Toward Cinematic Anthropocene

Researches on the relationship between the anthropocene and cinema have been gaining momentum in recent years. We are talking not only about film studies in general, but also such areas as eco-film studies and sci-fi film studies. We can say that the cinematic anthropocene forms a complex of environmental sciences, cultural studies and socio-political sciences, biopolitics in particular.

We hope that this introductory review will be useful not only for researchers to get into the subject matter, but also for directors of short films, video artists, and curators of film festivals and exhibitions on the topic.

The term “Anthropocene” was first introduced by the American biologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s. It was picked up in a variety of circles, with a major contribution to its popularization made by Nobel laureate in chemistry Paul Crutzen. The term was originally used to show human influence on contemporary natural processes.

Jennifer Fay’s Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene helps integrate the concept of the Anthropocene into the field of Cinema and Media Studies, probing the nexus where human-driven climate change meets film theory and aesthetics. For Fay, cinema bears a unique affinity with the Anthropocene insofar as it has likewise ensued from the Industrial Revolution and involved the uncanny defamiliarization of the world: “The Anthropocene is to natural science what cinema … has been to human culture”. The analogy runs even deeper, however, because film production also occasions artificial world-making, unnatural weather, and acts of destruction, whether in the studio or on location. Allowing viewers to perceive anthropogenic environments as both a design principle and an unintended consequence of human activity, cinema has served, in Fay’s words, as “the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene”. [1]

In his essay, Andrew Culp asks “What if The Anthropocene is actually a failed pitch for a film?” This leads him to consider the horizontal perspective of The Anthropocene associated with recent environmental thinking. This line of thought takes him back to early discourses of the human, the current visuality of the cosmic zoom seen in space photography of the earth, and their recent deployment to spur environmental change. He finds the much-touted newness of the discourse is already ubiquitous in contemporary film and military technology. [2]

Thus, cinema can serve as a kind of tool, a barometer of changes in human consciousness and self-consciousness. This determines the importance of research in this area. In this case, the object of research is usually a popular movie with a large budget. At the same time, Toby Neilson in his thesis drew attention to the need to look beyond the boundaries of Hollywood. [3] We are talking about arthouse, video art, and short films. Film festivals, of which there are over ten thousand now, accumulate and select such works. As a rule, we’re talking about sci-fi or eco/environmental short films. Such films can offer an alternative to the dominant Hollywood discourse.

My ten years of short films selection experience shows that the directors copy or adapt well-known narratives from big cinema in most cases. It’s hard to imagine a more deadpan strategy for a low-budget film. More promising are films that speak boldly about what distributed movies are silent about. Cinema is a big market with investor expectations and a big infusion of marketing. Thus, it would seem that short films have the advantage of courage and freedom. Streaming short film platforms, film festivals, even specific markets tend to expect and support this courage. But very few distinctive filmmakers enter the wide-open gates.

TRENDS

Researchers of the cinematic anthropocene have noted a number of trends. From the technological to the ecological shift and from biopolitics to thanatopolitics.

From the technological to the ecological shift

The Php thesis “Imagining the Anthropocene: Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema in an Era of Climatic Change” by Toby Neilson displays a shift from the technological to the ecological in the genre’s contemporary manifestations. The author details representational changes across a range of science fiction films, and argues that these changes are linked directly to the concerns of the Anthropocene context. The Anthropocene has exerted on the genre, and some of the ecocritical intricacies percolate through this exertion. [3]

from biopolitics to thanatopolitics

The article “The Cinematic Anthropocene and the Future Politics of Killing” by Gregers Andersen considers two films, Elysium (Neil Bloomkamp, 2013) and What Happened to Monday (Tommy Wirkola, 2017), in order to demonstrate that they foreshadow a paradigmatic shift in the relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics. According to Michel Foucault, and later Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, it is chiefly the association of humans with biological danger that causes biopolitics to mutate into thanatopolitics. I.e. politics that determines not only biological factors but life’s possibilities. However, in these two films, humans are construed as an ecological danger that prompt thanatopolitics. They depict futures in which the regimes in power act on ecological threats by brutally micromanaging and killing members of their populations. In this the films unveil how the idea of sustainability as equilibrium can never benefit all, but must always leave some human beings out, either by abandoning them to die or by actively killing them. [4]