewer’s aesthetic experience in each of these can
be very similar.
Four Types of Landscape Images
In film, as in photography, landscape images can
be analyzed and divided into different categories
defined by the relationship between the landscape and
its spectator. I’ve developed based on my research a
fourfold table, which presents the different categories
of landscape to be further analysed. The categories are
called pure landscape, person landscape, perceived
landscape and absent landscape. Each one of these
categories is characterised by a certain kind of image,
which is recognisable and can be extracted from the
flow of images in film.
In the landscape painting tradition, a pure landscape
is usually understood as a landscape without a
person. This type of landscape, in its natural state,
is found already in early photography and later in film
accordingly. This may be the most prominent form of a
spectacle image, an image which halts the narrative.
A pure landscape creates an illusion of continuing
natural space in front of the spectators. History of
romanticism, romantic view and admiration of the
landscape and nature in its spectacular state work
as a basis for this type of image. It is easy to watch,
naturally inviting for most of the Central and North
European or North American viewers. It leans strongly
on the tradition of early tourism and the urge to travel

and reach for spectacular landscapes and climb on
the high viewpoints. it is seen in documentaries and
travel diaries throughout the decades, even centuries.
The spots of interest marked in tourist guides are still
often places, where the most beautiful landscape is
possible to obtain.
In all of the history of art the images and their
connotations change by culture and cultural traditions.
The four categories of landscape images in my
research are thereby based in the western – mostly
European and North American image types more than
for example Asian or African image traditions which
would be thus a subject of a whole different research.
The second type or category is one easily
recognizable in, for instance, western films. Damien
Ziegler gives an example of this type an image where
a small character of a rider yields a perspective to the
vast desert that surrounds him (Ziegler 2010, 41). Also
in the road movie genre we frequently see a person
pictured against the vast scenery, maybe in front of him
or her the winding road heading towards the horizon.
In Gus Van Sant’s film My Own Private Idaho (1991),
and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), as well
as in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), to name a
few, we see many images, where the characters are
in the vastness of the landscape. They may stop in
their action to look at it, to notice it. In some cases they
seem to communicate with it as if it was a person itself.
This type of landscape, a person landscape, does not
interrupt the narrative as strongly as a pure landscape
image does. The landscape might form a back set for
narrative function of a travel or other spatial or temporal
transition. The landscape might be spectacular but it is
not anymore completely still as the character brings
in movement and defines through it the duration and
temporal boundaries of the image.
The third type of landscape is the perceived
landscape, as for instance in Friedrich’s Wanderer.
The person in landscape is pictured from behind.
Through my research I propose that this type of
landscape image is in traditional fiction films one
of the most common ones. It is often paired with a
pure landscape image, which then functions as the
person’s viewpoint image. A person pictured from
behind repeats itself often for instance in contemporary
photographic art as well as in cinema. Philosophical
connotation doesn’t necessarily mean the present of
divine but often an experience of sublime, a pondering,
moment of decision or life changing event. A person
withdraws from the world to contemplate in the face of
a landscape, which offers a viewer a pond in narrative
and underlines the importance of the moment. In the
landscape there might be a focus point, for instance
a moving object. Still, the landscape image is the
background for the person who stays in front of it.
The fourth type of landscape is particular only for film.
As such, it is structurally slightly more complicated
than the other three types, which present themselves
in both still and moving images. I speak about absent
landscape, imagined landscape, told landscape or
implied landscape, meaning an imaginative landscape,
where the landscape’s picture itself is not present, but
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only a person’s experience of it. The image is thus an
image of a person, who looks at a landscape. Typical
picture is an image of a person, who stays in front of
a window, looking out. His or hers point of view image
we see often then the landscape he or she is looking
at. Also the person may describe the view he or she is
looking at and it may have a certain meaning to him
or her. This type of image is difficult, because at the
same time as it presents us a landscape, it also lacks it.
May an image of a person be considered as an image
of landscape only because of its logical place in the
fourfold table?
In my dissertation this is one of the questions I intend
to research further. I will be conducting a separate
project about these images using both still and moving
images as my tool.
Conclusion
In my artistic work and artistic research I treat the
subject of time and presence mediated by the image
of landscape. As I see it, the image of landscape forms
a bridge of time from photography to cinema and it
encompasses the temporal differences between the
two. The nature and meaning of this bridge of time I
intend to articulate in my upcoming dissertation.
To look at the landscape is for a human being a
primitive need. For a Faustian human it is a way of
seeking his own future and taking a charge of it, writes
Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (Spengler
2002, 154–155). The unreachable horizon crops away
from the reach that what is outside our planning and
rule. The more we move towards it, the more it moves
away from us and the future stays always unreachable.
To the art of photography the subject of landscape
emerged from painting. The new technology gave
us a possibility to move towards the horizon, as to
approach our own future. It was possible to reach
new landscapes from all parts of the world and bring
them back home, pieces of reality which were hidden
from us before. When photography by its nature is still
and can be contrasted to Romantic painting tradition,
grows film towards Impressionism for its light and
movement. Otherwise in the moving flow of pictures
an image of landscape comes out. Its difference is
explained partly by the tradition of landscape painting
and the history of art, partly by the human experience
of landscape and the psychological or cultural need
to stop look at it. Landscape is “space freed from
eventhood” and creates thus an interesting connection,
a bridge of time, between film and photography.
The landscape images in film I divide in four categories,
by judging whether there’s a person present in it or not
and how the landscape is viewed. The four different
landscape images can be used as a tool when
analysing the landscape and its meaning in film in
respect to time.
Final notes
1
Christened Christian-Francois Bouche-Villeneuve (1921-
2012) Chris Marker was born in France (occasionally the place
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of birth is mentioned to be Ulan Bator, Mongolia). Marker was a England 1991). Helsinki: Tammi.
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