(Ed. Note: Originally published at Image Facts.)
“Big they fought! Big they loved! Big their story!”
(This is the actual publicity tagline for the film. How fantastic is that?)
The term “horizonless landscape” pops up often both in exhibition catalogs of contemporary photography and descriptions of post-modern culture. In its literal sense, it refers to a landscape image which is cropped in a way that eliminates the horizon as a point of reference. (Imagine, for example, how awful Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” would be without its horizon. Alternatively, among the most rewarding horizonless landscapes of our time would be Andreas Gursky’s giant high-resolution photographs of urban architecture.) In its metaphorical sense, it refers to what happens when we isolate a part from its whole context. Here in post-modernity, after the death of meta-narratives and all that, we live in such a landscape that lacks horizons and edges as points of ideological or spiritual reference.
I was stunned to encounter a perfect blend of this literal and metaphorical sense of the term in a place like a 1958 William Wyler western. By all accounts it is an excellent film, the cinematography making full use of the “big” country in which it was shot. It films its characters in deep focus from a distance, close-up as they look out at different vistas, and everything in between. But there a particular scene in which Gregory Peck (the good guy) dukes it out with Charlton Heston (the bad guy who eventually becomes a “good” guy) in the middle of the night. It starts off in a tight shot with Peck swinging away at Heston, but the camera soon pulls back to enough of a distance that these two brawlers become tiny features at the center of a bleak frame of windswept grass. The camera is placed in such a way that the horizon is deleted, and for several minutes Wyler cuts us off from everything but this monochrome patch of prairie. It is a stark contrast to the sumptuous landscape cinematography of the film at either side of this scene, and even at this distance one can hear the flat, meaty slap of fist on face as these two pummel each other into the ground.
This scene is a remarkable experience, a small moment in a giant film. It only comes to an end when both fighters agree that their ridiculous duel has been futile.