Landscape Depiction before Cinema

Abstract

In the most general sense, pre-cinematic depictions of landscape nurture a closer awareness of how natural environments are framed or, rather, organized into specific ideas within a wider cultural context. Scholars such as A. Bartlett Giamatti, Svetlana Alpers, Barbara Novak, Malcolm Andrews, and Leo Marx have thoroughly explored the rich Western tradition of depicting natural landscapes in drawing, painting, tapestry, and other artistic media. In order to explore the nature of landscape allegory in cinema, this study considers this tradition and the cultural trajectories that led to its emergence. This and the next chapter examine the more prominent research on landscape depiction in specific periods and nations. These general groupings include seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European sublime, and the subsequent mid- to late nineteenth-century American sublime. There are also certain influential artists such as Hieronymus Bosch in the fifteenth century and Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century whose particular treatment of landscape is evident in subsequent periods. The nineteenth-century Romantic sublime movement in particular informs cinema’s assimilation of allegorical approaches to landscape, which, in turn, function as cultural propaganda.