I discovered further works that made filmic assertions in landscape of “other” marginalised subjectivities, moving image practices that embraced the changeability and ambiguities of the natural environment as proxy for their own turbulent realities. 

For instance, John Akomfrah found in the Romantic landscape tradition and its pursuit of the sublime a surface on which diasporic subjects might assert their presence in an ocean of symbolic whiteness. In Vertigo Sea (20015) Akomfrah re-enacted, with actors in costume, the semantic disturbance caused by the freed slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano seen wandering the West coast of Scotland. The frontal Rückenfigur figure of Equiano set against the jagged Scottish coastline embodied not so much the eradication of African cultures under slavery but what Paul Gilroy identified as the “cultural mutation” that occurred when Africans found themselves in European dominated environments.^[12] In Akomfrah’s films, diasporic creole subjectivities have been made manifest in the whitest of landscapes, sometimes literally when he set his films in snow-bound arctic regions. 

Akomfrah and Hammer, alongside Jarman, Danino and Robertson ruptured landscape traditions and in the cracks made visible those sensibilities to which patriarchal western traditions in art had been structurally closed. A queered landscape could speak what had been silenced, giving voice to burgeoning alterities that found echoes in the flux and cycles of nature, the flow of the moving image, the uncertainties of our future here on earth – something growing in a world unfixed.

While I appreciated Akomfrah’s radical strategy of making visible the hidden history of colonialism in Britain through filmic inscriptions of the countryside, I still worried about the use of well-worn landscape aesthetics favouring sublime imagery that harked back to the imperial gaze of Caspar David Friedrich as well as the high production values of contemporary wildlife programming – in fact, passages in Vertigo Sea are drawn directly from the BBC natural history archives. I wondered whether the adoption of a theatricality redolent of the Fêtes Champêtre of 18^th Century painters such as Watteau and Poussin traded on the familiarity of Arcadian scenes in nature and there was a danger that in so doing they could elicit the spectatorial complacency that had so troubled me. And yet, I told myself, Akomfrah and Hammer’s work, alongside that of Jarman and Robertson diverged substantially from the mainstream narrative traditions that underpinned the televisual sublime of natural history programming and those Hollywood movies that spun their dramas of love and conflict against a backdrop of exotic locations. Many of the artists adopted the anti-narrative strategies of structural film that emphasised the constructed nature of the cinematic illusion using layering, repetition and image distortion to undercut any Arcadian aesthetic conventions. For his part, Jarman employed a blend of allegorical lyricism and unfettered camp performance, which prevented the image from settling into a timeless prospect of nature, in this best of all possible worlds. But the balance between the narcotic lure of landscape on film and its own political deconstruction remained a delicate one.