The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image

 

Project summary

The project is a collaboration between three researchers – a geographer, Professor Doreen Massey of the Open University; a cultural historian, Professor Patrick Wright of Nottingham Trent University and a film-maker, Patrick Keiller of the Royal College of Art – that sets out to locate economic, social and political aspects of the current global predicament in the UK's landscapes.

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

In the project's second year, Patrick Keiller is undertaking the 35mm cinematography for a feature-length film. The resulting footage will be assembled as a chronology of images encountered on a journey, becoming the basis for narration exploring the project's questions about belonging and other contemporary concerns. Patrick Wright is preparing a monograph, a critique of past and present ideas of deep settlement and their engagement with landscape. Doreen Massey's contribution will include an essay in which she will explore the nature of place, responding to the film, its subjects and the process of its production.

The film's early camera subjects were located in or near the Oxford-Newbury-Reading triangle, noted for its concentration of government scientific research establishments; an initial observation had been that government intervention was more crucial to the development of neoliberalism than the mythology of Anglo-American capitalism conventionally allows. Another feature of the film so far is a developing interest in agriculture.

The project team has discussed the temporalities and reconciliatory aspects of landscape and images of landscape, how these figure in cinema, and various alternative ways in which landscape can be conceptualised. These discussions have been developed in meetings and other conversations, and by exchanging images and texts.

Matthew Flintham completed his transfer to PhD in May 2008 and is currently engaged in fieldwork at various military sites around the country. These include the MoD's Shoeburyness weapons testing and disposal complex, Salisbury Plain training ground and the naval port of Portsmouth . He recently co-organised a cross-disciplinary event at the RCA, Mapping: Theory, technology, practice . Matthew has also presented papers at the conference Military Landscapes (University of Bristol, September 2008) and at Brutalism and Militarised Spaces (an Art and Architecture event, October 2008) and during the academic year 2007-8 attended events including the symposium Landscape in Theory (University of Nottingham, June 2008) and the conference Memory Maps (CRASSH, University of Cambridge, July 2008).