Gilles Deleuze: The Landscape And The Chôra

The Landscape and The Chôra

Gilles Deleuze is the first to introduce the term ‘landscape’ in describing Tarkovsky’s cinematic worlds that fuse time and space as mediums. The terminology of landscape becomes the embodiment of the new composed four-dimensional experience, like Bakhtin’s chronotype. The cinema of Tarkovsky for Deleuze embodies the following:

“There are crystallised spaces, when the landscapes become hallucinatory in a setting which now retains only crystalline seeds and crystallisable materials. Now what characterises these spaces is that their nature cannot be explained in a simple spacial way. They imply non-localisable relations. These are direct presentations of time. We no longer have an indirect image of time which

His idea of landscape consists of the space between the earth and the sky, its presence ‘takes place’ between the earth and the sky, connoting the dimension of the passage of time. In his essay “The Thing” , Heidegger explains that this space is a self-sufficient entity that extends itself between earth and sky — an aesthetic dream by definition. This space, the self-sufficient entity, is a world founded upon nothing but itself. The landscape is thus not only made of earth, contrary to a purely scientific perception of its compounding elements. For Heidegger it is the poetic, aesthetic landscape that is an event, taking place between earth and sky. His conception of space is thus not a ‘measured’, but a ‘dreamt’ space in terms of

The term chôra has been used in philosophy by Plato to designate a receptacle, a space or an interval; it is neither being nor non-being but an interval between which the "forms" it originally held exist . In terms of the landscape it can refer to a space where scientific or numerical measures do not apply. The landscape as an aesthetic phenomenon is a place, thus it can be considered a chôra, for the simple reason that its character is more spiritual than positive. In other words, a landscape does not constitute an empty or closed space within which one can perceive things, but it is a ‘thing’ in itself . If all things are places, as Heidegger says in his essay “Art and Space” , then the landscape becomes a representation of the Heideggarian ‘thing’. The arising question thus becomes how such a ‘thing’ can be perceived if the place (landscape) can neither be described by a subjective observer, nor conceptualised