Landscape has conventionally be used as mise-en-scene in narrative cinema with only very rare good exceptions (think Antonioni's Red Desert) But when landscape is placed as the subject of the film, rather than as backdrop, a whole range of questions and possibilities are opened to the filmmaker.

Since the earliest adventures in filmmaking, directors have had to make decisions about how to express landscape - either manmade or natural. How, for instance, does the camera express our relationship to the environment? Does it show the immovability of structure or navigate through the given world offering something of the active experience of being in a location? If the film does concentrate on movement then does the film automatically consider the manmade aspect to the film - the journey - or does it foreground the inanimate? How is landscape characterised as the subject of film? How does film, a time-based art, express space?