Greenscape as Screenscape - The Cinematic Urban Garden

Abstract

The relationship between city and garden appears in many feature films in order to visualize narrative dualisms. In particular, the character of the border - as a fundamental medial characteristic of gardens - determines the meaning of the represented space. According to the Western representation of ideal places and the historically-developed antagonism of city and garden, the border defines the latter as the diametrically opposed utopian antithesis to urban life. This antagonism is used, for example, in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) in the political context of World War II, or as in Being There (1979), embedded in a philosophical discourse centered on Voltaire and Sartre.