ABSTRACT

Returning to Brokeback Mountain and its mountainous aesthetics, my contribution develops a three-part argument that reengages the cinematic landscape projected in Ang Lee’s ‘love story’ – a landscape that echoes, as I show, a national visual culture mapped and remapped by paradigmatic moments in art, photography, and film. In part one, ‘Brokeback Mountain and “the force-field of melodrama”’, I show how mountains figure and function in the central genre of film history where they foreground, yet also curtail, the political dimension of personal fears and longings. Calling on the tradition of the Western as much as on the work of Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Andrew Wyeth, William Eggleston, Richard Avedon, and beyond, Brokeback Mountain – so I delineate in my second part ‘(Im-)mobility, mediation, melancholy’ – superimposes its own version of the West on representations we are more familiar with, producing a visual space and soundscape that is bound to shift our perspective. In its third and final part, ‘Landscaping a desire that has no name – or art’, my contribution shows why, since then, mountains have never been the same in the US-American cultural imaginary, and why we look at Westerns, at Adams, and Avedon even more mournfully now, superimposing on them Brokeback Mountain’s gender melancholy.

摘要

回到断背山及其山地美学，我的贡献发展了一个由三部分组成的论点，重新参与了李安“爱情故事”中投射的电影景观——正如我所展示的，这种景观与通过范式时刻映射和重新映射的国家视觉文化相呼应在艺术、摄影和电影领域。在第一部分“断背山和“情节剧的力场””中，我展示了山脉如何在电影史上的核心类型中扮演角色并发挥作用，它们突出但同时也削弱了个人恐惧和渴望的政治维度。在借鉴爱德华·霍珀、安塞尔·亚当斯、安德鲁·惠氏、威廉·埃格尔斯顿、理查德·阿维登等人的作品的同时，《断背山》也借鉴了西部片的传统——所以我在第二部分中描述了“（不-）流动性、调解、忧郁”——将它自己的西方版本叠加在我们更熟悉的表现形式上，产生一个必然会改变我们视角的视觉空间和音景。在第三部分也是最后一部分，“美化一种没有名字或艺术的欲望”，我的贡献说明了为什么从那时起，山脉在美国文化想象中从未如此，以及为什么我们看西方人，在Adams，还有Avedon现在更加的凄凉，在他们身上叠加了断背山的性别忧郁。