Anywhere and Nowhere: New Zealand, California, and Cinematic Place Substitution

“What is it you see up there, Phil?” a ranch-hand asks Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), gazing up at a vast landscape of rolling hills. “There is something there, right?” Phil responds: “not if you can’t see it there ain’t.” The year is 1925. The setting is Montana. The film is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021). Later in the film, Phil finds himself again gazing upon the hills, this time with Peter, his brother’s stepson. “Most people look at it and they just see a hill,” Phil remarks. “Bronco Henry looked at it, what do you suppose he saw?” Peter answers: “A barking dog.” Both moments purposefully call attention to land’s transposable otherness, in a film that has been described as the “latest phase in [Jane Campion’s] use of New Zealand to achieve specific goals.”[1] The Power of the Dog engages with Edward Soja’s concept of “third space”: a physical location where the real (first space) and imagined (second space) narratives overlap and “disrupt binary and linear historical understandings” of places and people.[2] The real first space, of course, is not Montana but rather the Hawkdun Range in Central Otago on New Zealand’s South Island, an area described as “an inspiring and timeless land of extremes.”[3] The imagined second spaces, as advertised by Film Otago Southland, a not-for-profit trust supporting screen production in the region, range from “Westerns to post-apocalyptic worlds.” In The Power of the Dog, the third space created through the film’s visual grammar, narrative strategies, and defamiliarization of western genre conventions is a reflexive site that deconstructs the settler history of both the American West and New Zealand. Third space in Campion’s film also acknowledges, in both locations, film space’s capacity to serve as a projective screen for expropriation. As Campion’s film highlights, the sensations evoked through third space in works of art, as Svetland Boym observes, are often fueled by nostalgia, a sense of being out of time and place with a rapidly evolving world.[4] This article will explore how this anywhere space quality of New Zealand is encoded into the visual strategies of The Power of the Dog, a film that stands alongside Campion’s other work in its use of landscape to reveal the mechanisms through which a third space is created. The film performs a cinematic anti-tour through its revisions of the western genre and acknowledging New Zealand as a versatile land of place-substitution, for which it has a global reputation.

Questions about national belonging and territoriality have been central to Jane Campion’s career from the outset, overlapping with her films’ explorations of gender and sexuality. The Power of the Dog is a continuation of this overlap, a “western gothic” film in which the sublime, emanating from the film’s rugged Montana setting, is repurposed to swallow up expressions of patriarchy. The sublime’s narrative power in the film, however, is also wedded to New Zealand’s twenty-first century reputation as a land of place-substitution, replicating the conditions that existed in Southern California during the early twentieth century that ushered in the western genre in the first place. Hollywood emerged from an established regional industry of tourism that promised immersive and participatory experiences, and, in turn, early Hollywood’s popular genres took advantage of Los Angeles’s edge-of-the-frontier status, visually marketed through these attractions. Nearly a century after Hollywood’s ascendency, transnational New Zealand film productions would feature what some scholars refer to as the “conflation of the tourist gaze with the filmic one.”[5] Capitalizing on the popularity of films like the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, the Chronicles of Narnia, Alien Covenant, and The Last Samurai, both contemporary New Zealand films and tourism harken back to a similar and equally vibrant culture of image-making, occasioned through the country’s geographic position and settler history. As with Southern California during the early twentieth century, New Zealand of the early twenty-first century is transformed into “anywhere spaces” with similar qualities of transposable otherness that catapulted the greater Los Angeles area into an American film capitol during the silent period. When we contrast the pre-cinema visual culture of both the American West and New Zealand, tourism in particular, we also find similar narrative strategies based around the promise of immersive, proto-cinematic experiences, fueled by the varied landscapes of these regions.

In 1999, Film New Zealand published The Production Guide to the World in One Country, which boasted the ability of New Zealand-based productions to reproduce “the Italian Lake district, the American Northwest, the Scottish Highlands, Norwegian fjords…Korea, Ireland, and Greece.”[6] This celebration of the land as an anywhere space echoes some of the earliest texts to grace the shelves of Hollywood studio libraries, such as Robert E. Welsh’s ABCs of Motion Picture from 1916 which described Southern California as “a picture mecca” in which a “land of continuous sunshine…stands in for the four corners of the globe.”[7] Later during the 1920s and 1930s, promotional material for Paramount Studios would openly advertise this fascination by including a location map of California that signaled, with a great level of self-confidence, places in California that have stood in for somewhere else. Traces of this transposable otherness quality to Southern California can be found today on the outskirts of Los Angeles: in Chatsworth on the northeastern end of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley and in the San Gabriel Mountain range above. Chatsworth’s Iverson Movie Ranch served as the location of over two thousand film shoots, standing in for Africa, Asia, the South Seas, the Wild West, and alien planets. Notable films include Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), The Good Earth (1937), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), and In Cold Blood (1967). In the San Gabriel’s, we find locations for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Kubrick’s Fear and Desire, the Tarzan films of the 1930s, and westerns old and contemporary. This location, one of the steepest ranges in North America, is visited annually by nearly 30 million tourists and is part of Los Angeles’s nearly 675-mile peripheral wild edge, the longest of any major non-tropical city.

Both locations figure into Hollywood’s formation as what Allen J. Scott terms a “cultural economy”: a constellation of “cultural product industries” whose goods and services carry a “subjective meaning that is high in comparison to their utilitarian purpose.”[8] In a cultural economy, which Los Angeles emerged as by the end of World War I, a location becomes both “a particular locale-bound nexus of production relationships” and a “disembodied assortment of narratives” at the heart of an multimedia exchange system.[9] For Scott, the formation of a cultural economy is accomplished in three phases: 1) the initial geographical distribution of production over a given landscape, 2) the location emerges as a “nascent agglomeration,” or an early assemblage of culture producing sectors, and 3) the consolidation of the agglomeration’s “market reach,” intensifying the cultural economy’s competitive advantages over other locations.[10] Southern California’s formation as a culture economy was facilitated through the motion picture industry inheriting a pre-cinema industry of visualization, centered around tourism, spectatorship, and near-cinematic experience, aesthetic forms with a history of contributing to each of these three growth phases in varying ways. During California’s Progressive Era (approximately 1880 to 1920), photography, painting, tourism, architecture and other related visual culture forms contributed to the rapidly changing landscape of Southern California and “occasioned innovative thinking about the relationship between physical environments and the production of images.”[11] These aesthetic forms constituted a loosely orchestrated industry of image production and circulation geared toward mythologizing the region, in turn providing a model for early Hollywood filmmakers on how a spectator’s mind could be both patterned and liberated.

Photography distinguished itself from popular painted spectacles through widely distributed photography albums (still and stereoscopic) and through a panoramic vision used to directly aid the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in opening the region to the rest of nation. These images captured the material reality of the Southern California frontier (and the frontier city of Los Angeles in rapid transformation) on collodion plates and dry plates, later to be transformed into proto-celluloid fantasy through panoramic exhibitions, stereoscopic technology, and mass-distributed photo albums. Los Angeles’s growth the “Progressive Era” was the product of a crucial relationship between photographers, railroad companies, and increased speed at which these images could be produced, distributed, and consumed. A crucial figure in this history is scenic photographer Carleton Watkins (1829 – 1916), who utilized mammoth plate technology and drew on the panorama photography techniques of Eadweard Muybridge to aid the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in the creation of the Tehachapi Loop in 1876, effectively opening the Los Angeles basin to the rest of the country by rail travel. Fueled by a desire to compete with popular painted panorama spectacles, panoramic photography flourished in Los Angeles throughout the late nineteenth century, offering new ways of visualizing cityscapes that have a distinct presence in Los Angeles-set cinema. Some of these panorama photographers also produced stereoscopic views of Los Angeles and the greater Southern California area, and companies like H.T. Payne, the Historical Society of California, and the Pan American Publishing Company distributed stereoscopic albums nationwide. This rapid circulation of images gave rise to a cultural imaginary of Los Angeles before motion pictures started to arrive. By the early 1910s, audiences outside of Los Angeles readily responded to moving images of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops hurtling down the wide streets of Echo Park and Silver Lake, as California photography had already fostered a recognizable Los Angeles look.

By contrast, California impressionist painters would give art traditions that were fading in Europe a new lease on life in the California sun, advancing a popular mythology of the region in partnership with prominent California real estate promoters who gave these artists nationwide exposure. The signature colors of these outdoor painters were used in the visual marketing of real estate, agribusiness, and health retreats, industries that often partnered with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to stimulate migration. Albert Bierstadt’s visits to California during the 1860s and 1870s provides a crucial starting point in sketching out the history of visual art in California. Steeped in the luminist style[12], Bierstadt imbued the state’s landscape with the symbolic and narrative meaning, layering these scenes with the visual language of American destiny. Belonging of the Hudson River School tradition, [13] paintings such as Valley of Yosemite (1864) or Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains (1868) anticipated Progressive Era booster literature through suffused light and sublime sensibilities, forecasting the future California myth-making industry of Charles Fletcher Lummis through oil paint; Ansel Adams would photograph these same locations in 1935, infusing Bierstadt’s luminist vision with the ideals of early twentieth century art photography. Bierstadt and other landscape romantics would set the stage for an outdoor impressionist style commonly referred to as Southern California plein air (French for “outdoors”) painting. The style used the region’s natural beauty to fuel back-to-nature attitudes that contrasted sharply with the rapid urbanization of the Downtown Los Angeles area. Painters like William Wendt (1865 – 1946), Guy Rose (1867 – 1925), and Richard E. Miller (1875 – 1943) were steeped in the style of French Impressionism and used California’s terrain and climate to provide the style with a new lease on life, creating what Michael McManus described as a “beautiful anachronism.”[14]

Southern California plein air constructed what some scholars refer to as the state’s social imaginary: a collective memory of a place that may never have existed but nevertheless is built in people’s minds.[i] That these mental images of California spring into the mind’s eye when prompted by booster rhetoric is the product of plein air’s engagement with the natural landscape in three distinct ways. First, they emphasized the state’s natural beauty in a manner that foreshadowed early Hollywood’s signature practices of place substitution. Drawing on earlier traditions of American Eden painting and French Impressionism techniques simultaneously, California plein air intensified the local population’s connection to nature amidst a period of rapid urbanization. In these paintings, the grassy hills and sycamore canyons of the Arroyo and beyond reinforced that state’s emblematic colors, notably purple and orange and provided an ideal environment to continue the legacy of the luminists in which the primal aspects of nature are connected to a spiritual state-of-mind. Second, plein air painters brought a sense of nostalgia and escapism to California life. Utilizing the favorable advantages offered by the climate and terrain, these painters fueled back-to-nature attitudes through an emphasis on nature in stark contrast to urbanization, providing a sense of civic pride through visualizing the region’s origins as a paradisical landscape. It also must be said that Southern California plein air constitutes a certain take on the concept of “the sublime,” an overwhelming sense of awe in the face of physical greatness that was a feature of landscape paintings in Europe and North America from the early nineteenth century. Third, Los Angeles’s location far from the world’s art centers shielded the region from the grim realities found in other art forms, making the plein air the dominant style until modern forms began to make in-roads into Los Angeles during the late 1910s and early 1920s. While the movement faded in popularity during the 1920s, artists trained in plein air painting would utilize these techniques in film production design, animation, special effects, and educating future film creatives at L.A. art academies like Chouinard, Otis, and Scripps.

Both photography and painting cemented a distinct California look-and-feel in the social imaginary that cast the state as more than just a place but also a state of mind. Southern California was known as the edge-of-the-frontier, or the end of the “Wild West,” a place that was both wild and tame/civilized and primitive. Taking advantage of California’s reputation as a blank slate upon which dreamers could project themselves, a tourism industry arose in Southern California that offered proto-cinematic transformative experiences.The West was no longer “wild” by the dawn of the twentieth century. In the movies, however, the Wild West continued through Los Angeles, a city that cinema depicted as the“last manifestation of the Western movement” and the “end of the frontier.”[15] This is a largely because in Los Angeles the concepts of “wild” and “urban” are viewed as “variable qualities and processes,” and the city’s edge-of-the-frontier status is quite literal. L.A.’s metropolitan area is “now bordered primarily by mountains and desert rather than farmland,” and has the longest “wild edge” of any major non-tropical city, roughly 675 miles long. In cities like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, the growth of the “urban” has traditionally been seen to decrease the “wild,” whereas the growth of L.A. as an urban space has paradoxically increased the wildness of the region.[16] The mountain lion, for example, a symbol of Southern California’s wildness that graced the logo of booster Charles Fletcher Lummis’ Land of Sunshine magazine, now lives in the Santa Monica Mountains, in-breeding and hemmed in by major freeways and foothill neighborhoods (Calabasas, Malibu, Topanga, etc.). Los Angeles’s reputation as a wild and untamed space figures strongly in movies set there, as Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself explores effectively through noir cinema and disaster movies. Los Angeles-set cinema appears to have anticipated the symbiotic relationship between urban and wild in Los Angeles, entrenching the city’s edge-of-the-frontier status into public consciousness.

Advertisements for Southern California attractions paradoxically anticipate Tom Gunning’s notion of “cinema of attractions,” early motion picture that owed “more to the attractions of the fairground than to the traditions of legitimate theater.” Yet, while the cinema of attractions, as Gunning argues, privileges “theatrical display” over “narrative absorption,” a goal of many Southern California tourist attractions was “narrative absorption.” For some of these attractions, the narrative absorption was quite literal, such the Home of Ramona in Ventura County, attracting thousands of dedicated fans of Helen Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona annually from 1888 to 1912 to what they believed to be the home of the titular character. Fueled by visual advertisements created by the Southern Pacific Railroad for their newly constructed Camulos railway stop, a stone’s throw from the attraction, visitors would ask the site’s caretakers if “Ramona, Alessandro, or Señor Moreno were home,” as they wandered the grounds of a home built using precise details from Jackson’s novel.  Other attractions were constructed around transformative experiences and affirmations of citizenship. The Mount Lowe Resort in the hills above Altadena, for example, created an enclosed and immersive narrative world, encouraging “visitors to reenact animal removal campaigns, as well as reenact the ‘taming’ of the frontier.” Writing about Los Angeles-set films, Ben Stanley notes that the “frontier” and Southern California are places “saturated by the hyperreal” that exist “as both . . . material reality and celluloid fantasy,” suggesting that the frontier was ultimately tamed into a simulacrum of its former self through pre-cinema visual culture, that was ultimately absorbed by Southern California and culturally repackaged endlessly the motion picture industry.

The influence of each of these visual forms, crystalized in the industrial practices of early Hollywood, was reflected strongly in a 1929 edition of the tourist magazine Southern California Through the Camera. [17]  Produced by the All-Year-Round Club of California[18], headed by real estate tycoon Harry Chandler, the magazine featured photographs of leisure life in the “joyous Southland,” trumpeting the region as a place of profound inspiration for “artists, writers, and moving picture directors.” A California Impressionist painting, Lake Pasadena and the Flintridge Biltmore Hotel from Linda Vista Peak (Orrin A. White, date unknown), graces the cover, promising “a trip abroad in your own America.” A section on “California tourism,” featuring images of sunbathing and camel tours through Death Valley (escorted by tour guides dressed in Arab Bedouin costumes), suggest that travelers will be stars in their own Rudy Valentino motion picture romance. A two-page panoramic aerial photograph, taken by photographer Robert Earl Spence (credited as “Spence Airplane”), pictorially captures Los Angeles as the prototype for a modern American city: multi-centered, dispersed, and less concerned with “city” and more concerned with “region.”[19] Yet a particularly curious feature of the magazine are production stills from silent films set in California’s colonial past, shot amongst local historical landmarks, implying that California was always a cinematic setting. A caption below the images reads: “Below is a scene from a motion picture where one of California’s old Spanish Missions supplies the background,” and declares that “nowhere in the United States is there a place so flavorful of ancient lands.” This signature quality of place substitution was accomplished, in part, through what Jennifer Bean describes as “an unprecedented fascination with the ‘place’ of motion pictures”: environments stripped of geographically specificity and reengineered for an optimal engagement with the senses.[20] When we look at the other visual cultural forms highlighted in Southern California Through the Camera, however, we can trace the origins of this “engagement with the sense” and the rendering of the California ecosystem in service of a visual myth-making industry.

During roughly the same period, a parallel visual culture existed in New Zealand that drew upon the country’s varied landscapes to create what Fran Walsh describes as a “gentle pull of the familiar” and a “sense of belonging.”[21] Photography, painting, and tourism in New Zealand from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century forged a cultural economy, with the landscape serving as a projection space for a growing national identity and regional mythology. While Southern California tourism and visual culture provided an immersive model for early Hollywood filmmakers, similar conditions behind New Zealand’s modernization cemented strategies for films, nearly a century later, to “construct viewers as textual tourists.” Visual promotion of New Zealand attractions, also in collaboration with railroad companies that collaborated with photographers and painters, narrativized the landscape as a land to be infinitely tamed. Linking what some scholars describe as the “cult of the physical” to the colonial logic of “inheritance and transferability of geographic space,” New Zealand tourist advertising cemented practices for “generative imaginative activity” that, in turn, informed New Zealand cinema’s “physical and simulated mobility typical of tourist practices.” This modernization of Southern California and New Zealand, according to Alfio Leotta, be also read as part of a broader postmodern phenomenon: “the blurring of the boundaries between high and low cultures and between different cultural forms…such as tourism and art.”[22] While photography studios such as H.T. Payne and Griffith & Griffith cemented a Southern California look-and-feel in the popular imagination, a robust industry of New Zealand photography and postcards emerged that drew on the “gentle pull of the familiar” and a “sense of belonging” to foster tourism, migration, and identity formation. Much of this image production and circulation was New Zealand railroad companies employed in-studio artists, such as the “Railway Studios” founded by the New Zealand Railways Department Advertising Branch, mirroring similar practices by California’s Southern Pacific Railroad company at the turn-of-the-century. A notable feature of postcards heavily circulated by the Railway Studios was their design to be unfolded into a panorama picture, a reminder of the centrality of the panoramic vision to New Zealand as a provisional nation forged by spectatorship. This visualization would also anticipate what Anne Friedberg identifies as the “mobilized” and “virtual gaze”: moviegoing propelled by mobilizing tourist and…by the virtual gaze promoted by pre-cinematic [art forms] such as the panorama and the diorama.”[23]

In The Power of the Dog, the panoramic vision is repurposed to disrupt genre expectations and the social imaginary of New Zealand as an anywhere space. The opening and closing of The Searchers is evoked at several moments throughout the film, interiors opening to exteriors as vast, sweeping landscapes (cinematic citation and part of a de-mythologizing of the Western). The camera follows Phil using a long lens but is positioned inside the house, a dolly shot that moves left with Phil’s movement. Yet, the spaces the film opens to are far from Fordian mythological visions. As Leotta and Molloy note: “The large, empty spaces of the Burbank house visually mirror both the imposing mountains and the vast plains through which the two brothers drive their cattle. The hostility of the natural landscape is conveyed through the use of a palette of cold hues, particularly blue and yellow. In turn, the spaces inhabited by the brothers and their men stand in stark contrast to the interior of the Red Mill, the restaurant ran by Rose, which is characterised by soft candlelight, cheerful laughter and the colourful paper flowers handcrafted by her son, Peter.” In these moments, the interiors also advance the exterior’s subversion of the landscape as an anywhere space, extending a haunted landscape trope to the level of psychological projection and bringing qualities of transposable otherness indoors. The film also recognizes the way that space and characters perform a cinematic cartography of a region. As Giuliana Bruno observes: “Films create space for viewing, perusing, and wandering about. As in all forms of journey, space is physically consumed as a commodity. Attracted to vistas, the spectator turns into a visitor.”[24] Here, Campion remaps the Western vista to create a visual tension between the real first space and the imaginary, or second space. Places and spaces in The Power of the Dog simultaneously feel vast through the Otago setting, yet the Montana of the film is shown as confined with its characters under a microscope.  

The film defamiliarizes visions of both the New Zealand and Western American frontier through what Robert Burgoyne describes as “extreme scale disparity,” in which the film “brings into view a host of oppositions: optical vs. tactile, distant vs. close, the gigantic vs. the miniature…oppositions that suggest a larger dramatic tension” within the narrative.[25] Campion oscillates between images of the vast and close shots of objects and hands that destabilize the spectators orientation and sense of mastery over the terrain. Panoramic wide shots of cattle being herded across the Montana plains evoke familiar associations with the genre’s conventions, as well as the memory of pre-cinematic antecedents in the paintings of Bierstadt and the 1870s Western expedition photography of Timothy O’Sullivan. This genre memory is contrasted sharply with large closeup shots of scissors cutting paper flowers and fingers later probing them (“what little lady made these?), that produce tonal shifts and a sense of competing ideas about landscape and its contemporary significance in an evolving world new media and intermedial exchange. This narrative strategy also positions the film as part of what Norman Klein refers to as “anti-tours”: showcasing locations where there had once been something in order to reveal more about the process of preservation and erasure.[26] Rereading the visual grammar of The Power of the Dogthrough this lens places the film and other New Zealand place-substitution films as part of a retrieval of palimpsest-like layers of historical erasure that rewrites the landscape from an anywhere space to a recontextualized space belonging to both its visible and marginalized people.  

This deconstruction of the traditional Western space, according to production designer Grant Major, was inspired by the work of photojournalist Evelyn Cameron, who “captured the west and the people inhabiting it…in contemplative isolation.”[27] Added to this, cinematographer Ari Wegner captures the “outsider’s view” in Cameron’s photographs, which Wegner incorporated into what she describes as the film’s “classic, unadorned, grounded photography.” This visualization mode stands in contrast to the “removal of place from people” that comprised the key rhetorical strategy New Zealand’s early tourism culture that linked its signature visual styles to its settler history. A similar strategy can be found in the aforementioned California impressionist paintings that, in addition to cementing a recognizable California color palette adopted by visual tourism and real estate promotion, emphasized the state’s natural beauty in a manner that foreshadowed early Hollywood’s signature practices of place substitution and intensified the local population’s connection to nature amid a period of rapid urbanization. In many respects, landscapes in Jane Campion’s films act as a rejoinder to this rhetorical strategy.  Whether the land plays itself in films such as The Piano or stands in for somewhere else like in The Power of the Dog, Campion achieves this through positioning figures and objects representing the familiar (coded as civilized) against sublime, overwhelming landscapes described as “creating a pleasurable vertigo and delightful horror reflecting a [human] sensation of smallness in the face of” a majestic land that refuses to be tamed. Though The Power of the Dog dispenses with The Piano’s palate of blues and dark colors, both films embrace a “haunted landscape trope” in NZ literature and imagery that “reflects the alienation of European settlers from a land they wanted to possess but failed to relate to.”

Writers like Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith have written on the haunted landscape trope, focusing on the way that New Zealand painters have responded to the qualities of New Zealand light: contrasts between high-key atmospheric light and shadowy landscapes. Though seemingly different than the Southern California impressionist painters who brought Monet’s techniques to the land of sunshine, the “haunted landscapes” of New Zealand painting recall the Northern California tonalists who were a regional precursor to sunny Southern California plein air painters.[28] The color palette of painters like John Gully (who’s painting here depicts the Otago region) can be compared to William Keith, William Frederic Ritschel, and Mary DeNeale Morgan’s moody tones, muted colors, and soft contours of the Monterrey and Carmel coastlines. The New Zealand tourism paintings of the Railway studios can be read as a corrective to this haunted landscape trope by using color palettes more akin to Southern California plein air and Southern California tourism advertisements sponsored by the Southern Pacific Railroad. By evoking the haunted landscape trope of New Zealand painters and applying it to an American Western setting, The Power of the Dog defamiliarizes the tourist gaze and the filmic process of creating textual tourists through haunting Otago as a third space.

At first glance, documentary films and other non-fiction genres appear best equipped to critically interrogate the process by which a third space is create, as the fantastical functions of narrative cinema are traditionally seen as capitalizing on the transposable otherness of landscapes and further entrenching the imagined anywhere space. This point also rings true when one considers the decline of Southern California place-substitution practices during the 1950s in the wake of neorealism’s global influence, a departure from the influence of theatrical stage production and pre-cinema visual culture where the “real is reoriented or recontextualized through artistic stipulation”; in neorealism, a “character is discovered in the real” and “proceeding from setting actualized by human activity.”[29] Yet, by evoking the western’s origins in pre-cinema visual culture and the use of physical landscapes as an anywhere space, The Power of the Dog indirectly acknowledges the cinematic New Zealand as a nostalgic simulacrum of its own imaginings. Campion’s New Zealand productions acknowledge through landscape and mise-en-scene staging the conflation of the national tourist gaze with its filmic one, an overlap rooted in New Zealand’s colonial history and reinforced by the panoramic vision of tourist culture. “If it can be Middle Earth, it could be Montana,” remarked Campion in an interview, suggesting that “the country’s allegedly intrinsic ability to stand in for other places…has become a prominent component of New Zealand’s national identity.”[30]

NOTES:

[1] Leotta 2022

[2] Soja 1989, 222

[3] “Filmmakers Love Central Otago.” Film Otago Southland: New Zealand. Web url: https://www.filmotagosouthland.com/filming-here/regions/central-otago/

[4] Boym 2001, 14

[5] Leotta 2012, 4

[6] Leotta 2012, 23

[7] Welsh 1916, 12.

[8] Wolfe 2018, 212

[9] Scott, On Hollywood, 138.

[10] Scott 2005, 16

[11] Wolfe 2018, 213

[12 Landscape painting of the mid-19th century that considered the impact of light on natural settings.

[13] Sometimes referred to as “American Eden” painting, the Hudson River School of the early nineteenth century infused American landscapes with mythic and celestial metaphors. Influenced by European Romanticism, Hudson River School artists like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church drew inspiration from the writings of Emerson and Thoreau and presented American landscapes layered with a language of emotion and rooted in concepts of American destiny.

[14] McManus, Michael P. “A Focus on Light,” in Patricia Trenton and William H. Gerdts California Light 1900 – 1930 (Laguna Beach Art Museum, 1990), pg. 11.

[15] Klein 2008, 10

[16] Lent 1987, 337

[17] David 1998, 204

18 DeLyser 2003, 903

19 Camp 2013, 82

20 Stanley 2021

21 Southern California Through the Camera. All Year Round Club of California. (1929). Huntington Library Special

Collections.

22 The All-Year-Round Club was founded in 1921 by real estate mogul and general manager of the Los Angeles

Times Harry Chandler and managed by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, aimed at promoting tourism in the

region. The organization was renamed “The Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.”

23 Hise 1997, 9

24 Bean 2014,

25 Quoted in Alsop, et. al, 2012, 7

26 Leotta 2012, 5

27 Pg. 6

28 Alsop, et. al, 2012, 12

29 Leotta 2012, 34

30 Leotta 2022

31 Bruno 2002, 18

32 Burgoyne 2023, 2

33 Pg. 3.

34 Ahuja 2022

35 Leotta 2012, 12

36 Pg. 12

37 Pg. 8

38 Palmer 2016, 36

39 Leotta 2022