Landscape Allegory in Cinema: From Wilderness to Wasteland by David Melbye (review)

If David Melbye's book reflects any impulse in contemporary film studies, it is the recent tendency toward scholarly projects that embrace the "visual turn" of cultural history. Rather than looking at cinema in isolation, such projects situate some facet of film history into a longer historical development that necessarily played out across media, regimes, and nations. Examples from earlier in the decade include Lucy Fischer's Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form (2003), a book that looks at Hollywood production design and costuming in relation to a larger commercial art movement that embraced everything from skyscrapers to diners, and Angela Ndalianis' Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2005), an attempt to tie the aesthetic and experiential tastes of Italian Baroque immersion (especially its tromp l'oeil ceiling paintings) to recent trends in cinema and theme park ride design, where audiences are expected to be swallowed up in the entertainment spectacle. Melbye's project charts literary and art historical approaches to landscape, quickly moving from the scattered examples that come down to us from antiquity to the contemporary cinematic sensibilities of films like No Country for Old Men (2007, Ethan and Joel Coen) and Into the Wild (2007, Sean Penn). What is immediately apparent about Landscape Allegory in Cinema is that it sacrifices a tightly constructed and carefully periodized historical argument for a comprehensive (though not quite exhaustive) account of a tendency that has been around almost as long as representation itself. Melbye stresses the wide applicability of reading texts for how they allegorize their landscapes, often with surprising results.

For Melbye, landscape allegory is "an assembled narrative mode wherein the principal characters move beyond their normal protagonist/antagonist functions and into a symbolic dimension of meaning" (3). Like allegory in other historical contexts (Medieval Italy, or 18^th Century France), cinematic allegory "derives from a cultural tendency toward social critique" (5). The substitutions and personifications enabled by landscape allegory (the ability to give a wilderness evil human traits, or to see cultural attitudes embodied by a carefully framed presentation of a mountain) thus have a certain stability—these figurations happen across cultural contexts over thousands of years—yet are always signaled by a simultaneous interpretive instability; thus a dense forest does not necessarily mean the same thing in every historical context, or for every culture. Melbye is therefore scrutinizing the interpretive framework that landscape allegory affords in the broadest possible way, always in service of illuminating "a wider conceptual link between space and popular culture" (7).

Landscape Allegory in the Cinema follows a generally linear trajectory: it moves from a discussion of art historical discourses about landscape during the 18th and 19 th centuries (in European and American production contexts) through various national historical clusters in film history (the wastelands that dominate1960s Italian cinema, or the use of rural highway landscapes in "New Hollywood" road movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s). Melbye does not offer a systematic account of landscape allegory in each decade of cinema's 100+ year history, but rather picks a series of contexts where the tendency towards landscape allegory is most common, or most urgently representative of oppositional cultural attitudes. While Melbye always provides sufficient support for his choices, his reasons for what he does not discuss are often vague. Melbye briefly explains why the main body of his text does not assess Japanese or Indian films, suggesting that to do so would necessitate a very different proto-cinematic history of landscape allegory, as well as a different account of the self in society or the coded meanings of natural phenomena (159-160). Yet the decision not to discuss, for example, contemporary travel documentaries or 1950s Hollywood musicals is never fully substantiated.

Ultimately, the book invites us to apply Melbye's sensibilities to films that he does not discuss. For example, one missed opportunity that would have enabled Melbye to tie a very specific historical discourse...