Landscape and 'location': Reading filmic space historically (Milcho Manchevski's 'Before the Rain')

Manchevski's film belongs to a tradition of 'landscape cinema,' represented recently by Angelopoulos and the Taviani brothers, and originally by Rosse llini and Neorealism. What these and other related films mean, it is sugges ted, can best be understood by reference to art historical and critical the ory accounts of landscape as a signifying practice, theorized by Clarke and Gombrich around 1950, then by Williams and Mitchell from an ideological st andpoint. Lefebvre's distinction between 'absolute' and 'abstract' space is used to characterize the three parts of the film, moving from Macedonia to London and back; and the authenticity of the locations is assessed in econ omic and aesthetic terms. The film is identified as an allegory of spatial relations in the modern world of civil wars; and also as part of a traditio n of elegiac landscape studies which lament the loss of arcadian innocence.