Resumo

The visual identity of Black Metal is deeply rooted in 19th-century Romanticism, particularly through themes of nature, solitude, and the “Sublime”. This paper explores the intersection between the iconography found in Black Metal album covers — the subject of the author’s doctoral research — and the directorial strategies in contemporary cinema. By drawing parallels with the works of filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Theo Angelopoulos, the study examines how the “Romantic gaze” dictates composition, lighting, and the representation of landscape in audiovisual narratives.
The research focuses on the concept of provenance, tracing how the pictorial heritage of artists like Caspar David Friedrich migrates from static design to cinematographic direction. Through a comparative visual analysis, this study identifies a shared grammar that prioritizes atmosphere, existential isolation, and the monumentalization of the landscape over traditional narrative structures. Ultimately, the paper argues that the prevalence of these romantic tropes in audiovisual media serves as a bridge between subcultural aesthetics and high-art cinema, offering a cohesive visual language for expressing the human condition through silence and the environment. By linking the production of audio-visual content with design provenance, this study contributes to a transdisciplinary understanding of modern image-making.