Abstract
This paper gives an account of ways in which recent documentary filmmakers and film essayists have used landscape as a tool to visualize connections between separate communities affected by similar environmental issues such as toxic waste (Blue Vinyl, 2002), tourist management (Peak, 2011), nuclear radiation (No Man's Zone, 2012) (Pandora's Promise, 2013), or resource extraction (Gasland, 2010) (Gasland 2, 2013). It puts forward a thesis that connects Christopher Wood’s work on the independent landscape in Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Wood, 1993), and Martin Lefebvre’s work on the modernist film landscape in Landscape and Film (Lefebvre, 2006), with Bruno Latour’s concept of the ‘intermediary’ in various works expounding his actor-network-theory. Latour complains that the attitude of twentieth century science has been: ‘Let us not mix up heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman’ (Latour, 1991/1993). The paper seeks to examine how the environmental documentary might display an attempt to complicate the process of isolating landscape as landscape (as in Altdorfer’ s painting), and of separating setting from landscape in modernist film (as in Antonioni), in order to maintain landscape as ‘simultaneously real, social and narrated’ (Latour, 1991/1993) and as an integrative, discursive argument for the purpose of establishing connections and collectives.