Transformations of everyday space are subjective, but they are not delusions, simply glimpses of what could happen, and indeed does happen at moments of intense collectivity, during demonstrations, revolutions and wars. It is this realisation, together with that of the individual’s predicament, ‘his desperate desire to flee from the prison of his subjectivity, his furious longing to find some escape from the ugliness of modem life’,21 that set up a dialectic that can inform an outlook on the townscape and landscape that constitute our surroundings, which are, as Georges Bataille points out, the physiognomy of our society.22
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Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape
I don’t suppose I can have missed a single episode in the first year of Z Cars, but I can’t remember any of them. In fact I don’t think I can remember in detail anything that I ever saw on television apart from a few oft-repeated items, and I suspect that such lack of retention is general.
This is a pity, for apparently only two episodes of Z Cars survive from the first six months of the series. I mention this having seen them (again?) at the NFT last September, this time on the cinema screen, where they were revealed as examples of a hitherto unknown and rather timeless genre. (Although there were elements of nostalgia: the cars, for instance – there were always an awful lot of Fords. Perhaps the BBC had done a deal.)
‘They fight crime on wheels in a new series beginning tonight’, said the Radio Times on 28 December 1961. Fighting crime on wheels has got itself a bad name in the period since, but in those days the lads in the cars were cast as more or less sophisticated social workers, imbued albeit with the extra moral authority of the law, who cruised from domestic disturbance to truant shoplifter distributing a positive understanding over the public-sector suburban desolation of (Kirkby) Newtown. It is this desolation that hasn’t dated: it’s all still there, and it still appears on television, in the work of Alan Bleasdale et al., though for my money a low-key Z Cars beats their didactic tear-jerking any day. The difference is that in 1961 things were considered to be capable of getting better, whereas now everyone thinks they’re getting worse. Both the episodes shown took a ‘social problem’ as their theme rather than any crime. The first had Jock Weir and Fancy Smith (‘Z Victor 1’) trying to prevent the biggest of a shipload of hard-drinking just-got-paid Norwegian whalers from being fleeced by a girl desperate for money (the ‘social problem’), posing as a waterfront prostitute. All the action takes place inside a pub, which is just as well as the surviving print is re-filmed from a video monitor and is not very sharp.
The other episode (‘People’s Property’, 15 May 1962) was mostly the original, probably 35mm, film, but parts of this have evidently gone missing and been replaced by sections re-filmed from a video monitor, which are inserted quite uninhibitedly, the change often occurring in mid-scene. The original photography is very good, and when seen on the screen is reminiscent of later Ealing films. This is an observation one could never make seeing it on television, and which quite undermined my vague memories of the series. The episode makes ‘much use of atmospheric locations’, which probably also did not come across on television, the landscape locations suffering most of all. It is not, however, my intention to make a polemic on television versus cinema or video versus film, by suggesting that revelatory experience when seeing a twenty-one-year-old television programme in the cinema is proof that, at least as regards the meaningful portrayal of landscape, television is a medium deeply inferior to the cinema. I probably do think all these things, but my purpose is rather to use the episode as a vehicle with which to get from the desolate landscape of Kirkby to another.
The story follows the exploits of two boys (the ‘social problem’), one a clever misfit, one his stooge. The former looks a bit like John Lennon aged ten, but we weren’t to know that then. First discovered misbehaving on the roof of a factory at night (the first atmospheric location), they go on to shoplifting and handbag theft. They are caught, but let out again because all the places they could be sent are full up. Skipping school, they go on a spree of petty theft until they are caught again but let out for the same reason as before. In a last gesture they run away to Wales to climb a mountain, departing on the bus to Wrexham via the Mersey Tunnel. Jock and Fancy (ZV1 again) find out about this shortly after the bus has emerged from the tunnel, but being some miles behind, don’t catch up with it until the boys have been thrown off as a result of their unruly behaviour, and hitched a lift with a farmer in a Ford Zephyr. He lets them off at his gate and they continue on foot up the desired mountain. By the time Jock and Fancy arrive they have left the road and are halfway up. J and F leg it up the hill, and after a display of puffing and rugby skills they apprehend the pair. All this time they have been facing in one direction, in single-minded pursuit of their respective goals, but after the capture, seemingly accepted by the boys, they all turn round, having got their breath back only to have it taken away again by a view for twenty miles across the Dee valley. ‘By ’eck,’ gasps Fancy, touched by the sublime, ‘look at THAT.’ The camera obliges with a slow pan over the view, during which not a word is spoken. An awesome spectacle of landscape, it seems, transcends even the most difficult predicament.
This is even more true in films than in life, and in both realms of experience such sentiments are prone to cliché. What is more surprising is that they seem to be universally felt, and to a great extent in the same way by persons of widely differing political and other persuasions, whereas other manifestations of beauty often are not. There is nothing improbable in the idea of a policeman, even a real policeman lacking the insight of Fancy Smith, being struck dumb by a good view.
The view itself is worthy of some scrutiny: a patchwork of fields and hedges, the occasional tree or copse, the ground undulating in a small way, all this viewed from high ground to the west and lit from behind the viewer by the afternoon sun. This is a dairy-farming landscape like those featured in butter commercials. It belongs to that type of view that could properly be called ‘green and pleasant land’, and is the dominant image of English landscape. In fact it is found only in small parts of the country to the west of a line between London and, say, Lancaster. The eastern counties and the hilly districts are not a part of this arcadia, and tend to be seen either as local phenomena, or in terms of landscapes of other countries: the East Riding of Yorkshire is ‘middle European’, the Cotswolds ‘Mediterranean’.
The Dee valley view is analogous with the view across the Severn valley from Malvern, perhaps that from Hergest Ridge, and others in the west of England. I suspect, however, that the hegemony of this type of view in the national imagination has more to do with the former appearance of Sussex than anything else, and reflects the class status of the home counties: their arcadia an imagined former rural identity now undermined by middle-distance commuting and suburbanisation. The famous view through the gap in the trees that surround the Duke of Norfolk’s cricket ground at Arundel Castle is surviving evidence for this supposition, and its connotations are in this location pinpointed by the feudal sounds of leather on willow and so on.
The society of the Dee valley is very much that of the Cheshire ‘county’. It is their creation, in as much as all landscape is the result of human interference. It is where the Cheshire hunt still hunts, now with the support of non-landed bourgeois money from nearby metropolitan areas. In short, the connotations of both its imagery and its inhabitants are more or less disgraceful, and yet its representation remains moving. The experience of landscape not only transcends individual suffering (the boys’ capture), but even that very general tragedy of which the landscape itself is a result.
This combination of the tragic and the euphoric is a dominant quality in innumerable depictions of landscape, especially when these are from above, and so supply implications of pattern, understanding or explanation, and hence compassion not available to observers on the ground.
It is a view that probably dates only from the nineteen
th century, and is in any case not universal. Notwithstanding the difference in motive, those paintings of various of Napoleon’s battles, seen from a nearby hill, contrast with battle scenes from a similar viewpoint in Birth of a Nation. The paintings display a disciplined efficiency, while Griffith, with a comparable lack of technical sophistication in visual matters, manages to present his war in a far more complex picture of chaos, squalor and pain.
Daniel Defoe, writing in 1724, says of the Dee valley: ‘The soil is extraordinary good, and the grass they say, has a peculiar richness in it, which disposes the creatures to give a great quantity of milk, and that very sweet and good.’1
Already the butter commercial is imminent, but here beauty is synonymous, rather than simultaneous, with productivity or prosperity. In any case Defoe may be said to pre-date the sense of the picturesque. In the rare instances where he describes landscape itself, that of the Yorkshire Dales for instance, his purpose is to discuss the disposition of industry upon it.2 For him the Lake District was a barren wasteland.
In Richard Wilson’s painting Holt Bridge on The River Dee (before 1762), the picturesque is already well established, not so much a result of easier travel or burgeoning industrialisation, but the concurrent desire for a Virgilian idyll in which to set the then present-day. In the painting, which echoes a Venetian sensibility as well as that of Claude, elements of the scenery are stressed for their classical comparability: the sandstone cliff; the (church) tower; the flat plain and distant hills; the ‘peasants’ and the bridge. All these elements are interpreted in terms of Wilson’s repertoire of elements of classical mise-en-scène collected in his sketchbooks while in Italy. Most important, because invisible, is the historical significance of the bridge itself as the link between England and Wales, and the aura of antiquity which this bestows.
Richard Wilson, Holt Bridge on the River Dee (before 1762)
This metaphorical transposition of landscape – seeing somewhere as somewhere else – and the consequent effect on the landscape are widely encountered in art, life and the relations between these. In the simplest sense, in Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979), photographed by Martin Schäfer, the journey along the A4 is converted by the cinematography into one across some unspecified but definitely East European plain. Blea Tarn, which lies at the top of a pass between the two Langdale valleys in the Lake District, was the inspiration and subject of a passage in Wordsworth’s The Excursion. A later sensibility, aroused perhaps by Wordsworth’s poem, but informed more by Chinese and Japanese scenes, was inspired in the unknown landscape-gardening landowner who planted rhododendrons around the tarn, which still thrive despite the altitude, and parallel the domestication of Wordsworth’s vision. This is not so much ‘seeing somewhere as somewhere else’, but ‘seeing somewhere in terms of a picture of somewhere else’.
By the time Thomas De Quincey passed through the Dee Valley, he too a runaway schoolboy in 1802, the sensibility of Wilson’s generation had had its effect:
The Vale of Gressford, for instance … offered a lovely little seclusion … But this did not offer what I wanted. Everything was elegant, polished, quiet, throughout the lawns and groves of this verdant retreat: no rudeness was allowed here; even the little brooks were trained to ‘behave themselves’; and the two villas of the reigning ladies … showed the perfection of good taste. For both ladies had cultivated a taste for painting.3
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 … The scene in the poem (‘Ruth’), 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.4
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
‘its 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: — 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 … In all other matters we are justly instructed to regard nature as supreme … In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true.5
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 – rain forests, uninhabited islands – 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 (‘unplanned’) 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 ‘frame 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 tragic–euphoric palimpsest; the reciprocity of imagination and reality; place seen in terms of other place; setting as a state of mind – 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 variet
y 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 ‘rootedness’ 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.
The View From the Train Page 3