Lois Patiño’s Landscapes: Aura, Loss, Duration

Resum

This essay is a reflection on Galician landscapes through a close reading of Lois Patiño’s experimental documentary film, Costa da Morte, and has two parts. The first is about temporality and the concept of duration, and asks how duration intersects with certain modes of deceleration in cinema, understood as an aesthetic but also as a structural mechanism of slowing down and capturing stillness. Here, I am particularly interested in photographic stasis when channeled through film, as well as the use of photography and stillness in cinema as an evocation of death. The second part explores landscape as an ecstatic, auratic, and sublime force; as a space of encounter, or «living tapestry»—a place in which the emergence of and absorption by the visible is always uncannily predicated on a poetics of disappearance, invisibility, and loss.