Melancholy Landscapes of Modernity: London and Passaic

Analysing the melancholy of Nordic Noir as stimmung: Affective world-building inThe Bridge

“…This is inspired by scholar of landscape architecture Jackie Bowring, who, in her book Melancholy and the Landscape , unfolds a series of ‘places of melancholy’ and their affective qualities. She describes one such place of melancholy as characterised by intimate immensity, seen as circling ‘around the irresolvable poles of nearness and distance’ (Bowring, 2016: 161).…”

“…The almost interruptive, contemplative breakers render the series relatively slow compared to other noir crime dramas and thrillers. The pace of the storytelling and cutting follow a punctuated rhythm that fosters a ruminative mode of relating to the world, described as both a key feature of melancholy (Bowring, 2016; Waade, 2017) and of the rise of landscape spectacles in television more generally (Wheatley, 2016). Contemplation and lingering also occur on the level of action as the series features several scenes where the characters are seen in a contemplative mode, often at home or sitting in the kitchen of the Malmö police station.…”

“…The Bridge is set in the autumn months, which is the greyest time of year in the Scandinavian countries. The season has been closely connected to melancholy since ancient times, where it was rooted in the idea of the humours and associated with black bile, coldness and dreariness (Bowring, 2016: 13). More than just a visual concept, the cold, grey materiality of autumn permeates the world of the series and invites its viewer to experience the world through autumn’s sensibilities.…”

Place, space, and capital: The landscapes of Patrick Keiller

“…Bowring (2011: 213) suggests that both Keiller’s London and Benjamin’s Paris ‘are cut through with liminality, the in-between moments in time and space that characterise the melancholic landscapes of modernity’. Our sense of the past is inevitably bound up with feelings associated with loss and the realisation that what has gone before can never return.…”

“…Keiller’s work is especially significant for the way in which it traverses the boundaries between creative practice, particularly film, and the critical analysis more commonly associated with academic forms of inquiry, but also for the way in which it takes up the spatial and topographic as the means to explore a set of contemporary issues centring around capitalism and neo-liberalism, landscape and mobility, memory and loss. Keiller’s work has already drawn a considerable body of scholarly attention (see for example: Bowring, 2011; Catterall, 2012a, 2012b; Clarke, 2007; Clarke and Doel, 2007; Daniels, 1995; Dave, 2011; Grimble, 2005; Goldsmith, 2012, Hegglund, 2013; Kinik, 2009; Martin, 2014; Massey, 2013; Moore, 2005; Nigianni, 2015; Power, 2010; Stevens, 2010), and Keiller has himself commented on London , Robinson in Space and his collaboration with Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright in the making of Robinson in Ruins (see Keiller, 2010, 2012; Keiller and Wright, 2000).…”