Landscape as What?
D.W. Meinig, elaborately took readers on a tour on defining Landscape in his article, "The Beholding Eyes". Ten views are presented to readers and I pondered. The views are interconnected, yet slightly different from one another. I am not sure if Meinig did a good job in connecting the view in one to two sentences is successful, but it definitely conveyed interconnectivity.
The ten views are: nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, and aesthetic.
I think that landscape as a place and aesthetic touched on the subliminal aspect of landscape, which are difficult to define, quantify, and quantify. It is like asking "what is Love"? However, these sublime moments in place or aesthetic plays a critical and irreplaceable emotional role in human. It is the closes thing they can experience in any scenarios: whether it is an individual's daily urban hustle, chill suburb, or quite rural. There is something exciting here-- a universal language that human understands instantly. A person's emotional connection to a specific location. As if the backdrop of a movie has to be a very narrow and specific loca
tion: Chicago, New York, or Hong Kong, or even a forest. Movies that have a well described backdrop tend to produce more emotional attachments and provoke the plot and the characters.
Although we can never fully understand the sublime, it is in fact a universal language which can be further explored and developed. * (read: landscape backdrops that inevitably shapes movies) There is opportunity in here. Immense opportunity, because we can interpret at an individual scale, and there are so many different views, different personalities, different ideologies, it is like a world of biographies waiting to be written and narrated.
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