A lyrical atlas of the French landscape This book is the first English-language overview of the landscape photography of Thibaut Cuisset (born 1958), who over the last 30 years has explored issues around the environment and notions of territory. Cuisset has photographed the landscapes of many countries, yet he inevitably returns to the terrain of his native France and its infinite variety. With the acuity of the New Topographics photographers, Cuisset captures the French landscape without frills or nostalgia, and reveals it to be the result of historic layers and constant human interventions. The land is perpetually being shaped and transformed, and Cuisset's quiet lens and restrained virtuosity of color record and authenticate these sometimes subtle processes. The images in this book are tranquil, direct and often imbued with a sense of life (despite the absence of human figures). They form a lyrical atlas of the French landscape, and show just how fragile the land's state of balance and upheaval is.

The Landforms and Landscapes of France provides an informative and attractive overview of the most scenic landscapes of France. The geodiversity of France is emphasized, for example the glacial landscapes of the Mont-Blanc Massif, the volcanoes of the French Massif Central, the chalk cliffs and sand dunes of the Atlantic coast, the granitic landscapes of Corsica or the lagoons and coral reefs of French Polynesia. The objectives are to provide the reader with an enjoyable and informative description of the selected sites within their regional geographical and geological settings; to offer an up-to-date survey of the evolution of France's landscape; and to give additional information on the cultural value of the selected sites wherever appropriate (prehistoric paintings, legends related to sites, famous vineyards, etc.). The book is a richly illustrated reference work that makes accessible for the first time a wealth of information currently scattered among many national and regional journals. It will be of benefit to earth scientists, environmental scientists, tourism geographers and conservationists

Presents an informative introduction to the tradition of French landscape painting. Featuring full-colour illustrations, this title highlights the key moments of the French landscape tradition from its emergence in the 1600s to its pre-eminence in the 1800s.

In Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene makes new sense of the rich variety of postwar French films by exploring the obsession with the national past that has characterized French cinema since the late 1960s. Observing that the sense of grandeur and destiny that once shaped French identity has eroded under the weight of recent history, Greene examines the ways in which French cinema has represented traumatic and defining moments of the nation's past: the political battles of the 1930s, the Vichy era, decolonization, the collapse of ideologies. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of films and directors, she shows how postwar films have reflected contemporary concerns even as they have created images and myths that have helped determine the contours of French memory. This study of the intricate links between French history, memory, and cinema begins by examining the long shadow cast by the Vichy past: the repressed memories and smothered unease that characterize the cinema of Alain Resnais are seen as a kind of prelude to a fierce battle for national memory that marked so-called rétro films of the 1970s and 1980s. The shifting political and historical perspectives toward the nation's more distant past, which also emerged in these years, are explored in the light of the films of one of France's leading directors, Bertrand Tavernier. Finally, the mood of nostalgia and melancholy that appears to haunt contemporary France is analyzed in the context of films about the nation's imperial past as well as those that hark back to a "golden age," a remembered paradis perdu, of French cinema itself.

This volume provides a comprehensive catalog of how various ethnic groups in the United States of America have differently shaped their cultural landscape. Author John Cross links an overview of the spatial distributions of many of the ethnic populations of the United States with highly detailed discussions of specific local cultural landscapes associated with various ethnic groups. This book provides coverage of several ethnic groups that were omitted from previous literature, including Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Arab-Americans, plus several smaller European ethnic populations. The book is organized to provide an overview of each of the substantive ethnic landscapes in the United States. Between its introduction and conclusion, which looks towards the future, the chapters on the various ethnic landscapes are arranged roughly in chronological order, such that the timing of the earliest significant surviving landscape contribution determines the order the groups will be viewed. Within each chapter the contemporary and historical spatial distribution of the ethnic groups are described, the historical geography of the group’s settlement is reviewed, and the salient aspects of material culture that characterize or distinguish the group’s ethnic landscape are discussed. Ethnics Landscapes of America is designed for use in the classroom as a textbook or as a reader in a North American regional course or a cultural geography course. This volume also can function as a detailed summary reference that should be of interest to geographers, historians, ethnic scholars, other social scientists, and the educated public who wish to understand the visible elements of material culture that various ethnic populations have created on the landscape.

The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent’s physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 27,1999 - March 14, 2000. French landscape is a part of larger exchbition, ModernStarts which is in turn part of a cycle of exchibitions entitled MoMa 2000.

Michel Desvigne is the most renowned French landscape architect in the world. Based in Paris, he has held guest professorships at such distinguished institutions as the Architectural Association in London and Harvard University. Desvigne’s projects have a strong strategic and conceptual component. Urban infrastructure projects play a major role, and emphasize the urban planning and design expertise evident in his landscape architecture. The book documents ten of Devigne’s major projects from France, the US, Spain and Qatar, in which he is responsible not only for the landscape architecture, but for coordination of the entire project. How can such highly complex projects be realized? What does the intellectual thought process look like? What specific problems arise in their realization?

This book, a compendium of 28 papers selected from two recent conferences on the topic, focuses on aspects of rural landscape, broadly related to issues of language, representation and power. These are issues that have not been addressed on a pan-European landscape level before.The aim is to offer a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of historical and contemporary processes in European landscapes.

These paintings - dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role - overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism."--Jacket.