Читать книгу Numerical Simulation, An Art of Prediction, Volume 2 - Jean-François Sigrist - Страница 13

In 1916, Chicago, Bill was a worker employed in a foundry. Following an altercation, he fled the city, accompanied by his girlfriend Abby and his sister Linda. He found refuge in Texas where wheat was harvested from huge arable areas and a favorable climate allowed him to grow it. Hired as a seasonal worker by a wealthy farmer suffering from an incurable disease, Bill pushed Abby to give in to his employer’s advances. A calculation to get out of poverty? Set in a bourgeois house drowned in an almost endless expanse of wheat, inspired by the paintings of the American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009), Days of Heaven (1978) recounts a psychological drama [MAL 78]. The contemplative camera of its author, the American filmmaker Terence Malik, also depicts the blazing sun of long working days, the power of harvesting machines and the hazards of harvests, stormy bad weather or locust invasion, which become a tragedy subject to the whims of the sky – whose unpredictability symbolizes that of human passion?

Controlled and perfected for more than 10,000 years, as attested to by remains from ancient Egypt (Figure 1.1), agriculture remains a survival challenge for a humanity facing climate change in the 21st Century even though it is capable of changing its practices.

Figure 1.1. Cereal harvest, Tomb of Menna, Sheikh Abd el-Gournah Necropolis, Egypt

(source: 10,000 Meisterwerke der Malerei, The Yorck Project)