The View From the Train (5 page)
Read The View From the Train Online
Authors: Patrick Keiller
The last sentence tells all. De Quincey moved on into the mountains in rehearsal for his sojourn as the Wordsworths' neighbour
at Grasmere. Earlier in the same journey, he pinpoints the phenomenon:
an elaborate and pompous sunset hanging over the mountains of North Wales. The clouds passed slowly through several arrangements, and in the last of these I read the very scene which six months before I had read in a most exquisite poem of Wordsworth's â¦Â The scene in the poem (âRuth'), that had been originally mimicked by the poet from the sky, was here re-mimicked and rehearsed to the life, as it seemed, by the sky from the poet.
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Poe was familiar with this mechanism of romanticisation, but such ephemeral effects do not satisfy him: the landscape gardener is produced to cement the cyclical relationship between poetic experience and the material world, to conduct
âits adaption to the eyes which were to behold it on earth': in his explanation of this phraseology, Mr Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma: â I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes there will always be found a defect or an excess â¦Â In all other matters we are justly instructed to regard nature as supreme â¦Â In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true.
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The supposition may be said to rest on misconceptions, but in the end it probably holds true. Landscapes that do not result from human intervention â rain forests, uninhabited islands â are no less susceptible to criticism than those that do, and still life and portraiture generally involve a far greater degree of verisimilitude, and consequently less idealisation, than depictions of landscape. The relation between the idea and the reality of landscape really is different.
The reasons for this lie in the rather obvious distinction between, say, a sheep, as a thing, and a landscape, as perhaps also a thing, but
more usefully a general disposition of things (one of which may be the sheep), and in the further distinction between the relationship of a viewer and the sheep, objects of more or less equal status, and that between this viewer and the landscape, in which the viewer and the sheep are constituents in the general disposition.
In the first distinction, the general disposition of things is much more susceptible to alteration (landscape gardening) than any single thing (the sheep), and is corollary-wise much more likely to be at variance with any imagination of it (a picture) than would be the case with the sheep. Thus the possibility of and the desire for landscape gardening both stem in the very same way from the nature of landscape itself, and the cyclical relationship between the imagination of it and its reality is permitted: the real appearance of Tuscany gives rise to an imagination of landscape which gives rise to an alteration of the real appearance of England. This relationship is not confined to visual matters: every landscape has its myth and every myth has its history. The landscape of Milton Keynes is rooted in a myth about Los Angeles, and the landscape of suburbia (âunplanned') is rooted in a myth about yeoman-villagers and their village, folk memory of the English petty bourgeois.
In the second distinction, the viewer's gaze surrounds the sheep: it is apprehended all at once. Even if the sheep were as big as a house, the viewer would only have to move away from it to restore the relationship. (If it
were
a house, the position would be slightly different, as the inside could not readily be apprehended, and when it could, the viewer would be inside
it
and only partly aware of the outside. This is the unique dual status of architecture.)
In the landscape, however, the viewer is always surrounded, and so the business of picturing is infinitely more complex both technically and conceptually. Devices such as the âframe within the frame' have evolved partly to deal with this, and it is this distinction between modes of viewing that differentiates the parallel analogies between an object and an idea, and between one's surroundings and a mood, atmosphere or state of mind.
Landscape functions in all these ways in the cinema, perhaps more so than anywhere else. The tragicâeuphoric palimpsest; the
reciprocity of imagination and reality; place seen in terms of other place; setting as a state of mind â all are phenomena that coincide in films.
The exact way in which this happens is generally determined by a more or less complex and more or less intense metaphorical relationship between landscape and narrative, like that between the volcano and Ingrid Bergman's spiritual crisis in
Stromboli
. The volcano, as singular a presence as any, is employed in a variety of ways: its rumblings parallel her unease; it is the cause of her isolation and it hosts her despair and redemption when she tries to climb over it to the outside world.
Similar ambiguities between benevolence and malevolence are general and twofold. The landscape may or may not be sympathetic to the protagonists, and the film may or may not echo this judgement. In Herzog's South American ventures both forest and invaders are equally godforsaken, but the forest is bound to win, and few tears are to be shed over this. On the other hand, the geography of
The Wages of Fear
is a lackey of the employers, and it really is sad when Yves Montand's truck goes over the edge.
In John Ford's films a more metaphorical idea of predicament is entertained.
The Lost Patrol
slowly and inexorably pursues the archetypal spiritual analogies of the desert, while the impotence of Boris Karloff's religious-fanatic behaviour increases as it becomes more extreme. Ford's desert is very like his opposite-but-similar ocean in
The Long Voyage Home
. In
The Quiet Man
the surface of Ireland is cast (as it often is) as a palimpsest of the type previously described, and the conflict that is the film's story is over rights of access to history and ârootedness' through ownership of land and other property. The outsider, John Wayne, despite the local origin of his parents, is only able to secure these rights to their past by employing his skill as an ex-champion boxer, the very thing he was so anxious to conceal in his own past. Subject-matter and setting are even more closely identified in
The Grapes of Wrath
. Here the palimpsest is active, for the landscape itself, by physically blowing away, becomes the instrument by which the landowners' exploitation leads to suffering on a biblical scale.
With Renoir the relationship is similar, if more subtle. The passionate excesses of
La Bête Humaine
are orchestrated entirely by the railway, its own landscape and that through which it runs. The sexuality of the railway engine pervades the intricacy of timetabling, and the landscape, again as a palimpsest, models the ideas about heredity and misfortune that underlie Zola's novel. The country house and its surroundings in
La Règle du Jeu
offer some kind of social order, but it is riddled with pitfalls, like the location where the shooting party goes wrong, all marshes and thickets: a model for the confusion that is unleashed upon it. In
La Grande Illusion
the geography is again a predicament. The hostility of the warring nations and their frontiers are mocked by the continuity of landscape and its beauty, as in an atlas the physical map mocks its political partner. At the same time, for the escaping prisoner of war, topography is all-important: inaccessibility and concealment now offer safety rather than the peacetime risk of getting lost; and all the best frontiers are located by geographical features.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
shows a landscape which may offer concealment, required despite the lack of war, but is more likely to trip up running feet shod with city shoes. It conspires with the invaders to isolate the town without the need for frontiers, and lends its fertility to their market-gardening operation. In a paranoid time nature is at best inconvenient and at worst actively hostile. Civil engineering projects were the human revenge for this. In
Hell Drivers
, a pleasant enough countryside is subjugated to the needs of construction. The landscape is again physically involved in the story: the protagonists dig great holes in it, pick it up and carry it about. Their pitfalls are provided by the remains of previous human exploitations: the narrow twisting roads on which they drive so competitively, and the abandoned quarry pit, on the edge of which they fight.
Night of the Living Dead
is perhaps more visually sensitive than some later films (
Zombies, Shivers, Rabid
, and so on) in which unpleasant beings confront living humans, and in which landscape generally plays a neutral role. The opening scenes show a country graveyard in a Pennsylvania landscape. This scene is well aware of
its history: it looks European, and the name of Penn underlines this connection. Elegantly photographed in sylvan black and white â not at all
noir â
it presents a poetic if melancholy scene. Only its occupants are spiritually uneasy as they visit a grave, while the technological hubris of their society accidentally restores a kind of collective life to their recent dead, who rapidly infest the landscape, devouring the living where they find them.
Several of the still-living find themselves sharing the refuge of an isolated house as night falls. This idea of the solitary house in the landscape is very clear, almost archetypal, as in âThe Fall of the House of Usher'. The landscape itself remains neutral: it provides concealment but isolates the victims from rescue; the living dead blunder across it, but it offers the possibility of escape. This does not occur, though, and the greater part of the rest of the film is set inside the benighted house, and offers more elegant photography in an essay of architectural phenomenology worthy of Gaston Bachelard: inside and outside; upstairs, downstairs and basement; windows, doors, cupboards and furniture are all clearly differentiated by the acuteness of the unusual circumstances. In the morning the one survivor, a black man, emerges from the basement to be shot by a sheriff's posse, who assume he is just another living dead-man, or by now simply don't care.
This brutalised attitude is duplicated in the portrayal of the landscape. Nothing about it has physically changed, but now the camera ceases to flatter: the sky is bleached, the composition blunt. There is an expediency like that of television news footage. The only feeling left is the uneasy camaraderie between the slobs who comprise the posse, and it is their view that we see in these last scenes. As always, the meaning in the landscape resides only in the imagination of whoever looks upon it.
Port Statistics
The following paragraphs were written in the last months of 1996, during the final stages of production of a film
Robinson in Space
(1997), for which the journeys they recall were carried out. Towards the end of a previous film,
London
(1994), its fictitious narrator offers the ambiguous assertion: âThe true identity of London â¦Â is in its absence â¦' âAbsence of what?' the viewer might ask. One of many possible answers to this question is that London came into being and grew as a port city. Its port activity is now largely
absent
, but continues somewhere else. One of
Robinson
's objectives was to locate some of the economic activity that no longer takes place in cities.
Robinson in Space
(1997) was photographed between March and November 1995. It documents the explorations of an unseen fictional character called Robinson, who was the protagonist of the earlier
London
(1994), a re-imagination of its subject suggested by the Surrealist literature of Paris.
Robinson in Space
is a similar study of the
look
of present-day England in 1995, and was suggested to some extent by Daniel Defoe's
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
(1724â26). Among its subjects are many new spaces, particularly the sites where manufactured products are produced, imported and distributed. Robinson has been commissioned by âa well-known international advertising agency' to undertake a study of the âproblem' of England.
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It is not stated
in the film what this problem is, but there are images of Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, a Rover car plant, the inward investment sites of Toyota and Samsung, a lot of ports, supermarkets, a shopping mall, and other subjects which evoke the by now familiar critique of âgentlemanly capitalism', which sees the UK's economic weakness as a result of the City of London's long-term (English) neglect of the (United Kingdom's) industrial economy, particularly its manufacturing base.
Early in the film, its narrator quotes from Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
: âIt is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.'
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The appearances by which the viewer is invited to judge are initially the dilapidation of public space, the extent of visible poverty, the absence of UK-branded products in the shops and on the roads,
and
England's cultural conservatism. Robinson's image of the UK's industry is based on his memories of the collapse of the early Thatcher years. He has assumed that poverty and dilapidation are the result of economic failure, and that economic failure is a result of the inability of UK industry to produce
desirable
consumer products. He believes, moreover, that this has something to do with the
feel
of âMiddle England', which he sees as a landscape increasingly characterised by sexual repression, homophobia and the frequent advocacy of child-beating. At the same time, he is dimly aware that the United Kingdom is still the fifth-largest trading economy in the world and that British â even English people, particularly women and the young â are probably neither as sexually unemancipated, as sadistic or as miserable as he thinks the
look
of the UK suggests. The film's narrative is based on a series of journeys in which his prejudices are examined, and some are disposed of.
