Dumontland: pejzaż duchowej pustyni
Dumontland: The landscape of a spiritual desert

Author(s): Magdalena Kempna-Pieniążek
Subject(s): Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Photography, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: Set, most frequently, in the realities of the Flandrian province, Bruno Dumont’s realisations convey a picture of reality in which traditional systems of values have been questioned, or, even degraded. Watched with a clear eye, the landscapes in The Life of Jesus,contrast, in their diversity, with bare existence of the protagonists. Intoxicatingly beautiful,almost pictorial locations of Humanity and L’il Quinquin become the scene of heinouscrimes, and lavish nature in Outside Satan seems to herald the return to the pagan experiencing of the world. Although the characters in Dumont’s films spend a considerableamount of time in the bosom of nature, gazing into space and their surrounding reality,the landscapes in these films do not serve contemplation, as understood in the cinema oftraditional spirituality. Here, nature is not a source of beauty or the sense of balance; rather,it hides the abomination of primordial instincts and a spectacle of death. In a sense, itsirrepressibility and ability to regenerate cyclically stand in contrast to the spiritual void ofcivilization tainted with a sense of the end and decline. The author characterizes the topography of Dumontland, in which the opulence of nature becomes a paradoxical reflectionof the spiritual void, which is the space of existence of post-modern man. The specificity ofDumont’s landscape, presented in this way, reveals the spectrum and complexity of issuesthat are the centre of the French director’s work.

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