SOGOBI (James Benning, USA 2002, 1. & 8.4.) Many of the films of this master of landscape cinema are filmic surveys of specific landscapes and confrontations with them. So is SOGOBI (a Shoshone word meaning earth), Benning’s rapprochement with the Californian wilderness, featuring 35 scenes of desertion that have been carefully composed using depth of field - observations of a flooded salt pan, burnt countryside, raging rivers, windy passes, gigantic mammoth trees, shots in Yosemite National Park or Death Valley, in the middle of a snow storm or black oaks. "I spent a year at the end of the world, and maybe that's when I got closest to portraying a real sense of place." (James Benning)
THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, USA 1956, 3. & 15.4.) "What makes a man do wander, what makes a man do roam?" – In the distance, a barely visible form emerges on the prairie. The first scene of Ford's epic Western delineates the protagonist Ethan Edwards' (John Wayne) only relationship - that with the vast landscape that surrounds him, and one whose embrace he is reluctant to leave. One that he always returns to in order to look for his niece, whom Indians kidnapped five years before. "A film that shines in two ways. Hollywood narrative cinema on the outside and doubt and torture in a script of darkness." (Harry Tomicek)
LUST FOR LIFE (Vincente Minneli, USA 1956, 4. & 16.4.) Minnelli's biography of the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh sinks deeply into his colors, surfaces, themes and details, and of course also into his sketches of interior and exterior landscapes. Minelli's ecstasy of colors and textures was based on Irving Stone's biographical novel of Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) which depicts the last 10 years of his life: his life as a preacher, his relationship with his brother Theo, his friendship and its rupture with Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) as well as his own decision to admit himself to a mental institution.
VIAGGIO IN ITALIA (Voyage to Italy, Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1953, 5. & 9.4.) Naples, Vesuvius, Pompeii, Capri – stations of a week-long trip through Italy. In Rossellini's film, the classic travel route of an "éducation sentimentale" has the opposite effect. The Italian landscapes and cultural sites serve to frame the end of a marriage: Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alexander (George Sanders) have grown apart; the possibility of divorce looms. Despite its melodramatic ending, the film is not a melodrama but rather the clear-eyed observation of a crisis and a matter-of-fact description of the Mediterranean landscape.
WEITE FELD (Volker Koepp, GDR 1976, 6. & 17.4.) & KURISCHE NEHRUNG (Volker Koepp, D 2001, 6. & 17.4.) Two landscapes as spaces that depict time in the here-and-now. The first is Fontane country - a "wide field", which Koepp takes as the starting point for a brief cultural history of the northern Mark Brandenburg and a portrait of its inhabitants and their environment. The other is the narrow peninsula of Kurische Nehrung, half Russia and half Lithuania, where people and terrain have shaped each other over time and where the history of the 20th century has become etched into the biographies of the inhabitants and the mythical landscape.
FATA MORGANA (Werner Herzog, FRG 1969–71, 7. & 10.4.) African landscapes between civilizing desecration and apocalypse - in three chapters entitled "Creation", "Paradise" and "Golden Age", Herzog combines documentary, fictional, experimental and essayistic elements to create an essayistic swan song for a dying planet. The nightmarishly shimmering shots of the desert are underlaid with Guatemalan creation myths, read by Herzog's mentor Lotte Eisner, as well as a musical collage of songs by Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen.
PEAK – ÜBER ALLEN GIPFELN(Hannes Lang, Germany/Italy 2011, 11. & 14.4.) "Over all the peaks," there has long been little "peace". In Lang's fascinating but disturbing survey, the Alps are subjected to constant modification. Static panoramic shots create a picture of the progressive industrialization of ski areas, the setting of an idyllic winter paradise that can only be maintained with artificial snow because of climate change. The soundtrack also documents the relationship between nature and technology: snow canons and piste caterpillars form the soundtrack of winter vacation mania whose traces are hard to miss in winter in the form of bulldozed slopes. With his associative montage, the director takes stock of the disappearance of a landscape.
DIE WEISSE HÖLLE VOM PIZ PALÜ (White Hell of Pitz Palu, Arnold Fanck, G. W. Pabst, D 1929, 12. & 16.4., silent film with musical accompaniment by Eunice Martins) In this mountain film classic, a rather simplistic plot about a fanatical climber who goes on an adventurous ski trip and is caught in an avalanche plays second fiddle to the majestic mountain massif, the glaciers and ice-scapes. In this film, Fanck once again explored his characteristic mountain mysticism in original locations.
TABU (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, USA 1930, 18. & 23.4.; silent film with musical accompaniment by Eunice Martins) A religious taboo overshadows life on a paradisiacal South Sea island and the love between two of its young inhabitants. Unintentionally, their paradise turns into a paradise lost, and their unselfconscious, playful life into a bitter struggle. A melodrama about destruction and loss, embedded in a staged paradise, which at the time of the shooting already no longer existed.
SUD PRALAD (Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / D / F / I 2004, 19. & 24.4.) A film in two parts and two worlds: What begins in Part 1 as a blithely meandering romance between the young soldier Keng and his friend Tong opens in Part 2, after an extended fade-to-black , onto an intermediate realm as mysterious as it is hypnotic. In the nocturnal jungle where Keng is searching for a friend who has suddenly disappeared the boundaries between humans, animals, and nature gradually dissolve. A grandiose, polyphonic soundtrack makes the exotically shimmering, crepuscular landscape audible and palpable.
SWEETGRASS (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash, USA 2009, 21. & 29.4.) An unsentimental and monumental elegy to the disappearing American West, to the last shepherds and the herds which spend the summer months on the meadows of the Beartooth Mountains in Montana. This fantastic Western in documentary format shows how closely nature and culture, animals and people, climate and landscape, vulnerability and violence are linked in this place and at this time.
LA RÉGION CENTRALE (Michael Snow, Canada 1971, 22. & 30.4.) Using special equipment that can move a running camera in any direction, at high speed, Snow films a mountain peak in northern Quebec. In its new structure, an original film landscape that is embedded in a cycle of light and dark, warmth and cold, emerges from the raw mountain setting. This film is not 'entertainment'. It is a phenomenon. It can be an agent of revelation. To be fully experienced it ought to be seen / heard in its entirety. The middle hour is a plateau, the nature of which will be understood if crossed, i.e. by looking back from the other side of the end. Take your time, take your place. Stay, look at the image, but think of something else. Later, perhaps, you will find that you have enjoined the image. (Michael Snow) (mg)
