The Angle of a Landscape

The renowned American poetry critic Helen Vendler died a few weeks ago; there was a nice piece in The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch comparing her to Marjorie Perloff, who also passed away this year. I thought I'd pick three poems from Vendler's Emily Dickinson anthology and quote from her illuminating commentaries. I'll begin with this one, which has one of those arresting first lines that draw you straight into Dickinson's poems (see my earlier post on how these have been used by artist Roni Horn).

 

Our lives are Swiss—
So still—so Cool—
Till some odd afternoon
The Alps neglect their Curtains
And we look farther on!

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between—
The solemn Alps—
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!

Here, Vendler says, 'while the blocking Alps are obscured by mist, one cannot even speculate about what lies beyond; but when they let down their guard, and forget to draw the curtain over their landscape, one can see, beyond the passes, an ecstatic vista. The still, cool, white life of an Alpine region remains untroubled until one senses a possible warmth. If only one could traverse the mountains!' I've always loved this idea of glimpsing a promised land, somewhere sunny and beautiful summed up in that italicised word, Italy. The Alps here are both solemn - "thou halt not" - and sirens, leading us on. Eden could be ours if it weren't forever barred from us.

 

The Angle of a Landscape – 
That every time I wake – 
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Upon an ample Crack – 

Like a Venetian – waiting – 
Accosts my open eye – 
Is just a Bough of Apples – 
Held slanting, in the Sky – 

The Pattern of a Chimney – 
The Forehead of a Hill – 
Sometimes – a Vane’s Forefinger – 
But that’s – Occasional – 

The Seasons – shift – my Picture –
Upon my Emerald Bough,
I wake – to find no – Emeralds – 
Then – Diamonds – which the Snow

From Polar Caskets – fetched me –
The Chimney – and the Hill – 
And just the Steeple’s finger – 
These – never stir at all – 

Vendler describes this as three sequential poems in one. The first three stanzas provide 'an enticing picture of a small sliver of landscape that is familiar to Dickinson because she sees it every morning between the edge of her curtain and the wall of her room.'  Then she moves through autumn and winter with emerald leaves replaced by diamond frost and snow. Finally there are the last three lines which leave us with a static chimney and the finger of a steeple. 'The denuding of the landscape in the last stanza is an almost invisible process' and we are left with 'a heartbreaking picture of a once-enhanced Nature which, with the death of its participatory observer, itself suffers rigor mortis.'

 

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Vendler ends her book Dickinson with this beautiful epigram, long a favourite poem of ours and one I've quoted on this blog before. She looks at the poet's word choice - for example, "prairie" is a good rhyme, distinctly American and reflects in its spelling the Latin pratum, "meadow". She also analyses the poem's linguistic game that is one of its most appealing features: the way "a" and "one" reverse their order. A bee needs just one random clover to sip nectar from, but in the second line they are separated by a comma and joined by the third essential term, "revery", which seems to arise 'as a "surprise" even to herself'. The word "revery" has various meanings, ranging from a vision to a state of being lost in thought. Its three syllables make it 'spread out' in a way you wouldn't have with the simple word 'dream'. This poem's last six brisk monosyllables bring us 'out of the dreamy reverie itself (here a clover, there a bee) into the poet's argument for the power of reverie alone, even when it is unsupported by correlative natural images. Dickinson is a rapturous poet of nature's flowers and bees, but her more abstract meditations can arise powerfully from reverie alone.'

Bitter Rice

I was at the BFI this week to see Bitter Rice (1949), a classic Italian neorealist film that also draws on elements of film noir and (in its climactic scene) the Western. It has four fine, photogenic lead actors: young Vittorio Gassman as a charming thief, Doris Dowling as his reluctant partner in crime who hides in a train full of women leaving Turin to plant rice in the Po Valley, Raf Vallone (an actor who had once played in midfield for Torino) as the good guy, a soldier stationed near the paddy fields, and, most notably, the extraordinary nineteen-year old Silvana Mangano (above) in a star making role as one of the rice workers. Its director Giuseppe De Santis, like the later nouvelle vague auteurs, had started out as a film journalist. In 1941 he wrote an article called 'For an Italian Landscape', arguing that there are 'some emotions that man cannot give voice to so we must draw on everything that surrounds him to express them.' The rice fields (which have recently suffered severe drought) act in this way, a sunlit tree-fringed mirror when the workers first arrive and a churned-up sea of mud when torrential rain threatens their livelihood.   

Pasquale Ionnane recently included Bitter Rice on a list of 10 Great Italian Pastoral Films. Although his choices are set in rural Italy you wouldn't necessarily think of them as landscape films, although I did once write a blog post here about one of them, Le Quattro Volte. The list includes Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders (2014) and he quotes an interview with her from when it was released: “my desire to show the changes the Italian landscape has gone through – the transformation of the countryside from a place of work to a theme park celebrating ancient values […] I wanted to show how agricultural work in the here and now isn’t being safeguarded.” Rohrwacher's next feature film Happy as Lazzaro was set in a landscape lost in time (not exactly an idyll though...) Her most recent one La Chimera, which I saw with my son a couple of weeks ago (we loved it), concerns the search for Etruscan antiquities lying underneath the Italian landscape.

Perspective of the Trevi Fountain

 Office of Sir John Soane, Interior of Hagia Sophia (detail), c. 1806-19

 

Sir John Soane’s Museum currently has a small exhibition called 'Fanciful Figures', focusing on the evolution of staffage in architectural drawings. I have included here a couple of photos I took when we visited yesterday. The painting above is by an unknown artist and was used for Soane's Royal Academy lectures. He was not really interested in the design of the building ('very defective'); the point was to illustrate the vast scale of the Hagia Sophia, at that time the world's largest interior space. I think the image resembles contemporary landscape watercolours, with small figures gazing up at awe-inspiring mountainous walls. The beautiful drawing of the Trevi fountain below includes figures so small as to be somewhat surreal - they are not only tiny compared to the architecture,  they are also out of scale with each other. 'Even more strange,' the curators note, 'is that the figures stand with their feet below a thick ruled line - possibly a border line - indicating their placement outside the principal composition'. It is as if figures in a landscape have been minimised to such an extent they have been pushed outside the frame.

Laurent Pécheux, Perspective of the Trevi Fountain, c. 1755

William Aslet has written a piece for Apollo about this exhibition which mentions this question of scale. 

If we look closely at Leonard Knyff’s c. 1695 drawing of one of Sir Christopher Wren’s schemes for Greenwich Hospital, for example, we see that many of the figures are comically out of scale and that the galleons in the drawing’s foreground are the same size as the rowing boats alongside them. If they do not convey the building’s size, what purpose do these details serve? Here things become more nuanced. Knyff’s drawing of Greenwich is for a project that was never fully realised. The staffage here works alongside the exaggerated – and unrealistic – sense of perspective to beguile the viewer with vignettes that do not just give a sense of scale, but also make the building seem alive. It is no coincidence, then, that several of the most impressive drawings included in the Soane’s exhibition are for buildings that probably never could have been executed.

Boating on Ruoye stream in the spring

The Government of Zhejiang Province have recently launched the Poetry Road Cultural Belt. There is a fascinating article on the literary sources for this, ‘Spatial patterns, causes and characteristics of the cultural landscape of the Road of Tang Poetry based on text mining: take the Road of Tang Poetry in Eastern Zhejiang as an example’ by Xuesong Xi, Xingrun An, Guangming Zhang & Shifan Liang. They analyse 1593 poems written in Eastern Zhejiang by 451 poets of the Tang Dynasty. These relate to 79 places ‘which are classified into four categories, including natural land-scapes, residences of celebrities, Buddhist temples and Taoist temples, and administrative zones.’ The authors find 47 natural landscapes covered in the poems, ‘of which 36 are related to mountains and 11 to water landscape, such as Mount Tiantai, Mount Wozhou, Mount Wanwei, Jinghu Lake, Ruoye River and Shanxi River’. I've reproduced their map below.

The ‘celebrity houses’ the poems refer to are Lanting (the ‘Orchard Pavilion’ associated with Wang Xizhi, who I've mentioned on this blog before) and the houses of the politician and poet He Zhizhang (c. 659-744), Zheng Qian (a Han Dynasty diplomat) and Yan Wei (a brave Three Kingdoms period general). The Tang poems also reference the ‘folk-cultural landscape’: ‘the perch and Brasenia of Eastern Zhejiang, the Shan paper and wine of Shaoxing, the famous tea of Eastern Zhejiang from the Shanxi River and the Mount Tiantai, the various kinds of valuable medicinal herbs produced in the Mount Tiantai, and the rattan of Yuezhong, the Huading Rattan, which was preferred by the literati.’ 

I feel I should now conclude by mentioning some actual Tang Dynasty landscape poetry from Zhejiang. However, the study only covers the area south of the Fuchun River, so excludes Wuxing, where the poet-monk Jiaoran had his tea farm, Duqing where Meng Jiao lived, and the great city of Hangzhou, where Bai Juyi (as governor) built a causeway and Meng Haoran wrote a poem about watching the tidal bore (maybe I'll write about this natural phenomenon in a future post). I could talk about Hanshan (Cold Mountain) and his Buddhist friends in the Tiantai mountains, but they have featured here before. So I'll go for Qiwu Qian (692-749), whose 'Boating on Ruoye stream in the spring' is in the famous anthology of Three Hundred Tang Poems (a fraction of the number analysed by Xuesong Xi et al!)

Qiwu Qian was a friend of Wang Wei, who wrote a poem immortalising his failure to get into the civil service, 'To Qiwu Qian Bound Home After Failing an Examination'. Ruoye River is at the foot of the Kuaiji Mountain. As Stephen Owen says (in The Great Age of Chinese Poetry), Qiwu Qian's poem traces ‘the oldest thematic pattern in Chinese landscape poetry: the poet moves through the landscape, attaining enlightenment or understanding the futility of public life.’ Qiwu’s boat is blown by the evening breezes. ‘Mist over pools flies billowing, rolling, and the moon of the forest lowers behind me.'

A tin flash in the sun-dazzle

 

I'm going to write about landscape in this book, but it needs a bit of explanation first. Here's the New Directions publisher's blurb:

Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a cache of notebooks dating back to the summer of 1912, when as a young man he had walked the troubadour landscape of southern France. Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of “Walking Tour 1912,” editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound’s footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. “What this peripatetic editing process… revealed,” he writes, “was a remarkably readable account of a journey in search of the vanished voices of Provence that at the same time chronicled Pound’s gradual discovery of himself as a modernist poet.”

This transition towards Imagism was leading Pound to look for precise observation of nature in the best troubadour poetry. In Sieburth's introduction he describes Pound's attempts to read their poems in elements of the landscape he passed through. 

Ambling down the valley of the Dronne near Arnaut Daniel's birthplace at Ribérac, he verified the vernal vegetation of the countryside against vocabulary of the poet's cansos. Observing the rhythm of "cusps & hills, of prospects opened & shut" as the road climbed northward toward Mareuil, he wondered whether the structure of Arnaut's sestinas might not derive from patterns of recurrence in the local terrain. Having fought the wind and rain through the greater part of his journey, he reflected that he now "found a deal more force in certain lines & stanzas than I had ever expected ... if we consider them as sung by men to whom the condition of the weather was a necessary concomitant of every action & enjoyment... the prelude of weather in nearly every canzon becomes self evident, it is the actual reflection." (Three decades later, exposed to the elements at Pisa, the full force of these observations would hit home.)

Pound also had a theory about troubadour topography: that Bertran de Born's 'Lady Since You Care Nothing For Me', about a composite ideal love with features taken from the fairest beauties of Provence, actually disguised a military plan to take the castles where these ladies lived. Sieburth suspects that 'Pound was in fact unconsciously projecting his own private scenarios of phallic beleaguerment and grandeur onto the landscape of his troubadour alter-ego'. 

The notes Pound made are fragmentary - readable but hardly polished travel writing. They nevertheless contain flashes of imagistic description that anticipate the Cantos. Sieburth quotes one example, where light on the river Dordogne, 'a band of bluish metal with rippled chevrons in the shadows', looks forward to this phrase from Canto 2: 'There is a wine-red glow in the shallows, / a tin flash in the sun-dazzle.' 

The book also includes three poems from 1915 that were directly inspired by the walk - one of these, 'Provincia Deserta' provides 'the first occurrence in Pound's poetry of that rarefied, virtually Chinese landscape of mountains and valleys which provides the elevated topography of the paradiso of the late Cantos.' Sieburth quotes lines from this poem that refer to the town of Foix in the Pyrenees and I'll conclude here with some of the original notes Pound made in 1912:

To Foix by night...

We are come again to a place where the waters run swiftly & where we have always this chinese background. The faint grey of the mountains...

I had at last my plan of starting late in the day so the hills were full of cloud & mist & there were bright & dim colours upon them. I went into this Coliseum of hills with Foix like Caesar's stand behind me, but with a veiled light over it & scarcely visible. I went out the other end where a great sheet of rock juts thru the quarry, out & into a paler basin that faced me with light emerald & pearlish shadows. Then you go up & over till the sky shows blue before you. It is not the rd. of the diligence. One may lie on the earth & possess it & feel the world below one.

Of related interest:

'Ezra the Troubadour' - an article on Pound's travels and poems that includes Sieburth's map.

'Poundian Itineraries': An attempt to map Pound's later 1919 walking tour (and another article on his third walking tour in 1923).

The Fountain of Arethusa

 There is sweet music in that pine tree's whisper...

- Theocritus, Idyll 1, trans. Anthony Verity

Last week I was in Syracuse, the home of Theocritus and, by extension, pastoral poetry. The first of his Idylls begins with two comparisons of nature and music. The words above are spoken in the poem's opening line by Thyrsis, praising the music of a goatherd's pan pipes. The goatherd replies 'shepherd, your song sounds sweeter than the water tumbling / over there from the high rock.' Thyrsis is persuaded to sing The Sufferings of Daphnis, the lament of a dying Sicilian cowherd (the reasons for his death are left mysterious). I have described here before Virgil's references to Daphnis in his Eclogues, and also the ancient novel Daphnis and Chloe, although in that story Daphnis tends goats on Lesbos. Re-reading Theocritus after visiting Sicily reminded me that many of his poems are set in the wider Greek world, although Idyll 16, is addressed to the tyrant of Syracuse, Hieron II. Both Idyll 16 and Idyll 1 refer to Arethusa, a spring that you can still visit on the island of Ortygia (the old centre of Syracuse). It is just be the sea and walled in to create a pond inhabited by fish and ducks.  

 

In Greek mythology, Arethusa was a nymph who fled from her home in Arcadia, emerging eventually as a fresh water fountain on Ortygia. The predatory male in this story was Alpheus, a river god, who pursued her until she prayed to be transformed into a cloud. But Alpheus wouldn't let up and, perspiring with fear, she turned into a stream and flowed through the sea until she reached safety in Syracuse. Ovid called her Alpheius - the name of a Greek river (it is said that a wooden cup thrown into the Alfeiós will eventually turn up in the Spring of Arethusa). Virgil alludes to this story when Aeneas reaches Sicily: 'an island lies over against wave-washed Plemyrium, / stretched across a Sicilian bay: named Ortygia by men of old. / The story goes that Alpheus, a river of Elis, forced /a hidden path here under the sea, and merges / with the Sicilian waters of your fountain Arethusa.' Virgil addresses his tenth Eclogue to Arethusa and refers to the story of Daphnis told by Theocritus, relocating the setting from Sicily to (an imaginary) Arcadia.

John Martin, Alpheus and Arethusa, 1832

 

Unsurprisingly Arethusa gets frequently mentioned in later pastoral poetry, right up to Wordsworth, who wonders in The Prelude whether 'that fountain be in truth no more'. Milton had referred to it in his elegy Lycidas, along with Mincius, a river in Italy that features in Virgil's Eclogue 7. 'O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, / Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds, / That strain I heard was of a higher mood.' But Samuel Johnson was not impressed with poetry of this kind. 'It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.'

A Tale of the Wind

Mentioning Bert Haanstra, a Dutch documentary maker, in my last post reminded me of the great Joris Ivens. I referred to him back in 2008 when I wrote about the city symphony films being made in the late 1920s. Rain (Regen, 1929) displayed an interest in the elements that persisted all his life. The image above of Ivens on a mountain in China is from A Tale of the Wind, which was released sixty years later, three months before he died. Derek Jarman was an admirer and mentions it three times in Modern Nature:

• 'Before we turned in: a ravishing film by Joris Ivens, at 90 chasing the elusive wind in China. The most refined work, it made the Hitchcock season look dreadful.'

• 'So late at night. I weep for the garden so lonely in the shingle desert. Dear Jean [Cocteau], am I the only one who, besides you, has funded a film on his name? Joris Ivens' perfect film of the wind? So few escape to tread this path. Hedges of money, fixed stars.'

• 'Joris Ivens walking breathless into the desert to find the wind. Asthmatic.'  

Like Jarman and Ivens I have always had asthma and love the idea of the aged director setting off to discover the secret of breathing in the rhythm of the autumn wind. Ivens was born in 1898, so was almost as old as cinema itself and A Tale of the Wind includes a fantasy sequence based on Georges Méliès’A Trip to the Moon (1902), as well as clips from a couple of his own films made in the thirties. When Jarman saw it he was forty-seven, almost half as young as Ivens, HIV positive and starting to suffer from the respiratory illnesses that would restrict his film making. In Modern Nature he describes listening to the wind at Dungeness and storms rattling the old walls of his cottage: 'a wild wind roared through the night, chasing sleep to the edge of dawn.' That morning he woke to 'crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind. The crocuses open quickly, bright yellow petals spread wide open at noon. The purple and white in the shadows. The snowdrops are out; and before the sun disappears round the house the first daffodil has opened.'

There is an excellent article on A Tale of the Wind by Jonathan Rosenbaum, written in 1992. He concludes by describing its final scene. 

Still later, trekking across mountains and desert with his camera and sound crew in search of the elusive wind, he is told by a Chinese peasant woman, perhaps a witch, that she can draw a magic figure in the sand that will beckon the wind out of hiding. She needs, however, two electric fans, and these are promptly sent for and delivered to the site by a camel, leading to the ecstatic miracle that forms the film’s climax. Like the Mélièsian warrior sequence, it is yet another instance of folklore and technology, archaeology and fantasy being brought into a sublime proximity, even a communication with each another. It is Joris Ivens’s message to — or is it from? — the 21st century, if only we are brave and alert enough to listen.

Mirror of Holland

This morning I walked along our local canal, with bright sunny weather creating reflections of the barges and bridges, the buildings of Hoxton and Haggerston, a few trees and many joggers pounding down the path. This evening I watched Mirror of Holland, made up entirely of shots of canal reflections, which won the short film Palme d'Or in 1951. It begins with the windmill below and a young lad who bends down to see the image the 'right way round' - the rest of the film continues in this way, with the reflections turned into water-blurred moving images of farms, gabled houses, a church tower, locks and canal boats. The director Bert Haanstra went on to make many other documentary films - his other big success was based on another reflective medium, Glass (1958).

Mirror of Holland put me in mind of Haanstra's Dutch contemporary M.C. Escher, whose compositions like Puddle and Three Worlds are interested in how water can contain a landscape. There are some abstract moments in the film that look like Escher's Rippled Surface which also dates from 1950. Of course there are reflections in Dutch Golden Age paintings too and you could probably make a version of Haanstra's film by montaging these together - the example below is in Jan Van de Heyden's Country House on the Vliet near Delft (1665). 

The purple glow of evening

Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on a Balcony, 1824
(used as the cover for OUP edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho).

The Mysteries of Udolpho is one of those famous novels like Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein that I've read with certain prior expectations, only to be surprised by how much else there is beyond the story I imagined it would be. One reason is that, like many people, I came to Ann Radcliffe's Gothic bestseller with a caricature in mind, formed by Jane Austen's parody Northanger Abbey (a book I quoted here back in 2008). But it is also a novel designed to frustrate your expectations, with slow sections and plot digressions that must be read before its numerous mysteries are explained. The obvious reaction on putting it down is that this 670 page novel could have been an exciting 200 page story if it had stuck to the Castle of Udolpho and not allowed its heroine an anticlimactic and relatively easy escape from the villain Montoni. But if you are interested in landscape and the way it was appreciated there is much of interest before and after Emily is incarcerated in the Apennines.

Ann Radcliffe's reference points are the standard ones in Britain at the time:

• The Mysteries of Udolpho is greatly influenced by Edmund Burke's theory of the Sublime and the term itself is frequently used. Descriptions of mountain landscapes, the great gloomy castle and Montoni's fierce face are clearly designed to evoke feelings of delightful terror. 
  

• The perilous paths Emily travels are straight out of Salvator Rosa. Banditti and murderous armed men are not just figments of her imagination. The novel is set in the sixteenth century but a 'scene of barrenness' interrupted by 'the spreading branches of the larch and cedar, which threw their gloom over the cliff, or athwart the torrent that rolled in the vale' was 'such a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed'.
  

• The novel's chapters begin with quotations from poets and it is no surprise to see James Thomson's The Seasons featuring along with Shakespeare, Milton and others. Verse epigraphs are still standard practice (Thomas Halliday uses them effectively in his recent book on prehistoric landscapes, Otherlands) but Radcliffe pioneered this technique. 

Like other writers from the Romantic period, Radcliffe's way of viewing nature was influenced by William Gilpin and she had followed him to the Lake District in search of picturesque scenery. Her heroine meets and falls in love with a free-spirited young chevalier encountered while he is on the kind of walking tour alone in the mountains that Coleridge and Wordsworth would later enjoy. As the OUP edition's editor Bonamy Dobrée says in his notes 'it is surely no accident that Radcliffe's villains do not care for landscape'. 

Because Radcliffe had never at this stage set foot in the south of France or Italy, her descriptive passages are based on those of travel writers like Hester Thrale. Some readers might dislike the idea of landscape imagined from a distance and through the prism of other books in this way, but there are moments where The Mysteries of Udolpho reminded me of the dream-like journeys I have praised here before in books by Kafka and Eichendorff. Radcliffe's vision of Venice, with its unintentional anachronisms, is as unreal as Kafka's New York and Eichendorff's Rome, but it has a poetic quality that would appeal to Byron. 

Terry Castle, in her introduction to the OUP edition, describes the early part of the novel as a 'bizarre quasi-travelogue' where 'the narrative repeatedly dissolves into extended diffuse, often phantasmagoric descriptions of landscape'. And she quotes the passage, below, saying that at moments like this the novel 'seems hypnotized by the possibility of not becoming a Gothic novel - of remaining instead in a world of beautiful unfolding description. Transported by the hallucinatory 'charms' of nature, Emily and her friends may in turn remind us of moon-walkers, travelling in endless slow motion through a mauve-tinted dusk.'

It was evening when they descended the lower alps, that bind Rousillon, and form a majestic barrier round that charming country, leaving it open only on the east to the Mediterranean. The gay tints of cultivation once more beautified the landscape; for the lowlands were coloured with the richest hues, which a luxuriant climate, and an industrious people can awaken into life. Groves of orange and lemon perfumed the air, their ripe fruit glowing among the foliage; while, sloping to the plains, extensive vineyards spread their treasures. Beyond these, woods and pastures, and mingled towns and hamlets stretched towards the sea, on whose bright surface gleamed many a distant sail; while, over the whole scene, was diffused the purple glow of evening.

Cloud tracks and tide-ripples

 

Last weekend I went to Cambridge to see the Kettle's Yard exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. Laura Cumming wrote in her review last November 'I can hardly think of a more uplifting show for the dying days of autumn' and I felt the same way on a cold day in January. 'Everything about it,' she goes on to say, is bright, beautiful, hopeful and as amiable as the subtitle suggests. For the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia (1929-94) had many friends, and attracted so many more to his extraordinary “museum” in Cumbria in the 1970s that over 300 artists eventually came to work in Banks, a remote village beside Hadrian’s Wall. This show is filled with their spirit.' There's a lot to say about Li Yuan-chia and his gallery space YLC, so if you're not familiar with it I'd recommend reading that review or an article Nicholas Wroe wrote for The Guardian, '"There’s a story of racialised exclusion": the forgotten Chinese artist who transformed Cumbria'.

Li himself wasn't primarily a landscape artist, although there are abstract ink drawings he made before arriving in England that could be imagined as referencing the shapes of roads, fence posts, waves or tree forms. However, deciding to live in Cumbria and establishing the YLC in 'a landscape of farmland, fells and forestry, of uncultivated moors and unpredictable mires' (Ysanne Holt) unsurprisingly brought him into contact with artists working locally with natural materials like David Nash and Andy Goldsworthy. And some of his work did draw on the history of these borderlands - there is a photograph of him in the LYC in front of an artwork based on a map of Hadrian's Wall that resembles the gallery works made by contemporary land artists. A catalogue essay by Elizabeth Fisher compares his decision to work away from urban art centres to Kurt Schwitters in his Merz Barn and Ian Hamilton Finlay creating Little Sparta.

Li Yuan-chia's friends and associates included people I have referred to here before, like Winifred Nicholson, Frances Horovitz, Delia Derbyshire and Elsa Stansfield. The exhibition also includes Nash and Goldsworthy, Naum Gabo, Ian Hamilton Finlay (The Land's Shadows) and a Cumbrian artist I hadn't encountered previously, Donald Wilkinson (an etching/aquatint of The Greta Joining the Tees/Winter). They are among the long list of LYC Museum artists on the Li Yuan-chia Foundation website. There were also several examples of concrete poetry by Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh), including SANDROCKTIDE, shown in my photograph below. The correspondence between dsh and Li is referred to in Amy Tobin's interesting essay 'Friendship as Method' and I'll end with a nice quote from this. 'dsh said his work was akin to 'dual-space probes of inner & outer' that should be read like 'cloud tracks and tide-ripples, lichen patterns and gull flights, or simply as horizons or spirit levels.''

Radical Landscapes

Back in 2022 Tate Liverpool held an exhibition of 'Radical Landscapes'. I didn't make the effort to go because it sounded like I would be familiar with a lot of the work as well as the underlying theme. I have written here before about exhibitions questioning 'traditional' ideas of landscape and land use in Britain - see for example my post in 2012 on Patrick Keiller's Tate Britain installation The Robinson Institute. I was also rather put off by Jonathan Jones's review (even though my views often diverge from his). He took the curators to task for their naive view of Constable and illogical politics. By defining Constable’s 'love of the British countryside as something retrograde, oppressive and literally Tory, it makes nonsense of its own thesis that the land belongs to us all, as well as its warnings of the urgency of climate crisis. If loving green fields is wicked, why go there? If nature is exclusive, why save it?' Laura Cumming also noted that 'Constable gets the usual pasting for showing a rural England where the poor are free to farm and roam the land as if the Enclosure Acts had never happened,' but was overall much more positive. Anyway, I didn't get to go, so I can't really comment on all this.

The reason I mention this exhibition now is that a cut down version of it has been on display in Walthamstow's William Morris Gallery. This is just a short tube journey away for me, so I popped along last week. It was certainly full of familiar work - Derek Jarman's garden, Peter Kennard's Constable missiles, Homer Sykes' Burry Man - and went through some predictable radical history landmarks: Kinder Scout, Greenham Common, Newbury. I've seen footage of the Spiral Tribe in various music documentaries and exhibitions and it never makes those nineties outdoor raves look remotely appealing! The Neo-Naturists were on show again here - they are unavoidable at the moment, getting naked at the Barbican in RE/SISTERS and (apparently - I haven't been yet) in Tate Britain's 'Women in Revolt!' But I was expecting to see a lot of this and in such a small show there were also inevitably obvious omissions - no Ingrid Pollard or Fay Godwin for example, both of whom are in RE/SISTERS.

 

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Apple Tree, 1962

If you want to read about this Walthamstow exhibition, there is a comprehensive review of it in Studio International by someone a bit less jaded than me! I suspect I might have found more eye-opening art among works from the original Liverpool exhibition that had to be left out here. But it was definitely worth a trip (and free!) and I will end here by mentioning a Klee-like painting by Anwar Jalal Shemza that I particularly liked. I don't recall seeing this one before. Shemza was born in India and published Urdu novels in the fifties before permanently relocating to Stafford, his wife Mary's hometown, in 1962. The Hales Gallery website notes that 'throughout his career, Shemza’s visual vocabulary drew on an array of deeply studied and lived experience, from carpet patterns and calligraphic forms to the environments around him: Mughal architecture from Lahore and the rural landscapes of Stafford, England.' 

Renamed City

Talking this weekend with my teenage son about holiday ideas, we agreed that the place we would both most like to visit is St. Petersburg. I wonder when that might be possible again... I have never been, but I've always assumed I would go one day. I’m not sure I associated Leningrad with anything much when I was a child - it was when I started to read Russian literature that St. Petersburg came into focus, accompanied by a shock of recognition. In Gogol, men ‘scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live.’ When I first read his stories, I too was a lowly, alienated civil servant living in shabby accommodation. And then there was Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, ‘full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city’s cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle that made people sick’ (Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance).

 

 Vasily Sadovnikov, Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, 1830s

 

In his 1979 essay 'A Guide to a Renamed City' Joseph Brodsky talks about how the city has been reflected in Russian literature. The presence of the Neva means that St. Petersburg's 'architectural landscapes' are already reflected in water, 'as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland, which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images.' But behind these surfaces, it was the interior of the city that became the subject of Russian poetry and novels. And as this was happening, St. Petersburg itself grew and changed at extraordinary speed, until the Revolution came and it entered a long period of stasis and decline - 'quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of the seasons.' Brodsky concludes his essay with Russia's literary city preserved in the memories of Soviet school children, as they learn verse and re-read nineteenth century prose. He ends with a memorable final paragraph, that describes the cityscape in June...

A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours - a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it is too light and because any dream will be inferior to reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.

Scenery-Killers

Derangements of My Contemporaries is Chloe Garcia Roberts's 2014 translation of Li Shangyin's Za Zuan ('Miscellaneous Notes'). This work is a delightful oddity in literary history - the most obvious comparison is The Pillow Book that Sei Shōnagon compiled at the Heian court in Japan around a hundred and fifty years later. They both feature whimsical Borgesian lists and many of Li Shongyin's concern people's potential failings, ranging from 'Judgment Lapses' and 'Brief Odiums' to 'Raging Stupidity'. His notes refer to things you can still easily agree with, but also aspects of ninth century Chinese life that now seem remote or bizarre. 'Aggressive Posturing' for example starts with 'Seeing another's writings, aggressively rifling through them', which would sound relevant if it wasn't for our recent move from writing on paper to laptops. Next comes 'Seeing another's saddled horse, audaciously riding it', which is maybe less relevant unless you live in Texas or go in for show jumping. 'Seeing another's bow and arrow, aggressively drawing and shooting it' also sounds rude, and even less prevalent in the twenty-first century. Then we are back to something many people will have experienced, 'Reading another person's essay, aggressively drawing out its contradictions.' And so on.

I have referred here before to the poetry of Li Shangyin (c. 813–858). The reason I'm now mentioning this book (published as New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #14) is because one of his lists pertains to landscape: 'Scenery-Killers'. Here are the thirteen things Li complained about, which I've re-ordered and accompanied with a modern interpretation.

Damaged landscape: 'A weeping willow, felled'

Inappropriate architecture: 'Raising a tower on the ridge of a mountain'

Land use confusion: 'Vegetables planted in a fruit orchard'

Incongruous nature: 'Under a flowered arbor, rearing poultry' 

Incongruous underwear: 'Undergarments drying below blossoms'

Poor parking: 'A horse tethered to a stone pillar'

Disrespecting the beauty of the night: 'Carrying a flame in moonlight'

Obscuring nature with something artificial: 'A mat spread over moss'

Encumbered landscape appreciation: 'Carrying something heavy on a spring outing'

Hierarchy disrespected: 'A high-ranking officer on foot'

Nature appreciation thwarted: 'Among pines, ordered to make way'

Unexpected sadness: 'Looking at flowers, falling tears'

And not rising to the occasion: 'Speaking of mundane affairs at a banquet of courtesans'

Conway Castle - Panoramic View

Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway

I've been reading Bryony Dixon's book The Story of Victorian Film which can be seen as an extension of the brilliant free-to-access BFI Victorian Film archive. For example, she discusses Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway, a 'sedately paced' landscape film which the BFI website describes thus:

This beautiful film, shot in February 1898, has a dream-like quality and is hand tinted (possibly stencilled). It is believed to have been coloured some time after it was first shown as no contemporary reviews or advertisements refer to what would surely have been a major selling/talking point, 1898 being very early for coloured films.

This film was made in response to the first American phantom train ride film (by the British Mutoscope and Biograph's parent company, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), 'The Haverstraw Tunnel', which showed the scenery around the Hudson river and a tunnel and so delighted the audience that the British operation decided to make their own version, which also proved very popular - it showed not only in London but also in Rochester, New York, and then travelled all over Europe, still being shown in cinemas as late as 1910. This film is preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands.

Dixon's chapter 'Moving Images: Panoramas, Phantom Rides and Travel' explains that the first travel film made from a moving vehicle was Alexander Promio's Panorama du Grand Canal pris d'un bateaux, shot from a gondola on 25 October 1896. There are several versions of this uploaded on YouTube and I've embedded one of them below. Two years later Biograph produced Panoramic View of the Vegetable Market at Venice with a large format camera that gives a remarkably clear, almost 3D stereoscopic effect. Such films can be related in their subjects and composition to earlier picturesque views in art, as well as the more recent phenomenon of moving panoramas (views unfurled on rolled-up cotton with a lecturer explaining each scene). A little later we get more Italian travelogues with more than one shot - Visit to Pompeii (1901) is 8 minutes long and features a 360-degree pan of the ruins, a lovely misty view of Vesuvius with sheep providing motion in the foreground and then a ride up the volcano's funicular railway (another version of the 'phantom train ride'). One more to recommend you look at is Ride on the Peak Tramway (1900), filmed in Hong Kong, which has a grainy, mesmerising quality. 'As the tram crests the peak it's just possible to see the huge vista of Victoria Harbour and Kowloon laid out before us, as if viewed from the world's greatest natural rollercoaster.' 

 

 

Another interesting genre discussed in Bryony Dixon's book is the sea wave film. 'Nearly every report of early film screening mentions audience reaction to films of sea waves. Films showing the movement of water were very popular for their mesmeric effect as well as for the initial shock they gave audiences at their feeling of 'absolute realness''. She quotes a reaction to Birt Acres' early Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - "It is not too much to say that persons seated near the screen must have shrunk from the approaching billows which gathered, lifted their foam-tossed crests, curled and crashed down with an absolute realism from which nothing was wanted but the roar." Again there are obvious precedents in art and recent photography (Acres was himself a photographer). Cecil Hepworth's film Rough Seas Breaking on Rocks (1899) reminds me of the 'rough seas' genre of postcards I wrote about here in 2011.  Dixon lists other examples but notes in particular 'the beautiful Sea Cave Near Lisbon, filmed by Henry Short for Robert Paul in 1896, in which Portugal's famous Boca di Inferno (Mouth of Hell) frames the waves swirling and smashing against the rocks.'

 

Sea Cave Near Lisbon

Branches Waving in the Current

Back in October I was fortunate to be able to attend a book launch for Michael Wood's new book In the Footsteps of Du Fu. He gave an excellent speech on Du Fu's life and importance (not everyone present had read the poetry) and was clearly moved when he quoted '500 Words on the Road to Fengxian'. He said his interest in Chinese poetry was sparked by A. C. Graham's Poems of the Late T’ang, published in 1965 (this was the book that inspired Roger Waters' lyrics for 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun'). When I first read this book in the mid eighties there were still hardly any translations of Chinese poetry available, although Arthur Cooper's Li Po and Tu Fu had appeared as a Penguin Classic in 1973. I've never understood why more haven't appeared over the years, although readers of this blog will have encountered quotes from the trickle of books published by American publishers. I doubt Michael Wood's book will provoke a new wave of enthusiasm here for Du Fu, but you never know.

 

Michael Wood on the Yangtze
(from the one hour BBC documentary Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet, 2020)

Rather than discuss the whole book, I thought I'd use the opportunity to talk here about a specific landscape which Du Fu wrote about. White Emperor City (Baidicheng or Baidi Fortress) is on the northern shore of the Yangtze, near Fengjie. Sadly, construction of the Three Gorges Dam submerged many buildings although tourists can still visit what remains on an island. Du Fu was one of many poets who came here over the years - ‘Early Departure from White King City’ by his friend Li Bai (701-62) is in the Arthur Cooper book. On the 15th of November 767 Du Fu saw here ‘a pupil of the Lady Kung-Sun dance the sword mime.’ In response he wrote a beautiful, moving meditation on aging, at about the age I am now. He had seen Lady Kung-Sun when he was a child in 717, but now even her pupil was past her prime. Arthur Cooper says in his notes for the poem that the dance, in the style of ‘West of the Yangtse’, was ‘probably at its climax very fast and vigorous, much like Tartar or so-called Polovtian dances known today through Russian ballet.’

A. C. Graham, in Poems of the Late T'ang, explains that Kuizhou (K’uei-chou), was ‘a town adjoining and apparently no longer distinguished from Pai Ti (White Emperor City)’. These places can be seen in the helpful map above, which I hope it's OK to reproduce from Michael Wood's book. ‘K’uei-chou had been part of the old kingdom of Shu and contained a temple to the great Shu statesman Chu-ko Liang, who was one of Tu Fu’s heroes’ (David Hawkes). ‘Ballad of the Old Cypress’ concerns a tree that Chu-ko Liang (Zhuge Liang) was supposed to have planted. Also near the city ‘there was a formation of dolmens which appeared as the Yangzi river sank. This was supposed to have been Zhuge Liang’s symbolic representation of the military formations his army should assume in the conquest of Wu’ (Stephen Owen). Du Fu wrote a famous poem about these too, ‘The Diagram of Eight Formations’. This was the setting for Brian W. Aldiss's 1978 short story 'The Small Stones of Tu Fu' in which a time traveller meets the aging poet. 

Zhuge Liang's Diagram of Eight Formations, or Stone Sentinel Maze, features in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written in the 14th century about events at the end of the Han Dynasty. Lu Xun is leading his troops towards Kui Pass when he begins to sense danger, but no sign of enemy soldiers. One of his followers inspects the area but finds only 'eighty or ninety chaotic rock piles alongside the river.' Some locals tell Lu Xun that when his enemy Zhuge Liang had been here, he had sent troops to arrange these rock formations and 'since then, a kind of cloudlike effluvium seems to emanate from their interiors'. As the sun goes down Lu Xun goes to investigate the rocks himself. Suddenly violent winds appear, the river rumbles and the sky is covered with streams of sand and stone. An old man appears and tells him this is the Eightfold Maze, whose openings appear unpredictably. They each have a name and Lu Xun had entered by the one called 'Perish'. But the man, who identifies himself as Zhuge Liang's father-in-law, leads him to safety. The novel then quotes Du Fu's poem.   

Du Fu had arrived in the Kuizhou-Baidicheng area in the spring of 766 and found two farmsteads to live in, the main house an hour’s walk uphill. Michael Wood, in the footsteps of Du Fu, noted that the poet's ‘vegetable garden with an orchard and orange grove of almost six acres commanded wonderful views which with a little imagination we can still see in the mind’s eye. Sometimes he walked higher up above the Gorges to see the whole vista unfold with distant mountain ranges beyond. So although the river has covered the site of Du Fu’s houses, if we look up, something of the ‘landscape remains’, as we would say’. It was here that the poet wrote his two great 'Autumn' sequences, which many consider the greatest of all Chinese poems. 

Bill Porter (Red Pine) visited this location a few years before Michael Wood for his odyssey round the poetic sites of China, Finding Them Gone (2016). The island of Baidicheng (Paiticheng) was surprisingly quiet - 'the only sounds I heard above the wind were those of crickets and doves. I was also joined by a passel of sparrows and what must have been the last butterflies of the year.' The famous view down the gorge (which can be found on a 10 Yuan note) still looked beautiful. As the site of Du Fu's Western Study has been drowned, a replacement version has been carved from rocks higher up. Red Pine ignored this and headed instead for Huanhua Village, named after the stream Du Fu lived by in Chengdu where he could look down over a slope of farm plots to the water, beneath which the poet's hut and orange grove now lie. He then made for the site of Du Fu's second submerged home, at a place called Huangchuehshu. A local explained that it is named for the ancient trees (Ficus virens) planted there.

'The trees were so big, he said, it took the outstretched arms of several people to encircle one of them. The huang-chueh was a relative of the banyan and was often used in that part of China to honour sites of historical or communal importance, and the site of Tu Fu's former house would have qualified. I thought about all those branches waving in the current where so many poems were written. It wasn't simply the landscape that inspired Tu Fu's poems. It was also his life coming to an end and he felt it.'

Salt Island

 Mónica de Miranda, Salt Island, 2022 (detail)

I recently went to look around RE/SISTERS A Lens on Gender and Ecology, at the Barbican. In this exhibition the politics goes well beyond environmentalism and feminism, encompassing work that reflects on sexuality, race and the history of colonialism. And yet it would be possible in some cases to wilfully ignore all these strata of meaning and admire a work as landscape art, like Salt Island, a sequence of five photographs embroidered with green thread. We are told by the wall label that Mónica de Miranda's work 'considers the complex experience of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe's colonialist past through a Black ecofeminist lens, drawing on ideas of matrilineal relationships, kinship, migration, slavery and African liberation movements.' However it's hard to get all this from Salt Island and the exhibition would ideally have displayed more of the multimedia project of which this is just a part, The Island. There is a good description of this in a text by Ana Nolasco on the artist's website, including historical background on the “Ilha dos Pretos” (Island of Blacks) which inspired it - stories of an eighteenth century settlement of people of African origin by the Sado River. 

 

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982

The addition of new ways of understanding our relationship with the planet make it increasingly hard to position art in this field. Agnes Denes, for example, is included for her famous Manhattan Wheatfield project, but she is now being criticised for using wheat, a Eurocolonial industrial cereal crop, 'implicated in the displacement of Indigenous people and indigenous plants over much of the continent for at least two centuries' (Catriona Sandilands). Today, artists need to think intersectionally. They have to create arresting work while steering (if I can use a mythological gendered landscape metaphor) between the Scylla of 'Mother Earth' attitudes, that equate women too closely with nature, and the Charybdis of panoramic or abstracting viewpoints, associated with power and possession

Back in 1986, Tee A. Corinne's Isis photomontages placed vulvas in the landscape of Oregon. Did this go too far in equating the female body with nature? Context is important: Corinne is well known for her books and images celebrating lesbian lives and these 'landscapes' were just one small project in a prolific lifetime's work. It is hard to criticise artists like Corinne, Ana Mendieta, Laura Aguilar and others for positioning themselves as part of their environments, as an alternative to the disembodied vistas of landscape painters or large-scale interventions of land artists. They were 'performing ground' - locating 'the self not merely in the world but of it' (Lucy Bradnock). Writing about Corinne's work, Tamsin Wilton argues that her 'celebration of woman in the woodland focuses on women's sexuality, the seat of female sexual pleasure. In other words, precisely what is most often erased in the women-as-landscape genre.' 

Symrin Gill's aerial photographs of open-pit mines can be seen as avoiding the industrial sublime by 'alluding to the corporeal' (the series is called Eyes and Storms), emphasising the landscape's 'bodily textures' by allowing shadows to disrupt a two-dimensional 'extractivist viewpoint.' By contrast, Sim Chi Yin does provide a beautiful abstract aerial view (below) as part of her Shifting Sands project. But this aestheticisation of the 'infrastructural' gaze' is juxtaposed with other photographs ('the human gaze') that show the impact of erosion in poorer areas of the Global South. Another artist, Mary Mattingly is represented by some striking unpeopled 2016 photographs: Mineral Seep, where a cliff is transformed into a drip painting by black and brown stains, and Ore Transport, where an uncanny, unfathomable concrete structure, framed by grey water and pale sky, draws you into its shadowy interior. But these too are contextualised with a chalk board Cobalt Map showing the complex system that supports its production and distribution, 'a network of violence that percolates outward from the original site of extraction.'

Sim Chi Yin, Shifting Sands #2, 2017-ongoing

Uncultivated regal hunting grounds

Awrangzib Hunts Nilgais c. 1660

I've just read Julian Bell's new book on Adam Elsheimer, Natural Light. He talks about the paintings I referred to here in 2006, when I visited the Dulwich Elsheimer exhibition, including The Flight Into Egypt (1609) with its extraordinary depiction of the night sky. He explains that Elsheimer would not necessarily have needed a newly-invented telescope to paint this, although he was working at a time of increasing interest in natural phenomena. The book's last chapter takes an unexpected turn east, to consider some paintings from Mughal India that have been described as 'naturalistic' in a similar way to art made in seventeenth century Europe, beginning in Rome with Elsheimer, Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci. The painting above, by an unknown artist (owned now by Dublin's Chester Beatty library), is one of Bell's examples. It struck me as a relatively rare Indian 'landscape painting'. Artists working in Agra knew about European compositions from engravings and some of Elsheimer's best paintings travelled in this form, although Bell doesn't suggest Awrangzib Hunts Nilgais is based on any of these. However, he thinks Vermeer's observational experiments, 'paintings of high ambition and coolly systematic facture', bear a 'distant affinity' to this detailed, panoramic view. Figures seem of minor importance here. Instead the interest is in 'unbounded open space - the looseness and rambliness of the uncultivated regal hunting grounds, with their warm harmonies of ochre and sap green'.      

Lake Superior, Cascade River

Sugimoto Seascapes at the Hayward Gallery

I wrote about Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascape photographs here in 2007, referring to some online images at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum. Checking back just now I found the link was dead, but there is still information on the exhibition at their website. I would love to visit the actual building in Washington one day - not only did they do that major career retrospective, they have also more recently commissioned Sugimoto (who is also an architect) to redesign their lobby and renovate their sculpture garden. This autumn though, at long last, a British gallery has put on a Sugimoto retrospective and it's just a 341 bus ride away from our home. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine includes the photograph I mentioned sixteen years ago, Boden Sea, Uttwil (1993), along with others just as beautiful. 

These luminous images, made with an old large-format camera, are referred to by the artist as seascapes, although Boden Sea is what Sugimoto calls Bodensee, i.e. Lake Constance, and my photo below shows another lake view. But The Guardian exhibition review begins with a wonderful view of the North Atlantic Ocean and the Evening Standard's includes Sugimoto's photograph of the Bay of Sagami. I will briefly quote Laura Cummings' article, as she manages to include the lovely word for a cold sea fog, 'haar'.

These monochrome photographs must all be captured at a particular moment, by their very nature, and yet they appear to stand outside time. Their poetry lies in more than they show. [They] hover between representation and abstraction. There are visions of shining light where up and down appear inscrutable, seas that tip over the horizon, or resemble nothing but haar. There are seas that register as oblongs of graphite shading. All are real – look closely and you can even distinguish tidal flow – but as intangible as outer space.

 

Lake Superior, Cascade River, 1995

Sugimoto's photographs allow you to imagine a primal sea untouched by humanity. In my book Frozen Air I described looking out on the English Channel, which Sugimoto has photographed for this series from both shores. There can be passages of time when no ships cross your field of vision, and nothing but light and water lie in front of you. In Marcel Proust's first book, Pleasures and Days, he described this pristine vision: ‘unlike the earth, the sea does not bear the traces of human works and human life. Nothing remains on the sea, nothing passes there except in flight, and how quickly the wake of a ship disappears! Hence the sea's great purity, which earthly things do not have.'

The Eight Mountains

I recently watched The Eight Mountains which I'd been looking forward to since reading Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian:

This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between men who can’t talk about their feelings and about winning and losing at the great game of life. It is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta, which includes the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the “eight mountains” of the title refers to the eight highest peaks of Nepal: a mysterious symbol of worldly ambition and conquest. Belgian film-makers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch have adapted the award-winning 2016 novel by Italian author Paolo Cognetti and have created a deeply intelligent meditation on our capacity for love, and how it is shaped by the arbitrary, irreversible experiences of childhood, and by our relationship with the landscape. The Aosta valley is depicted with magnificent sweep, and van Groeningen and Vandermeersch find a stratum of sadness under it, a kind of water table of tears.

Unfortunately, although I did quite enjoy it, I was disappointed - my view of the film was closer to Richard Brody's review in The New Yorker. In this he describes a scene that echoes a central dilemma of landscape appreciation I've referred to often on this blog. 'By far the best scene in the film is one in which the adult Pietro (Luca Marinelli) brings a trio of Turin friends to the mountains; in response to their rapturous enthusiasm for “nature,” Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) explains that the people who live in the mountains never use that “abstract” word but rather speak lovingly of the physical specifics—“forest, meadow, river, rock, path: things you can point at, things you can use.”' 

However, 

that line of dialogue conveys more of the essence of the movie’s alpine setting than does the cinematography. Much of the action there takes place outdoors; Pietro’s father (Filippo Timi) is an enthusiastic hiker and climber who takes the two boys with him on his expeditions, and Pietro, in his many returns to the region, delights in the peaks, in the clear water of the lake, in the rock formations. The movie presents these landscapes as cinematic abstractions, with drones and Steadicams and cameras perched on high to show the small figures of humans overwhelmed by, yes, nature, and to show the spectacular sights that surround the characters. But it stints on the visual point of view of the characters, voids itself of contemplative poise and analytical precision, hardly stays still long enough, looks in detail long enough. It doesn’t pay enough closeup, hands-on attention to soil and stone and water and snow, to wood and fire, to flesh and fabric, to suggest that the characters have any more of a physical connection to the settings than they have a perceptual one.

We used to exclaim "oh no, not a drone shot!" whenever they appeared on TV documentatries or movies, until they became almost ubiquitous. But complaining about the drone shot cliché has itself become a cliché, so I won't labour the point here. A New York Times article on the phenomenon did note some highly effective examples - Werner Herzog 'opens his remarkable 2016 picture “Into the Inferno” with an astounding aerial sequence that soars up a mountain and then into the volcano at its center.' Maybe we could just have some more drone shots that are grainy or misty or flawed in some way, rather than being taken on smooth glides over perfect landscapes that are not as awe-inspiring as they should be, because they look almost computer-generated. 

Another review of The Eight Mountains notes that 'some obvious drone shots are included, but much of the hiking sequences appear to have been done with Steadicams, following the men through their treacherous treks. Andrea Rauccio is listed as the Steadicam operator, but the credits for camera operators are lengthy, and the entire crew deserves credit.' Richard Brody may be being a bit harsh on all this, but I do know what he means when he says that in these scenes it's hard not to 'hear and see the crew, the walkie-talkies, the muffled clamor that goes into turning raw experience into overcooked and denatured images.' 

I feel I should end on a more positive note though. So here are a few more quotes from reviews (ending back with Peter Bradshaw), where the temptation to use mountain metaphors has proved irresistible.

• 'Stately and serene from a distance, but up close riven with the fissures and follies of a friendship that costs both men so much but gives them even more, the movie, too, is a mountain.' (Variety)
  
• 'Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.' (Irish Times)
• 'A movie that seems to grow before your eyes, leaping across continents as years go by, all the while slowly accruing power. By the end it has scaled a peak, offering a bracing perspective on life experience.' (FT)
• Much like climbing a mountain, the two-and-a-half-hour runtime may occasionally feel arduous, but the emotional release is worth it once you reach the peak.' (Time Out)
• 'This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.' (The Guardian)