Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

3. Territory: The Geomorphology of the Visible

3 ‫ﱚ‬ TERRITORY The Geomorphology of theVisible Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appear to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”1 From Stagecoach (1939). Directed by John Ford. Credit: United Artists/Photofest. Shown: Exterior location, Monument Valley, Utah. 70 TERRITORY It is almost possible to say that people become the fixed monument around which landscape swirls.… In today’s world of computers, film, and television, automobiles , high-speed rail, and airplanes, people sit down and the landscape moves. Crossing the screen faster than a speeding locomotive, able to leap over states of countries in a single bound, television’s cars, trucks, and SUVs fragment the spatial continuum of landscape into a mountainous swell of imagery, sights without measure , an oceanic voyage with little hope of landfall. Mitchell Schwartzer, “The Moving Landscape”2 Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all … Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”3 I don’t know what it’s like when there is no one here, but as soon as humans appear everything begins to move. Stalker (1979) FILMS CREATE WORLDS: they lay out a certain set of relations defining what is given, what is possible, who the actors are that enact the possible and make it real, and the nature and character of the background against which their actions take place. This chapter deals with the background and context, the given against which, or in front of which, the action happens. It deals with the relations that constitute that background and hold it together. This is the geomorphic dimension of cinema, the territorial ontology that underlies the world of any film. Such an ontology—which is always a sensed or perceived ontology, an implicit understanding about things in general, and therefore about “nature” in the most general sense—can be highly variable. It can take the world to be stable and reliable, or to be unstable, precarious, perplexing, frightening, and even incoherent. It can be simply ours—ours to claim and take and use and transform—or it can be sharply divided between what is ours and what is not ours, territory to be fought over, either with the assurance that truth, or God, or nature itself (progress, evolution, and so forth) is on our side, or without any such assurance. To understand how such a geographic ontology emerges within a film and how it is territorialized and distributed across the world of that film, we need first to understand how it emerges in life. From this basis we can examine how film impinges on life, building on and complicating it, and then proceed to survey some possibilities for the geomorphism of cinematic worlds. As The Geomorphology of the Visible 71 mentioned previously, the “geomorphy” of cinema worlds is ultimately not extractable from their “anthropomorphy” and their “biomorphy.” This chapter, coming first in a sequence of three, lays out a set of themes that will be picked up in different keys in the others; but because these require some ground laying, this will be an extended chapter. Geomorphism in Life and in Image In everyday perception, we gain knowledge about how the world is structured by virtue of our ability to move about within it. From our first infant steps, we explore the space around us: the domestic space, the space between us and those we learn to recognize as different from us (mother, father, siblings, neighbours, friends), and eventually the spaces outside the home, in the backyard , the neighbourhood, the schoolyard, and beyond. Piece by piece, step by step, we build up a geography of sites and relations, scapes harbouring meanings and affording potential actions and relations. Our everyday geographies are always already meaningful: here is where we do this, there is where we aren’t allowed to do that; our space ends here, which is where theirs begins, but this place here is ours, not (as they claim) theirs. Beginning with our bodily motility...