Introduction

The films of Chris Welsby have long been considered as central to the formation of an eco-cinema. In film theorist Peter Wollen’s 1980 article Landscape, Meteorology and Chris Welsby, Wollen discusses at length the possibilities Welsby’s works open up in new amalgams and relations of environment, nature and technology (Wollen 210). Wollen lauds Welsby’s films for their ‘direct… registration of natural phenomena’ (Wollen 210) wherein ‘natural processes… could be made to participate in the scheme of observation itself’ (Wollen 210). Defined primarily as a systems-based film-maker, Welsby’s films incorporate elements of environment into the practical creation of the film itself. Variables such as weather systems, wind, people, tidal surges and other meteorological phenomena aid in the formal structure of his films. Whilst this has been written on extensively, the teasing out of the implications of these areas for the understanding of space and place in Welsby’s films has been left untreated. Indeed, what surfaces in Welsby’s films is the issue of the term ‘landscape film’ itself; if each view of a landscape is an amalgam of different forces, what then is the view represented in Welsby’s films? Through the modulations and becomings of the renewed camera-environment apparatus, both landscape and view is refuted. Furthermore, the presence of the view as an amalgam flattens and negates definitions. If the view (discussed in the next section) is an amalgam of different causes, it has no self-essence in the slightest. What has been left perhaps untouched also is the appeal to the body in Welsby’s films. Through the incorporation of natural systems into the structure of the films, many works are dictated by those elements to have frenetic and chaotic editing that appeal to the affective register of both the eye and the body. Thus, as I will argue, new affective ecologies outside of the weather systems are present in the rejuvenation of the spectator’s body to natural phenomena. Welsby’s films thus represent possibilities in re-orienting our bodies to and perceptions of the world in a post-modern era of increasing fragmentation of both bodily and physical spaces.

Landscape and Welsby

In order to best understand the function of Welsby’s films, a brief history of the landscape form and Welsby’s tutelage is required. Landscape as a media form emerged in the mid to late 16th century in the Flemish painting culture of the Lowlands. Landschap (Flemish) or Landschaft (German) became defined as a form that displayed to the viewer a view of mastery over a given landscape. Indeed, the Flemish and German words, as Catherine Elwes writes, became interchangeable with two definitions; the view over a landscape and an imagistic representation of that landscape (Berger 106-108). The form’s origins are tied inextricably in developments of private property and land ownership throughout the Renaissance era and well into and through the Enlightenment. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger deftly critiques the relation of landscape to private property (Berger 106-108). Painted landscapes often represented the land owned by the landed gentry, often the only people with enough capital to commission such works. The finished painting usually either contained a mastered view of landscape or a representation of the family, usually the male head, within the landscape itself. Berger singles Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews as an example of such a form (Berger 106-108). Positioned in the left foreground of the frame, the Andrews’ property stretches out behind them to the hills in the horizon. The presence of agriculture and livestock, as well as the sheer scope of the land, attest to the families affluence. Mr Andrews, toting a shotgun with hunting hound afoot, represents an upper class vision of mastery of the land. Indeed, the landscape appears as backdrop to the spectacle of his own affluence. More than functioning simply as a spectacle of affluence, the view in Gainsborough’s work also encourages the Cartesian dualist split of human and nature that plagued both the Enlightenment and modern thinking (Elwes 19). Pictured as both different from and surveying the land in the image, the Andrew’s themselves function as proprietors within an already proprietal gaze enshrined in the use of Renaissance perspective within the painting. Landscape as form is thus inextricably bound up with the history of land ownership, land dismissal and private property of the upper classes, a capitalistic form par excellence.

Chris Welsby’s films certainly sit within the landscape tradition. His films represent images of nature and participate in the construction of the landscape as an image. Crucially, however, Welsby’s films differ in their relationship to landscape. Emerging from the Slade School of Fine Art, Welsby joined the London Film Co-Op and started making systems-based films that defined his early works. As Federico Windhausen writes, Welsby’s films can be defined by “the emphasis on process at the Co-op; the reactionary rejection of the perceived romanticism of poetic avant-garde; and the special value accorded to ‘reflexive’ strategies of different types” (Windhausen 96). In Welsby's films, this manifests in the crucial  placement of the camera within or related to patterns in the environment. Breaking the mastery of the view found in early landscape representations, the dependency of camera upon environment thus challenged both the propriety nature of the gaze in capitalistic forms and the naturalism of Romanticism by blending technology and nature into a single system. In this sense, environments are not displayed in order to be captured by the camera. Instead both Welsby and the camera take on a dependent role in relation to environment. As Windhausen writes of Welsby, “many of the procedures, constraints or rules he applies to his shooting process link the film in a visible and often repetitive manner to a particular place and set of circumstances” (Windhausen 95). The environment thus becomes enshrined in Welsby’s films as the focal point, not its subjugation to symbols of capital and class.

Welsby’s mode of filmmaking here, as we shall see, fundamentally questions the landscape form. Indeed, as I will argue, his films cannot be conceded as landscape films. If, as Catherine Elwes suggests, landscape is most readily understood as a view, Welsby’s works seek to dismantle the view. Instead, multiple views and the becoming of the landscape become the focal point of his works. Rather than mastering nature, their active participation in the moulding of the film product elevates their position from something seen to something productive and crucially felt within the film. In addition, the images’ status as an amalgam crucially calls into question their very own identity. Being the product of many differing affects and causes within the environment, each image lacks a central core of stable self-essence. Indeed, the crux of Welsby’s understanding of environment rests on this very notion of the lack of self-existential value in all things. Instead, dependency and the resulting ethic of care for the inter-becomings of things pervades Welsby’s works. The landscape, then, cedes its importance to the understanding of ecology and environment. Indeed, the creation of new affective ecologies in the form of Welsby’s films –the alliance of camera and natural systems –creates renewed modes of rejuvenation with both human perception and the human body revealing the intertwining of human and nature. To illustrate these points, we might first turn towards a group of films that represent Welsby’s investment in systems based film-making; Running Film (Chris Welsby, 1973), Park Film (Chris Welsby, 1973), and River Yar (Chris Welsby and William Raban, 1972). 

Systems Based Film-making

Running Film starts with film-maker Welsby running from frame left into centre frame. When he gets to a predetermined point within the frame, the film cuts to a pair of hands in centre frame that then snap, clap or click in various permutations. Welsby then runs again from screen left into centre frame. The film continues in this fashion for a few minutes. In this case the use of a predetermined structure brings out the change in environment between the constancy of that structure. As Welsby runs each time, changes in wind, people and light showcase the change even within human constructed environments. Whilst the changes are not overt –Hyde Park’s manicured lawns and boulevards retaining a certain constancy themselves – the film nonetheless places changes in the environment as consistent with changes in the presence of people.

Park Film builds on the understanding of humans and landscape, integrating the two in the view of active environment. As Welsby writes of the film, “one frame was taken each time a person on the pathway moved into the picture and one frame was taken again as they moved out. The procedure was repeated over a period of three days with filming beginning at dawn and ending at dusk. Two of the days were sunny and the other was very stormy. The speed at which people, clouds and shadows move in the film is directly related to the flow of people through the park” (https://www.sfu.ca/~welsby/Parknote.htm). Thus, the presence of people within the park is dependent upon the weather systems currently subjecting the environment. Moreover, the temporal stratification of modern life is present within the film. Nestled in the centre of London, Hyde Park hosts a variety of people throughout the capital all throughout the year, all transfused with the rhythm of the city. In Park Film in particular, influxes of people can be seen at differing times of the day; the morning rush, tea or coffee breaks, lunch breaks, evening rushes. The weather system is thus not at odds with modernity but can be seen to be actively influencing and disturbing its routines.

The interactivity of film-maker, camera and environment within one system is perhaps best crystallised in Welsby and William Raban’s collaborative effort River Yar. Filmed on the Isle of Wight in 1971, the film concerns the river Yar’s tidal ‘becomings’ through the Autumn and Spring equinoxes. Taken at a frame per minute, the changing environments are projected side by side to give a view of seasonal change within one given view. Breaking the mastery of the Singular, Renaissance gaze of landscape, the double projection takes us through an understanding of nature not as landscape but as a system. Within this system the predictable cycles seasonal cycles provides a structure for the then random occurrences that continue throughout the film; radio excerpts, people walking, farm equipment and gulls on the soundtrack. Thus, the film is perhaps most intriguing for its blending of a typically Romanticist scene and the process filmmaking Welsby would become famous for. In a deconstruction of the Romantic perspective, Welsby’s processual film-making reveals the structures already present within the environnment. Key to this construction is the use of time-lapse photography, aiding in the production of a view of the becoming of the environment as opposed to the stasis of a landscape (Elwes 112).

The question thus arises of the view in Welsby’s films. In the typical construction of the landscape the image is displayed in Renaissance perspective allowing a singular perspective by which the viewer masters the image. However, Welsby’s films negotiate and change this understanding of the view. In a constantly shifting and fluctuating image, Welsby’s films do not conform to a singular view. Embedded within the environment of its construction, the image can never master the environment but always be influenced by it. Moreover, the participation of the environment in the images construction creates an amalgamated view that defies a singular perspective. Whilst Zoltan Szabo suggests that Welsby’s films capture the gaze of the landscape looking at itself, I disagree (Szabó 80). As Windhausen suggests, but perhaps does not follow through to full conclusion, ”the finished works that resulted from such encounters have often been called ‘landscape films’, a label that conveys what is seen in their imagery and where they were shot. Yet the term does not communicate the stress that Welsby places on activity, on film-making as a direct contribution and response to the events occurring in a particular site” (Windhausen 92). There is something more than just a landscape view at work in Welsby’s films.

Whilst the variability of the film’s view is determined by its environment, it is my contention that it is not the landscape that views itself. The reason for this is double-fold. Firstly, and perhaps more practically, the manifestation of a singular view, the mode proper of the landscape form, is negated. Instead, the multivalent causation of each successive view in Welsby’s films call into relief the becoming of an ecology, not a landscape in stasis. Thus troubling the notion of landscape altogether. Secondly, and perhaps at the philosophical core of Welsby’s films, the identity proper of that which creates the view is not fixed and mutable. In each instance of these films, the view is not one that can be attributed to a singular space or causal force, as in the form of landscape painting. In all images, the causal nexus of film-maker, weather systems and camera in delicate balance and re-constitution is the identity proper. However, such an identity refutes the basis of identity. Being a consequence of causations, the image itself is without position or essence; it is only through the amalgam of different forces within an ecology that each image in Welsby’s films comes to be. Being an amalgam, each frame has no self-existential ontological value. Moreover, the causation of the system’s forces –weather, people, film-maker, camera– each themselves have causes and conditions that  have aggregated their existence. Each image thus defies a stable ontological ground.

Whilst thus without self-definition, each image continues and nonetheless manifests the immanence of the system’s becomings. The question of whether Welsby’s films are even landscape films thus emerges. Embedded within an environment, the landscape never appears in the image as something static and therefore knowable. Whilst Sazbo suggests that there is something Hegelian at work in Welsby’s films in the synthesis of tech, nature and artist, I feel there is something rather Deleuzian about Welsby’s approach. What registers in Welsby’s films is thus the pure immanence and becomings of each ecological instance. These films, then, cannot be understood as landscapes but as ecological becomings that re-orient us away from human-nature and technology-nature, divides and embeds us thoroughly within the systems that form and inform us.

Space, Borders and Becoming

River Yar equally challenges borders and space in many aspects. It is perhaps the night sequences in River Yar  that produce the most intriguing images upon this subject. In the darkness of night, the pane of glass used to shield the camera from the degradation of weather reflects the image of the camera back onto itself. Within this image, then, the systems-based understanding includes the product of representation in its understanding of environment. Whilst not directly inscribing the nature elements into its structure, River Yar nonetheless forwards the idea that the landscape cannot be apart from its mode of representation. Indeed, the understanding of the camera as part of the system of the image, alongside and with nature, represents a utopian alliance of camera and nature. Rather seeing the presence of the camera as manipulative and destructive, the ability of the camera to call its own presence, all the while altering our perception of nature from landscape to ecology, ushers in an equitable relation between the two. The border of the artwork is thus expanded to include its mode of production.

The contestation of borders that we see in River Yar continues throughout Welsby’s films, seen most clearly in a selection of films of micro environmental features. Films like Stream Line (Chris Welsby, 1976) and Sea Shore (Chris Welsby, 1979) enliven us to particular aspects of landscape whilst at the same time questioning definitions of anthropocentric boundaries placed upon the earth. In the same vein as River Yar, these films open us to both the causation and formational processes of environments yet at the same time delicately undo fixed understandings of place. Implicitly, borders and nationalistic thinking are challenged in these films, albeit in abstract modes.

Sea Shore represents an ambiguity in the exact relation between the two spaces of its title. Rather than show the full process of tidal becoming, Welsby jump cuts between the start and end of each tidal pull, as far as this can be delimited. Firstly we see the tide come in with froth and scum atop the waves. Next, the film jump cuts to an image of the final pull of the outward tide on the shingle, stones and pebbles.

Space, place and borders thus become contested in Sea Shore. Already a fraught nexus of defining the beginning and end of a cyclical tidal pull, the differentiation between sea and shore becomes hard to define. The sea’s tidal wave pushes and pulls the border of sea and land. Moreover, the retreat of the tide brings extra space in which the notion of land may be placed. The land under the sea current thus emerges and disappears with each tidal pull, placing and replacing the border of land and sea with each tidal becoming. Moreover, in the close-up shot of the outward tidal pull pebbles and stones can be seen to be pulled outwards by the tide. The land is very literally modified and changed by the sea. Land is thus not fixed and mutable in Sea Shore. Where, then, is the exact border between things, if in a constant state of tidal and erosive becoming the border never becomes stable in a fixed identity? What then is a border and where can it be placed? Certainly in Welsby’s consideration it can never be something of the land or sea.

Stream Line continues in a similar vein, however modifying the focus of the critique of landscape from cyclical processes to the matter of causation within an environment. Whereas Welsby’s system based films neatly aid us in an understanding of the factors at play within an environment, thereby also integrating technology and nature, the simplicity of Stream Line’s single tracking shot upstream reveals deeper understandings of environment in an unconstrained, non-systems based representation of landscape. Isolating the frame’s consideration to the stream and water therein, the causation of the river’s course becomes the focal point of the film. As the camera tracks upstream, the prior/preceding cause of the river’s path is made apparent to us. Rather than dwell on the instance of motion out to sea and the movement to larger things, the move upstream pulls an attention to causation and origin. The origin, however, becomes not a cornerstone of heritage or national pride  –the formulation of an identity forged with land–  but a geographical treatise that focuses our gaze and minds upon the infinite regress of causation, a fraught nexus of identity. With each new cause in the track upstream  –a deeper bed creating a faster flow, a harder rock at the river’s edge diverting its course– the identity of the effect, what we see further downstream, becomes deeper and deeper entrenched in a prior state that seems ultimately to never appear. We might understand the model in this films as such: Effect A is rendered by Cause B, Cause B is equally Effect B rendered as it is by Cause C. Cause C equally becomes Effect C and so-on. In each instance, a prior cause is rendered an effect, the origin of the river’s course forever delayed and altered. Even if we were to come to the spring that brings forth the river, its becoming in water tables and its relation to the water cycle in the clouds, wind and sea would remain unexplored. Rather, the track upstream through myriad causation’s reveals the identity-less state of things. I say identity-less here as the river is in a constant process of becoming. Indeed, Effect A’s identity is never fully understood in the upstream tracking shot. First it is Cause B, then it is implicated in Cause C and so on. It’s exact causal identity never becomes apparent. Where the Effect itself is dependent upon a cause, the cause of that effect becomes an effect itself beholden to its own causes. Thus, there is not self-essence present in any of the effects observed in the river. Where, as Catherine Elwes argues, “landscape painting has long reinforced this conflation of land and nation” Welsby’s films thoroughly contest the border of the nation and the origins of things, cornerstones of nationalistic dogma  (Elwes 34). Whilst the border of the sea and shore is more explicitly contested, it is the philosophical position of a film like Stream Line that thoroughly de-constructs notions of identity and becoming directly in the landscape, a cornerstone of nationalistic identity.

If borders cannot be aligned with geographical features then logically one could assert that within the delimited zones of borders different spaces are contemporaneous. Welsby’s Wind Vane (Chris Welsby, 1972) suggests otherwise. Welsby’s Wind Vane takes place on Hampstead Heath. Attaching two cameras to separate wind vanes and placing them a short distance apart from each other, the film operates as a two screen projection of these two images as the wind blows over the heath. As one watches, an uncanny sense of alignment and misalignment emerges. At times the image takes on a wide, stereo-esque format as the two images seem momentarily to line up, thus giving us a wide view of the terrain and optic mastery over the landscape. However, due to the wind and weather system’s unruly becomings, the image rarely settles on an intelligible format. Rather, due to the knock on effect of the wind we are made aware at each instance of the difference in becomings between spaces. In the double projection in Wind Vane, the singular place Hampstead Heath is called into question. Instead, we see the becoming of two spaces. Moreover, these spaces themselves cannot align with a singularity as the becoming of each never and can never align with each other. Thus, space is understood in Wind Vane as a series of discontinuous points that though related in the sense of cause and effect  –we see the wind from image one eventually cause change in image two– can never and will never be one. There is thus a delicate non-duality in the understanding of space in Welsby’s films. Not entirely the same, the image’s manifest to us the difference in causal origin of different spaces. Not entirely different, the causation of each image finds its origin in the same wind, a wind that, however, is in no doubt changed in quality in its becoming with the first wind vane as it proceeds to the second wind vane. Space is thus understood delicately as non-dual in Wind Vane, thus positioned in a causal chain that is always becoming and without fixed identity.

As in the focus on systems, the double projection of temporally simultaneous yet non-contemporaneous sites within a small zone brings into question how human sight and camera sight produces differing understandings of the world. As Welsby’s states in an interview with Catherine Elwes, “I am much more interested in the camera as a machine. I think it is a waste to use the camera to try and reproduce the way we see the world. I think of the camera as an instrument to show us something we can’t see with our eyes” (“Interview Chris Welsby July 2007- June 2013 In Conversation with Catherine Elwes.” 313). Being singular, human sight reproduces an understanding of the world’s image –in the retina and brain’s cortex– as whole. Welsby’s double projection, however, readily expresses to us the non-contemporaneity of place by dividing the singular human view. The camera, in conjunction with wind and weather systems, thus pushes up against the human gaze, a singular perhaps violent understanding of environment. Thus is produced a necessary distance in order that a re-evaluation of our understanding of the relation of sight and space is affected. In this way, Welsby’s films execute an understanding of the ability of the camera and modes of projection to re-orient human perception and cognition. This view, seen in early twentieth century theorists of cinema from Dulac to Epstein, retains a certain popularity within mainstream discourses on the power of film. In Welsby’s films, however, its direct employment in a philosophical understanding of space and border, and thus a resulting ethical system of non-duality related to ecologies and environment, employs the camera for a complete cognitive renewal in the human understanding of the world. Questioning the very ontology of things when engaged in becoming, Welsby’s films re-invigorate our relation to the world, revealing an ethical mode of being in environments based precisely in our being immutably moulded by them.

Affect and Ecology

In the de-construction of space, border and place within Welsby’s films, another facet is produced in the co-mingling of nature and technology; new affective ecologies that produce new becomings between spectator, nature and film. The affective aspect of Welsby’s films come to the fore when systems-based constraints impact editing structures within his films. Fforest Bay Two (Chris Welsby, 1973) represents a first example of this. Utilising the Pembrokeshire coast, Welsby used the low and high tidal lines in order to capture the ecology. Facing the Irish Sea, “the first half of the film was shot from the high tide line. During the first 360 degree pan [facing out towards sea] one frame was taken in each of the predetermined 45-degree angles. During the second 360-degree pan, two frames were taken at each position. Then three frames were taken, and so on, until a thirty-frame sample was being taken at each position. During the second half of the film, which was shot from the low tide line, the above structure was reversed. The film rapidly accelerates in pace, the movement of clouds, people and waves are caught up in the insistent rhythm of the filmic structure, only to disappear in an abstract pattern of light and colour at the films end.” (https://www.sfu.ca/~welsby/Ffornote.htm). Thus in Fforest Bay Two, the weather system of the Pembrokeshire forms the basis of the editing and frames the structure of the film. Taking the causation of the image’s structure as the environment Fforest Bay Two aids in the construction of an explicitly eco cinema that foregrounds the affective capacity of environments, indelibly grafting the rhythms of landscape onto the film image. The rhythms at the start of the film cause a flurry of sensations and affections within the body of the spectators, gradually decreasing throughout the film and then increasing again towards the end.

A film like Seven Days (Chris Welsby, 1974) addresses the body in an even greater capacity and is perhaps my favourite film by Welsby for just this reason. Welsby’s Seven Days takes us through a week on the Pembrokeshire coast tracking the weather front and its burgeoning cloud formations. Using an equatorial mount, the camera tracks the sun through the sky between two rocky outcrops that frame the view. The film cuts between two 45 degree angle views of the clouds (ascending angle) and the scene behind the camera (descending angle). The ascending angle remains onscreen as long as clouds cover the sun. When the sun bursts through the clouds, however, the descending angle is cut to revealing the heathland behind the camera with the shadow of the camera visible on the ground. Whilst firstly foregrounding the mode of production within the environment itself, the film’s editing pattern makes an explicit reference to the body in its hectic and frenetic pace on certain days. Catherine Elwes identifies a phenomenological aspect to Welsby’s films in the inscription of weather into the structure of the film (Elwes 24). Upon my first viewing of Seven Days my body was shocked into receptivity of the environment and the film’s editing structures. On days of patchy cloud the editing structure of the film assumes a frenetic, fast-paced chopping motion as the sun quickly emerges from and disappears behind the clouds. Thus, the film hectically transports the viewer between two views, creating a new affective ecology that places the spectator’s body in relation to the editing structures dictated by the weather systems onscreen. Turning to phenomenological film theory, Laura Marks writes of the difference between the optic and haptic in film (Marks 4). The optic comes to us as one wherein the object of the image appears clearly to us (Marks 4). In our context, we might ally the optic with the historical understanding of the landscape form. For Marks the haptic, however, pushes up close to the object of the image so that either the texture of itself or the film, video or media medium becomes apparent to us in the affection of our body. Welsby’s Seven Days and Fforest Bay Two can be said to be trading primarily the haptic visuality which makes an environment felt, not seen proper. In the haptic visualities, the weather patterns cause editing structures to blur the image and affect our bodies. Thereby, the weather patterns alliance with film technology transmutes a semblance of the original weather pattern to our body – allowing us to feel the rhythm and pulses of environments– at the same time as enculturing new affective ecologies in the amalgam of film and nature. There thus occurs a re-enchantment through the vitality of our body and the vitality of film with natural processes, something lost in the modern world. Though not the environment itself, the film creates a new ecology that renews a vital relation to the world; we feel nature once again through the form of film.

Conclusion

Speaking at a retrospective at the BFI Southbank in July 2022, Welsby suggested that his aim was to grant nature and the environment agency within his films. Certainly, the method and choice to place dependence of film form upon the environment grants it visibility. Whilst his films certainly do grant a visilbity to this agency, the processes at work in Welsby’s films have always formed and informed the human as a part of its wider ecological function. The question thus hovers: how do we understand the weather systems and environments that Welsby films? These are not agents in the typical formulation of having will. Rather, they represent a force of causation within the systems based structures that Welsby outlines. Instead, we must understand them as actants within ecologies. Perhaps against Welsby’s own words, I suggest his films illustrate something different; that the ability of things to affect the world is not something we can grant. It is something that has been and is always present. Instead, Welsby’s re-orient our understanding of self and other, implicating each together to the extent of inscrutability, and re-enliven us to the processes of the natural world lost to our modern way of living.

Thus, the borders of beings and things are always contested within Welsby’s works. Starting with more concrete revelations, political borders and symbolic borders of space are thoroughly distended. Though Welsby’s films completely deny the plausibility of borders in this sense, it might be of interest to think how these films may function in a greater political fashion in today’s climate of increased migration and death at sea. Indeed, Welsby’s systems film such as Park Film, wherein the human aspect of environment is foregrounded, may need updating in order to understand constructions of race, sexuality, gender and more as they pertain to British landscapes. This being said, Welsby’s films show us how systems and environment by their very nature – or should I say becoming– negate the border.

Moving into a more abstract fashion, films like Stream Line and Wind Vane enliven us to the ephemeral yet brute fluctuation of all beings and things. The pure immanence of environmental systems thus comes to us not as a thing known but as a thing felt in Welsby’s films. And thus the films of Welsby create their very own affective ecologies at the point of screening. Within these moments, the spectator’s bodies are drawn into and enmeshed with the patterns and structures of the films, themselves derived from the environments. Whilst certainly not experiencing the environ itself, the films nonetheless transmute an alternative understanding of landscape, indeed refuting landscape’s proprietal view altogether. Our bodies, enmeshed with the film as the camera intertwines with environment, feel the force of these spaces. In post-modernity, where spaces and beings have become parceled and fractured beyond recognition, Welsby’s films symbolise a move towards a revivification of the human mind and body in relation to the land and environment. In this vein, Elwes, in an interview with Welsby, suggests an aspect of the sublime in Welsby’s work (“Interview Chris Welsby July 2007- June 2013 In Conversation with Catherine Elwes.” 321). Certainly a renewed sense of wonder pervades Welsby’s images but an investment in the sublime’s insistence upon the Romantic distance and symbolisation of landscape is lost in Welsby’s films. Instead, moving towards an understanding of our intertwined relation to things rather than a mastery over them, Welsby’s films reinvigorate a sense of being in the world directly in our bodies. Thus whilst his films reposition technology and nature as mutually beneficial and enriching, the crucial status for me is their convincing elaboration of the potential of a renewed human relation to the world. Sensing this world in our body, casting our gaze and sensate being out and beyond, Welsby’s films show us our immutable becoming with the world in our/its thriving immanence.

Bibliography

Catherine Elwes. Landscape and the Moving Image. Bristol: Intellect Press, 2022.

“Interview Chris Welsby July 2007- June 2013 In Conversation with Catherine Elwes.” Moving image review & art journal 2.2 (2013): 308–324.

Steven Jacobs. “Screening Landscapes: Film between the Picturesque and the Painterly.” Acta University Sapientiae 19 (2021), 1–16.

Laura Marks. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Zoltán Szabó. “The Ethical Anxiety of Remediation and Speculative Aesthetics in Landscape Film.” Acta University Sapientiae 18 (2020), 73-87.

Federico Windhausen. “Systems and Constraints: Contexts for a British Cinema of ‘Intentional Limitation.’” Moving image review & art journal 6.1 (2017): 90–101.

Peter Wollen. “Landscape, Meteorology, and Chris Welsby.” Millennium film journal 16 (1986): 208–211.

https://www.sfu.ca/~welsby/Parknote.htm

https://www.sfu.ca/~welsby/Ffornote.htm

Volume 28, Issue 11-12 / December 2024 Essays   british cinema   chris welsby   experimental cinema   landscape