The Sky on Location

The radiant 16mm images capture many of the definitive sights and locations of the American West (Yellowstone National Park, Death Valley, Mount St Helens, Grand Canyon) across four seasons and with an keen eye for specific hues and shifts in light. These limitless natural landscapes are flanked by a trio of voiceovers, including one spoken by the director herself. The shifts between her own impressions of making the film, external comments and quotes and historical testimonies are left deliberately unmarked, as a multi-layered, fiercely intelligent interrogation of both this specific landscape and landscape itself is gradually pieced together. When did nature become landscape, how is landscape shaped by our previous visual experiences and the vantage point we view it from and where do the traces of human intervention lurk in vistas otherwise devoid of people? “Unlike the first immigrants, we know what’s on the other side of the horizon” (BM). (jl)