Screenwriter and filmmaker Masao Adachi coined the term FÛKEIRON (LANDSCAPE THEORY) to describe a style of cinema that sought to infer narrative and ideology in a reading of landscapes. With a sparse, factual voiceover and a free jazz score, Adachi’s film A.K.A. SERIAL KILLER (1969) documents the story of a 19-year-old murderer through a decentralised sequence of images of places, people and actions.
A Marxist militant who would later go on to fight alongside the PLO in Lebanon as a part of the Japanese Red Army, Adachi theorised that in all aspects of the visible environment, no matter how beautiful or banal, an expression of the dominant political power could be read. In A.K.A. SERIAL KILLER, politics and power are framed through a collective view of space, providing an alternative to codified images and pre-determined judgements, rejecting the psychologising of mass media.
The film’s release fronted a wave of international works offering an examination of juxtaposing narratives through the form of landscape interrogation. In Canada, Jack Chambers’ THE HART OF LONDON (1970) interpreted this overlap quite literally, laying ghosted histories of London, Ontario atop one another to portray a tension between nature and the urban environment. In the US, James Benning’s AMERICAN DREAMS: LOST & FOUND (1984) presented three narratives in the form of simultaneous yet thematically separate images, audio and writing. A viewer’s attention is divided, as in society, between conflicting versions of the world around them. Three years later, Benning’s LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (1987) embraced the documentary format, closely examining the testimonies of two murderers, alongside the mundanities of the environments in which they were in some way shaped. Long, static embraces of space challenge the viewer’s perceptions of that which they themselves inhabit.
In this style of filmmaking exists a notion of no single truth embodying the experience of space. As I seek to further explore my ongoing concern with perception and the unseen in my practice, I will be exploring this idea through work that tests and challenges the boundaries between the coexistent narratives that surround us.
The aforementioned artist and filmmaker Jack Chambers wrote of PERCEPTUAL REALISM (later PERCEPTUALISM), an alternative realism that pursues some sense of unreality through a reflection on a sensory experience of space, as opposed to a reproduction of it. He suggested that a painting and film could serve as more ‘truthful’ representations of a space, incorporating multiple experiences and sensual subtleties the mechanical ‘tool’ of the camera could not.
Source: https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/jack-chambers/key-works/401-towards-london-no-1/
This notion was embodied in his painting 401 TOWARDS LONDON NO. 1 (1968 – 1969), painted over a lengthy period and with the reference of multiple images and visits to the site. The work visually represents a site as a whole, yet draws on a multiplicity of interpretations and moments for various visual elements, such as lighting, cloud formations, street signs etc.
By representing this intangible, sensory experience of space, Chambers embraces the whole image of space as something incorporating a multiplicity of interpretations. There is perhaps some suggestion in this idea that multiple ‘versions’ of space are able to co-exist. I am interested in further exploring the heterotopic nature of such a notion.