Landscape as Event: Geometrics and Geopoetics in Contemporary Spanish Cinema

This chapter focuses on landscape in Spanish cinema as a disruptive and destabilizing figure rather than an integral part in the forging of an identity or, indeed, any kind of national or regional affiliation. Landscape is here conceptualized as a transformative element rather than as the setting or staging for the films’ action. Through a close reading of three very different films in which landscape features prominently (though in very distinct ways), it seeks to question our notions regarding the configuration of space to place. To this end, it proposes landscape, rather than a natural phenomenon, as an artifice, the framed enclosure of space defined by geometrical parameters and poetic sensibilities.