Gone to Earth : cinematic encounters with the British rural landscape

Through a synthesis of critical and practical research, this thesis looks beyond semiotic approaches to film landscape which consistently view the representation of countryside in film as a metonym for the national. My research is concerned instead with an interaction with land which is experiential, embodied and felt. Considering the ways in which landscape imprints itself upon our physical and spiritual selves, the thesis investigates rural space through the sensorium of the body, engaging with both the elemental properties of soil and stone and the substrata of myth, memory and dream to formulate a model for an embodied and enchanted British landscape cinema. Within a framework of film phenomenology, the thesis questions aesthetic readings of film landscape borrowed from art history and looks instead to anthropological conceptions of landscape as dwelt space, the result of a persistent communion between occupant and land. Considering landscape and the natural sublime from gendered perspectives, as products of a male gaze reinforcing men’s domination over women and nature, the thesis proposes an alternative conception of landscape and sublimity which are rooted in material immanence rather than transcendental distance. Through this process, the work advocates a new kind of occupation of the British countryside which challenges human sovereignty over nature and resists the colonial hegemonies of ownership and possession. My practical enquiry into landscape and rurality is informed by my work as cinematographer, sound recordist and sound editor. Through this multidisciplinary approach, the research questions the primacy of vision in cinema’s representation of countryside. Contributing to discourse on soundscape, film sound and field recording, the thesis contends that ocularcentric interpretations of landscape often estrange and exile us from the land whilst sound-led filmmaking approaches invite us towards it. The thesis enquires about cinematic rural space from perspectives of film realism and proposes an alternative, hybridised model of realism to account for our occupancy of the countryside. Drawing from diverse magical realist film texts as well as existing discourse on magical realism, my work speculates that the imbrication of realism and fable grants access to long repressed systems of thought within the countryside and, crucially, places human creative imagination at the centre of our sensorial engagement with rural space. In their different approaches to sounding and visualising the countryside, the two films which comprise my practical research enable us, as filmmaker and viewer, to consider how imaginary, non-naturalistic representations of the rural help to reclaim the British countryside for ourselves.