More to the picture than meets the eye: ecocinema, landscape, and James Benning's Deseret

A central conceit of theories of ecocinema is that moving-image works can provide immersive experiences of place that cultivate more ecologically attuned forms of life. It has recently been argued, however, that such experience also tends to prompt viewers to master the places viewed by ascribing specific meaning and value to them. This perspective is tied to the persistent assertion that landscape is inherently ideological in ways that confound attempts to use it to model care for the natural world and critique ecologically destructive activities. Against this position, this article argues that work at the intersection of ecocinema and the landscape film can maintain a commitment to providing an instructive experience of place while also making space for 15 viewers to reflect on encultured responses to landscape and human histories that have shaped and defined the places pictured. It also cautions against making overly broad claims about landscape’s embodiment of utilitarian vision, while affirming the need to situate ecocinema and the landscape film within a lineage of visual culture beyond the moving image. These arguments are 20 pursued through a case study of James Benning’s Deseret (1995), which is situated against the history of landscape photography in the American West.