The ritual of gazing and experiencing landscape in a diptych by Gustavo Fontán

Abstract

Even though it is still premature to measure the impact of the pandemic on human beings, research is being made which accounts not only for the negative effects, but also for outstanding cases of creativity as a result of the extreme lived experience. In this context of pandemic and post-pandemic, Argentine filmmaker Gustavo Fontán made four short films, which formed a polyptych, made up by two diptychs: Stone Garden and Water Light on one hand, and About Nature and Trees and Birds on the other. On this occasion, we will focus on the first of the diptychs, created in the middle of the isolation period, and where a cartography of withdrawal is drawn in the privacy of a terrace. It is there where life metaphors are discovered, coined, paradoxically, in times dominated by death. We will try to approach both shorts, appealing to film Semiotics and the Phenomenology of the spectator, while at the same time we will resort, as a theoretical framework, to recent studies on the concept of landscape. In this context, this is understood as an affective experience, in intimate relationship with the human being.