作者：Hasan Cem Çal
寫于：2024-08-21
轉載于：Fog Line | Chute Film Coop www.chutecoop.com
...Landscape films are those that stay on the verge of rendering the materiality of the film visible and making the eye seize the invisible. In the first sense, landscape films are immediately structural in that they make the viewer aware of the ongoing processes of the medium in question: flickering, graining, and cutting. In the second sense, they turn the viewers into seers of sorts, placing them in front of the all-too-visible yet invisible things, that is, landscapes, which surround their everyday lives but nevertheless remain unnoticed. It is in this second sense that we find the essence of these kinds of films and their proper end, whereas, in the first sense, we only find a means or a necessary condition. To form the film in such a way that it gains the capability to exist as an autonomous body, sensible in and of itself throughout the viewing, and simultaneously call attention to what has been long unseen: the power of the landscape film.
Landscape films are comprised of landscapes covered with the halo of the film’s materiality, indistinguishable from the fixation on and of landscapes. Not so ironically enough, there is no landscape film without a landscape, even if the landscape seen is not generally considered as such, like inTen Skies(2004) by James Benning. Ironically, however, there is no landscape film without a landscape seen, that is, a landscape that one is used to because what defines a landscape film is that what is seen in it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It is possible to see a familiar landscape in such a film. Still, it is not possible to see it familiarly due to the core procedure of the landscape film as defined: it is what mutates familiar into unfamiliar in topographical means. Without the modulation of the milieu, the familiar space, or “place,” as they say it, and without constituting a foreign land in between the celluloid strips, there is no landscape to be rendered by the film but only the background, the scene, or the stage, which are all pragmatic. To create a terra incognita in motion: the proper aim of all landscape films.
Before we jump into the example, the paragon, there are simply two protocols of landscape films: one is primary and the other secondary. To unify them makes an exquisite landscape film, but not all of them activate both. Firstly, establish the film’s duration as uninterrupted and execute a minimum of cuts to mirror the duration of the object captured, that is the landscape. To match the way it exists, turn the film as durable and composite as the landscape itself. Secondly, do not hold the idea that the landscape must be clear, soft, and intact; see it as an object of vision, but as a particular one in which the eye is compelled to see the world differently, in all its blurriness, uncanniness, and ephemerality. Although the first is pretty much essential, without which nothing can happen at all, unifying these two aspects makes up or synthesizes a landscape film that redefines what a landscape is and thus gives way to a rethinking of what the film can offer when it comes to reimagining the world. The criterion does not change even if it is for the landscape film: to see the world differently by a disturbance in vision, whether it is the result of too much light or darkness. Some films make you blind and bored and scratch your eye a little so you can see better.
Larry Gottheim’s monumentally minimalistic filmFog Line(1970) is one of these films, which activates and thereby unifies the two protocols already mentioned. It not only exposes you to the duration of laying underneath the landscape at hand but also unfolds, even dissolves it in time, the time given in the duration itself, and makes you see what you see slowly by processing it infinitesimally, that is, in an immeasurable manner, a manner in which lay deep in the time as an indivisible yet mobile unit of matter. What is happening in Gottheim’s film is relatively simple: a fog is dispersing. From a verbal standpoint, it is what it is. But from a different angle, what is happening is also a clearing of sight, of vision, which is indistinguishable from the coming of a scene anew, bursting forth and getting matched with the surface of the film. In this way,Fog Linemimics the art of painting in a special sense: it is not so much about creating a scene but letting it create itself in time, without doing anything but gazing like expressionist painters (who Gottheim seemed to be indebted to). It is only in this sense expressionistic, not because it expresses something but because the expression of nature, of time, of becoming expresses itself via the film. If we ask, then, what we are in terms of this film, we cannot say that we are the viewers, but we can say we are the witnesses, and it is the exact spot where the filmmaker himself is standing; we’re no different than him. It is cinematic elegancy at its finest.
But how doesFog Linecreate a landscape? In time and bits and pieces, for sure. But how does it differ from any other landscape film? Generally speaking, landscapes are considered linked to the land, soil, and the earth. Without a bit of a solid matter, most of us cannot imagine a landscape. Although this is true in most cases and reasonable considering the sociopolitical nature of terra firma, which finds new utterances in films likeDeseret(1995) andFortini/Cani(1976), it is not true for this one. Gottheim’s film is not in any way romantic and connected to romanticism, which always yearns for the land to come or the land long gone, but is about making a landscape of the mind. That’s why it starts with the fog, eventually clears it away, and then finds it dwelling. Time makes up the landscape in this film, nothing else. In this way,Fog Lineemphasizes what makes up a landscape for us: the line of time. If it is harder for us to see it or watch it, it is because we do not know how to behold a scene like that without interruption and with relative muzziness, and that’s exactly why it seems to be made. This not only makes time flow uninterrupted but also turns it into a correlative of dense matter, that is, fog. In short, the simultaneous execution of the protocols mentioned makes it what it is: an exquisite landscape film.
Finally, anyone can easily say that nothing is happening with this film. After all, what is happening really? In one sense, it is true: nothing is happening. But in another sense, what defines a happening itself is happening in it: the now, the present, the time being. If it is distinguishable from the films mentioned above, it is because it turns the attention via the landscape to the moment, the moment we seize, we live in, we partake, which we sense nearly never, and makes us aware of the surrounding matter, covered with air, covering land, and uncovered like its water. In this sense, Fog Line is both about the formation of a landscape and a time, the present moment in this case. It both uncovers the time of now for us and, by that, uncovers a land. All in all, then, it does not matter if it was made more than fifty years ago. If it can make us perceive and feel a landscape so deeply that we lose track of time, immersed in the nowness contained in the film, which is a sign of the creation of spacetime in and of itself, then it is now. It is film’s now and our now, and, of course, the oscillation between them. It is both, the superimposition of both: the shared now. The fracturing of the time with the space: is there any other formulation better suited forFog Line?
