Walking within Film: Gilbertson and Tait and Insignificant Steps Within landscape

List, H (2017) Walking within Film: Gilbertson and Tait and Insignificant Steps Within landscape. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 21 (3). pp. 262-274. ISSN 1468-8417

Preview

Accepted Version Available under License In Copyright. Download (336kB) | Preview

Abstract

Two Scottish women film-makers, Jenny Gilbertson and Margaret Tait both encounter walking within 20th century Island culture. This study considers the function itself within cinema as an occurrence of landscape. To this end it treats their earlier work, investigating it through a Deleuzian cinematic framework. The predominantly visual field of film is demonstrated as rendering walking relatively invisible, with particular relevance to the action image. The wider investigative construct of affect is also observed as incompatible. Only in Tait’s later work does the cinema of chronology convey a satisfactory explanation of walking, but this is confined to the schema of ‘organic’ documentary. Finally, walking in relation to landscape is considered as conceptual act. This employs a model suggested by Jean-Luc Nancy that is only partially attainable through cinema, so that the role of the medium itself is open to doubt.