If you’re me, and you really love films (that utilize landscape to show the destruction of their protagonists’ lives and their helplessness in the face of all-encompassing systems), you might be asking: Do the people who make landscape cinema know about landscape theory? Raphael investigates.
Landscape Theory is a film theory conceived and applied by a group of Japanese film critics and -makers in the late 1960s. It was, so say Yuriko Furuhata, & Conor Bateman & more expert people I read stuff by like Go Hirasawa, a very specific response to late-60s Japanese politics and cinema politics— to simplify: unhappy with uniform militarism in Marxist documentary filmmaking, as well as relentless news-media depictions of brutal student protest police clashes, the cinema of landscape theory posited that all of our environment, the cityscape, the landscape itself, are products of and make visible the dominant ideology & political power of a place.
The first film produced deliberately within this theoretical framework was AKA Serial Killer, a 1969 documentary by landscape theorist and director Masao Adachi, also known as a prolific screenwriter for Nagisa Oshima films. The documentary shows sweeping footage of the many towns in Japan where the 19-year-old spree killer (and later controversial award-winning novelist) Norio Nagayama spent his life before going to prison for killing four people with a handgun. Matsuda Masao, who first proposed landscape theory, said the following about the journey of making the film:
Whether it was the colonized city Abashiri or the indigenous town of Itayanagi or ultimately the metropolitan city of Tokyo, they all looked almost identical to our eyes. (…)
[I]t was neither the “circumstances” nor “situation” (terms the intelligentsia were so be [sic] fond of), but rather landscape that had surrounded, confronted and antagonized Nagayama, and that in order for us to grasp him materially from the outside, landscape was to be our only option.
The film also features minimal voiceover of facts of Nagayama’s life and scary Jazz music by Takagi Mototeru. The landscapes are mostly urban, because that was a lot of what concerned Adachi, Masao and their friends. There are hundreds of signs in Japanese, many of which I assume to be advertising, none of which I can read. The shots are often dynamic and sometimes very detail-focused. It’s frankly beautiful to watch, a snapshot of an industrialized, urbanized nation that engages even as it repels.
Landscape cinema does its job: it immerses viewers in a landscape where something, often something terrible, sometimes something violent, has happened or started to happen. It induces feelings we might not have had about the places depicted otherwise. And, in contrast to landscape photography, it controls the speed and rhythm at which viewers experience these places (as well as, of course, the sounds.) It frustrates some people. It intimidates; It bores. It can’t control people turning it off or walking out.
This theory’s origins are very small and specific. But there has been somewhat of an evolution of works using similar approaches, who equally saw the opportunity for cinema to capture crime scenes as landscape instead of landscape as crime scenes and thus create a cinema that tries to capture the power (and capacity for affect) of landscape.
Harvard Film Archive organized a short program called Film = Activism. The Revolutionary Underground Cinema of Masao Adachi in March 2013, where they mention that AKA Serial Killer is often discussed for its anticipation of the topographical cinema of the French experimental filmmaking duo Straub-Huillet. Go Hirasawa, co-writer of Masao Adachi’s Film / Revolution later curated a series of screenings for the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2015 that widened the scope to include a lot of Japanese contemporaries of Masao Adichi’s (including two by his long-time collaborator Nagisa Oshima), who embraced his structural approach to some extent and incorporated elements of landscape theory into their narrative films.
“Landscape Cinema” as a sort-of microgenre term has also been in online circulation for a little while now, with Jenni Olson making a short feature for MUBI in 2016 where she says she has been making “durational urban landscape voiceover films” since the late 90s, and that her fans often ask her for recommendations of similar films. Olson seemed to me at the time of writing to be unaware of the Japanese landscape theory entirely and her picks are all Western films, almost all from the 90s or later (apart from News From Home.)
She and MUBI also consulted Patrick Brian Smith, a PhD student at the time who clearly was familiar with the theory and added a really beautiful list that he described as “broad and by no means exhaustive; however, it does draw together a range of filmmakers whose works engage with space, place and landscape for either poetic or political ends (and oftentimes both).” (Smith actually has a book coming up about all this, release date February 2024.)
These lists, then, mock up an idea of “landscape cinema” that broadly tacks onto landscape theory without being necessarily closely affiliated or even familiar with it or its founders.
James Benning, described by Jenni Olson as “pretty much the king of landscape filmmaking” has been making very simple complicated films for all his career now, since the first in 1971. Many of his 72 (!!!) documentaries are (series of) static shots of landscape, sometimes they have music, voiceover, or people talking. One of his best-known works is Landscape Suicide, a film that sort-of dramatizes parts of two real homicide cases in Northern California and Wiscounsin: the scandalous murder of cheerleader Kirsten Costas by a female classmate, and the oft-sensationalized Ed Gein, the suspected serial murderer who taxidermied corpses and made a lamp out of a woman’s skin. Between the two, they became the inspiration for what feels like every TV and film serial killer for the rest of time. Inbetween the unusual acted bits (actors reading out court transcipts and two potential victims comfortable in their rooms), Benning puts his more typical landscape footage.
None of the murders are dramatically recreated. Some of the graphic details are there to read or hear about. The closest Landscape Suicide gets to depicting the killings is by proxy in one of its last shots: A grisly two-minute scene of a hunter in the snowy Wisconsin woods cutting open a deer, removing its organs and dragging it off-screen. The hunter’s efficiency, the blood and guts bright on the snow, his red jacket— the scene points rather obviously to the famous story of Bernice Worden being found on Ed Gein’s property with her torso “dressed out like a deer”.
As for the landscapes, critic Dave Kehr summed it up well upon the film’s release: “The prosperous California suburb is linked to the depressed Midwestern farm town through a shared sense of isolation, desolation and quiet despair.”
Though there are obvious thematic links and very similar approaches here, I haven’t been able to find out if Benning ever knew about Masao & co.’s Landscape Theory prior to making this or any of his many other landscape ventures. He most likely didn’t in the 70s, especially since AKA Serial Killer didn’t receive any public screenings until 1975, though he may know it now. He teaches a ‘Listening and Seeing’ class at CalArts. His influences are not really other filmmakers.
Filming crime scenes as landscapes is a very specific goal, but as we and Olson and Smith have established, the theory of landscapes being inscribed with power has more to offer than just serial killer documentaries. Masao, Adachi and Benning have influenced so many filmmakers, many of them working today, many of them with a much more narrative approach. Sight & Sound claimed in 2018 that apart from his American colleagues and mentees, Benning’s work was also echoed in films by Chantal Akerman, Patrick Keiller, Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Haneke, and more. It’s possible. It seems short-sighted to give him sole credit for a world cinema influence that might just as well have come from the Japanese landscape theorists’ work, but at the end of the day, what they, Benning, and many other filmmakers who may or may not have been inspired by them did was not invent something, but discover it and try to make art with it.
This place has power, you can tell. This place can’t move past itself, the past won’t leave it, but exists here. This is not about time! This is cinematic, so it has time in it, but it’s spatial. It’s about the violence inflicted on landscape and people through landscape. It’s state violence, corporate violence. It’s environmental, colonial, capitalist— all inextricable in the furrows they bore into the world. Look out!