Landscape as transitional space in film practice
Bowen, Sarah Louisa (2015) Landscape as transitional space in film practice. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts/University of Brighton.
- Details
Walking Albion is the 38-minute stop-motion film at the centre of this thesis. The film and accompanying written text seek to establish the symbolic function of a particular camera movement through cinematic landscape.
Inspired by the 'anima-photography' methods of the earliest moving images, the film is composed from over 27,000 still photographs that were taken on a 550-mile walk between Cornwall and Norfolk. Screened at 12 frames per second, these animated photographs form the film's temporal and spatial diegesis, where the journey is represented over the same length of time as the breaking dawn along the same route on the day the walk began.
Movement through landscape is experienced differently by the filmmaker, the spectator and within the film's morphology. This thesis addresses the questions that arise from these differences through the notion of 'the gaze.'
The first chapter is a literature review focusing on approaches to walking and landscape film and establishing the difference between the representational and presentational artifact. The historical contexts of landscape and the moving image are connected to the emergence of the railway and a 'shattering' of temporal/spatial alignment.
The second chapter determines the theoretical contexts for an investigation of cinematic landscape, concluding that motion across the x-axis of cinematic space has become a specific trope that both represents and produces a moment of suspension in which a sense of self and the other may be renegotiated. Konigsberg's alignment of Winnicott's 'transitional space' to 'the gaze' extends the trope's function from within a film's morphology to include the filmmaker and the film spectator's experience.
The final chapter, Walking Albion considers the film against the interdisciplinary theories of the previous chapter, establishing through its practice-based inquiry the form and function of a cinematic trope as an original contribution to film and landscape studies.
This thesis is accessible on the University of Brighton's research repository at: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/landscape-as-transitional-space-in-film-practice
Actions (login required)
 |
Edit View |