This book offers a rare and innovative consideration of an enduring tendency in postwar art to explore places devoid of human agents in the wake of violent encounters. To see the scenery together with the crime elicits a double interrogation, not merely of a physical site but also of its formation as an aesthetic artefact, and ultimately of our own acts of looking and imagining. Closely engaging with a vast array of works made by artists, filmmakers and photographers, each who has forged a distinct vantage point on the aftermath of crime and conflict, the study selectively maps the afterlife of landscape in search of the political and ethical agency of the image. By way of a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography brings landscape studies into close dialogue with contemporary theory by paying sustained attention to how the gesture of retracing past events facilitates new configurations of the present and future.
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A few days after my mother died, my dad remarked: âShe used to be all over the place, and suddenly sheâs nowhere.â 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.
It has often been noted that the moments of suspension and standstill in Antonioniâs 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 EugĂšne Atget whose inventories of depopulated streets and urban peripheries have been described like film sets, as âstages for implied narrativesâ or âthe natural theatre of violent death.â3 In common with the abandoned settings framed by Antonioniâs 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 Benjaminâs 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
On the one hand, Benjaminâs conception of Atgetâs 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 âa fingerprint left at the scene of the crime,â7 or Roland Barthesâs melancholic notion that mortality is already inscribed through the indexical trace as a premonition of âa catastrophe which has already occurred.â8 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, Atgetâs 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 âstills from a film that is missing.â9 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 â calls âthe narrative void,â in their meticulous reconstructions of real and fictive crime scenes .
The narrative voids instilled by the vacant expanses of rock, grass or concrete in Antonioniâs 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 Pâtit 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.
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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 (2009â) 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: â1855 Crimeaâ; â1863 Gettysburgâ; â1917 Passchendaeleâ; â1930 Marionâ; â1936 Spainâ; â1945 Berlinâ; â1951 Nevadaâ; â1963 Texasâ; â1968 Saigonâ; â1970 Kent, USAâ; â1972 Vietnamâ; â1989 Beijingâ; â1992 Somaliaâ; and so forth. The withdrawal of the human figure provokes a series of afterimages of Pathosformeln, the art historian Aby Warburgâs 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...