| An increasing number of landscape scholars have promoted the cinema as a means to comprehend the complex characteristics of place and site that inform the discipline of environmental design. This dissertation explores the utility of the landscape essay film as a dynamic research method and site analysis tool to reveal otherwise invisible or underserved aspects of landscape that may have been forgotten, hidden, or suppressed by engaging the unique affordances in film and video with the alchemy of eidetic montage. Contextualizing the cinema as a representational, analytic, theoretical, and hermeneutical resource that acts as a repository of relationship between humans and the land, the landscape essay film as a discursive practice has the potential to re-present landscape experiences, uncover underlying cultural values, and act with predictive agency on future design and planning. This method arranges acquired and appropriated imagery and sound into the narrative sequence of a short film, building upon the tradition of the essay film, a searching hybrid of narrative, documentary, and experimental film making through research-as-praxis. As such, this dissertation investigates the value of employing film production techniques for landscape studies scholarship, pedagogy, and practice. |
