Through the lens pass all that remains unspoken about the modern age, with its indeterminate conception and tendency to mythologise relations between time, place and space. Certainly, our acknowledgement that the world seldom conforms to our views of existence contributes to our ideation of nature, and film evolves with acute awareness of this condition. In early films, darkness itself had roles to play. It made sequential appearances in silent narratives as if a momentarily darkened screen could evoke our fine primitive instincts. From that perspective, one could choose an approach into the new era. One could enter into conformity through the universalising trends in irreversible narratives or one could choose encounters among the invisible sign language that played simultaneously upon the screen, a theatre of other possible worlds.

It is said that language is action. So, to speak in images is to usher in the action we could take if empowered to elect other realities — the kind a lens records in the space between the living of modern life, and our feeling for our prehistory — a condition that may still influence the future.

The events pictured here are collected from various continents. Their common features are the fusion between the natural landscapes and four distinctive views of ecology as a vessel that collects and reveals the results of modern behaviour.

Defining space as live ecological forms have allowed these artists to pose their views of modernity as a philosophical problem. Each has physicalised a visual language to transform our awareness of the earth as our body-double, in forms as concrete as mineralogy or as ineffable as climate. In these four scenes, we see the environment host the movement of civilisation through the spatial features of natural forces.

In 1903, in an early short film, Edison’s cameramen, Porter and Smith, were assigned a silent staging of image and fact, A Capture of Pirates on New York Harbor. Multiple agents of change, including nature itself, transformed the symbolic value of the sea through the instrument of cannon shot. In 2:09 minutes, the idea of eternity as a romantic pairing of nature with unlimited freedom and trust was overturned.

The lens, stationed in a moving sea, positioned the shore in the inner eye. The sheer unpredictability of fate was echoed in the perpetual movement of the sea. With no reference to land, eternity and finitude were made specific in the piloting of a small craft by a few men, plying their course along the crests of waves to either side of uncertainty. At first glance, their struggle seems protected by nature’s dominance over time and space.

Then, dominant force, portrayed by the sudden advance of an armoured gunship, pursues an object of liberty, across New York Harbour. Liberty is embodied, not by a monument, but rather by the timeless movement of the oceanic world and these few men; caught between the infinite resilience of nature and its limitations in proximity to civilisation.

Explosions first crest and burst in the spatial field above the sea, then ignite within its waves to sink and shine. When, ultimately, the men are captured, the real implication here is the mortal aspect of nature — that of ecology and that of man.

By 2001, Peter Hutton’s lens was steadily focused beyond the reach of such contradictions. With the camera placed as a moveable datum, seemingly within the sea, the behaviour of natural forces play the leading role. Infinity is made visible as a naturally occurring event. Its form is the ecological ordering of space. In sixteen minutes, he describes a direct trajectory between light emanating from its point of origin along the many forms the sea assumes. Light and darkness spill through the lens to effect a state of evolution across its face, placing every reference to the life of the ecology at no risk to interpretation.

Multiple transformations occur as sea forms flow. They evolve as a silent visual narrative with the ability to reflect relations between our conscious awareness, our rational understanding of art and then finally relieve the screen of associations with romantic notions about nature and historical origins. Washed in this sense of clarity by the tide’s infinite production of unique forms, a sombre confirmation arrives in the final frames, suggesting that we may turn away from epochality at any time, reverse the confinement of earth to infrastructures and see that vision and experience have suffered but survived a long “absence of light at the very heart of perception.”¹

That sombre resonance involves the absence of land. Properties of earth are suspended there, evacuated from the logic of sight. This world, with no defensive structures, with allusions to infinity, is shown in turbulent union with its global process, and then, at rest in its interior properties, as the earth at Lime Hills is not.

Through Hatakeyama’s lens passed the sheer volume of a world composed of material desire for all the energies and matter that coalesced before the era of man. This sequence of still images begun in 1984, ends in 1991 with a classic Asian landscape reduced to a particular form of action we as moderns can intuit but seldom see — a place-form unable to resist the remorseless application of imagination and energy. The integrity with which Hatakeyama alerts the senses to these realities, is shown in the unveiling of each successive strata of earth that increasingly resembles human flesh.

Allusions to the value of irreducible space circulate through both the sea and the lime hills. Ultimately, the domains of geological time and the oceanic collide with our well-conditioned belief that technology, like nature, has its own irreversible life-force. In the final sequence of Looking At the Sea, a jet enters the scene in a distant corner of sky, perhaps unnoticeable but for the fact of its glistening surface. This small, distant, ineffectual object takes on a near-historic presence, a messenger perhaps from another epoch. In its brief appearance in this theatre of ecology, its authority over time and place becomes instead a sparkling, fleeting ornament from another world.

For each generation the waxing and waning significance of the unseen individual in such messages are clear. Hatakeyama allows the disintegration of a place form to show how, exactly, the interior of a landscape is exposed. The shock that results from the implosion of human potential into the ecology, is rendered by unseen labourers and technological visionaries as an allied, invisible force; in this case, a destructive pair.

Meanwhile, in the Arcadian landscape, a regenerative spirit has been given a site for quite a different fusion of horizons. The Temenos Association, guided by filmmaker Robert Beavers, has posthumously edited the films of Gregory Markopolous.

By screening them in his native landscape, the life achievements of one man and his narrative art, are introduced into the land that sustained him. Allowed to regenerate on a natural stage, the cooperative artistic production that enables these screenings can remind us of how one life sometimes surmounts certain limitations of mortality.

To expose what is irrevocably lost and what is irreducible, allows us to reconsider the physical realities of our evolution through the modern era. In viewing these possible worlds, we may still resolve the post-modern rejection of direct experience, as these artists suggest we can.

Their philosophical penetration of the world prolongs the fleeting nature of reality, of vision and cognition. With this, we may reason with, and ultimately, capture what Emmanuel Levinas described as, “The world still going about its business, that manifests itself in language admitting its inability to synchronize the life of things, play the game of signifiers without the signified, in a world of possibilities that is never at rest, allowing what would otherwise be the margins of the world, to occupy their centre.”²

¹ Veronique M. Foti Vision’s Invisibles, 2003, State University of New York Press, Albany, 70
² Emmanuel Levinas Transcendance et intelligibilite: suivi d’un etretien, Labor & Fides, Geneva, 1996, 102

Peter Hutton’s films will be shown in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in March, 2005. The web site for the films of Gregory Markolpolous and the Temenos Association is: www.Temenos.org