The Sublime Excess of the American Landscape - Maurizia Natali, Historia sztuki
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Article
"The Sublime Excess of the American Landscape : Dances with Wolves and Sunchaser as
Healing Landscapes"
Maurizia Natali
Cinémas : revue d'études cinématographiques / Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 12, n° 1, 2001, p. 105-
125.
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The Sublime Excess
of the American Landscape:
Dances with Wolves
and
Sunchaser
as Healing Landscapes
Maurizia Natali
RÉSUMÉ
Dans cet article, l'auteur analyse les paysages des films
Dances with Wolves
de Kevin Costner ainsi que
Sunchaser
de Michael Cimino, les considérant comme
« théâtres de la mémoire » dans lesquels de nombreux
arts sont « re-médiatisés » pour l'écran. Dans le cas qui
nous occupe, la relation conflictuelle que les
Américains entretiennent avec l'Autre autochtone, en
tant qu'obstacle à la doctrine de la
Manifest Destiny,
est
projetée sur les paysages, montée et recomposée en
ceux-ci. Dans
Dances with Wolves,
le nouveau nom du
héros suggère la perte de sa subjectivité américaine, ses
liens avec les autochtones et une version révisionniste
de la
Manifest Destiny.
Dans
Sunchaser,
de même, la
dynamique Est-Ouest illustre l'espoir de renaissance et
de rébellion. Le «sublime pyramidal» de la montagne
est le signifiant qui motive le road movie des deux
protagonistes. La séquence dans laquelle ils montent à
cheval avec les Amérindiens condense les différentes
strates de la culture du paysage. Les paysages filmiques
font partie des archives contemporaines de la « re-
médiatisation » : ils instaurent une mémoire conflic-
tuelle et produisent les emblèmes de l'iconologie ciné-
matographique de « l'excès ».
ABSTRACT
The author analyses the landscapes of the films
Dances
with Wolves
by Kevin Costner and
Sunchaser
by
Michael Cimino, considering them as "theatres of
memory" in which numerous arts are "remediated" for
the screen. Here the conflictual relationship Americans
have with the native Other as an "obstacle" to the doc-
trine of Manifest Destiny is projected onto its land-
scapes, staged and recomposed on them. In
Dances
with WolveSy
the hero's new name suggests the loss of
his American subjectivity, his links with the natives and
a revisionist version of Manifest Destiny. In
Sunchaser
also the east-west dynamic illustrates the hope for
rebirth and rebellion. Here the "pyramidal sublime" of
the mountain is the signifier that motivates the road
movie of the two heroes. The sequence in which they
ride on horses together with the natives condenses the
landscape culture's various strata. Film landscapes are a
part of the contemporary archive of remediations: they
instigate a conflictual memory and produce emblems
of cinematic iconological "excess."
Introduction: Landscape as "Screen"
From many past experiences of one hundred years of movie-
going, spectators silently recognise landscape clichés of which the
last one is the resurgent ghost. Always
sudden,
the images of land-
scape perpetuate the ecological
shock
of haunting fragments of
Nature returning as interval and pause, background and horizon,
a framed Nature which is lost just at the instant of its recording.
From a symbolic point of view, since the Renaissance landscapes
and cityscapes have opened an outer scene in the narcissistic the-
atre centred on the human body. In its most traditional defini-
tion landscape is a portion of the earth "cut out" from a human
point of view, while in rhetorical and philosophical terms, the
landscape is a "parergon," as defined by writers as different as
Gombrich (1978, p. 107-121) and Derrida (1978, p. 44-94).
The beauty of film landscape is a cryptic spectacle that
restages and recycles motifs from multiple sources. Beyond its
naturalistic, scientific or documentary rhetoric, landscape
imagery has been an archive of memories and fantasies linked to
metamorphic ideas of visible nature. As a "deep surface," land-
106
CiNéMAS,vol. 12, n° 1
scape is an oxymoron of manifest dreams and ideologies, a
framed perspective of the known earth functioning as the sym-
bolic frontier of the
visible
in a society.
With the advent of cinema, the
moving
landscape, as both
emotion and movement, has inherited the archives of landscape
painting, theatre decor, panoramas, illustration, photography,
and other
mises en scène.
As in other media, film not only
reframes nature, uses and abuses the "unnatural" beauty of its
cut-outs, and screens the aesthetic formatting of the profilmic
landscape: it also enhances its emotional effects with editing and
composition in movement. Restrictively, landscape imagery can
be defined as a narrative tool and a stylistic signature for many
authors, as a spectacular resource and a polyvalent ornament of
well coded genres. In reality, film landscapes are ambivalent
backgrounds encoding historical, aesthetic and ideological con-
flicts in the emblems of narrative representation.
However, in Western culture, even before the invention of
cinema, the image of landscape already functioned as a symbolic
screen
on which notions of nature and national identity, Utopias
and dystopias, relationships to ancestors and newcomers, and
religious and historical narratives had been projected, recom-
posed and enhanced, presented as dreamed decor or advertised
as faithful reproductions. In movies, the landscape, as a window,
multiplies
ad infinitum
the metaphor that has been used to
define the cinema itself as a window onto the world. With this
imagery, the recorded or staged views of nature not only
remediate the special effects of painting (depth, perspective,
planes) but also reveal the nature of these special effects of the
cinema as a whole, what could be called its technological, emo-
tional, and spectacular dream-work.
On the screen, the spectacle of nature, a decor invisibly
encrypted with traces of aesthetic and technological
dépenses,
maintains the contradictory character of an
auratic
(reproduc-
tion offered as a gift, an ornament or a supplement to admire,
an attraction to contemplate as a residue of silent cinema resist-
ing mainstream logocentric narrativity (Gunning, 1993).
In all media at all times, from Renaissance painting to lanter-
na magica, from science fiction to video art, the landscape
The Sublime Excess of the American Landscape:
Dances with Wolves
and
Sunchaser...
107
image may be considered a magic interface with the archives of
obsolete or recent technologies invested in the spectacle of
nature. This spectacle (from picturesque to sublime, from realist
to conceptual) also "screens out" ecological and political con-
flicts, enveloping them under its aesthetic and narrative masks.
The landscapes recreated by the movies have "remediated"
and "hypermediated" (to use recent terminology by Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin [1999] the spectacles of the land-
scape archive into new moving icons, reconfirming that cinema,
as a mechanical eye placed between the human body/eye and
the world, is essentially a machine for producing virtual emo-
tions.
The ideal spectator, and film analyst too, should be able to
detect and appreciate the never-ending
prismatic
effects of the
landscape dream-work, its brilliant façade of lost conflicts, con-
densations and displacements. He or she might use film essen-
tially as a mnemonic medium, a Freudian
façade
of dreams con-
trolled by the illusory perspectives offered by narrative codes, a
process of rendering secondary that masks the chaotic likenesses
and traumatic associations connected with cinemas
pathos for-
mulae.
1
In the history of American landscape, ideology and ecology,
myth and consumerism, and cinema and the graphic arts con-
tinuously produce incongruous tapestries of meanings with
montages of landscape imagery.
2
With few exceptions, the link
of high art historical icons with popular culture and movies has
not frequently been studied by film historian or theorists, as if
the aesthetic nature of such excess had frequently appeared as an
overly political issue for film criticism. In fact, the ghostly fasci-
nation and ecological message of these sources feed Hollywood
landscape photographers and special effect experts as well as its
audiences' patriotic and touristic reveries, and even explains
much of American cinema's worldly commercial empire.
However, it is precisely this excess of mesmerising propaganda
and technological frenzy that demands an iconological consider-
ation. Often presented as a result of aesthetic choices of the
authorial
mise en scène
(the landscape styles of John Ford,
Anthony Mann, Terence Malick or Ridley Scott), this
excess of
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CiNeMAS, vol. 12, n° 1
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