ABSTRACT
Director Paul Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) 1 is a brooding, critically acclaimed epic that harkens back to vast constructions of avarice and greed witnessed in classics such as Citizen Kane (1941) 2 and Giant (1956). 3 Like Citizen Kane, it charts the insidious manner in which the power to direct people and things corrupts the human soul. And, like Giant, it tracks the emergence of a Western landscape punctuated by empire builders who want to capitalize on the exploitation of human and physical resources. The complex acts of rendering, attending, viewing, and reading films of this kind require a nuanced appreciation of intertextuality that stipulates an understanding of the connections between geography and the humanities. Landscape features hugely in the ways that geography and art coexist, but often these connections are taken for granted. With this essay, we want to dig a little deeper into the politics of landscape representation by engaging its filmic contexts as emotionally charged movements.
