To Europeans of the so-called Age of Discovery, the whole North American continent seemed a sort of Edenic rod and gun club, and their descendants here still haven't gotten over their obsession with the pure primal landscapes they despoil with their own presence.
His films, accordingly, attempt to connect modern cinemagoers to their prelapsarian selves: the emotions are always primal, and landscape is integral to the drama.
Hepworth started to find those primal exemplars in the landscape of Britain itself.
The use of Dennis' body in making his primal mark on the landscape would be evocative enough, but in adding representation of his son overlapping him, the signage assumes a timeless aura--the kind that in another century would inspire romantic phrasing of human transcendence over mortal limits.
I kept having these primal images; just quite strange landscapes and shapes I couldn't shake.
Nor, for all its lyricism, is "Ballast," in which Lance Hammer uses the reticence of his actors and the strangeness of the Delta landscape to lay bare complex, primal feelings of loss, loyalty and fear.
The first time I approached the Grand Canyon I walked to the rim expecting to look down, and instead looked over and out at a vast landscape of undulating canyons in primal colors, rising up into fantastic shapes and plunging down to the Colorado River.
But the evil that has crept up on her while she was looking the other way is something quite other: a primal force whose roots lie in the godless and unearthly landscape around her, an innate and lurking foulness that goes beyond even violence, torture or murder – "a whisper of unrest bred deep in the soil".
Ever since, Mr Long's work has been modern and primal, conceptual and material as much about the time spent in the landscape as the finished product.
