Henrik Gustafsson

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Out of Site

This dissertation examines landscape as a concept for analysis and interpretation in film studies by considering the New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Contextualized within the contested notion of nationhood at the time as well as the concern among filmmakers to probe the properties, practices and traditions of American cinema, this was also a period when landscape underwent widespread redefinition as a field of artistic and academic practice. From the outset an aesthetic and pictorial concept, landscape is understood as consisting of a number of interacting ideas and systems of representation which are addressed in terms of intermedial relations. Not something to be encountered or discovered and fixed on canvas or film, landscape involves an ongoing process of construction, appropriation and transformation.

As the subject of extensive research in visual arts and literature, landscape has been explored as a vehicle to assert national or artistic supremacy, and for how it forms and reflects cultural values and identities. Instead, this study examines landscape as a site where nationhood and representation is contested and interrogated, and how it can be advanced to reflect on the construction and mediation of such values and identities. Considering the New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early a period marked by an impulse for retrospection and self-examination, the study offers new interpretations of a number of key films of the era. Applying landscape as a concept for analysis and interpretation, it also launches attention to what has remained a largely uncharted field of investigation in film studies.