Estudio sobre las nubes negras en ensayos literarios de John Ruskin y audiovisuales de Werner Herzog y Peter Mettler

Abstract

The English essayist John Ruskin (1919-1900) devoted a large part of his profuse work to research meteorological phenomena, particularly to the study of clouds. His essays share the characteristic of combining three dimensions: the aesthetic concern, the scientific interest in describing, comprehend and explaining nature, and the moral concern, which inquires about the authenticity of human existence, as it is expressed in the experience of landscape. In our paper, we intend to return to this three dimensions, just like they are presented in Ruskin’s Lectures «The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century» (1884). In this Lectures, Ruskin states a phenomenon that had not been described until then: an immense and strange cloud suspended over England, which wilted plants, sickened the men and blanched the sun as if it would be a coin in a glass of soapy water (Ruskin 87-89). The purpose of our work is to link this literary essay, written at the end of the 19th century, to two essay films from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21th: Lektionen in Finsternis (1992) by Werner Herzog and Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009) by Peter Mettler. In both films we find huge clouds rising from the fire in oil fields. We think that is possible to see in the poetic treatment of documentary images, one of the main characteristics of the essay film as an audiovisual genre, a new expression of the transtemporal category of the sublime. The sublime representation of clouds is also the predominant feature in Ruskin’s descriptions, as they appeared in his Lectures.