The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place

8 Rural (and Urban) Hours

c h a p t e r 8 Rural (and Urban) Hours [T]he contrast of the country with the city and the court: here nature, there worldliness. This contrast depends, often, on just the suppression of work in the countryside , and of the property relations through which this work is organised, which we have already observed. But there are other elements in the contrast. The means of argricultural production—the fields, the woods, the growing crops, the animals—are attractive to the observer and, in many ways and in the good seasons, to the men working in and among them. They can then be effectively contrasted with the exchanges and countinghouses of mercantilism, or with the mines, quarries, mills and manufactories of industrial production. That contrast, in many ways, still holds in experience. But there is also, throughout, an ideological separation between the processes of rural exploitation, which have been, in effect, dissolved into a landscape, and the register of that exploitation, in the law courts, the money markets, the political power and the conspicuous expenditure of the city. The rhetorical contrast between town and country life is indeed traditional. RAYMOND WILLIAMS, THE COUNTRY AND THE CIT Y 247 From our perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fascination of so many nineteenth-century American painters with rural and wilderness landscape can seem—depending on one’s predilections—a poignant, quaint, or silly refusal to come to terms with the arrival of the industrial revolution in North America. Some painters saw that further development was inevitable but used painting to warn those indi¤erent to the beauties of nature about what, in a spiritual sense, the transformation of nature into modern culture might cost. Others saw development itself as the divine plan for the Western Hemisphere and traveled to the farthest reaches of New World territory to celebrate Manifest Destiny while avoiding its results, at least for the moment. And still others looked for ways to maintain forms of spiritual contact through nature regardless of the extent of development, and even within development itself. On another level, however, virtually all the painters who committed their art to the representation of landscape were men of the city. They may or may not have been born in cities, but they came to live in major urban centers because that’s where paintings were bought and sold. Indeed, while they may have made frequent trips into rural areas, and to wilder regions as well, to make pencil and oil sketches, generally they returned to the city to produce their paintings.1 In some cases—Thomas Cole and Frederic Church are examples— long-term economic success enabled painters to finally leave the city and take up permanent or seasonal residence in a rural surround. But by the time Church was settled in Olana, high above the Hudson, the river had become one of the major industrial thoroughfares of the republic and New York City businessmen were increasingly concerned that the continued denuding of the 248 R U R A L ( A N D U R B A N ) H O U R S Adirondack forests might lower the water levels of New York rivers and the Erie Canal and slow the exploitation of the continent. A century or so later, a generation of American independent filmmakers were confronting the urban/rural distinction, but in a new way. While nineteenth -century landscape painters had focused their painting on what was disappearing or, really, had already disappeared—a rural or wilderness experience una¤ected by urban realities and stresses—this generation of filmmakers lived lives that made impossible any pretense of being able to avoid the urban: indeed, as they were well aware, their chosen art form—their “paintbrush”— was one of the quintessential products of the industrial revolution (Hollis Frampton called cinema “the last machine,” a gesture that on the one hand suggested his pride in being part of modernity and on the other, perhaps, betrayed a Thomas Cole–like hope that that the domination of the continent by the machine would have a limit). For this generation of artists, the issue was not how to reverse or slow or even ameliorate the impact of the urban on the rural and the wild, but how to create a livable integration of the inevitable (and often wonderful) urban and the historically modified (but still salutary) rural. Life Considered/Life...