Pictorial landscape into cinematic landscape: Example of Angelopoulos

Landscape, which literally means a picture representing a framed view of the visible natural world, has become to include not only a certain part of the world, but also interior and exterior architectural spaces, urban and rural settlements, even virtual and digital spaces. The multiple meanings latent in the ontological structure of the landscape which has been the subject of many theories and criticisms in the modern age have emerged, and the determination of being a medium that bears and conveys various messages in many areas such as cultural, social, political, economic has increased its importance even more. The relationship of man with the landscape indoubtedly follows a parallel course of development with the history of civilization. By the advent of the ancient Greek theater and the theater architecture that opens to the landscape in a semi-circular form, the landscape was taken into a frame, and its decorative feature made it one of the indispensable elements of antiquity. It was in 16th century that landscape painting, which was briefly defined as the pictorialization of nature, was accepted as an autonomous painting genre and gradually developing and becoming classicized it reached its pictorial peak in the 19th century. In the same century, with the invention of photography and cinema, a great revolution took place in the history of vision and therefore the modernization process of the landscape began. The aim of this study is to investigate, from the respect of art history, the transformation of the landscape phenomenon into a cinematic landscape (filmic image) in the 20th century, by following its pictorial journey in both philosophical and historical planes, within the framework of the cinema of the modernist Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos, who synthesized classical elements with modern tools and created an original landscape form, meaning and aesthetics. It is within the scope of the study to specify the means of expression that the landscape, which is one of the distinguishing features of Angelopoulos' poetic and political visual style, inherited and transferred while passing from painting to cinema, as well as the new functions and possibilities it acquired. Accordingly, besides applying a holistic and synthesizing landscape reading methodology by utilizing both iconographic and formalist methods, the study endeavors to develop a system of thought and interpretation especially in line with the cinematic theories of André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze, and eventually testifies and records the story of the formation of a new understanding of landscape within a special cinematic experience.