Topographies of Absence: Landscape, Memory, and the Afterlife of Places

The past, to paraphrase Faulkner, isn’t past in the films that comprise Topographies of Absence, cinematic investigations into the landscapes of rural backwaters, cities in post-industrial decline, and other scenes that bear the scars of their complex histories. Timed to Metrograph’s run of Michelangelo Frammartini’s Il Dono, the series offers a travelogue of haunted destinations that include, among others, the near-abandoned Calabria of Frammartino’s film, the titular Chernobyl-made ghost town of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Pripyat, and the Welsh mining town seen through the softening scrim of memory of John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. Films concerned with places on the map that men and women have largely forgotten or struggled to forget, where the land cannot but remember.