Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography

Beschreibung

This book offers a rare and innovative consideration of an enduring tendency in postwar art to explore places devoid of human agents in the wake of violent encounters. To see the scenery together with the crime elicits a double interrogation, not merely of a physical site but also of its formation as an aesthetic artefact, and ultimately of our own acts of looking and imagining. Closely engaging with a vast array of works made by artists, filmmakers and photographers, each who has forged a distinct vantage point on the aftermath of crime and conflict, the study selectively maps the afterlife of landscape in search of the political and ethical agency of the image. By way of a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography brings landscape studies into close dialogue with contemporary theory by paying sustained attention to how the gesture of retracing past events facilitates new configurations of the present and future.
This book offers a rare and innovative consideration of an enduring tendency in postwar art to explore places devoid of human agents in the wake of violent encounters. To see the scenery together with the crime elicits a double interrogation, not merely of a physical site but also of its formation as an aesthetic artefact, and ultimately of our own acts of looking and imagining. Closely engaging with a vast array of works made by artists, filmmakers and photographers, each who has forged a distinct vantage point on the aftermath of crime and conflict, the study selectively maps the afterlife of landscape in search of the political and ethical agency of the image. By way of a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography brings landscape studies into close dialogue with contemporary theory by paying sustained attention to how the gesture of retracing past events facilitates new configurations of the present and future.

Autor*in

Henrik Gustafsson

Themen in »Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography«

landscape memory aftermath late photography art Aby Warburg George Didi-Huberman Nicolas Poussin violence war filmmaking aesthetic political agency war crime

Stimmen zu »Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography«

“As this is a film and television journal review, I’ll leave the photographers aside and concentrate on Gustafsson’s selection and analysis of the films. He systematically examines works that together cover a significant geographical and chronological stretch and are all preoccupied with more or less detectable traces left in a landscape by warfare … . All in all, Gustafsson’s book successfully argues that reports about the death of landscape as an art form have been greatly exaggerated.” (Andrei Rogatchevski, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, March 10, 2022)
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“Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography opens our eyes to otherwise invisible witnesses of some of the 20th century’s most violent wars. We discover the secrets held by landscapes as distant as Beirut, the West Bank, postwar Germany and Poland, as they have been glimpsed in film and photography. The traces of past and present violence are found on the earth, in the trees, and imprinted across the topography of the viewer’s memory, and subsequently, magnified for us through an accessible discussion of image theories from Walter Benjamin to Georges Didi-Huberman.” (Frances Guerin, University of Kent, UK)

“Where W.J.T. Mitchell speculates that landscape is an exhausted medium for the arts, Henrik Gustafsson finds a new imperative to look at landscape once again, this time to pay attention to the sites where violence has taken place, often without leaving trace. These ‘crime scenes’, it is persuasively argued, are the sites for artistic fieldwork practices that interrogate our relation to trauma, absence and the experience of secondary witnessing. Working forensically, patiently across a compelling selection of film and photographic works, Gustafsson in Crime Scenery invites us to see the aesthetics of landscape as an imminently political interface.” (Janet Harbord, Queen Mary University of London, UK)

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