As the subject of extensive research in visual arts and literature, landscape has been explored as a vehicle to assert national or artistic supremacy, and for how it forms and reflects cultural values and identities. Instead, this study examines landscape as a site where nationhood and representation is contested and interrogated, and how it can be advanced to reflect on the construction and mediation of such values and identities.

Considering the New Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early a period marked by an impulse for retrospection and self-examination, the study offers new interpretations of a number of key films of the era. Applying landscape as a concept for analysis and interpretation, it also launches attention to what has remained a largely uncharted field of investigation in film studies.