Road to Utopia: Working towards an Affective (Poetic) Cinematic Inquiry into the “Ecological Emergency.” (original) (raw)
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Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency
PhD Exegesis, 2016
Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency is situated within a moving image practice that applies methods aligned with essayist cinema and video installation, as well as historical avant-garde film. The project was initiated in response to subjective experiences of ecological devastation, which induced a personal state of melancholy. It works from the position that another tactic for progressing discourses around anthropogenic climate and geological change might be poetic or affective modes that are often present in the aforementioned moving image practices. The research aims to eschew ‘fact’ based representational modes, for contemplative, expressive and ambiguous registers of visual and aural inquiry. The iterative studio practice is composed of a range of moving image experiments and approaches, including extensive field investigations in locations linked tenuously or specifically to fossil fuel production and consumption. Through research into a variety of cinematic devices, conclusions were reached, which led to the application of creative constraints in the composition of the works. These techniques include, high-speed cinematography, ultra-long or ultra-wide lenses, formal composition and camera movement. The project has been guided by the belief that the sensate realm holds greater political potential for filmmakers than tactics that use didactic means to tell a ‘story’ about the crisis. Thus, the project has explored in some detail the concepts of affect and sensation, through the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze. In addition, it locates theoretical provocations that have contributed to my thinking and making, with the objective to reveal the political potential of grief (Judith Butler) and the ‘politics implicit in aesthetics’ (Jacques Rancière). Rancière’s notion of the invisible becoming visible at a moment of rupture and Butler’s argument configured by Levinasian ethics and her post-9/11 experiences of living in the United States have been important influences. Writers and thinkers whose discourses are focussed on the subject of the ecological crisis situate the subject historically with the help of Felix Guattari’s transversal ‘ecosophy,’ while Timothy Morton’s ‘Ecological Thought’ and Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialist’ positions are enlisted as methods for reflecting on the ‘uncanny’ experience of living in a time of ecological emergency. From the position of thinking through the poetic and political potential of art, Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency has turned to Robert Smithson, Agnes Denes and Buster Simpson. Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker and Werner Herzog provided insights into essayist modes of cinema through their distinct methods of practice. Chris Welsby’s and Richard Mosse’s films and installations are reviewed in relation to their capacity to extract the invisible and make it seeable through the material. The creative outcomes produced during this research are two video works. The first, Crude, is an essayist film that attempts to see and hear some of the elusive signs of anthropogenic climate change in order to make what is invisible, visible, to evoke contemplations on the subject of ecological crisis, through affective cinematic devices. Crude is accompanied by Flight, a series of filmed passenger jet stream or contrails — forming a database of a particular type of human presence and movement. The work seeks to evoke a space of contemplation, uneasiness, and sadness by engaging with the residual and stratified signs of our collective impact on our environment.
Cinema and Environment: The Arts of Noticing in the Anthropocene
The aim of this paper is to raise questions about how cinema can allow us to rethink our relationship with the environment in the context of what is known today as the Anthropocene. In the discussion, I chart the current debates about the ecological in the humanities, with a particular focus on new materialisms, to argue that cinema can be fruitfully thought of as part of what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) calls the "arts of noticing". I then turn to a consideration of the potential influx of affect theories on ecocriticism and film studies, before sketching out possible approaches to studying film from an affective, new materialist and postanthropocentric perspective. These approaches might have wider implications for rhetorical perspectives on cinema, especially for those investigating emotional appeals.
THE RIVER PROJECT A Poetics of Eco-Critical Film-Making
Fusion Journal, 2016
THE RIVER PROJECT A Poetics of Eco-Critical Film-Making There is a body of film that falls under the categories of eco-cinema, environmental cinema and landscape cinema. These films take the natural environment, place or landscape as their subject matter As we try to make meaning of the connections of our lives and world through film, Rust and Monani (2013) note that, 'cinema is a form of negotiation, a mediation that is itself ecologically placed as it consumes the entangled world around it, and in turn, is itself consumed.' This influence is evident in complex, poetic ways, and appears to revolve around the manner in which the films listen to the landscape, rather than seeking to impose themselves upon it-exhibiting a certain kind of humility. As a child I was attracted to flowing water. In my early teens I experienced the fear and awe of canoeing down Australia's wild Snowy River. As an adult I find myself drawn to cross, swim, walk along, look into and film rivers. Not to narrate, or even describe the river, but to use film to find a nonfiction form that acknowledges the river, writes the river. I'm making a series of films around the Snowy River that investigates the poetics of rivers. The first in that series, A View from the Bank, is a 40-minute experimental, structuralist film that documents parts of the Snowy from its source to its mouth. I will examine how this film does not seek to interpret the world as much as listen and bear witness to it. This is realised aesthetically by its use of stillness, long takes and unadulterated audio which has created a form that appears and is experienced as a counter to the deliberate rhetoric common to much documentary. I will show how my methods of production were guided by the river and the landscape around it. Further, in the Anthropocene, how can this film be an agent for environmental awareness without resorting to dogmatic imposition?
University of Amsterdam, 2021
Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco et al have observed that climate change documentaries are becoming “a popular tool to reach wide-ranging audiences in efforts to elevate concern, raise the prominence of the issue in political dialogue, and stimulate action.” Bieniek-Tobasco et al recognise the capacity of the film medium to “combine imagery, narrative, and music” as essential to the environmental documentary’s ability to “emotionally engage audiences as well as provide information.” The capacity of documentary filmmakers to combine audio and visual narrative elements with the aim of generating affective emotional responses in audiences is particularly pertinent to the task of persuading audiences to meaningfully engage with the climate crisis. The rhetorical and narrative devices adopted by two filmmakers to generate this response, through visual, audio and cinematic means, informs my research focus: Chris Jordan's Albatross (2018), and the premiere episode of Joel Bach's Showtime documentary series Years of Living Dangerously, "Dry Season" (2014). In encouraging viewers to consider their positionalities through the compelling generation of pathos and ethos, this comparative endeavour attends to Timothy Morton’s question: how do we move forward from the melancholy of a poisoned planet? I locate the answer in collective consumer recognition; in allowing one’s judgement to be affected by one’s emotions; and in being reactive in the face of sustained argumentations for the climate, such as those made by the filmmakers featured here.
‘Affective’ witnessing and testimony in contemporary environmental cinema
Acta Academica, 2018
This article advances that through incorporating registers of affect, environmental cinema might better approximate its socially and ecologically transformative goals. A film in which this has been attempted is Fisher Stevens's Before the Flood (2016), and it is contended here that for this reason the film holds promise despite the weakness of some of its proposed solutions to climate deterioration. An analysis of the film is offered, during which certain of Julie Doyle's, Nathan Farrell's and Michael Goodman's reservations about Before the Flood are countered, drawing particularly on Anton Van der Hoven and Jill Arnott's arguments in favour of affective cinema. Indeed, a pro-affective film-making approach finds theoretical support in the perspectives of materialist ecological feminists and African philosophers on the role of affect and emotion in being fully human. The article concludes that affect should be recuperated and strategically included within cultural products and interactions, particularly if these aim to engender significant socio-cultural change.
The Psychoanalysis of Environmental Crisis: The Progress of Eco-Cinema
This paper analyses three different films representing attempts of the film industry to portray people in the process of re-establishment of the healthy relationship with the nature and their quest for “ecological self” juxtaposing it with a Freudian definition of civilisation as a defence against nature. It is crucial to mention that movies such as Dersu Uzala, Medicine Man and Take Shelter serve as an explication of cultural myths related to eras of the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s in relation with corresponding real-life worsening of environmental crisis and reflecting psychological impacts of climate change. The analysis demonstrates how this marginal genre as opposes to various apocalyptic and dystopian movies develops from a dialogue of opposing forces of the civilisation and the nature into a sphere of an intimate dialogue within our minds to overcome psychological defence mechanisms and recognise the reality of environmental crisis.
Afraid of the Dark and the Light: Visceralizing Ecocide in Science Fiction Films: The Road and Hell
2012
As a speculative genre that "dreams" alternative and often futuristic worlds into existence, science fiction is in a near-ideal position to explore perceived risks and anxieties regarding large-scale environmental change. Science fiction film, with its ability to visualize and visceralize speculative future worlds, is particularly powerful in this regard. Maurizia Natali suggests that the "fantasies" we find in recent science fiction films, such as Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (2004), may "offer a means for arresting the many preemptive wars of the Empire" we have seen in older movies, and instead "inaugurate a new sublime Desolation: that of 'global warming' and future catastrophes of a different nature" (121). Natali does not explore further what exactly such a "new sublime Desolation" would entail, but she certainly is correct in pointing out the remarkable increase in disaster science fiction films in recent years that directly or indirectly evoke potential future ecological catastrophes as a consequence of present human behavior. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon-the 1970s, especially, saw a number of ecologically-themed dystopian science fiction-the re-emergence of such narratives indicates their relevance in a time of ecological uncertainty and change. 1 Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann even argue in Ecology and Popular Film (2009) that such films should be seen "as indicators of real changes in worldview" (3). However, not all science fiction filmmakers who invent eco-futures embrace the openly political stance that Murray and Heumann see behind The Day After Tomorrow as well as behind a number of computer-animated family films such as Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) and Happy Feet (2006). Some of these filmmakers are more interested in an exploration of the future subjectivities and societies that may result from radical ecological changes, and in the representation of human bodies and minds that are marked by much more hostile environmental conditions than most of us enjoy today. In this essay, I will look at two pertinent examples from two different national traditions: John Hillcoat's 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (2006), and one of the very few German-Swiss science fiction films with an environmental theme, Tim Fehlbaum's Hell (2011). My focus will be on how these two films represent future environments and the ways they shape human communities and individual destinies. Of particular importance in this context is the complex role of setting and location in both films. Given that they both represent post-apocalyptic scenarios with an all but dead biosphere but, for various reasons, rely on no or very little
Cinema as Eco-critical Criticism: Can Movies Represent the Conscience of the Anthropocene?
Ekphrasis, 2020
This paper critically questions the postulate that an ecological conscious cinema performs the task of raising global awareness and generates knowledge about the real problems of the Anthropocene. Interrogating the possibility that a cinematic "eco-mind" could be formed within eco-conscious movies, the author discusses the consequences of the interest displayed by many filmmakers towards the environment and the representation of the multitude of crises our planet faces today. By putting to the test the speculations and methods of eco-criticism, the author returns to the classical method used by Marx and Engels in "Die heilige Familie" and suggests that there is a third option, a path rarely taken, positioning interpretation between the optimistic eco-critical perspective and the hypocritical ecologist propaganda. Denouncing also the eco-Marxist revisions and proposing a reading of contemporary cinema based on the critique of the critical critique, this paper illustrates how this method of interpretation can be used in film studies and could produce an alternative practice in the ever-growing field of environmental humanities.
Cli-fi: cinematic visions of climate change. Filmmakers’ gloomy fantasies or a plausible future?
Man faced with ecological catastrophe has become one of the most frequently explored topics in contemporary cinema. Filmmakers take advantage of the anxieties that slumber within us, watering the seeds of fear sown by climatologists predicting possible climate change scenarios: extreme weather events, floods, mass migrations, droughts and depleting food and water resources. Although the connections between cinema and ecology are as old as cinema itself (the first environmentally-themed film was made by the Lumiere brothers), environmental issues have never before been so omnipresent in cinema as in recent times. With the rise of the emerging genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) movies, there have appeared questions about how much cinematic visions of eco-disasters make a difference to how people react to environmental concerns.