A few days after my mother died, my dad remarked: “She used to be all over the place, and suddenly she’s nowhere.” This is a commonplace, if bewildering, experience, as the places we inhabit or revisit tend to strike us as much for what is physically present before us as for what is palpably absent, no longer there to be seen, yet felt. This sensation also provides a point of entry into the conception of landscape and crime that informs the present study. Rather than promoting ideas of rootedness and belonging, inspiring community by tying a people to a place, landscape will be considered here as a means for reckoning with disappearances, with what has passed and vanished but nonetheless impinges on the present.

One of the primal scenes of landscape painting marks such an encounter: the discovery of a tomb in Arcadia painted by Nicolas Poussin in the late 1630s from Virgil’s Eclogues where a small group of shepherds have gathered around a gravestone to study the Latin inscription “Et in Arcadia ego ”—“I too once lived in Arcadia,” or, “I, death, am also in Arcadia” (Fig. 1.1). Following art historian Christopher S. Wood , a notion of disappearance is endemic to the novel species of Western art that came into prominence sometime in the sixteenth century when the pictorial depiction of scenery began to gain autonomy as an artistic enterprise in its own right. “These pictures tell no stories,” Wood asserts, “[i]nstead, they look like the settings for missing stories.” ¹ Disappearance is also at the heart of the reinvention of landscape as a key pursuit of high modernism. Paul Cézanne , who during the last thirty years of his life made endless studies of the rockface of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Southern France, once remarked to a fellow painter: “You will have to hurry if you want to see anything. Everything is disappearing.” ² Turning to the alienated landscapes of postwar cinema, Cézanne’s credo is echoed in a brief exchange from Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975): “People disappear every day”/“Every time they leave the room.” In Antonioni’s films, this vanishing act is performed in moments of temps morte , of dead or inert time where the camera lingers on the locations long after the characters have exited the frame, sometimes never to return. Often, these desolate sites—the volcanic island in L’avventura (1960), Maryon Park in Blow-Up (1967), the Spanish courtyard in The Passenger—mark the scene of a crime that may or may not have taken place. Or, conversely, of a crime yet to be perpetrated, like the prospect of impending nuclear annihilation conveyed in the post-diegetic inventory of a deserted Roman suburb that concludes L’Eclisse (1962). In all cases, a disappearance takes place.

It has often been noted that the moments of suspension and standstill in Antonioni’s films, when the story dissolves into the setting and narrative-driven time slips into a palpable sense of duration, entail an ontological blurring between the moving image and still photography . The opposite sensation has been attributed to Paris photographer Eugène Atget whose inventories of depopulated streets and urban peripheries have been described like film sets, as “stages for implied narratives” or “the natural theatre of violent death.” ³ In common with the abandoned settings framed by Antonioni’s camera, the first question these images provoke is not what they depict, but rather what compelled the photographer to minutely preserve, or dwell on, a site where nothing of apparent interest takes place. In Walter Benjamin’s famous interpretation, the rationale could only be to mark the space for future investigation:

It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget , photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. ⁴

A crime scene thus solicits a specific form of attention. It is a look after the deed, in the wake of the event. It interpellates the spectator not as a disinterested or complacent viewer, but as a witness or bystander. The withdrawal of man augments the image’s status as evidence, Benjamin says, “clearing the ground for the politically-trained eye.” ⁵ This city devoid of people also alerted the surrealist imagination of André Breton and Man Ray , who praised Atget for his apprehension of a poetic yet sinister banality within the fabric of the everyday environment. Replete with illicit associations, the blind alleys, empty doorways and vacant windows suggest spaces where one could easily disappear, or secret passages through which a perpetrator might have fled the scene. For Atget himself, these documents served rather as portents of a crime to come, salvaging the overlooked and yet un-colonized remainders of an older Paris soon to be demolished by the onset of urban renewal. As Molly Nesbit has noted, the conspicuous absence of Haussmann’s grand boulevards comes to function as indices of this crime, exerting “a subnormal pressure in the pictures as visible as a footprint.” ⁶

On the one hand, Benjamin’s conception of Atget’s uninhabited city as a crime scene ties in with ontological accounts of photography . Consider for example the prevalent metaphor of the photograph as equivalent to “a fingerprint left at the scene of the crime,” ⁷ or Roland Barthes’s melancholic notion that mortality is already inscribed through the indexical trace as a premonition of “a catastrophe which has already occurred.” ⁸ On the other hand, it indicates an ontological ambiguity, as the crime scene may be said to constitute something like a threshold between still photography and moving images. Whereas the effect of temps morte in the films of Antonioni calls attention to the underlying presence of still photography in the celluloid strip, Atget’s crime scenes mark the site of a latent narrative. As clues to something larger, they invite us to consider them, to borrow a phrase from Giorgio Agamben, as “stills from a film that is missing.” ⁹ Photographers like Thomas Demand , John Baldessari , Clare Strand and Mac Adams have all pointedly highlighted this space of suspension between the still and the moving image, or what Adams ’ calls “the narrative void,” in their meticulous reconstructions of real and fictive crime scenes .

The narrative voids instilled by the vacant expanses of rock, grass or concrete in Antonioni’s enigmatic crime films have remained a salient trope of international art cinema. For some recent examples, we may consider the vast fields and monotonous plains of the provincial crime scenes in Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003), The Night of the Sunflowers (Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo, 2006), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011) or P’tit Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, 2014). In all, landscape presents the inscrutable evidence of an unfathomable crime, a paradoxical signifier of that which exceeds a discursive frame or narrative logic. Rather than unlocking its secret, the characters and criminal investigators are exposed to the gaze that the land casts back upon them. In films like Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) or Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003), there is nothing but the landscape and the crime , the vast, inert mineral expanses of the desert and a sudden outburst of senseless violence. Here, landscape serves as a visual corollary for the opacity of motif and explanation. It holds meaning at bay, lingering like a question mark.

* * *

The following pages will address the various facets of what the study proposes to call Crime Scenery , cross-referenced with a number of artistic works to delineate its two basic modalities as those of coming-after and retracing. While the visualization of affliction and atrocities tends to be synonymous with images of the human body, wounded and disfigured, the corpus of works to be considered here are noticeable instead for a conspicuous absence of bodies, showing neither perpetrators nor victims.

Instructive in this regard is an on-going series called Fatescapes (2009–) where the Czech photographer Pavel Maria Smejkal grafts the effect of temps morte onto a selection of iconic photographs of war, carnage and political assassinations by digitally removing the human figure from the image. What remains is a compilation of dates and locations: “1855 Crimea”; “1863 Gettysburg”; “1917 Passchendaele”; “1930 Marion”; “1936 Spain”; “1945 Berlin”; “1951 Nevada”; “1963 Texas”; “1968 Saigon”; “1970 Kent, USA”; “1972 Vietnam”; “1989 Beijing”; “1992 Somalia”; and so forth. The withdrawal of the human figure provokes a series of afterimages of Pathosformeln , the art historian Aby Warburg’s coinage for a vivid or agitated gesture of shock or pain, like the outstretched arms of the Loyalist Militiaman at the moment of death, or of a child burnt by Napalm. Often, these afterimages...