Peter Hutton: The Filmmaker as Luminist
2001; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25304776
ISSN2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoThe new landscape mode expressed--and in turn shaped--a growing midcentury appreciation for nature as complex organic realm surrounding human world.... The aesthetic of atmospheric luminism was grounded...in an identification with nature rather than an insistence on one's physical separation from it.... Instead of temporalizing space through planar divisions, atmospheric luminism spatialized time. doing so it freed landscape art from its loyalties to narrative or literary meaning. Angela Miller, The Empire of Eye (1) Barbara Novak's famous distinction between two approaches to American landscape in nineteenth-century painting--grand opera and the small voice--remains useful for twentieth-century film, and not merely as theoretical construct that assists in distinguishing different kinds of work developing from different aesthetic sensibilities. (2) The two areas of contemporary cinema that conform to Novak's categories are responses to same set of historical developments that produced paintings her Nature and Culture surveys; and their positions vis-a-vis contemporary commercial culture are analogous to positions occupied by painters and with regard to mid-nineteenth-century commercial development. To significant degree, grand landscape epitomized by Frederic Edwin Church and Rocky Mountain (Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Thomas Hill) became, and has remained, literal, as well as historical, background of epic commercial films, from earliest attempts to interest filmgoers in natural scenes, to John Ford's depiction of Monument Valley in such films as Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), and The Searchers (1956), to more recent popular films such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and What Dreams May Come (1998); and it has played major role in history of independent feature filmmaking, from Robert Flaherty's Nanook North (1921) to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1984) and Robert Fricke's Baraka (1993). But still small voice of is also alive, not as major influence on commercial cinema, but as sensibility of considerable use in coming to terms with number of accomplished American independent filmmakers of recent decades, including Larry Gottheim, Nathaniel Dorsky, Leighton Pierce, and focus of this discussion: Peter Hutton. Art historians have defined Luminism in variety of ways since John Baur coined term in 1940s, to refer to work of John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane, and to selected paintings by some Hudson River school painters, especially Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. (3) Generally, Novak and others have described Luminists as reflecting and offering more meditative route to spiritual than that provided by awesome paintings of Church, Bierstadt, and Moran: In contrast to operatic is classic rather than baroque, contained rather than expansive, aristocratic rather than democratic, private not public, introverted not gregarious, exploring state of being rather than becoming (Novak, 32). Stylistically, is identified with particular rendering of atmospheric effects--specifically, as Angela Miller puts it, a resonant, light-suffused atmosphere [that] melded topographic divisions into visually seamless whole (Miller, 243), often presented in comparatively small compositions extended along horizontal. Generally, paintings betray little or no evidence of artists' labor trail so obvious in contemporaneous, European impressionist painting and in modernist work in general. There seems little point in exploring origins of cinema for progenitor of Luminist sensibility evident in more recent, independent films. Film scholars are in process of reconstructing early American film history, and while landscape has, so far, played little role in this process, new generation of scholars has begun to recognize that even during dawn of cinema history depiction of or at least landscape, was of significant importance. …
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