A landscape is a like a rumpled bedspread midway through a fitful night. The knowledgeable observer sees in cliffs and swales, forests and meadows, canyons and bajadas, not a creation frozen in final fulfillment, but rather, a process with much tossing and turning yet in store.
Digital forgeries of natural landscapes luxuriate in cloned and fractal and L-system complexity, bearing only the mark of iterative algorithms. Avatar's Pandora was seeded by zeros and ones in a nursery of RAM. There is no story to be read in the marks of nature where nature had no hand.
When the Wieslander Survey crews clambered over the California landscape in the 1930s, their trained eyes observed not only the vegetation types but also the telltale signs of old burns healing. The Yellowstone fires of 1988 revealed fire patterns and subsequent regrowth as a complex mosaic of natural history. A hiker ascending a Sierra trail scarcely notices lodgepole pines in thickets where John Muir had remarked upon the open glades tended by frequent low intensity fires.
Muir particularly noted the signs of glaciers. In the grooves and polish of granite, in the U-shaped profile of valleys, in the isolated boulders perched upon ridges, he saw a landscape hewn by massive moving ice. Muir was a world class noticer of things in their place and things out of place.
Movie audiences are not so particular. They do not object to pretty waterfalls with no watersheds to feed them (The Hobbit) , or to mountain ranges with no faults or folding (LOTR). Even with photography of real places, few viewers object to a Monument Valley drive-in theater just down the road from a California suburb (Back to the Future III) or to slaves shuffling in chains over the Eastern Sierra on their way to Texas (Django Unchained). They accept shallow verisimilitude and impossible juxtapositions as plausible because they are used to scenery as backdrop, not as story.
Digital forgeries of natural landscapes luxuriate in cloned and fractal and L-system complexity, bearing only the mark of iterative algorithms. Avatar's Pandora was seeded by zeros and ones in a nursery of RAM. There is no story to be read in the marks of nature where nature had no hand.
When the Wieslander Survey crews clambered over the California landscape in the 1930s, their trained eyes observed not only the vegetation types but also the telltale signs of old burns healing. The Yellowstone fires of 1988 revealed fire patterns and subsequent regrowth as a complex mosaic of natural history. A hiker ascending a Sierra trail scarcely notices lodgepole pines in thickets where John Muir had remarked upon the open glades tended by frequent low intensity fires.
Wieslander Vegetative Type Map for South Lake Tahoe, 1930s
Movie audiences are not so particular. They do not object to pretty waterfalls with no watersheds to feed them (The Hobbit) , or to mountain ranges with no faults or folding (LOTR). Even with photography of real places, few viewers object to a Monument Valley drive-in theater just down the road from a California suburb (Back to the Future III) or to slaves shuffling in chains over the Eastern Sierra on their way to Texas (Django Unchained). They accept shallow verisimilitude and impossible juxtapositions as plausible because they are used to scenery as backdrop, not as story.
To the lover of living landscapes, scenery is a tangled story inviting unravelment. Was there ever a fiction movie that showed place authentically? Better still, was there ever a movie where Place served as a main character, in the manner of Thomas Hardy's heath in his novel, The Return of the Native?
We like to think in our vanity that a landscape is merely a stage upon which humans perform unbound fancies. But in truth, we are so bound to the land that its fate is our own. What is to become of a society whose entertainments are estranged from its realities?
We like to think in our vanity that a landscape is merely a stage upon which humans perform unbound fancies. But in truth, we are so bound to the land that its fate is our own. What is to become of a society whose entertainments are estranged from its realities?
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