The Invention of Landscape. How to Rethink the Idea of Environment Through Intermedial Forms of Vision, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Enchanted Mountains to Anthropocene (2019)

Enchanted Mountains is the title of a series of photographic works made by Michelangelo Antonioni, starting from some of his paintings. Enchanted Mountains is an extraordinary example of how the forms of vision have the possibility to recreate the idea of landscape, to renew our concept of environment. Here, the final work is given neither by the individual paintings nor by their specific photographic reproduction, but by the enlargement of small details of these paintings, capable of generating a radically renewed relationship between work and gaze. The enlargement of these pictorial details generates a process capable of revealing a new reality: a series of photographic blow ups intended to create mountain peaks where, originally, there were only spots of color, chromatic matter, features of Informalism. This delicate relationship between detail and photographic enlargement characterizes not only the work for cinema (and photography) made by Antonioni, but also the work of other contemporary authors, such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Terence Malick, Patricio Guzman, Kleber Mendonca Filho, until the case represented by Anthropocene (2019), the documentary created by Burtynsky, Baichwal and de Pencier. In this one movie, the landscape is represented by the detail of the space to the vast immensity, through a sort of informal vision made with the same matter and form that composes the deepest layers of the earth: an intimate and personal reworking of reality itself which reimagines a landscape through the techniques and forms of vision.