Landscapes as Realms of Indistinction in Contemporary British Cinema

Landscapes as Realms ofIndistinction in Contemporary

British Cinema

Lucy Panthaky

MA in The Contemporary - 2014

Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………….1

Chapter One…………………………………………………………….…3

Chapter Two………………………………………………………….….14

Chapter Three…………………………………………………………..27

Conclusions……………………………………………………………...41

Appendix…………………………………………………………………..42

Bibliography………………………………………………………………46

Filmography …………………………………………………………..…48

Introduction - Man in his Habitat, Man as Animal

In what ways does film draw attention to a changing

understanding of landscape, and how are these perspectives

used to explore areas of ambiguity in our current conception

of the human condition? To respond to this question I have

chosen primarily to explore the recent films of Ben Wheatley

and Ben Rivers, as well as Peter Greenaway’s earlier films. As

British directors, and as directors whose work predominantly

focuses on British landscapes, they offer comparable studies

into the particular relationship a person - as an individual

and as part of a culture - has with their natural

surroundings. Though many of these films lack an overt

ecological subject matter, and few dedicate much time to

wildlife on screen, they nonetheless share a depiction of man

as an animal, as a creature indistinct from the workings of

his ecological habitat. These films are conscious, even while

in urban locations, of how their human characters are haunted

by the distinction between man and animal, and how the natural

world, or lack thereof, is something against which man asserts

himself as a species. This distinction, as thinkers later in

this text discuss, is the basis for society as we know it. How

does cinema depict the relationship between cinema landscapes

and mankind, as individuals, cultural agents and political

bodies? Before exploring these three spheres in detail, it is

worth noting the similarities between these film’s

perspectives on the relationship between man and landscape and

that of early environmental writing.

In cinema these political and moral implications of

viewing man as an animal are explored through the aesthetic of

the environments on screen. This is also true of predominantly

1

scientific ecological works. Rachel Carson, whose

environmental science book Silent Spring is one of the

foundational texts of the environmentalism movement, 1

dedicates much of its text to an appeal for the preservation

of an aesthetic ecological heritage. The book's primary

purpose is to detail the risk that excessive use of

insecticides poses to our health, agricultural industries and

the environment as a whole. Alongside environmental

sustainability and compassion for other species, she places

importance on the beauty of nature in itself, 'This sudden

silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the

colour and beauty and interest they lend to our world have

come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those

communities who are as yet unaffected.'2 Though this appeal to

the experience of natural beauty is a uniquely human concern,

Carson nonetheless writes from the perspective of man as an

animal, placing humankind within ecology rather than outside

of it arguing that 'in nature nothing exists alone.'3

The landscape we experience in cinema, therefore -

though unnatural and inevitably reconstructed in our

perception by the framing of the camera - still communicates

this value of natural beauty. Its aesthetic, in being brought

to screen, is proliferated and appreciated with the same value

that Carson invokes in her ecological writing. In this

capacity the camera allow us to flatten the divide between

man and nature by presenting them within the same space.

1 "Rachel Carson and the Awakening of Environmental Consciousness, Wilderness and American Identity, Nature Transformed,." National Humanities Center. (accessed: 1 July 2014) <http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntwilderness/essays/carson.htm>.2 Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin (2000) p.1003 Carson, Rachel (2000) p.60

2

Though not all of the directors discussed deal

intimately or explicitly with the natural landscape, I

consider all of these to have a strong ecological focus since

the relationship they explore between man and his environment

has roots in the genesis of ecological thinking. First I will

explore how this distinction is navigated by individuals, by

people alone in their environment, where they are arguably the

most animal like. Next, I will see how these ways of thinking

change when we take into account our culture, examining how

these films reveal a human history running parallel with the

natural history of these landscapes. Finally, I will discuss

how these landscapes act as visual metaphors for the political

tensions present when we separate humanity from animality.

3

Chapter One - Landscapes and The Individual in

Solitude

In this chapter I will discuss two of Ben Rivers' films

which explore the relationship between man and his landscape

in a solitary context, establishing an intimate connection

between self and habitat. Here, in retreating into solitude we

may discover how the land we live in shapes us. Do these

landscapes construct our sense of self, or do we project our

own topologies of being onto our natural surroundings? Can we

create spaces which unleash our ownmost possibility and still

remain members of society?

Solitary Experiences of Landscape

These questions manifest in Ben Rivers' two feature

length films, Two Years at Sea and A Spell to Ward Off Darkness. These

films explore the ramifications of retreating from modern

urban society. The existential implications of self-

sufficiency and solitude are brought to screen through

landscape, recalling the Romantic tradition of the lone

wanderer while never losing their contemporary relevance and

aesthetic. During this chapter I will be looking at two very

different thinkers whose work on landscape is comparable with

Rivers' work. First, Martin Heidegger, whose writing on human

nature frequently centres around dwelling: our relationship

with spaces in which the natural and manmade meet. Ben Rivers

investigates this conflict between nature and society and its

influence on self-perception. While Heidegger’s analysis

4

centres around etymology, poetry, the act of speech and quite

consciously draws attention to his use of the written word,

Rivers’s films use dialogue infrequently, choosing instead to

explore this dialectic through the collision of images. Both

he and Rivers have a strong tie to language, be that

linguistic or cinematic. The ideas of Robert Macfarlane will

also be used, whose work as a psychogeographic nature writer

brings to attention ancient, forgotten pathways in nature,

both earthly and literary. His writing revolves around the

premise that: 'Landscape has long offered us keen ways of

figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping

memories and giving form to thought.'4 - an existential

faculty of landscape which is again communicated in Rivers'

films in cinematic language.

In Two Years at Sea he follows the life of Jake, a hermit

living in a Scottish forest. By exploring this relationship

between self and place through the medium of film, his

audience becomes aware of how strange acute solitude can be.

We are always aware that Jake's solitude is imperfect. Though

Two Years at Sea so closely portrays Jake’s life that it is often

referred to as a documentary,5 it is impossible in this medium

to portray true solitude. Rivers is always present and the

camera, by extension, invites an unlimited number of eyes into

a private moment, even one so intimate as bathing. The beauty

of this hermetic state is illustrated before the camera rather

than objectively represented, since the camera’s very presence

breaks the solitude. The film instead invites the viewer to

4Macfarlane, Robert. The Old Ways: a journey on foot. London: Penguin Books,(2012) p. 1935 Romney, Jonathan. "Review: Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers." The Independent. (accessed: 1 June 2014) <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/two-years-at-sea-ben-rivers-88-mins-u-7717371.html>.

5

reconfigure themselves through Jake’s relationship with his

landscape. Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways discusses how

landscapes influence our thinking and behaviour as we

experience them:

I have long been fascinated by how people understand

themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we

carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate

these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from

place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our

thought, but actively produce it.6

Rivers’ films explore this concept closely, dedicating much of

their runtime to showing the individual wordlessly navigating

his terrain, with their internal experience bought to us

through photographs and music, allowing the landscapes

themselves to become a metaphor by prompting these insinuated

memories through cultural objects. In the audiovisual medium,

Jake's extended silence is a closer portrayal of solitude than

the image of the individual in isolation. This is emphasised

by the fact that we only find out Jake’s name during the

credits demonstrating the redundancy of proper nouns in this

state of solitude. The metaphors are created wordlessly, in a

manner unique to cinema. Rivers claims that the raw images

provided by a camera are ‘defiantly not metaphorical’, but

‘physical realities’.7 It is the editing process of filmmaking

which becomes metaphorical. The camera creates a filmic

landscape adjacent to the literal one that was before the

6 Macfarlane, Robert (2012) p.267 Sicinski, Michael. "Listen to Britain: On the Outskirts with Ben Rivers." Cinema Scope. (accessed: 2 June 2014) <http://cinema-scope.com/features/features-listen-to-britain-on-the-outskirts-with-ben-rivers/>.

6

camera at the time of filming, and in showing this landscape

Rivers is able to explore the ‘self-created island’8 that his

subjects inhabit in parallel with the literal landscape.

Meaning, and metaphor, is generated through montage, through

the juxtaposition and clashing of images.

For instance there is a soft and lingering take of mists

against the silhouetted trees of the Scottish wilderness,

cutting sharply to the vapours of a kettle steaming on Jake's

hob.9 The audio is consistent between each shot - birdsong and

a faint hiss - the latter of which we recognise in the context

of this second image as a kettle, rather than a brook or

stream as the audio first implies. This multifaceted use of

diegetic sound is exemplary of the blending between dwelling

spaces and wilderness spaces in Rivers cinematography. This is

in keeping with Heidegger's observation that,

When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man is

stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not

something that faces man, It is neither an external object nor

an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over

and above them, space.10

By having these polarised images of the wilderness and the

domestic to share consistent audiovisual qualities they cease

to be treated as an external object. Jakes's actions, here the

act of cooking, are imprinted upon all spaces by virtue of his

dwelling intimately with them.

In Two Years at Sea Rivers explores this relationship

between the individual, space and dwelling, showing Jake’s8 ibid 9 Two Years at Sea. Dir. Ben Rivers, The Cinema Guild (2012) 0:18:2210 Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row (1971) p.154

7

hermetic routines. We see how he builds and maintains his home

and how he chooses to interact with the world around him.

Jake, his home and his location merge to the point of

indeterminacy on both physical and conceptual levels. This can

be seen in scenes featuring long, almost motionless takes. In

one scene we see Jake carry an air mattress, wooden chassis

and several empty containers to a lake and precedes to tie the

materials together, eventually drifting upon the lake on a

raft he has constructed. The shot lasts for around seven

minutes. These long takes allow the viewer to experience how

the filmed subject melds with the landscape and fits the quiet

and so nearly static progression of nature. Furthermore, it

is here we can see how the use of monochrome film amplifies

how Jake and his constructed home develop a homogeneity with

the Scottish landscape.11

The Filmic Representation of the Sublime

This indistinction between Jake and his surroundings not

only reminds us that Jake is a part of his surroundings in the

most basic, animal sense, but functions as a moment of

cinematic sublime. Thomas Weiskel describes how

[t]he sublime dramatized the rhythm of transcendence in its

extreme and purest form, for the sublime began where the

conventional systems, reading of landscape or text, broke

down, and it found in that very collapse the foundation for

another order of meaning.12 11 Two Years at Sea. (2012) 0: 47:00-0:54:5012 Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: studies in the structure and psychology of transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, (1976) p.22

8

Sublime locations allow for our habitual relationship between

the mind, the human body and the landscape to be broken, and

thus made anew. Instances of montage in these films, such as

the cut between the misty hills and Jake's kitchen previously

discussed, indicate or imitate the internal process that the

sublime provokes, but they are not sublime in themselves. That

is, they sever and reform these orders of meaning for us,

rather than capturing a moment or place which prompts this

breakdown, a moment of transcendence.

The scene in which Jake builds his raft operates in a

different way. Here aspects of duration, indistinction and

scale bring the sublime experience itself to screen. Weiskel’s

conception of the sublime location bears resemblance to

Heidegger’s description of man’s relationship with space:

‘[t]he natural sublime established inner space by a conceptual

metaphor, in which immeasurability of physical space was

linked to the infinitude of our supersensible faculty.’13 The

sublime environment has an almost unsurmountable physical

space and thus can determine the unknown reaches of inner

space. This reveals the relationship between man and space

that Heidegger describes, where space is neither internal nor

external to man by being itself at the edges of

perceptibility. These sublime spaces contain and alienate

their inhabitants simultaneously. This is brought to screen in

Two Years at Sea through use of scale and duration. This evident

during the raft scene in how the lake is framed, its vastness

taking up most of the lower screen making it seem almost as

large as the sky and mountains above it. The lake, though

pleasing aesthetically is not inviting in the usual sense of

13 ibid p.7

9

the word. It is a moment in keeping with Weiskel's

observation that ‘Unlike the beautiful, the sublime is cognate

with the experiential structure of alienation.’14 Jake’s

tiny, wrapped up body upon it expresses the lake’s coldness

and perilous immensity, while the extended duration of the

shot and the slowness of his journey across the screen

emphasises his minimal progression through its vastness. This

aspect of duration brings forth the breakdown between man and

surroundings into the temporal aspects of the film. It

defamiliarises us with our usual cinematic relationship with

the natural world by introducing an element of longevity

unusual to the medium. By showing the same image for a period

of time we are not used to, Rivers communicates the sublime

aspects of the location on screen by showing moments of

indistinction between Jake and his landscape - a collapse in

the conventional boundaries between self and location.

This convergence between Jake and his surroundings is

also paralleled in the audio of the film. Aside from the

ambience of the forest and occasional diegetic music from

Jake's radio, there are only two constant distinctive sounds -

Jake's whistling and the sound of birdsong - which overlay and

gradually merge throughout the film.15 This primarily musical

use of voice accentuates the wordlessness of the film. The

only words are on shots of letters, unreadable, or muttered

under Jake's breath, inaudible. Implicitly, in a retreat from

society there is a retreat from language. Even in other works

of Rivers such as Slow Action or 'The Origin of the Species'

which heavily utilise narration, there is usually

juxtaposition between the words in the audio and the

14 Weiskel, Thomas (1976) p.3615 Two Years at Sea. (2012) 1:09:50 - 1:10:42

10

unspeaking figure or figures on screen. As philosopher of

language, Heidegger brings insight to this relationship

between wordlessness and alienation: 'Man acts as though he

were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language

remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's

subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his

nature into alienation.'16 In his act of self-alienation,

Jake, and Rivers by extension, has a dominance of sorts over

language by ceasing to use it. Though he cannot escape

language internally by choosing isolation and by extension

wordlessness, we are brought into his experience of nature as

a wordless but by no means silent place. The landscape is

never totally apart from the human gaze, both thanks to the

presence of the camera and through Jake on screen. Jake is

always looking out onto his surroundings while in doors, if

his current task allows it, even while he showers.17 The trees

are framed by a window or manifest as distinct shadows across

his home. We get the growing impression that Jake is never

truly separate from his landscape, that his lifestyle and home

have been constricted to incorporate them at every available

opportunity. Our experience of the relationship between Jake

and his surroundings is predominantly visual rather than

lexical.

The relationship between Jake and the space he dwells in

is established by other means. Though he does not speak, so

cannot name the space he resides in as his home, the film is

full of visual motifs which reflect this relationship between

the individual and his place in the environment. For much of

the film we see Jake building his own home. Building,

16 Heidegger, Martin (1971) p.14417 Two Years at Sea (2012) 0.08:06

11

according to Heidegger, constructs our surroundings. Manmade

constructions 'gather the earth as landscape'18; we do not

build into locations so much as building establishes our

location. Rivers introduces us to our setting in a similar

way, with the earlier scenes of the film showing Jake

maintaining and residing in his buildings, before we trail off

from these familiar locations and follow Jake into the

wilderness, into landscapes which gradually become more empty.

The camera frames the landscape through the act of building,

participating in a similar Heideggerian gathering of space.

Inhabiting this gathered space, for Heidegger, carries

essential existential weight: 'To say that mortals are is to

say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of

their stay among things and locations.'19 He goes on to write

that 'Building and thinking are, each in its own way,

inescapable from dwelling. The two, however, are also

insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with

its own affairs in separation instead of listening to each

other.'20 Two Years at Sea demonstrates these faculties of dwelling

by showing how landscape are shaped by man's presence, both

through the physicality of building - persisting among things

and locations - and its dialogue with our thoughts. Though

there is no internal monologue to communicate Jake's thoughts,

Rivers frequently shows Jake in silent contemplation for long

periods of time, both inside of his home21and out.22 In doing

this, he shows how Jake's dwelling - that is, the act of his

being in landscape - is comprised of both building and

thinking. 18 Heidegger, Martin (1971) p.15019 Heidegger, Martin (1971) p.15520 ibid p.15821 Two Years at Sea. (2012) 1:04:42 - 1:07:5322 ibid 1:17:31 - 1:24:03

12

The Converging Pathways of Man and Camera

Philosopher of landscape Christopher Tilley claims that

'landscapes, unlike their representations, are constituted in

space-time. They are always changing, in the process of being

and becoming.'23 Rivers films show that cinema is an exception

here. Duration and movement are captured on screen even if

they are necessarily made for repetition; it is a repetition

which illustrates the process of being and becoming which we

find in landscapes themselves, allowing the camera to

transform a location into a moment, space into time. Film

theorists Harper and Rayner discuss this aspect of the filmed

landscape:

Humankind doesn’t just ‘impact’ on the landscapes of film, we

create them. Even if these landscapes are captured or recorded

rather than constructed it is the place and purpose of film to

bring them to the aesthetic and communicative fore, where both

makers and audiences can experience and, to an increasing

extent, interact with them.24

This aspect of landscape on screen is similar to a feature of

physical landscape which Macfarlane discusses: ‘Paths are

habits of landscape. […] Paths connect. This is their first

duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a

23 Tilley, Christopher. Interpreting Landscapes: Geographies, Topologies, Identities. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press (2010.) p.1224Harper, Graeme, and Jonathan Rayner. Film Landscapes: Cinema, Environment and Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, (2013) p 12

13

literal sense, and by extension they relate people.’25 For

Macfarlane these paths, like the movement of the camera

through a pre-existing landscape which Harper and Rayner

describe, provide a way of not only navigating a space, but

also ‘ways of feeling, being and knowing’26.

Rivers' next film, A Spell to Ward off Darkness, is a

collaboration with fellow ethnographic director Ben Russell.

Here the 'path' of the camera becomes our principle means of

connecting people and places in a situation free from

exposition and familiar narrative conventions. The film

follows Robert Lowe, a musician, in three distinct contexts

which represent community, the individual in solitude, and

transcendence. First, we see him as part of an Estonian

commune. He plays guitar, he smokes, and he is seen to speak,

though we do not hear him. Around him other members of the

commune rear children, philosophise about social

responsibilities, recount sexual exploits, cook and build.

Following this, Lowe retreats into the wilderness of

the Finnish countryside. Here he walks, cooks and sails alone.

Cinema has a unique relationship to our experience of a

walking through landscape as film theorists Clarke and Doel

observe: 'The connection between the picturesque conception of

landscape and the history of walking is important because the

former was always configured for the appreciation of a mobile

spectator.'27 This resonates with the reflexive, poetic state

of perception which Macfarlane associates with walking:

25 Macfarlane, Robert (2012) p.1726 ibid p.2427Clarke, David B. and Marcus A. Doel, Film Landscapes: Cinema, Environment and Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, (2013) p 216

14

Out there, nothing could only be itself. The eye fed on false

colour-values. Similes and metaphors bred and budded. Mirages

of scale occurred, tricks of depth. […] When I think back to

the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strange disorder

of perception which caused illusions of the spirit as well as

the eye. I recall becoming sensational; the substance of

landscape so influencing mind that mind’s own substance was

altered.28

The camera panning across the landscape is able to illustrate

this experience. It captures some of these illusions we

experience while walking and so portrays what Rivers calls the

‘physical realities’ of landscape with this figurative

capacity. Acknowledging this aesthetic relevance of movement,

Clarke and Doel state that 'Once one acknowledges the

centrality of movement to the picturesque conception of

landscape, one can appreciate why films taken from trains

rapidly became a staple of early filmmaking.'29 This

relationship between camera movement and location has

persisted. Films which place great emphasis narrative on

navigation and landscape often open with a panning sequence of

their terrain. This can be seen in The Wicker Man (1973), Essential

Killing (2010) and A Field in England (2013) to name but a few. This

is also seen in A Spell to Ward off Darkness, which opens with a

circular, panning shot across a lake at dusk. The camera first

drifts left across the lake, then right where a choir of

voices begins to chant over the movement of the darkening

lake.30 The shot lasts approximately six minutes, establishing

28 Macfarlane, Robert (2012) pp.74-7529 Clarke, David B. and Marcus A. Doel (2013) p.21730 A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness . Dir. Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, Rouge International (2013.) 0:00:00 - 0:06:13

15

in the opening minutes a focus on the natural world,

impersonality and vastness, both spatial and temporal.

While Robert is wandering in the Finnish forests these

panning long shots place emphasis on the landscape and are

combined with close ups of Robert at eye level. The sublime

expresses human awe, and thus needs a face to guide us through

its emotional impact and a human body to show its scale. Just

as Jake's presence, in his body and his dwelling, guides us

through the Scottish wildernesses of Two Years at Sea, Robert's

body, as he struggles to traverse the rocky Finnish

countryside becomes our marker for the overpowering nature of

that landscape. 31 But this aspect of the landscape is not

perfectly portrayed; Heidegger observes how the technological

development of film alters our relationship with our

surroundings:

The germination and growth of plants, which remained hidden

throughout the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute,

on film. Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown

on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today's

street traffic. Moreover, the film attests to what it shows by

presenting also the camera and its operators at work. [...]the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for

nearness does not consist in shortness of distance.[…] Short

distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance

remoteness.32

This presence of the camera, as previously discussed, is

implicit when Rivers films solitude. But more importantly, a

great deal of Rivers’s filmography, and this section in

31 A Spell to Ward Off Darkness (2013) 0:42:40 - 0:43-1832 Heidegger, Martin (1971) p.163

16

particular, draws attention to this discrepancy between

nearness and shortness of distance, bringing us close to a

setting and way of life in a manner which emphasises our

disconnect from it. The location on screen is dangerous,

overpowering, and we are shown this through Robert’s evident

struggle in navigating this location, but we are not ourselves

physically alienated by its presence. Though we are no longer

distant from the forest, we are not near to it in the

Heideggerian sense, it is not a space which we familiarise

ourselves with through the physicality of things.

That is not to say that the image on screen is empty.

Since this medium diminishes distance without bringing us

near, the limitations and lack we experience can be utilised

to depict a transcendent experience. For Heidegger,

‘transcendence becomes the essential constitution of human

finitude.’33 That is to say, to transcendence is found, for

Heidegger, the meaningful approach towards the limitations of

the Dasein (a being capable of self-reflexive existence), in

coming to know and understand them rather than in surpassing

them. These limitations are brought to screen through images

of possessions, incomplete physical projections of the things

we use to understand the space we occupy. Throughout this

section of the film, there are frequent, almost static shots

of magazines, photographs, letters, wallpaper - unremarkable

yet sentimental possessions which we assume belong to Robert.

These man-made, flat images are placed in contrast with shots

of Robert in his landscape with ceaseless physicality -

climbing, hiking rowing, and cooking upon a camp fire. As a

result, the two-dimensional possessions become less near in

33 Blond, Louis P. Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics. London: Continuum (2010) p.18

17

comparison to the subtle movement of the landscape and

Robert's journey within it. These contrasting images form a

wordless portrait of the self, one which intermingles the

clear image of a being, Robert's body, with his non-visual

aspects of identity; his relationship with things and

locations, the parameters of self outside of the body. This

formation of the self is something which Heidegger clearly

associates with transcendence:

Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case

already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we

call “transcendence.” If in the ground of its essence Dasein

were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in

advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could

never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without the

original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no

freedom.34

It is from this revelation of nothing that we can ground

our sense of identity - the being of a Dasein is both

manifested and surpassed by nihilation. That is, the activity

of nothingness, to ‘nothing’ something, which lays the ground

for the self in revealing its 'human finitude'. This

thoughtful interaction between objects and nothingness in the

transcendence of Dasein beings is made clear in the next

section of the film. Rivers shows Robert's transition from

solitude to transcendence with him applying white face paint

in a mirror with intense contemplation. There lingering shot

of a lichen heavy branch, Lichens being Robert's stage name, a

34 Heidegger, Martin. "Heidegger: What is Metaphysics?." Wagner College(accessed: 15 July 2014) <http://wagner.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/psychology/files/2013/01/Heidegger-What-Is-Metaphysics-Translation-GROTH.pdf>

18

parting moment with the natural world which reminds us of

Robert’s personal connection with it.35 Next, we see his

whitened face in the darkness for several minutes, ominously

lit by what is revealed to be a small shack burning in the

darkness.36 The destruction of a building, a dwelling place,

that which has previously allowed for Robert to live with his

surroundings, carries potent sacrificial meaning. There is an

existential dimension to building that Heidegger observes: ‘To

build is to be in a certain location. The manner of our

dwelling is the manner of our existence on the face of the

earth – an extension of our identity.’37 The camerawork of

this scene emphasises the connection between building with

individual identity, remaining fixed for several minutes on

Robert’s fire-lit face, rather than the burning building

itself. This scene illustrates how Robert is severing the

connection we have watched him form with the landscape over

these past minutes, and how in achieving transcendence the

nihilation of the self and its surroundings are entwined.

This transcendence, the final segment of the film, takes

place as Robert performs at a black metal concert. Though

there are lyrics in the audio of this section they are almost

inaudible with wordlessness remaining a dominating motif.

There is as much screen time dedicated to the enraptured,

softly nodding faces of the strobe lit audience as there is to

the musicians on stage.38 Due to this unusual emphasis of the

camera, and the slightly distorted audio, the music ceases to

become a performance in the purest sense. Rivers is recording

the experience of being at a concert rather than a concert

35 A Spell to Ward Off Darkness (2013) 0:59:3936 ibid 0:59:56 - 1:02:5337 Heidegger, Martin (1971) pp.105-10638 A Spell to Ward Off Darkness (2013) 1:04:51 - 1:25:04

19

itself, incorporating perspectives of the audience, the

performers and the bodiless, panning camera-eye of the filmic

audience into the building of a single moment. This scene

shows an experience in which all witnesses, the viewer

included, are equally participatory. Though we have broken

from solitude, there is not a true return to society - these

are individuals, wordlessly, having a separate experience of

the same thing together. The film ends with Robert standing

front of a backstage mirror removing his stage make up to the

atonal rhythm of distortion mingled applause from the

audience. He walks out into the city, this time filmed

exclusively from behind, where the darkness eventually

eclipses him. The return to nothing is again an accentuated

aspect of Robert's identity.

Both of Rivers’s feature films are permeated with the

knowledge that solitude is a fragile, transient state. In

retreating from society we are engaging in an active, rather

than a passive, state of being, and one which is easily broken

by the presence or even the memory of other people. Locations

play a crucial role in this experience of solitude, their

existential properties. In discussing A Spell to Ward off Darkness

its images have out of necessity been summarised and

consolidated, imbuing them with a stronger narrative than is

present in film itself. For instance, it is not clear until

several minutes into Robert's solitude that he is the closest

thing to a protagonist that this film will offer. The camera

offers a subtler path through these images, one which does not

compromise the ultimate, internal solitude of Robert's journey

(and it remains solitary even with company and the presence of

the camera) by giving it the inevitable narrative of language,

a means into the mind. In these films the individual

20

experiences wilderness, solitude and the sublime as transient

moments, rather than aspects of locations. This makes them

ideal subject matter for the cinema, a medium of duration and,

potentially, wordlessness.

Chapter Two - Cultural and Social Associations

in Filmed Landscapes

Here I will discuss the landscapes portrayed in these

films with allusions to broader cultural constructs:

supernatural belief, fairy tales, the art world and games.

These films prompt the audience to bring their perceptions of

landscape into their configuration of themselves as a member

of society, rather than internally reconfiguring themselves as

individuals against the landscape.

Filming the Painted Landscape

Like Rivers, Peter Greenaway’s films have a

philosophical focus on landscape. Both directors consciously

draw attention to the figurative dimension of landscape which

runs parallel with the spaces physically put before the

camera. But where Rivers examines personal topographies,

Greenaway emphasises the shared cultural perceptions

landscapes. These spaces methodically draw from works,

artistic movements and aesthetics of which many viewers will

be aware. These landscapes are used to explore a collective

identity, one which is shaped by artistic dialogue, rather

than the silent inner workings of the individual. Critic

Vernon Gras describes how Greenaway's films there is '[a]

21

metaphoric mode, a thematic reiteration of a loss of center,

of any continuity principle between nature and culture,' a

tension which manifests in Drowning by Numbers with 'the tidal

river plain with its three river goddesses versus the

ceaseless efforts to coerce and tame the river in games and

water towers along its shore.'39 Here, the tension is not so

much identity and location, but between common cultural

expectations of nature derived from the art world and its

realities.

To explore these tensions in Greenaway’s work, this

section will focus particularly on early works which overtly

incorporate elements of landscape art: Drowning by Numbers, Vertical

Features Remake and The Draughtsman’s Contract. These films call upon

both artistic and literary traditions in their meditations on

artwork, morality and the interpretation of landscape.

Greenaway describes Drowning by Numbers as 'a black fairy tale

for adults [...] It is a poetic, amoral tale told morally to

support the belief that the good are seldom rewarded, the bad

go largely unpunished and the innocent are always abused.'40

This systematic, formalist aspect of fairy tales is reflected

in the structure of the film with its use of distinctly un-

didactic narrative repetitions and its topological symbolism.

The film follows three women, all called Cissie Colpitts, who

drown their dissatisfactory husbands. I will refer to these

women numerically, as Greenaway does, in order of age. They

escape conviction with the help of the local coroner, Magdett,

who afterwards is rebuffed in his advances towards each of the

three women. Reviewer Janet Masline describes the locations

39 Gras, Vernon "Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway." New Literary History 26.1 (1995) p.12540 Greenaway, Peter. Fear of Drowning, Paris: Dis Voir, (1989) p.154

22

used as having 'a seductive look, with a setting on the

English coast and an inviting mixture of seashore and

greenery.'41 - a quaint aesthetic which seems at odds with

Greenaway's success in 'staging an elaborate whodunit without

bothering to determine whether anyone was ultimately to

blame.'42 The natural spaces in which these events take place

fit the tone of an amoral fairytale with the locations on

screen providing centres for both nostalgic, romanticised

natural beauty and deviance.

This dynamic is achieved by using visual cues from the

art world to give the landscape a symbolic agency similar to

the didacticism of a fairytale. Elliott and Purdy observe that

'Greenaway never relegates his landscapes to the role of

background'.43 As such these landscapes are complicit in the

amorality before the camera, rather than merely adorning them.

At times these environments passively reflect the events on

screen, such as when reams of dead fish wash up upon the beach

where the three Cissies celebrate their murderous triumph.44

At others it seems to orchestrate the actions before camera,

for neither is Greenaway's involvement with the landscape

passive. Though the film is set in summer filming took place

in November, by which point the landscape had been ravaged by

storms.45 In recreating the atmosphere of summer it was

necessary to manipulate the details of landscape, such as

41 Maslin, Janet. "Drowning By Numbers (1988) Review: Counting to 100With Peter Greenaway." New York Times. (Accessed: 13 July 2014.) <http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D0CEEDD1730F935A15757C0A ibid42 ibid43 Elliott, Bridget , and Anthony Purdy "A Walk Through Heterotopia ." Film landscapes: cinema, environment and visual culture. Newcastleupon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars (2013) p.27844 Drowning by Numbers. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Film Four International (1988) 1:33.39 - 1:36:0045 Greenaway, Peter. (1989) p.82

23

attaching artificial blackberry leaves to the bush which Smut

is obsessed with counting. This control over the landscape

prevents it from becoming a mere background. For instance,

when Cissie 2 leaves her house to drown her husband in the sea

there is a strange contrast between the balmy, artificially

lit landscape in which Cissie stands quite comfortably, almost

nude, and the darkening stormy sky above her.46 This eerie

contrast shows Cissie in an attitude of supernatural power,

her murderous intentions somehow allied by her surroundings

which simultaneously protect her body while enabling her to

pass off her husband’s watery death as an accident in

unseasonable weather conditions. Though these incidents are

outside of the director’s control, the faculties of landscape

that they bring to the camera become engrained in the films

aesthetic. These uses of artificial lighting and fake foliage

produce landscapes with painterly qualities - these are not

photographically perfect images of the British summertime, but

landscapes constructed to illustrate the British summertime.

This transformation of landscape into an art-object is

used to create spaces before camera which convey indistinction

between inside and outside. Immediately following the titles

of the film we see Cissie 1 walking towards a house were her

husband, Jake, is having a drunken affair. Jake decides to

bathe with his mistress. Naked, she runs into the garden to

collect a second tin bath. Unknown to her, Cissie looks on

from the garden. Once inside again the two drunkenly fall

sleep in their baths and Cissie enters, silently pushing

Jake’s head underwater and drowning him as his lover sleeps

on.47 During this scene, fruits and insects litter the room as

46 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 1:04:3047 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 0:03:08 – 0:11:30

24

though it had no boundary from its landscape. There are vases

of flowers so overfilled and numerous that they seem to remain

untamed despite their domestic location. In Fear of Drowning, a

textual accompaniment to the film, Greenaway discusses how

still life painting influenced the portrayal of landscape in

his films:

The genre of "still-life" can be an evocation of a landscape

through its small parts. In Drowning by Numbers consciously

composed "Still-Lifes" assist the narrative - arranged to be

consciously "arresting" (in both its meanings of stopping the

action and capturing the attention). Whereas the English all

the Still-Lifes, the French call them Natures-Mortes - one

suggests life arrested and the other nature dead.48

He goes on to note that in the process of painting, the

subject will often turn to decay, concluding that,

It is an engaging game to transpose some of these ruminative

definitions of the "still-life" genre into "moving" cinema. In

the strict comprehension of the word - the "lifes" are no

longer "still" (though the movement is minimal) and the nature

is no longer "morte" (though always short lived)49

The landscape in a still life is dissected, its static

presence evoking a kind of death. It brings the landscape, its

fruits and wildlife, into an inside space. This is achieved in

the opening scene of the film by showing these images of the

landscape at ease amongst the domestic object on screen, such

as the moth perched comfortably upon the still foaming soap

48 Greenaway, Peter. (1989) p.4849 ibid p.52

25

which Nancy had been using.50 The reverse is also employed as

the camera pans across a desk resting amongst the foliage in

the garden.51 The imagery of insects on fruit represents

nature in a state of simultaneous life and death, the ripeness

of the fruit implicit in its inevitable decay, a process

ironically alluded to through the movement of living insects.

The cut flowers embody a similar momentary threshold between

life arrested and nature dead. These elements of still life,

along with the scene preceding it showing the tin baths being

dragged in from outside, affiliate these otherwise manmade

bodies of water with the natural environment. Critic Vernon

Gras acknowledges that bodies of water are 'the most

appropriate site to stage the recurring tragic conflict

between nature and culture' since rivers extensively operated

as symbols of nature processes, temporal loss, change, and

renewal.'52 This is portrayed in Drowning by Numbers in scenes

which establish indistinction between inside and outside

spaces. This ambiguity is important since water is

consistently affiliated with nature, even in locations where

it appears to be tamed - the beach where Cissie 2 drowns her

husband visually draws upon a nostalgic, Victorian aesthetic

of tourism yet she appears to summon a storm. While Cissie 3

chooses to drown her spouse in an open air pool, with the

night sky above her a disconcerting void. By using imagery of

nature in stasis in the manner of still life artworks, water

comes to embody this tension between nature and culture.

But what makes these particular uses of close up

painterly? While Rivers focuses on the landscape in small

parts, he does not evoke still life painting in doing so. For50 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 0:10:1751 ibid 0:05:5752 Gras, Vernon (1995) p.130

26

instance, in A Spell to Ward off Darkness there are frequent shots

which isolate small natural elements of the landscape. At

0:44:40 there is a close up of a crop of fungi growing upon a

mossy stump.53 Like the moth in Drowning by Numbers it is close

to being static, drawing our attention to it as an object. But

unlike Greenaway, in this image of the mushrooms there is no

ambiguity between life and death. The fungus is clearly

attached to the other elements of its landscape on which it

depends, when the plant next to it is disturbed we can see it

move subtly, connected it to the flora around it. These

elements of landscape in A Spell to Ward off Darkness are not

‘arresting’ in the way Greenaway’s images are - they do not

enter into realms of indistinction between inside and outside,

organic and inorganic, they remain outside of these

idiosyncratically human configurations of the natural world.

The painterly cues used in Drowning by Numbers have a clear

impact upon how we configure the landscape before us. The

effectiveness of these references comes from the pre-existing

relationship between landscape and painting. On the etymology

of 'landscape' Robert Macfarlane writes that:

'Landscape' is a late-sixteenth-centenary (1598) anglicization

of the Dutch word landschap, which had originally meant a 'unit

of tract of land', but which in the course of the 1500s had

become so strongly associated with the Dutch school of

landscape painting that at the point of its anglicization its

primary meaning was 'a painterly depiction of scenery': it was

not used to mean a physical landscape until 1725.54

53 A Spell to Ward Off Darkness (2013) 0:44:40 - 0:45:0354 Macfarlane, Robert (2012) p.225

27

So when Greenaway alludes to a painting, he is not merely

bringing an artistic representation to the landscape on

screen, but accentuating a set of widely held perceptions and

associations of natural landscape prevalent in European

culture from artworks which focus on the land. In Drowning by

Numbers this can be seen in the wood where each of the Cissies

decline Magdett’s advances.55 The dark, twisted trees resemble

the drawings of Victorian children’s illustrator Arthur

Rackham, whose work frequently features woodland areas with

particular focus upon gnarled trees, all flora strangely

ungreen.56 Even without being familiar with Rackham’s work

this setting suggests the simultaneous danger and fascination

of a fairytale. The wood in Drowning by Numbers is of an

uncertain shape and depth and dimly lit, so as to appear

heavily outlined in black and just as drained in colour. This

creates a look of ambiguous innocence - both in the sense that

our three protagonists are bargaining for their legal

protection and in the Victorian sense that sexual desire is

stifled. It is here that Smut sits enclosed in a bush counting

insects - his fairies - when he is disturbed by a bizarre

howling sound from some close by beast.57 While the

supernatural never fully emerges in these landscapes, through

these visual references to fairytales Greenaway creates

locations in which seem an apt setting for a fairytale, which

further emphasises these qualities in the narrative of the

film.

Though Greenaway uses cues from the art world to depict

an already existing cultural conception of landscape, this is

55 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 1:16:04 – 1:20:4056 Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham: his life and work. London: Heinemann (1960) See appendix, figures 1-357 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 0:54:33

28

not to say that the landscapes in his films are purely

derivative in aesthetic and meaning. These references

challenge our perceptions of landscape. In Drowning by Numbers

the cinematography frequently draws upon pre-Raphaelite

painting, Victorian illustration and other artistic movements,

imbuing the landscapes in front of the camera with a cultural

history of landscapes represented before it. This constructs

a hazy, idyllic rural space which is constantly disrupted both

visually and narratively. For instance, the beach on which

Cissie 2 drowns her husband58 recalls the colour scheme and

rocky structure William Dyce’s painting of Pegwell Bay. 59

Dyce depicts somewhere tamed by man’s presence and innocuous,

bringing to mind, with a degree of nostalgia, the then recent

Victorian conception of tourism, a persisting myth of the

wholesome outdoors. Mythographer Marina Warner writes that

'home as a place or a time of innocence can only be an

illusion'60 - this is what Greenaway's landscapes in Drowning by

Numbers reveals in challenging the easy comfort that our

aesthetic cultural heritage projects into the landscapes we

experience.

Similarly, in Greenaway’s earlier film The Draughtsman's

Contract the thing which joins the landscapes on screen together

is interpretation through painting, though this time

‘painting’ features as an object and an action. The film, set

in 1694, follows a young artist, Mr Neville, as he is

contracted to produce twelve drawings of the estate of Mrs

Herbert. When her husband, who has been absent, is discovered

58 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 0:56:19 – 1:08:2159 William Dyce, Pegwell Bay [Oil on Canvass] Tate, London (1858) <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dyce-pegwell-bay-kent-a-recollection-of-october-5th-1858-n01407> See appendix, figure 460 Warner, Marina. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time , London: Vintage (1994) p.83

29

in the final act of the film drowned in the moat of the house,

people begin to speculate that Mr Neville is responsible

thanks to several objects of Mr Herbert's which have been

planted in the drawing by known conspirators. The narrative

centres on the act of drawing, the commission being the

impetus for the events of the plot and each drawing showing

how art works can affect our perception of landscape, with the

perspective that the draughtsman is painting from being close

to the framing and angle that Greenaway presents the scene

from. Throughout the film one is reminded of painting not just

through the subject matter of drawing, but also through this

'painterly' composition of these locations which emphasises

the effect that Mr Neville's drawings have on our view of it.

Perhaps more importantly, these drawing show how the

gardens begin to bear the marks of the films events. Various

objects which have been placed within the composition of Mr

Neville's drawings belonged to Mr Herbert, while others mark

out his daughter, causing some to wonder if Mr Neville was

involved in the conspiracy to murder Mr Herbert and consorting

with his married daughter. Again, as in Drowning by Numbers the

landscape is not a passive background, but this time

accusatory. Mrs Herbert's daughter explains how it is that

Neville is able to capture the meaning of these landscapes

without interpreting it:

I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes

an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain

blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

An intelligent man will know more about what he is drawing

30

than what he will see and in the space between knowing and

seeing he will become constrained.61

Here it is shown that there is a dimension to landscape which

cannot be caught with 'neutral eyes' (as the draughtsman

claims to have), be that through the draughtsman's drawings or

the camera. Vernon Gras observes, on the subject of the

draughtsman being killed at the end of the film, that Mr

Neville 'is guilty of coercing nature (house and garden) into

his simplified landscape views'62 It is insinuated in this

that the objectivity of the camera eye must too fail. This

illustrates a meaning to be found in landscapes through its

resonances with distinctive cultural symbolism. The

draughtsman's drawings, almost unconsciously, seem to operate

within a mode of perspective which he cannot, a testament to

the strong cultural intuitions that art, in both its aesthetic

and narrative modes, can summon within us.

Greenaway uses the inevitable associations between the

natural world and artistic representations of it to subvert

the expected aesthetics of his locations at moments of

unprecedented narrative disjuncture. In comparison with

Rivers, the landscapes in these films are abundant with

references, taking on a sense of agency and meaning making

participatory in the narrative as well as functioning as usual

locations. Greenaway’s films differ from Rivers in that there

is no clear single protagonist, no intimate relationship

constructed between landscape and self. Instead, the locations

in front of the camera are used to describe troubling areas of

indistinction which arise in human experience, between life

and death, moral and immoral, fantasy and reality. By61The Draughtman's Contract. Dir. Peter Greenaway. BFI, (2004) 0:47:18 62 Gras, Vernon (1995) p.128

31

interlacing these landscapes with artistic allusions he shows

these how spaces function under the weight of cultural

expectations we receive from fine art.

Physicality of the Landscape - Games, Ritual, Superstition

While Rivers' films heavily emphasise how we interact

with our environment and the personal sense of self and

pleasure that can be gained from moving through these spaces,

Greenaway draws more attention to physical interactions with

landscape which fulfil a social function. Games and

superstitious rituals feature heavily in Drowning by Numbers, and

there are many similarities between them; both have goals,

penalties and physical cues which correspond to metaphysical

rules. In Drowning by Numbers these cues and rules centre around

landscapes. Macfarlane argues that 'Landscapes and nature are

not there simply to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and

into our bodies and minds, complexly affecting our moods, our

sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways - both perplexing

and perforating us.'63 These games and rituals provide cinema,

usually a disembodied, visual medium, with a means of

incorporating this physical dialogue between self and

landscape into its storyline. We see characters participating

with the landscape as a physical space, rather than a

background, and bringing their internal life into them. This

sustained spatial sensitivity in the narrative of Drowning by

Numbers is noted by Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy, who

observe that: 'the plot of Drowning by Numbers is

ritualistically played out in space, much like a chess game

63 Macfarlane, Robert (2012) p.341

32

where the pieces move according to fixed patterns.'64 This is

complimented by frequent narrations from Madgett’s 13 year old

son Smut, who creates sprawling, occultish games which connect

the topology of landscape with that of the narrative, whose

victories and internal semiotics foreshadow the plot to come.

For instance, the game Sheep and Tides:

Sheep are especially sensitive to the exact moment of the turn

of the tide. In this game, nine tethered sheep react, pull on

the stakes, jolt the chairs and rattle the tea-cups. Bets are

taken on the combined sensitivity of any three line of sheep -

read vertically, horizontally or diagonally. Since there are

normally three tide-turns every twenty-four hours, it is

normal practice to take the best of three results. 65

This game echoes several narrative and symbolic elements of

the plot which, at this point in the film, are just being

established. The game, like the film, centres around water,

specifically the ocean in which the next drowning will take

place. The reaction of the sheep, their sensitive relationship

with water and the disruption of objects from domestic

settings to which they are tied, resembles the actions of the

three main protagonists. The use of sheep for this game may be

an allusion to The Billygoat’s Gruff, a fairy tale which the

film mirrors. Even the characters appear to be aware of the

parallel, with Cissie 2 likening Madgett to the troll from the

story.66 As in the film as a whole, the number three is deeply

configured into the physical workings of the game – the lines

of three, three tide turns and best of three bets

64 Elliott, Bridget , and Anthony Purdy (2013) p.28565 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 0:16:55 - 0:17:50 66 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 1:34:36

33

corresponding to the three Cissies, their three murders (of

three husbands) and the three funerals they attend.

The two differences between games and superstitions are

duration and belief. Games, with few exceptions, are something

we participate in for a set period of time. Even an incredibly

long game, such as a narrative based, open world video game,

we stop and start. The game is only ‘in play’ for finite

intervals. In contrast, the ritual acts which respond to

superstition are the result of a belief carried at all times.

Even when the belief is not adhered to, or even consciously

thought of, the ‘rule’ is still ‘in play’. Games also have a

different relationship with reality. While superstitions bring

beliefs and rules into reality, when we play a game we

consciously enter a temporary unreality with different causal

relations between actions. These distinctions are blurred in

Drowning by Numbers, many of Smut’s games boarder upon obsessive

(such as his need to count the leaves on a blackberry tree67)

or have no end such as The Great Death Game:

A great many things are dying very violently all the time. The

best days for violent deaths are Tuesdays. They are yellow-

paint days. Saturdays are second best - or worst. Saturdays

are red-paint days. The Great Death Game is therefore a

contest between red-paint days and yellow-paint days. So far

yellow-paint days are winning by thirty-one corpses to twenty-

nine. Whatever the colour, a violent death is always

celebrated by a firework.68

Smut describes natural processes through the language of

games, putting the inevitable decay and violence he

67 ibid 1:20:30 68 ibid 0:21:42 - 0:22:40

34

experiences in nature into a context he can monitor and

understand. The landscape is tamed and humanised by Smut

bringing his interpretation of its workings into physical

space.

A similar reconfiguration of landscape can be found in

Greenaway’s earlier short film Vertical Features Remake in which

physical spaces are also viewed through the act of game

playing. Here, the overlap of cultural spheres that the

landscape stages is between games and modern art. In a spirit

similar to The Draughtsman's Contract the landscape is shown

through the act of interpretation. However this time it is not

in the form of straightforward artistic depiction, but the

mediation of aesthetic enquiry through film. Vertical Features

Remake is a mockumentary about a film created by the fictional

philosopher Tulse Luper: ‘part magus, part game player […] a

romantically elusive Greenaway alter ego who flits in and out

of a number of early works.’69 Taking place after the original

Vertical Features was lost, the film features four attempts to cut

the recently discovered raw footage and notes on the project

into a short film, each with a different rhythmic

configuration of cuts and musical score based upon Luper’s

notes. The narration describes the film as– ‘a project of

structure and organisation. In this case, the organisation of

a number of images of vertical features.’ 70 This raw footage

consists of rural landscapes with an abundance of verticals by

way of trees, posts, telephone poles, fences and ladders. The

filming takes place within the arbitrary parameters of one of

the grid spaces of an Ordinance Survey map of Great Britain.71

69 Elliott, Bridget , and Anthony Purdy (2013) p.27070 Vertical Features Remake. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Zeitgeist Films, (1978)01:5571 ibid 02:30

35

These features are often overlaid in order to further this

indistinction, for instance, at 4:15-4:22min, we see a post

transforming into a umbellifer plant,72 creating an unsteady

consistency of scale between the two items and further

emphasising their structural similarities despite their usual

differences in size and context.

In keeping with the geometric restrictions established

by his use of the Ordinance Survey map, Luper divides his film

into 121 images, which he diagrams using a grid format of 11

rows and 11 columns. He chooses this numerical pattern for

four reasons. First, 11 is itself two vertical features.

Second, 11 X 11 if rearranged, can create a cross in a box

()which reflects his intended structure of the project.Third, when represented as numerals the number 121 (1 11 1)

can be arranged into the four sides of a square. Lastly, 121

is the same backwards and forwards. Using these four ‘rules’

several artists attempt to recreate Vertical Features. In between

every section there is a disclaimer that the film produced may

not be in line with Tulse Luper's vision of the project, but

instead they hope creating something 'in the spirit of Tulse

Luper's research'. This structural organisation is analogous

to the rules of a game allowing the participants, the artists

recreating his film, to fulfil the criteria for an act which

consists of a Vertical Features remake. This is especially

noticeable during the first two remakes, which consist of

quite literal interpretations of this work. Each use the 11x11

format to refer to the frames and cuts of the film and having

a narrator count over the images. Here the numbering and the

homogeneous imagery of verticals along with the

straightforward rhythm of the editing gives an impression of a

72 ibid

36

location which is wholly contained and explainable according

to human schemes of thought.

The third and most intricate incarnation of the film

arises from the suggestion that the schemes employed in

remakes one and two are less homogeneous than Luper would have

liked. It is claimed that the scheme ought to emphasise the

centre of the project, rather than the end, as the top down

arrangement of the 11x11 would suggest. 73 This time, the

length of the frames alternates between short and long

formations. These cuts gradually become more similar in length

until the middle of the film where their frame length is

identical; from here they return gradually to short and long

formations. The chords used compliment this new pattern by

altering in pitch and the counting voiceover is foregone. At

this point, the landscape seems less at the unyielding whim of

the form it is presented in. It is suggested when introducing

the fourth and final remake that project was originally made

'to demonstrate, among other things that it had changed and

would continue to change without assistance from synthetic

sources.'74 With this in mind, the final remake of Vertical

Features consists of a less rigid, almost indecipherable

structural scheme and it orders its images through thematic

references with sections utilising the same time of year,

ratios of empty space or qualities of light. Here, the greater

freedom of the visual structure allows for the accompanying

piano to be more melodic than it has been in previous

configurations. There is a suggestion in the progression of

these remakes that strictly human and numerical projection

onto the landscape is lessening, so that by the fourth remake

73 Vertical Features Remake (1978) 23:15 - 23:4874 ibid 32:04 - 32:12

37

we see how the landscape itself influences the editing of the

film, since the piece is now arranged according to features of

landscape.

Through these attempts to decipher Tulse Luper’s

numerical rules in the medium of cinema, a geometric

homogeneity emerges between natural, rural and urban spaces.

The manmade faculties of the countryside are brought into the

natural world by being shown besides the trees, the most

abundant of vertical features to be seen. The landscapes

before the camera are realigned into visual patterns and

filmic or auditory visions so rigid and absurd that the

'naturalness' of the outside world - its organic elements of

randomness and disorder that are so often treasured in art -

are shown perfectly through the numbered grids which serve as

Luper's remaining topographical incarnation of the film. In

showing the slow failure of these rules, as each remake uses

fewer of them, the landscape itself becomes the single,

resonate reality of the film. When watching Vertical Features

Remake the viewer and the fictional artists participating in

the project achieve a perception of landscape which is at the

whim of the physicality of landscape itself, rather than

reducing the physical qualities of landscape to our human

perceptions of them.

Just as Rivers brings the physicality of landscape to

screen to portray the sublime, in Greenaway’s films games

bring human perspective into the landscape through the body.

Madgett’s games in Drowning by Numbers express the connections

between characters in a physical space, as we can see in Dead

Man’s Catch, where the order in which the players lose

foreshadows the order of the murders for the rest of the

38

film.75 But Greenaway, unlike Rivers, shows how a group of

people configure themselves through landscape. Water is a

unifying force between the three female protagonists. A

semiotic manoeuvre similar to the existential dimension which

emerges between the landscapes and protagonists of Rivers’

films, but here the transcendence of the three protagonists

comes from their close identification with each other rather

than the singular relationship between a person and their

location which Rivers depicts. This can in part be attributed

to the identical ways in which the women choose to use the

spaces around them – the means of water to dispatch their

husbands, the same location in which they rebuff Madgett’s

advances. A set of rules and repeated actions in keeping with

the film’s aesthetic and narrative resonances with fairytales

- and its structural similarities to a game.

Greenaway describes cinema as a game in which ‘the aim

of the game is to successfully suspend disbelief.’76 In

Greenaway’s films, the games on screen together with this

essential game of cinema transcend the spatial divide between

the audience and the landscape before them on screen. This is

made especially clear in Drowning by Numbers, where the numbers

1-100 appear on screen in ascending order. This motif allows

the viewer, like Smut, to participate in an activity which

blends game playing with adhering to superstitions. When we

count these numbers we abide by the temporary, leisurely rules

of game playing (an activity which will cease along with the

film) but as cinema watchers we also engage in the act of

counting with a sincere search for meaning. It also causes the

viewer to become attentive of the landscape of the film since

75 Drowning by Numbers (1988) 0:24:50 - 0:27:2976 Greenaway, Peter (1989) p.88

39

the position of these numbers is often obscure, on tents,

stamps, livestock, on cross country joggers, even painted on

insects. Like our game players on screen, we become attentive

to our landscape in the entangled pursuit of leisure and

meaning. In Greenaway’s films games are used in a symbolic

narrative capacity, but more importantly describe the

landscape, its essential processes and to draw attention to

how we relate to them as humans. Aspects of landscapes which

draw upon cultural functions, be that artistic or social, are

depicted in order to be cast into doubt. These films show how

our human - that is to say, cultural and apparently inanimal -

experience of landscape is built into even our most direct

perceptions of the natural world.

40

Chapter Three – Landscapes and Conflict

The films of Ben Wheatley will be discussed here to explore

how the environment can be used to demonstrate areas of

indeterminacy in British politics, particularly with regards

to the subject of war. As such, thresholds between man and

beast, individual and state, home and wilderness become

blurred. Particular attention will be drawn to how these films

explore these tensions within the horror film genre. The ideas

of political philosopher Giorgio Agamben will be used to

explore how Wheatley’s characters fall outside the political

systems and how this area of indistinction is depicted through

their relationships with landscape.

Politics as Intervention between Body and Landscape

In Ben Wheatley’s films Kill List and A Field in England we

encounter characters who define themselves against the

landscape, rather than seeing themselves as part of it either

as an individual or identifying with shared social conceptions

of their environment. Our protagonists hold an analogous

political position to Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer, or

sacred man, ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed.'77 Agamben does

not clearly define what it meant by sacrifice in a modern

context, but if we take its usual definition as slaughter as

an offering to a god or deity,78 under the rule of a secular

77 Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Stanford, Caliornia: Stanford University Press (1998) p.878 "sacrifice, n." Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, (Accessed: 18 July 2014) <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/169571?rskey=WohrEA&result=1>.

41

sovereign we may call it a politically or ritualistically

meaningful death. The homo sacer represents a body reduced to

bare life – the life excluded from politics which is hence

vulnerable to sovereign violence. This sovereign is the

political power which controls the right to life and death of

its subjects, and thus ‘presupposes itself as the state of

nature.'79 This is the power that a king or president has over

its people, one which is paradoxically both inside and outside

the juridical order, since it can produce laws which it is

itself outside of. It possesses troubling power over bare

life, since ‘Sovereign violence opens a zone of indistinction

between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and

law.'80 The interaction between these political roles, and how

they have changed over time, are dramatised in Wheatley’s

films through interactions with landscape as a visual

signifier for the state of nature.

The protagonists of these films are men who have ceased

to be political beings – who are reduced, in the face of

sovereign power, to bare life. But the relationship between

this sovereign power and the homo sacer differs between these

historical periods. Between the events A Field in England (set

between 1642–1651, the English Civil War) and Kill List (2011, the

aftermath of the Iraq War) the power to control bare life has

been established in politics. Agamben writes that, ‘The first

recording of bare life as the new political subject is already

implicit in the document that is generally placed at the

foundation of modern democracy: the 1679 writ of habeas

corpus.’81 This document brought the body corpus, rather than

the man into democracy, thus shifting 'the center of its79 Agamben, Giorgio (1998) p.4180 ibid p.6481 Agamben, Giorgio (1998) p.123

42

battle against absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the

citizen, but zoē – the bare, anonymous life that is as such

taken into the sovereign ban.'82 Wheatley's films depict these

changes in the political configurations between body and

citizen by showing its protagonists reforming connections to

their landscapes - the remnants of an apolitical state of

nature - which aids them in escaping the authority of

sovereign power. But this escape is complicated by both of

these spaces - the field and the forest in Kill List - functioning

as wildernesses in a political and geographic sense; they are

marginally accessible areas, outside of the reach of human

influence. This facilitates the actions of our antagonists -

the cult in Kill List and O'Neil in A Field in England - both of which

are portrayed as humans with a close affinity with animality.

While the antagonists of these films willingly take

on animal attributes, our protagonists find themselves forced

into a position where they enter a problematic, bestial status

between man and animal. This is especially the true in Kill List,

where Jay and Gal have served as snipers, but now work as hit

men. As criminals they are located within the realms of

biopolitics, by deviating from law they have forsaken certain

freedoms which now allow the law to control aspects of their

natural life. In taking on the roles of soldier and criminal

they have experienced the status of homo sacer in two different

ways - through the biopolitical reach of the military and the

bandit status as perpetrators of homicide. As soldiers their

bare life has been controlled by compliance with political

powers, but now as criminals their bodies under complete

control of the law as a result of deviation from it. On the

status of the criminal Agamben writes:

82 Ibid p.124

43

He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the

law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it,

that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life

and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is

literally not possible to say whether the one who has been

banned is outside or inside the juridical order.83

Jay and Gal’s current roles as hit men seem to be horrific

extensions of their political condition as soldiers. Now not

only are they killing for their livelihood and death, but

they are also subjects of a political ban, with their bodies

both at the mercy of law while being unable to appeal to it.

Thresholds Between Man and Beast

Kill List presents the dark path that Jay unknowingly treads

in reclaiming this sacrificial status. The film follows Jay

eight months after an unspecified disastrous mission in Kiev.

His partner from this mission, Gal, tells Jay about a

lucrative job as a hit man which Jay’s wife, Shel, convinces

him to take. Kiev is an unseen space – referred to in such a

way which transforms the location into an event, a similar

transformation as when Ben Rivers emphasises his landscapes

turning into temporal moments through the medium of film. But

here, the change takes place because the location is off

camera. This also allows for there to be some ambiguity about

what the mission in Kiev was. It is unknown whether it was a

military or criminal mission for Jay and Gal, blending further

their politically ostracised statuses as soldier and murderer.83 Agamben, Giorgio (1998) pp.28-29

44

During Kill List Wheatley consistently draws attention to the

landscape in which these events take place. From the opening

minutes of the film there are frequent establishing shots of

British agricultural scenery.84 These increase as Jay retreats

into the forest for his final kill. Meanwhile sinister things

appear in Jay's garden, a rabbit so mangled it's barely

recognisable, which the couple initially blame on their cat.

Jay defiantly cooks and eats it, attesting to some kind of

power over his surroundings and property while also mirroring

the final meal; the rabbit that Gal catches in the woods

towards the end of the film.85 Shel explains to their son,

'Daddy thinks the cat brings us little presents. The cat

doesn't think we eat enough in this house. I think the cat

just likes killing rabbits.'86 This exchange corresponds to

the idea that Jay, over the course of the contract, comes to

kill with a kind of animalistic pleasure, rather than purely

as a means to provide for his family as earlier scenes

suggest. Later the cat is found hanging dead off of the

threshold of the house itself. This is an alarming location

for such gory, threatening events to take place. Being outside

and yet overtly domestic private property the garden acts as

part of the home and part of nature. It is, despite its

location, somewhat inside in terms of our configuration of the

home. These dead animals are left gradually closer to the

house, the family unit, reflecting how the audience can see

death approaching Jay and his family, a danger that Jay spends

most of the film in denial of. It is also in the garden that

one of the film's most horrific events is foreshadowed, as Jay

playfully jousts with his wife and son, they fall to the84 Kill List. Dir. Ben Wheatley, Film Four (2011) 0:02:3385 Kill List (2011) 0:22:51 - 0:24:3086 ibid 0:24:34

45

ground in a manner resembling the final moments of the film.

Again, as host to these ominous events amongst playful

fighting between Jay and Gal, the garden acts as a mediatory

between Jay’s domestic world and the violence he encounters in

the forest, where these fears and dangers are enacted on a

minute scale.

The couple invite Gal and his new girlfriend, Fiona, to

the house for dinner. Jay and Shel have been having money

troubles and constantly erupt into arguments. These disputes

are far more tense than the moment when Gal reveals the

profession the two of them share by convincing Jay to take an

assassination job with him. Other aspects of this scene also

overshadow what would usually be a dramatic reveal; Fiona goes

to the bathroom, marks the mirror with an unusual sign and

takes some bloody tissue left from Jay shaving.87 This moment

is left unexplained but is referred to visually and

thematically throughout the film in moments which call into

question Jay's control over his body and self-perception. This

is notably the case when Jay and Gal sign the contract to

commit the three murders. They meet in a hotel, a rainbow

arches above their car as they park.88 From here on in, the

landscape is only shot for extended periods of time by night.

Inside they meet their client, an old man, who takes them to

a private room. The contractor cuts his own palm and Jay's and

lets the blood mingle on the page in lieu of a signature. He

reveals that he knows about Kiev: 'It's important to learn

from one's mistakes, I always find.'89 This moment embodies

the power that the contractor and his men have over Jay’s

physical and internal existence, a power which replicates87 Kill List (2011)0:19:49 - 0:20:3588 ibid 0:26:22 89 ibid 0:27:14 - 0:28-12

46

their tie to the military. This control that the contractor

has over Jay is also reflected in the structure of the film,

which now centres around these murders, titling each section

after the victims - “The Priest" "The Librarian" and "The MP".

Film critic Roger Ebert notes that ' These portentous titles,

as large as the frame can contain, seem to announce a quasi-

ritualistic murder agenda'90 Here, these figures seem to

represent trusted spheres of society which have recently come

under scrutiny - organised religion, information security and

politics – suggesting, especially in light of the film’s

finale as will be discussed, that Jay’s contractor may have

influence over these areas.

With each assassination on the list there are two

alarming and accelerating phenomena. First, their victims seem

to recognise Jay - though he does not know them - and thank

him has they die at his hands. The priest simply mutters

'thank you' and goes to his grave smiling.91 Secondly, Jay

becomes increasingly violent, indulging in extreme physical

violence whenever Gal is absent. The Librarian, who Jay is

alone with for much longer, asks 'Does [Gal] know who you

are?' before going on to thank Jay, saying he was glad to have

met him. 92 Though he continues to cry out in pain, the

librarian says that he understands why Jay needs to hurt him,

and continues to thank him as Jay takes a hammer, a horribly

domestic object, and smashes his hands and knees, eventually

killing him with a blow to the back of the head. 93 There is a

growing difference between how Jay and Gal conduct these jobs.

90 Ebert, Roger. "Kill List Movie Review (2012)." Roger Ebert. 14 Mar. 2012. (Accessed: 19 July 2014) <http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kill-list-2012>.91 Kill List (2011) 0:39:01 - 0:39:3892 Ibid 0:48:09 - 0:48:5193 ibid 0:49:10 - 0:49:59

47

Jay is becoming more animal than Gal. Wheatley notes that 'In

the business sense, Jay is the asset and Gal is almost the

trainer. It’s like an owner watching a Rottweiler, this hardly

trained creature.'94 This alarming violence is accentuated by

the way the scene if filmed. Unusually the camera does not cut

away at the moment of impact, instead lingering upon the

librarian’s body parts as they twist and break. Wheatley

breaks cinematic language in order to bring brutality to

screen. Here, not only is the gore disconcerting but the

unflinching camerawork aligns the viewer’s perspective of the

scene with that of Jay and his victim. By showing this moment

as one in which both Jay and his victim are willing to be

fully present, fully aware of the atrocities taking place,

Wheatley communicates the increasingly inhuman behaviour of

both Jay and his targets.

After subtly transitioning from a kitchen sink drama to

a crime thriller between the first and second acts, in the

final act there is an abrupt tonal shift as Jay and Gal

retreat into the woods to hunt their final victim, the M.P.

The forest is a political wilderness of sorts, as suggested by

the character of the man who owns the land – The M.P. - who

Jay and Gal assume is corrupt and comment upon the economic

disparity between him and them.95 It is here that the symbolic

configurations of natural spaces becomes important. Here, Kill

List begins to explicitly resemble a horror film. As the two

camp outside of the M.P.'s house that night Jay sees a

procession of chanting, masked people. A woman blinded by a

94 Harley, David, Michael Smiley, and Ben Wheatley. "SXSW ’11: INTERVIEW: ‘Kill List’ Director Ben Wheatley." Bloody Disgusting. 18Mar. 2011. (Accessed: 29 June 2014) <http://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/23858/sxsw-11-interview-kill-list-director-ben-wheatley/>.95 Kill List (2011) 1:13:02 - 1:13:25

48

crown of thorns walks among them, and the procession

culminates with the sacrifice of a woman in a robe of 20 pound

notes, who appears to willingly hang herself.96 When we

encounter the cult in the forest in the third act of the film,

it is as though our protagonists once again face the figures

which they have been trying to annihilate. It has facilities

of all three roles - religion, the cataloguing of information

through surveillance (suggested by the librarian possessing a

file on Jay and Gal) and the insinuations that they may have

political power. As a horror film Kill List presents fears first

and foremost. That we find these mistrusted roles in the

forest suggests that the promise of escaping from society into

nature is false, that there are aspects of humanity which are

inescapable and are perhaps more evident when taken outside of

the corrupt social and political systems we are used to.

As previously noted, Wheatley has kept landscapes

present throughout the film by his use of rural establishing

shots, domestic outdoor locations and scenic flourishes. But

it is in the forest that the landscape becomes explicitly

entwined into the films aesthetic and philosophical direction.

The forest is shot in darkness and using rapid cuts,

preventing the viewer, much like Jay and Gal, from building a

clear picture of its size and shape. This gives it the

labyrinthine quality of a space which is at once

claustrophobic and enormous. Jay fires at the cult, against

Gal's advice, and they are pursued.97 The cultists seem

disturbingly untroubled by the experience of a violence death,

since two of their members have welcomed their death at Jay’s

hands. Now the cultists run straight towards Jay as he starts

96 ibid 1:15:23 - 1:18:3697 ibid 1:18:27

49

shooting, even though most of them are unarmed or even naked.

They are fearless of death, which combined with their

nakedness produces a troubling creature which while quite

clearly human is also animal. Heidegger describes how for the

Dasein, 'Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be

understood existentially.'98 But in the case of the cult we

never learn about their beliefs, so from this brief appearance

on camera these people seem to lack the existential

relationship that humans have with death. They do not, as

Heidegger claims the Dasein does, visibly approach death with

ontological awareness. Instead, they simply 'perish', that is,

come to an end biologically.99 This is further emphasised by

the swift, casual way in which Jay dispatches of them, and

their consistently non-verbal shrieking and grunting. As with

Ben Rivers’ films, wordlessness is aligned with nature, but

here to the effect of alienating the audience from it, rather

than portraying man in peaceful, unspeaking existence with the

environment.

The cult chase the pair into a network of tunnels, whose

closed, winding structure reflects the atmosphere of the

forest. They disembowel Gal who Jay then has to kill, with Gal

thanking him for putting him out of his misery, his last words

ominously resembling those of the cult members. Jay goes to

the cottage where his family have been hiding, but the cult

catch him. A final title appears on screen, "The Hunchback".

They reopen the wound on his left hand, put knife in his right

and put him in a wicker mask. Jay then faces the hunchback,

also armed with a knife. Jay stabs the hunchback repeatedly,

and once it falls to the floor the cultists applaud. The98 Heidegger, Martin. Being and time. 1962. Reprint. Oxford: Blackwell (2009) p.28499 Kill List (2011) p.291

50

cultists remove their masks. Fiona is there alongside other

minor characters including Jay's contractor. Her comment

during the dinner party scene where she refers to her

profession as 'human resources'100 becomes an insinuation of

her involvement with selecting Jay for this role, and a dark

nod towards how the cult values human life. The hunchback is

revealed to be his wife with his son strapped to her back.

She gives a short, hysterical laugh as Jay looks on in

disbelief. He stares on as the contractor places a wicker

crown upon his head. He stands bewildered amongst the drumming

and applause before the film ends, cutting first to the crude

symbol which Fiona carved upon his mirror.

Previously, before the final name on the list, Jay and

Gal met with their client to negotiate a way out of the

contract. He claims to see them for what they are, as 'cogs'.

When they ask what's going on he answers 'reconstruction' and

encourages them to 'keep turning.'101 In light of the film's

final scene, it seems that the contractor was referring to the

ritual Jay finally participates in, though other events

preceding it - such as the other assassinations or the marking

of Jay's hand - may be part of the same process. It is unclear

what it is exactly that Jay is being 'reconstructed' into.

Does the cult see him as a deity, a king or an instrument of

evil? The only clear outcome of the ritual is that it places

Jay on a similar threshold between man and animal that the

cult are shown to occupy. He is not animalised in the sense

that he becomes aware of his affinity with his animal

attributes; he is a chimera-like beast, a figure which takes

associations from both categories in order to produce

100 ibid 0:11:31101 ibid 1:07:06- 1:07:24

51

something both unhuman and inanimal. By beginning to include

animality again, Jay becomes occupies a strange threshold

which Agamben associates with the bandit:

Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources underline the bandits liminal

status by defining him as a wolf-man [...] What had to remain

in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human

and animal, divided between the forest and the city – the

werewolf – is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man

who has been banned from the city. [...] the life of the

bandit, like that of the sacred man [homo sacer], is not a

piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the

city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of

passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and

inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup

garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and

who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to

neither.102

By setting the finale of Kill List in the forest, Wheatley

has an ideal location in which to draw up a topographical

rendering of Jay's political and social status. He has

forsaken the law, lost his family and his place in urban life

and yet has not found replacements for these things in the

cult, as the other members seem to have. The pagan gloss of

the cult suggests worship, something divine, therefore outside

of the realm of law, but Jay is excluded from that too. Now,

having broken many laws, social taboos and having lost

everything which ties him to humanity, Jay exists as both man

and beast while belonging to neither category. Kill List is unique

in this thesis as it uses landscapes to primarily represent

102 Agamben, Giorgio (1998) p.105

52

fears - quaint, idyllic and habitable spaces seem to be filmed

purely for the purpose of their own symbolic 'reconstruction'

in the final act. The forest is a space in which the question

of what makes us human is pondered with nightmarish brutality.

Warner observes that ‘In today's myths of human nature, the

warrior and the wild creature, the child and the beast don't

stand at opposite ends, but are intertwined, continuous,

inseparable.'103 Kill List is not a horror story because it shows a

warrior becoming a wild creature, but because it shows the

struggle Jay goes through to maintain these two sides.

"Open up and let the devil in": The Supernatural in Political

Ontology

Ben Wheatley's next film further accentuates this

relationship between political power and animality, this time

more explicitly focusing on how they are described through the

supernatural. A Field in England follows a small party of men who

abandon a battle in the English Civil War and escape through

an overgrown field. They are led by a man, Cutler, who

conjures an outlawed Irishman in the field. From here,

Whitehead, our protagonist, and two other deserters are forced

into work by the pair digging for a treasure that they claim

is buried under the field. Wheatley has referred to A Field in

England as an 'unofficial prequel' to Kill List, since it

dramatises political changes made during the English Civil War

which go on to affect Wheatley's modern narratives.104 It is

103 Warner, Marina (1994) p.49104 Wheatley, Ben, and Michael Bonner. ""The blood in the earth": an interview with A Field In England director Ben Wheatley." Uncut. (Accessed: 2 Aug. 2014) <http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/the-view-from-here/the-blood-in-the-earth>

53

here that the banking and financing systems which constantly

occupy the worries of our characters in Kill List are first

introduced. Much like Kiev in Kill List, the Civil War itself

takes place entirely outside the mise en scene of A Field in England.

As discussed in Chapter One, the mechanics of cinema translate

spaces into time by showing locations as moments. In a similar

way these locations become almost metonyms for duration. Kiev

and the Civil War are referred to as an event or period rather

than physical locations. By confining these violent periods of

time to unseen locations, they overshadow the narrative

through dialogue alone, their verbal signifiers coming to

wholly represent them. These films also share the use of

particular landscapes as a place outside of the reach of law

and other social realities. The forest and the field both

provide locations in which the influence of law is called into

question.

But the realities from which our characters are escaping

differ. In Kill List the supernatural is portrayed ambiguously.

The film can neatly be explained by accepting that the cult

has supernatural influence and that Jay is undergoing a true

'reconstruction', but these events are not inexplicable if we

choose to reject the existence of magic. For instance, both

the field and the forest in Kill List are locations with

indistinct boundaries. But while the forest's contradictory

shape is illusionary, the field has more explicit spatial

abnormalities, appearing to trap its occupants by continuously

looping back on itself as they try to escape.105 While watching

A Field in England we accept the supernatural as part of the

existing political ideology since it is as visible for our

audience as it is for the characters on screen. This

105 A Field in England. Dir. Ben Wheatley. Film Four (2013) 0:03:06

54

ideological sympathy is complimented by a merging the artistic

language of the time with cinematic language. Significant

scenes begin with a tableau of the characters standing still

in a two dimensional formation, resembling medieval woodcuts.

The time period of the English Civil War was in part picked

because it was a time where magic as a threshold between

religion and science was changing. Wheatley describes how

during this period:

Magic became science effectively [...] The Puritans were trying

to iron paganism and magic out of Catholicism. Splitting up and

melding ideas. There are two really important periods in British

history where we actually made a difference to the world – the

civil war and the industrial revolution – and I think at that

moment in England, anything could have happened. Everyone was

starving, and they were basically killing God, because they were

killing the king, God's representative.106

The field acts as a space in which these changes from the

Civil War can be dramatised. Characters make use of both magic

and rationalism. For instance, O'Neil owns a scrying mirror (a

pitch black instrument which Whitehead explains is used for

divination) presumably for its occult value but also uses it

for practical purposes, using its reflection to spy on the

other three men, so that he might identify Whitehead without

Whitehead seeing his face. 107

106 Godfrey, Alex, and Ben Wheatley . "Ben Wheatley: master of the macabre." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 June 2013. (Accessed: 13 June 2014) <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jun/22/ben-wheatley-field-in-england>.107 A Field in England (2013) 0:31:25 - 0:32:14

55

The field functions as a pastoral location, as a

cultivated space, and a wilderness due to its spatial

abnormalities which make it inescapable. The field, like the

forest, embodies this relationship with the law by literally

taking its characters beyond these physical parameters. They

are placed outside the reach of law while playing out its

consequences, providing a location for us to experience the

indistinction between nature and politics. The impotency of

law is demonstrated through Whitehead - who has been tasked

with finding O'Neil - as he attempts exert the power of the

law and place O'Neil under arrest for theft, 'in the presence

of merciful God', hoping that O'Neil will comply 'as a good

Christian.'108 Meanwhile O'Neil exploits the political

indeterminacy of the situation, telling Whitehead, upon

hearing that his master's mercenary is dead, 'then your arrest

is academic, is it not?' 109 Suggesting he will comply neither

with the will of God or the King, God’s representative. By

determining himself the conditions of his arrest O'Neil takes

on the role of the sovereign. Agamben describes how 'The state

of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides

of a single topological process [...] and the sovereign power

is this very impossibility of distinguishing between outside

and inside, nature and exception.'110 The supernatural

dimension that the field exists in resonates with both the

state of nature - since the men are outside of human society -

and the state of exception, for they are excluded from the

reach of law and the Civil War.

Particular attention is drawn to the field as a living

entity. There are frequent close ups of its insects and108 ibid 0:32:52109 ibid 0:34:27110 Agamben, Giorgio (1998) p.37

56

plants, the mushrooms which sustain the troop and account for

Whitehead's eventual retribution. The opening credits are

shown against a long pan across the field at ground level,

drawing us from the beginning into the literal earth of the

field.111 Unlike the opening of A Spell to Ward off Darkness, which

shows the landscape from a human perspective, this opening

shows the field to have a use beyond human consumption such as

agriculture and land ownership since it retains a value

outside of these human conceptions. On the formation of the

wilderness ecocritic Greg Garrard observes that '[a]griculture

becomes both the cause and the symptom of an ancient

alienation from the earth that monotheistic religion and

modern science then competed.'112 This agricultural element of

the landscape feeds into our conception of the field as having

a biosphere outside of the centre of human life. That is,

while the field exists with humans it does not exist for

humans. This alienation is explored in A Field in England through

the portrayal of the field as an entity which is indifferent

to human life, and thus as a place (corresponding symbolically

with the event of the Civil War) in which the sovereignty over

human life may be justly fought or debated, as our characters

do.

The bandit figure that Jay resembles in Kill List is also

found in Whitehead. He, like Jay, embodies what Agamben

characterises as ‘a zone of indistinction between the human

and the animal, a werewolf, a man who is transformed into a

wolf and a wolf who is transformed into a man – in other

words, a bandit, a homo sacer.'113 These three overlapping

categories – the outlaw, the animal-man and homo sacer are111 A Field in England (2013) 0:03:28112 Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge (2004) p.60113 Agamben, Giorgio (1998) p.106

57

embodied by Whitehead over the course of the film. First, he

finds the field by running from battle, his cowardice putting

him outside of the law. While in the field his physical body

becomes controlled by O'Neil, a contender for the next king of

England. Whitehead is tortured, used to divine hidden treasure

and has runes taken from his body – showing that the harm upon

his body which was previously being inflicted by the war is

still present outside of the law. Only now, outside of the

warzone, his death no longer has sacramental value to an

ideology. He seems at this point to embody the subhuman

category which the indistinction between man and animal

produces.

Whitehead uses this ambiguous status, as Jay does in Kill

List, to exact violence. He eats psilocybin mushrooms from the

fairy ring and plans to kill O'Neil, believing that he is able

to transform his body, 'I shall pray for more legs and arms to

greater appreciate the many natural intrigues and wonders that

play out below us.'114 By taking on the liminal status of the

bandit, the animal-man, Whitehead strengthens his connection

with his landscape and draws political conviction from it.

Believing himself to have taken on these qualities, and

perhaps connecting to the mysterious still-to-be-found

treasure buried in the field, Whitehead defeats his adversary

shooting O'Neil in the back of the head and exclaims 'The

coward is here.'115 During this sequence the cinematography

makes use of fast cutting, an editing process where brief

shots are cut together consecutively, here lasting for as

little as a fraction of a second.116 Combined with the black

and white film, this creates moments where two visually114 A Field in England (2013) 1:12:29115 ibid 1:21:55116 ibid 1:08:10 - 1:10:36

58

distinct moving images are viewed at once, creating illusions

as the shots rapidly change between the two streams of video.

A similar audio effect is achieved with whispered over-dubbing

as the characters battle against tempestuous winds creating

disjuncture between the image of an open space and close,

clear audio. These editing techniques bring Whitehead’s

internal psychedelic experience into the landscape of the

film, again creating a supernatural reality. Here, Whitehead’s

personal narrative arc of transcending his cowardice also

serves as a metaphor for the social reordering which took

place during the Civil War when the power of the sovereign was

challenged.

The extent of this power is illustrated in an

excruciating scene in which O’Neil leads Whitehead to a tent

and, following agonising minutes of screaming, causes him to

emerge with a demonic grim and races towards the treasure in

the field. He then conjures runes from Whitehead's stomach by

making him drink ordinary liquor while chanting: 'open up and

let the devil in.'117 These supernatural moments resemble the

biopolitical power that the sovereign possesses since

Whitehead's body and actions are put under the control of

O'Neil. Since these instances of unexplainable magic exist in

A Field in England the references to psychedelic mushrooms are

strange since the 'trip' sequence of third act in which

Whitehead eats them and kill's O'Neil could easily have fit

into the mystical ontology of the film as a whole. The

mushrooms are used alongside the mystic reality for several

reasons. It allows for some ambiguity with regards to the

film's ontology, giving us an additional, though dull and

somewhat inconsistent, interpretation that the characters

117 ibid 0:46:50

59

experiences were hallucinations. There is also a prominence of

mushrooms in British folklore, such as the fairy ring, a myth

alluded to when they originally summon O'Neil into the field

by pulling from the earth within a mushroom ring. More

importantly, it ties the political shifts within the

characters (and, metonymically, England as a whole) to the

landscape. Whitehead himself seems to be aware of this. Before

consuming the mushrooms O'Neil hunts him, telling him that he

cannot escape the field. Whitehead from his hiding place

amongst the grass replies: 'Then I shall become it! I will

consume all the ill fortune that you are set to unleash. I

will chew up all the selfish, scheming ill intensions that men

like you force upon men like me and bury it in the stomach of

this place.'118 This moment melds together these intersecting

spheres of power - the political and physical (or animal). In

Whitehead aligning his attempt to destroy O'Neil - the

sovereign power who acts within both spheres - with the

symbolic consumption of the earth itself. The mushrooms as

symbols, though not mystical in themselves, have a strong

folkloric tie and come to represent the supernatural by

imbuing power through the natural landscape.

The mysterious treasure in the field - or our

character’s ideas of what it might be - is analogous with this

depiction of landscape as a source of political change. What

the treasure is is never fully disclosed. When they dig at the

spot which O’Neil has divined through controlling Whitehead,

they discover a coffin full of bones.119 This may be the

treasure, a relic hinting at the bloody, cyclical history

taking place within the British landscape. But Cutler

118 A Field in England (2013) 1:05:05 - 1:05:36119 ibid 1:05:44

60

believes there to be no treasure, while Whitehead is keen to

characterise it as the friendship formed between Whitehead,

Friend and Jacob,120 which is emphasised by the film’s closing

shot of the three standing in line, looking out upon the

battleground together.121 Though the treasure itself remains

undefined, its affiliation with the earth conveys a clear

notion of the role of the British landscape in our character's

conception of what it means to be a subject of that land, and

thus becomes the filmic signifier for this idea.

In Wheatley’s films war and landscapes are spatial

renderings of political ideas. Like Rivers his films

demonstrate ways in which people come to know themselves

through these spaces; but Wheatley, in directing horror film,

chooses to examine darker qualities of the human condition.

Both of these films play upon the fear that there is

something hidden in the environment - buried under the field

in A Field in England or lurking in the forest in Kill List - to

explore a fear that excessive political power and the state of

nature may share similar violent realities. These locations

also represent a tension between the desire to escape the

control of political power and the fear of indifferent

brutality of nature – a tension navigated at a great cost to

our protagonists. This is most strongly suggested by the fact

that the antagonists, the cult and O’Neil, thrive in both

conditions, something which is portrayed alongside

supernatural power.

120 ibid 1:20:04 121 ibid 1:26:32

61

Conclusions

Though these films use landscapes to explore similar

concerns, the manner in which these are used differs. The

environment is the central concern of Rivers' films. He uses

ambiguous, low exposition camerawork to capture it in a manner

as far removed from our anthrocentric artistic language as

possible, never losing sight of these spaces as physical

realities. While Greenaway shares a fascination with

landscape, its role in his films is explicitly symbolic.

Greenaway alludes to other works and activities which involve

the environment to depict an 'English landscape that is

recognisable but dramatised - dramatised in the way that a

child might remember it.'122 This creates spaces which are

neither straightforward realities nor wholly fictionalised,

they are landscapes seen as only human eyes can. The use of

landscapes in Wheatley's films is similar in that it is

overtly metaphorical, but here the environment captures

anxieties concerning our experience of nature by symbolically

aligning landscapes with the supernatural. The cinematic path

which guides us through landscape in Rivers’ film is a

disruptive device in Wheatley’s, where fast cutting and

distorted editing create places which the human brain cannot

process, creating environments imbued with spatial

abnormalities and hidden evils. In his films the protagonists

battle their spaces as much as their enemies.

Throughout these films landscapes are used to explore

realms of indistinction in our understanding of human

experience - between creature and habitat, game and belief,

inside and outside, self and society, man and animal. These122 Greenaway, Peter (1989) p.10

62

directors use spaces which parallel the ambiguity of these

categories, creating landscapes which act as topographical

renderings of our uncertainty.

63

Appendix

Figure 1

Arthur Rackham, Adrift [Drawing - Colour Lithograph]Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham: his life and work. London: Heinemann (1960) p.104

64

Figure 2

65

Arthur Rackham, he would sit on a wet rock and fish all day [Drawing - Colour Lithograph]Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham: his life and work. London: Heinemann (1960) p.63

Figure 3

Arthur Rackham, Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm? [Drawing- Colour Lithograph]Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham: his life and work. London: Heinemann (1960) p.81

66

Figure 4

William Dyce, Pegwell Bay [Oil on Canvass] Tate, London (1858) <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dyce-pegwell-bay-kent-a-recollection-of-october-5th-1858-n01407>

67

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Filmography

A Field in England. Dir. Ben Wheatley. Film Four, 2013.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness . Dir. Ben Rivers. Rouge

International, 2013. Directed with Ben Russell

The Draughtman's Contract. Dir. Peter Greenaway. BFI, 1982.

Drowning by numbers. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Film Four

International, 1988.

Kill List. Dir. Ben Wheatley. Film Four, 2011.

Two Years at Sea. Dir. Ben Rivers. The Cinema Guild, 2012.

Vertical Features Remake. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Zeitgeist Films,

1978.

71