Résumé

In cinema, landscape allows for two different understandings: firstly, in its literal form, in other words, as the background of the narrative action. Secondly, its background status can be raised to a character status in the narrative, through metonymies and metaphors. Therefore, this tension between the cinematic landscape as background and as character is, purely in filmic terms, what characterizes the dynamics of the landscape, especially in narrative cinema. (Lefebvre 2006, 29) According to Filipa Rosário and Iván Álvarez, the landscape as “character” appears when the action loses its narrative primacy, and also when the scene is presented through mechanisms that enhance its representation as a show. This happens when the director compels to the contemplation of the image by applying slowness to the scene and when the characters seem muted and their bodies fixed. (2017, 56) The purpose of this study is to explore how the long takes, the lack of dialogue and the use of silence are employed in Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool (2008). These formal mechanisms allow us to embrace the landscape through static takes, inviting the spectator to immerse in a contemplative state. Furthermore, they turn the landscape into a “bearer of the possibilities of a plastic interpretation of emoticons” (Eisenstein 1987, 217).