A landscape can shield someone from view and make it harder to find one’s way; it can also offer open space while leaving a body exposed. In Kubrick’s films, its function depends on what the characters are trying to do within it.
Forest and Plain: Hiding or Being Exposed
Fear and Desire places its soldiers in a territory whose national identity remains uncertain. The forest creates obstacles between the observer and whatever they are trying to locate. Trees and vegetation provide cover, but also prevent a full view of the surroundings. The same space that can conceal a group allows presences to remain outside its field of perception. Refuge and threat depend on who is watching and from where.
Moving through the landscape requires decisions based on incomplete information. A route may bring someone closer to an exit while exposing them to an unforeseen encounter. The war without a country in Fear and Desire examines this uncertainty in the conflict; from the perspective of the landscape, what matters is that the territory does not function as a surface the characters have already mastered. What lies behind an obstacle matters precisely because it is not immediately visible to them.
Barry Lyndon offers scenes in which open space changes the problem. The expanse makes it possible to see military formations and recognize their order, but that order makes the bodies visible and vulnerable. Advancing in a regular formation does not eliminate exposure to gunfire. The landscape reveals a distance that must be crossed, while discipline requires the soldiers to maintain a particular way of moving across it. The clarity of the composition does not mean that those in view are safe.
The analysis of formations, discipline, and exposure in the war in Barry Lyndon helps distinguish this experience from concealment in the forest. In one case, perception encounters too many obstacles; in the other, the body has little protection from a gaze or a shot. There is no need to assign the forest an innate goodness or the plain a permanent hostility. Its function changes with the action and with the power relations that organize the space.
The Overlook’s Snow: An Environment That Hinders Escape and Records Movement
The Shining connects the hotel with an inaccessible exterior that changes over the winter. Snow affects movement and makes it necessary to have the right equipment to get through. This material condition affects the ability to call for help and for anyone to arrive. The landscape does not act as a will that punishes the characters, but it changes the practical options within which they must make decisions.
The contrast between indoors and outdoors does not establish a fixed equivalence between refuge and danger, either. The building offers protection from the weather while containing a direct threat. Going outside may mean exposure to the cold and, at the same time, a chance to escape the person in pursuit. The meaning of a space depends on the risk being considered at a given moment. A door can separate temperature, visibility, and access to other people in ways that do not coincide.
Snow preserves tracks and turns movement into information for whoever arrives later. A body leaves a mark that can be followed, but that relationship also makes it possible to act on what the pursuer expects to find. The analysis of the maze and the ending of The Shining explores the specific sequence. What matters here is that the surface is not an indifferent backdrop: it records movement and takes part in a confrontation between reading the trail and the pursued person’s actions.
The maze also complicates the opposition between nature and construction. Its plant life forms a designed route, and the snow changes the conditions of that design. What appears to be a natural environment is part of a human organization of space. Family ties of protection run through that place, but they do not, by themselves, explain how it works materially: orientation, tracks, and distance continue to pose problems that each body must solve in motion.
2001: Changing Scale Without Turning Landscape into an Explanation
The beginning of 2001 places animal bodies and groups of hominids in an environment where water, food, and territory shape what they can do. The scale of the landscape makes it possible to observe a relationship with resources and threats before any explanation is given. The Dawn of Man examines the change associated with the tool; from the perspective of the environment, what matters is how a place gains value by offering something necessary that may be contested.
The lunar landscape changes that relationship. Human bodies need suits and equipment to remain there and act. The surface is presented through routes, vehicles, and an excavation site organized by people. This is not a completely separate nature untouched by human intervention: the frame brings together terrain, infrastructure, and research activity. The scale makes the dependence of those who have arrived on technology perceptible, even though they are capable of working there.
Describing that space as a lunar landscape within the fiction does not mean claiming that it was filmed on the Moon or reconstructing how it was made based on its appearance. Narrative analysis attends to what the place makes possible to see and do. The comparison between technical progress and relations of domination raises another question: going farther changes the means available, but does not automatically eliminate hierarchical organization or the withholding of information among the explorers.
Forest, plain, snow, and the lunar surface offer different relationships between body and scale. To compare them, it helps to consider cover, freedom of movement, traces, and resources, as well as the distance from which they are filmed. A wide shot can show freedom of movement or make vulnerability visible; an enclosed area can offer protection and disorient. Meaning comes from these relationships with the action, not from attributing an intention to the director that the landscape’s mere presence does not prove.
References: Stanley Kubrick, Fear and Desire (1953), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980). These films’ depicted landscapes are discussed, not travel destinations.
View all articles in Themes and Conflicts in Kubrick's Cinema