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HOW DOES REALITY BECOME A THEME? 97
is 'the mood of the landscape' but there is no mood save that of some human being and those who look at the countryside with the greatest objectivity — a farmer, for instance — would be least likely to see any sort of 'mood' in it. 'Mood' is the feeling of the painter, the artist, not of the ploughman, the shepherd, or the wood-cutter, whose business with nature is not of the soul but of the body, a practical, not artistic activity. The landscape is the physiognomy of some countryside, as seen by the painter who can put it on his canvas, but also by the cameraman who can shoot it with an appropriate set-up. It is as though the countryside were suddenly lifting its veil and showing its face, and on the face an expression which we recognize though we could not give it a name. There have already been several landscape artists of genius in the film, artists of that moving landscape which has not only a physiognomy, but mimicry and gesture too. On these landscapes the clouds gather, the mist drives, the reeds tremble and shiver in the wind, the branches of the trees nod and toss and the shadows play hide-and-seek — these are film landscapes which wake at daybreak and darken to tragedy at the setting of the sun. There is no painter born whose motionless pictures could match this experience.
HOW DOES REALITY BECOME A THEME?
The 'soul of nature' is our own soul which the cameraman picks out of the objective shapes of the countryside. Nature was not always naturally a subject and material for art. Man first had to permeate nature with his own humanity, turn nature into something human. The great art of the Christian Middle Ages knew nothing of this 'soul of nature' and the self-sufficient and meaningful beauty of the landscape. Nature was merely a background, the space in which human events and scenes were played out. In Europe it was the art of the Renaissance which first transformed lifeless nature into living landscape. It is well known that Petrarch was the first to whom it occurred to climb a mountain peak solely for the pleasure of looking down from there on the beauty of the countryside below. Tourist travel is an entirely modern phenomenon. The
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