Landscape film
Films where place is the subject: land, weather and light watched closely, usually with few people or none.
Experimental filmmakers have long pointed the camera at one place and kept watching. James Benning and Peter Hutton, among others, built careers on long, still views of land and cities. The idea is to keep looking until the landscape starts to change.
Scott Barley's landscapes are darker. He films Welsh and Scottish valleys, lakes and woods, mostly on an iPhone, and layers them into something closer to horror, where an unseen presence passes through the night.
Films to start with
In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Hinterlands
A short horror film about something coming down from the sky, built from footage shot from a car's passenger seat. Barley drew on a recurring nightmare.
Sleep Has Her House
A wordless landscape film with no people in it, shot in Scotland and Wales. An unseen presence passes through a valley, a lake and woods as night falls. Its longest take is an eleven-minute sunset.
Still from Optimism to come. Optimism
A portrait of Dawson City in the Yukon: cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, gold sifted from river gravel and a mirrored disc on a cliffside, in a valley that sits in shadow all winter. Charlie Chaplin's music plays over it.
Nearby
Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.