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its myth and every myth has its history. The landscape of Milton Keynes is rooted in a myth about Los Angeles, and the landscape of suburbia (‘unplanned’) is rooted in a myth about yeoman-villagers and their village, folk memory of the English petty bourgeois.
    In the second distinction, the viewer’s gaze surrounds the sheep: it is apprehended all at once. Even if the sheep were as big as a house, the viewer would only have to move away from it to restore the relationship. (If it
were
a house, the position would be slightly different, as the inside could not readily be apprehended, and when it could, the viewer would be inside
it
and only partly aware of the outside. This is the unique dual status of architecture.)
    In the landscape, however, the viewer is always surrounded, and so the business of picturing is infinitely more complex both technically and conceptually. Devices such as the ‘frame within the frame’ have evolved partly to deal with this, and it is this distinction between modes of viewing that differentiates the parallel analogies between an object and an idea, and between one’s surroundings and a mood, atmosphere or state of mind.
    Landscape functions in all these ways in the cinema, perhaps more so than anywhere else. The tragic–euphoric palimpsest; thereciprocity of imagination and reality; place seen in terms of other place; setting as a state of mind – all are phenomena that coincide in films.
    The exact way in which this happens is generally determined by a more or less complex and more or less intense metaphorical relationship between landscape and narrative, like that between the volcano and Ingrid Bergman’s spiritual crisis in
Stromboli
. The volcano, as singular a presence as any, is employed in a variety of ways: its rumblings parallel her unease; it is the cause of her isolation and it hosts her despair and redemption when she tries to climb over it to the outside world.
    Similar ambiguities between benevolence and malevolence are general and twofold. The landscape may or may not be sympathetic to the protagonists, and the film may or may not echo this judgement. In Herzog’s South American ventures both forest and invaders are equally godforsaken, but the forest is bound to win, and few tears are to be shed over this. On the other hand, the geography of
The Wages of Fear
is a lackey of the employers, and it really is sad when Yves Montand’s truck goes over the edge.
    In John Ford’s films a more metaphorical idea of predicament is entertained.
The Lost Patrol
slowly and inexorably pursues the archetypal spiritual analogies of the desert, while the impotence of Boris Karloff’s religious-fanatic behaviour increases as it becomes more extreme. Ford’s desert is very like his opposite-but-similar ocean in
The Long Voyage Home
. In
The Quiet Man
the surface of Ireland is cast (as it often is) as a palimpsest of the type previously described, and the conflict that is the film’s story is over rights of access to history and ‘rootedness’ through ownership of land and other property. The outsider, John Wayne, despite the local origin of his parents, is only able to secure these rights to their past by employing his skill as an ex-champion boxer, the very thing he was so anxious to conceal in his own past. Subject-matter and setting are even more closely identified in
The Grapes of Wrath
. Here the palimpsest is active, for the landscape itself, by physically blowing away, becomes the instrument by which the landowners’ exploitation leads to suffering on a biblical scale.
    With Renoir the relationship is similar, if more subtle. The passionate excesses of
La Bête Humaine
are orchestrated entirely by the railway, its own landscape and that through which it runs. The sexuality of the railway engine pervades the intricacy of timetabling, and the landscape, again as a palimpsest, models the ideas about heredity and misfortune that underlie Zola’s novel. The country house and its