The Ethical Anxiety of Remediation and Speculative Aesthetics in Landscape Film

Abstract

Abstract The link between avant-garde cinema and painting has always been a conspicuous one but perhaps never as much as in the case of landscape films. However, not only repurposing or evoking specific paintings but constructing entire films with the intention of producing cinematic analogies to certain traditions of landscape painting presents a number of issues, especially when the films in question are inspired by the sensibilities of 19th-century Romanticism and explore similar topics, such as the works of Peter Hutton. The problem is essentially twofold: on the one hand, how to break away from the painterly roots and make an exclusively cinematic pictorial representation of landscape and, on the other hand, how to account for the complicit position of the filmmaker with regard to the nature–technology opposition they address. Within the theoretical framework of the recent speculative turn in philosophy and the implications of this with regard to aesthetics, I argue that an object-oriented approach to landscape filmmaking – as seen in the works of Chris Welsby –, by establishing pre-compositional rules within which landscape itself can intervene in the filmmaking process, provides a solution to both the aesthetic and the ethical anxiety that haunt landscape filmmakers.