The notion of landscape is a complex one, but it has been central to the art and artistry of the cinema. After all, what is the French New Wave without Paris? What are the films of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee without New York? Cinema and Landscape frames contemporary film landscapes across the world, in an exploration of screen aesthetics and national ideology, film form and cultural geography, cinematic representation and the human environment. Written by well-known cinema scholars, this volume both extends the existing field of film studies and stakes claims to overlapping, contested territories in the humanities and social sciences.

Landscape is everywhere in film, but it has been largely overlooked in theory and criticism. This volume of new work will address fundamental questions: What kind of landscape is cinematic landscape? How is cinematic landscape different from landscape painting? How is landscape deployed in the work of such filmmakers as Greenaway, Rossellini, or Antonioni, to name just three? What are differences between the use of landscape in Western filmmaking and in the work of Middle Eastern and Asian filmmakers? How is cinematic landscape related to the idea of a national cinema and questions of identity. The first collection on the idea of landscape and film, this volume will present an impressive international cast of contributors, among them Jacques Aumont, Tom Conley, David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, Peter Rist, and Antonio Costa.

A distinguished group of scholars here probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature in a discussion enriched with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. Exploring the interrelation among nature, beauty and art, they show that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature. The distinction and relation between art and nature are questioned, and the volume culminates in philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and appreciation in aesthetics.

On Chinese and Japanese art and cinema.

This study seeks to understand the form of cinematic space referred to as 'the landscape of the mind,' in which natural, outdoor settings serve as outward manifestations of characters' inner subjective states.

Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers’ contemplations of “Heimat”—a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity—it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. In its emphasis on rootedness and homogeneity Heimat seemed to challenge the validity and significance of Jewish emancipation. Several acculturation-seeking Jewish artists and intellectuals, however, endeavored to conceive a notion of Heimat that would rather substantiate their belonging. This book considers Jewish filmmakers’ contribution to this endeavor. It shows how they devised the landscapes of the German “Homeland” as Jews, namely, as acculturated “outsiders within.” Through appropriation of generic Heimat imagery, the films discussed in the book integrate criticism of national chauvinism into German mainstream culture from World War I to the Cold War. Consequently, these Jewish filmmakers anticipated the anti-Heimat film of the ensuing decades, and functioned as an uncredited inspiration for the critical New German Cinema.

Although in recent years, the entire world has been increasingly concerned with the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian relationship, there are few truly reliable sources of information regarding Palestinian society and culture, either concerning its relationship with Israeli society, its position between east and west or its stances in times of war and peace. One of the best sources for understanding Palestinian culture is its cinema which has devoted itself to serving the national struggle. In this book, two scholars--an Israeli and a Palestinian--in a rare and welcome collaboration, follow the development of Palestinian cinema, commenting on its response to political and social transformations. They discover that the more the social, political and economic conditions worsen and chaos and pain prevail, the more Palestinian cinema becomes involved with the national struggle. As expected, Palestinian cinema has unfolded its national narrative against the Israeli narrative, which tried to silence it.