Umwelt and the Paradoxes of Landscape in Lupu Pick's Sylvester (1924) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (1968)

In this article, I examine Martin Lefebvre's distinction between setting and landscape (or, as he also formulates it, narrativised space and autonomous spectacle). I examine this distinction in order to think about some of the complex ways landscape can function in film. 

I draw on the concept of Umwelt (surrounding-world) which the German film historian Lotte H. Eisner uses to analyse films from the Weimar period. Particularly focusing on Lupu Pick's Kammerspielfilm Sylvester (1924), Eisner shows how images of the surrounding-world in the film are not directly part of the narrative yet, at the same time, symbolically function to enhance or enlarge what is occurring in the drama. One of my aims in drawing on the concept of Umwelt is to respond to Lefebvre's claim that there are not always fixed boundaries between setting and landscape or between 'narrational' and 'spectacular' modes of spectatorship. 

In order to show how permeable the boundaries between narrativised space and autonomous spectacle can be, I tease out and develop one of the paradoxes that is implicit in Lefebvre's analysis of the desert terrain in Pier Paolo Pasonlini's Teorema (1968). 

You can read the article here at Senses of Cinema (Issue 66, March 2013): 

http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/feature-articles/umwelt-landscape-and-lupu-picks-sylvester/