My PhD Project- Chapter Four

My PhD Project: Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency

Chapter Four – Positioning of Practice
The project Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency was initiated from a deep sense of melancholy about our world in the face of climate change. These feelings accumulated during the filming of the project, predicated by lumps in the throat, a chill in the bones – nausea. Trucks, trailers, roads, parks, shopping malls, contrails, oceans, pipelines, golf courses, clear-cuts, entropic forests, modern ruins and construction sites are the motifs that make up the dominant visual assemblage of this project. The people that do intermittently populate the frame are filmed in the distance, their faces turned away or outward, heads down, not connected, not looking. The creative works are more tuned to the human traces, lines, and scratches of us. They are instants of imperfect memories about our presence in the world. In these images there is sadness, illness, depression. Through the feeling and thinking of these instants, in the field and in the studio, this project emerged, fragment-by-fragment, sensation-by-sensation, as a collation of visual and aural samples, informed by living in a time affected by the production and consumption of oil.

Since I had also been thinking around these terms, Matthew Gandy’s reading of Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) triggered an insight for me. I had also been trying to work out how to produce a “romantic motif of individual alienation” expressed through a “heightened sensory experience”, as a way to make up for the “privations” of the moments of affective capture that have emerged during the practice.[1] Gandy proposes that one of the “consequences” of the psychological state of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) as she recovers from a car accident is an accentuated sensitivity to the world: “she has become much more aware of the aesthetic characteristics of her surroundings.” Antonioni applies a rich, but limited, range of colour to the film’s mise-en-scène to articulate Giuliani’s “visual acuity” elicited by her psychological trauma. In doing so he “deploy[s] an established romantic trope of illness and suffering as a means towards heightened states of creative insight.”[2] The outcomes in this project have been constructed through a metaphorical lens of sickness and sadness.[3] The camera and the practice have emerged as much as a method of coping with the conditions as a way of seeing again; a subversion of ‘neurotypical’ encounters with the world as method. “The neurotypical always has at the ready a kind of experiential shorthand with which to abridge the event, as habit”^[4], or cliché, in the terms outlined earlier by Deleuze.

Through material experimentation, and extended field excursions, which focus on contemplative and concentrated engagement with the ecological emergency, a range of approaches have been distilled to produce the recorded materials for the exhibited works. This chapter critically reflects upon methods implemented during the testing phase and production of the creative outcomes.

Practice-based filmmakers that moved from an emphasis on form to one of affect paved the way as intercessors for the thinking orbiting this project. However, in saying this, these are springboards only from which to confront the subject of a contemporary ‘ecological emergency.’ They are aligned with the early avant-garde cinema (1920s to 1930s) of Joris Ivens and Dziga Vertov, and Post-WW2, experimental film (particularly the later work, 1980s to 2000s, of British structuralist Chris Welsby).[5]

The move from historical influences to contemporary demands, both theoretical and aesthetic, presents an array of questions and problems. I am, for instance, apprehensive about aestheticising the subject and turning it into a pleasurable experience. Nor do I want to produce fact-based or cynical encounters. My position, as stated in the introduction to this exegesis, is that I consider these approaches to be the agents for polarising popular opinion and stagnating discussion about the level of ecological threat that we face and our role in bringing it about. These considerations led me to investigate the possibilities of what are known as essayist films,[6] identified in Chapter Three as those by Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, and Chantal Akerman. However, for my own work, the ‘essay film,’ with its emphasis on the personal or subjective design of the filmmaker is an overly broad classification. This also accounts for my decision to include as many competing voices as possible, in the design of the sonic elements, in how they relate or not to the images in the films.

The application of digital moving image technology deployed in the production of the films has been essential to the production techniques, providing means to open up the subject for closer, clearer, or alternate perceptions.[7] Cinematic devices that were tested include: monochrome, inverted channels, high-contrast and saturated colour, time-lapse, and manipulated location sound recording and non-diegetic sonic elements. These methods and their efficacy, in relation to the aims of the project, are discussed through the film project Aspects of Trees. Conclusions reached during the making, testing and analysis of this work led to experimentation, and eventual application of creative constraints or restrictions. [8] In the end, I limited the techniques to long duration takes, extreme telephoto and high-speed (slow motion) cinematography. These formal devices now dominate the visual frameworks of both the exhibited video outcomes of the research. Application of sound design through accentuated location recordings,[9] as well as layers of data-mined TV, radio and Internet sources for discursive content is utilised as a method of subverting the subjective position often present in essayist cinema, and to draw out the networks of noise and voices that surround us wherever we are, even if we can’t see or hear them.

The questioning that initiated the projects and activated experimentation with video and audio materials was formulated into the following propositions: (1) if working from the belief that fear-inducing or fact-based documentary polarises popular opinion, alternatively might a poetic and affective mode or register act as a provocation for progressing debates about anthropogenic climate change?^[10] (2) Might cinematic affect, through sensation, recalibrate our perceptions of the world at this moment of ecological crisis? I hypothesised that my feelings of sadness about the crisis might be a common experience for people who were attempting to grapple with the complex problems that face our planet’s ecology. I felt, and still feel at times, incapacitated by the enormity of the problem and wanted to address it through my practice, supported by a range of research methods that would allow me to not only see the world as it is, but also to sense it more acutely.

What I subjectively know, from planting trees and managing plantation reforestation is that human impact on the ecology is destructive, vast, and moving at a rapid rate.[11] The destruction is, however, predominantly invisible, hidden up long logging roads in places that people rarely visit or see. Distant clear-cuts and diseased forests have the same cloak of invisibility as the methane in our air, the plastics, acids and toxins in our water, and the oil sands and mining operations that exist far away from our cities and imaginations.

Fig. 23. Andrew Denton. [Photograph] North American Pine-Beetle Epidemic:
Dead Forest, British Columbia, Canada (2012).

The first completed experiment of my research comprised of a multi-screen film, Aspects of Trees, which looked at environmental issues through a range of cinematic and photographic media, seeking to engage with these in an evocative and affective register (which I contextualised in Chapter Two).[12] The work documented the barely visible or invisible, but ultimately destructive, mountain pine beetle epidemic in North America, brought about by human interference in the ecology of the region.

In 2012 and 2013 I conducted fieldwork in Williams Lake, and the Merrit Region, in British Columbia, in the Rocky Mountain Ranges in Alberta, and in the Pinyon forests in the Gila in New Mexico. These locations are at the heart of the pine beetle infestation in Canada and the USA.[13] The fieldwork utilised a variety of documentation techniques, including cameras placed remotely across locations (sometimes in unusual places, under a ditch or inside a log or under the forest floor). The cameras ran for long capture times in a variety of frame rates. These shots worked as ideation sketches that uncovered subtle changes in the location, across a range of macro and micro perspectives, temporally and spatially. It is a method developed through close readings of Dziga Vertov’s polemic and poetic notion of the ‘kino-eye’ as applied in his film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929).[14] Vertov worked with his cameraman Mikhail Kaufman to construct inventive cinematic language, using material devices to extend and shift perspective,[15] through expressive use of camera and methodological applications of montage developed with editor, Yelizaveta Svilova.[16]

Fig. 24. Andrew Denton. [Photograph] Pine-Beetle Damage, British
Columbia, Canada (2012).

Fig. 25. Andrew Denton. [Photograph] Underwater of Sky and Moth Landing,
British Columbia, Canada (2012).

Sometimes unexpected results emerged from the sketches. Happy accidents either directed me into another way of filming or became raw material for post-production experimentation. Once time was taken to absorb and contemplate the location, I looked for material that reflected the sensations of being there. The possibilities for post-production pathways were also considered at this stage and noted. Methods uncovered on the field trips informed the development of new material. Most shots were eventually discarded or their use altered though multiple iterations of reviewing and editing. An example of a technique I have used in the past, but that proved to be an unexpected challenge in this case, was the application of time-lapse cinematography.[17] Although I discarded most of the shots I recorded, I found at times its economic application in extended shot sequences revealed aspects of the subject that would not otherwise emerge if filmed in real time.[18] When time-lapse cinematography is utilised in Aspects of Trees, it is to make visible unexpected patterns, movements, or connections in the images that speak to the complexity of the ecological subjects. A process of testing, and elimination, favoured less dramatic temporal registers. It worked most effectively when footage was sped up slightly, five to ten frames per second, rather than one frame every minute, which produces a more subtle effect on the material, while still disclosing previously invisible motions.[19] If you stand or lie down under the trees in a large dead forest you can hear the wind and sense the trunks and branches moving but not really see their inter-relationships. The entropic forest is heard moving in the wind but this movement is not visible to the human eye. In this section of the film, time-lapse footage (shot once every five seconds) was collected in very high-definition.[20] The temporal compression, and the sharp level of photographic detail, captured the movement vocabulary of the distressed trees, producing images that speak to the rhythm that emanates from the forest.

Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame. Just as from the quivering of a reed you can tell what sort of current, what pressure there is in a river, in the same way we know the movement of time from the flow of the life-process reproduced in the shot.[21]

Fig. 26. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Aspects of Trees] Entropic Forest, British Columbia,
Canada (2015).

Many hours of time-lapse material were recorded during the production of Aspects of Trees, but very little of it ended up in the final project. What the technique taught me was how to look more closely at the subject and how to search where possible for other less invasive cinematic rupturing techniques. I discovered, over time, affective moments in the slowly immersive, personal experiences of the instants of capture. I came to favour these compositions over abrasive digital manipulation of the images; fast cuts to graphically divergent frames, and disjuncture through screen placement, which I had experimented with in the past. An example of the latter is Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s, untitled, multi screen installation at the 55^th Venice Biennale (2013). The hyper-intense affective register of the work fits its subject, disaffected youth culture, by “conjur[ing] alternate realities and warped futures populated by a motley cast of unstable characters, played by Trecartin and a rotating cast of friends and collaborators.”[22]

Fig. 27. Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. [Film Still: Untitled] Performers with Costumes and
Paint, at 55^th Venice Biennale (2013).

The contemplative register at work in Aspects of Trees can be demonstrated in a slow motion, long take midway through the film. The final composite was developed through multiple experiments and iterations in the field and later in post-production. The purpose behind the shot was to evoke the dislocation that unfolds while traversing a dead forest and then that moment of emptiness as the trees disappear and the landscape opens up to the endless tree stumps of a clear-cut.[23] The durational pressure, due to the length of the take, and the nauseating skew of the dead trees as they warp across their disrupted vertical linearity, opens into a lonely and perplexing instant of negative space. Encountering the filmed world as it slows down affects a different state, inducing a forensic element of discovery in the languid quality of movement. The experience of alienation in the filmed site is underlined by the monochromatic image and the technical failure of the low-resolution images.[24] At this stage of the production, I was unaware of the importance this moment would have on the practice in the latter stages of the research.

Fig. 28. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Aspects of Trees] Dead Forest and Clear-cut Sequence,
British Columbia, Canada (2015).

The potential for high-speed cinematography was further revealed while filming a clear-cut, in Merrit, British Columbia. Days on site trying to capture the scale and intensity of the violence that had been exerted on the landscape proved fruitless. Attempts with high-resolution cameras, time-lapse, and other filming techniques, were ineffective in ‘connecting me’ emotionally with the subject.[25] Finally, by filming handheld with a Casio FH-20 at 240 frames per second,[26] along a deer barrier, which circles the clear-cut logging for many kilometres, I observed that the fence operated as a formal structure to the chaos of the shattered landscape behind the wire. The images evolved into a simultaneously languorous and kinetically jarring sequence.

The compositing of the images into a triptych amplified the tension between the kinetic movement, yet slow motion images of the clear-cut through the fence. Offsetting the timelines of the three screens accentuates this. The result is a sequence that unfolds on multiple visual levels. Frenetic and violent, its fractured horizon is tethered by the slow-motion cinematography, and then disrupted by the motion parallax effect of the close foreground in relation to the deep background.[27] The shots slip in and out of synch, in and out of chaos, and the horizon drifts away and then reconnects with itself. Sensations of time, space, and distance move through registers of familiarity and strangeness.

Fig. 29. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Aspects of Trees] Clear-cut and Deer Fence, British
Columbia, Canada (2015).

Taking advantage of the lightweight camera led camera tests, which drew on erratic and kinetic shooting techniques.[28] Composition of several dozen shots into single frames drew results that were interesting abstractions, but were not compelling over long durations of playback. More often than not they disintegrated into visual noise, rendering the subject unrecognisable. This particular technique was eventually rejected as not synchronising with the aims of the project, though I noted during the testing that the abstracted shots were more captivating when they contained an identifiable visual element in them. There was something compelling about the isolated recognisable elements in the image that I reflected back on when I started collecting databases of images of contrails, as if our eyes search out the familiar as way make sense of the what is difficult to grasp.

Fig. 30. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Aspects of Trees] Discarded Camera Test of Composited
Pinyon Forest After Fire, New Mexico, U.S.A. (2015).

The decision to construct Aspects of Trees, in its first iteration as a multi-screen work, came from extensive testing and review of the images during the post-production phase of the film.[29] The challenge for the work was to integrate the scale and complexity of the subject with the subjectivity of the affective experience of encounter. The multiple high-definition composited screens allowed for a certain acuity in the images, which was then complicated by temporal disjuncture, repetition, and material distortion. Later however, I came to find the constant fragmentation of the frame distracting in its busyness. I re-edited the film into a mostly mono-screen work, which I found to be a more successful iteration.[30] From fevered melancholy to nausea, grief and then clarity, Aspects of Trees evolved into a eulogy of the entropic forests its composition traversing a single to a dozen screens.

At this point of the research, my plan was to develop visual material that emerged from my subjective experience of observing, and then to complicate this subjective response through the process of temporal and spatial disruptions of images and sounds. It was Tarkovsky’s writing on his cinematic process and theories that served as a ‘friend’ to consult in this regard.[31] “Naturalistically recorded facts are in themselves utterly inadequate to the creation of a cinematic image. The image in cinema is based on the ability to present as an observation one’s own perception of an object.”[32] His writing and work has also had an influence on cinematic construction of sound.

On reflection, after many iterations with different soundtrack elements, I decided that one of the creative constraints that I would apply to the final exhibited works was to not use a musical score, and to think about the sound in a similar way to the images. That is, to use the recording technology itself over post-production methods to shift perceptual encounters of the objects and locations. I engaged a sound designer to help produce the sound for the film.[33] As in past projects we have worked on together, we utilised a mixture of location recordings (for this work the sound of bark beetles, fences, trees), manipulated in post, which then also conversed with the score.[34] Raw audio materials were fed into a variety of MAX MSP patches, in order to create immediacy in the work. Live improvisational recordings of a cello influenced these elements in the final outcome.[35] In 2012, I met with electronic composer, sound designer, and science artist, David Dunn while I was in New Mexico. David has been recording pinyon pine beetle sounds in the damaged forest of New Mexico and Colorado for over two decades.[36] He offered to donate his recordings to the project, which can be heard in various iterations on the soundtrack. These are the clicking crunching sounds on the track of the beetles eating the trees.

Aspects of Trees traverses a range of evocative and temporal registers. Through the process of making the work, a subjective resistance built up to producing images that are spectacular or focused on the aesthetics of human interaction with “Nature”,[37] seen in such films as Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Baraka (1992). During refinement of the collection methods, extreme high-speed and high definition cinematography, as well as super-telephoto lenses, were trialled with increasing frequency. I concluded that subtle ripples and ruptures in the image were more contemplative in their form, as methods of locating an enhanced clarity or acuity in the material engagement with the subject. A decision to establish filming techniques with limited formal restrictions, in order to anchor the images with certain perceptual elements, was arrived at due to reflections on the many material experiments conducted. Further consideration of works such as those by Buster Simpson, Agnes Denes, and Richard Mosse, discussed in Chapter Three, convinced me that simplifying and limiting the possibilities of the media can agitate, counter-intuitively, a complex, contemplative, engagement with the subject.

Attempts:

Halfway through the research the emphasis of Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency shifted from a focus on natural entropy, to subjects that are linked tenuously or specifically to fossil fuel production, energy, and consumption. This choice was elicited from observations made during my fieldwork in Canada, and through scoping out current socio-politico-ecological conditions during the contextual review process (see Chapter One and Two). In North America, in the context of the oil sands production, the infrastructure of this industry is everywhere. Its iconography of tankers, pickups, helicopters, power-lines, refineries, and seemingly endless pipes, and highway construction is so commonplace that it is rendered benign in the everyday, unless you take time to concentrate on it, or come to it with new eyes.

This is Morton’s uneasiness as he contemplates the uncanny ‘weirdness’ of our ‘ecological emergency.[38] They are the fragments or signs of the hyperobjects of oil and climate change. “From [his] point of view oil is what makes America look the way it does: it covers the plains with highways while weeds grow through the rotting wood on a railway track.”[39] Rather than shocking us by dramatically altering the familiar, the uncanny encounter gently shifts the commonplace into discord. I imagined that through approaches of contemplative disruption of the quotidian, the lens could tease out the invisible elements that elude daily capture. Perhaps, in our current circumstances this could be a method of reconnection, drawing out the unseeable and altering perception. This could be a way for the world to present itself differently; for us to feel its strangeness against our own.

Deleuze reflects on our spiritual disconnection with the world: “The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us.”[40] If we have lost our belief in the world then are we incapable of a meaningful encounter with it? “Only belief in the world can reconnect [humanity] to what [he and she] sees and hears.”[41]

Filming and Thinking:

Sherwood Park, near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, is home to the refineries that process the oil sands material that is transported from far northern strip mines such as those at Fort MacMurray. Steam, smoke, fire, and dust pour from machines, cloying the air; haptic entry points into this landscape. The brutal objects of tank farms, depots, train yards, and truck stops are where I first set up my camera and waited and filmed day and night over many months thinking and feeling through what I was seeing. This was accompanied by excursions to Fort MacMurray to witness the town and the phenomenon of the sands. It is a science fiction vista reminiscent of the scarred landscapes in Lessons of Darkness. Having visited these awful sites, I think I now understand why Herzog chose to assemble his cinematic ‘inferno’ with Wagnerian scoring, artifice in the imagery, false quotations and otherworldly narration. I believe he was caught up in the alluring horror of the aesthetics of that place, and overwhelmed by the human transgressions that caused these toxic landscapes to happen.

Fig. 31. Garth Lenz. [Photograph] Oil Sands Operation, Fort MacMurray, Alberta, Canada
(2013).

I have certainly felt awe in the face of the destruction I have witnessed during this research project. Despite this, I knew at my core I needed to resist a spectacular encounter with the subject; to take a deep slow breath and look at the vibrations and pulses that were radiating from the source. This conclusion led me away from the sources of oil and out into the world of its consumption. I drew a line on the map that started at the refineries in Edmonton and finished at the golf courses and wind farms of Palm Springs. This was followed by an epilogue excursion that took me to the farms and toxic waters of the Salton Sea, where the residue our wants leaves visible traces of what our future might be.

The spatial and temporal scale of climate change makes it an imperceptible entity of enormous finitude. As Morton notes: “We can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time. The reason why they appear nonlocal and temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this transdimensional quality. We only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness.”[42] Those fleeting glimpses we catch are clues to the strangeness our world is becoming. As I stood alone filming I imagined each drop of oil as pebbles striking a pond, sending ripples of affects out into the world. Some dynamically present, some elusively slippery; fragments of our day-to-day to direct a lens towards, in order to perceive them and sense them in ways only a camera can extract. Landscapes, infrastructures, and structures, under the close scrutiny of cinematic devices can show us that our eyes would otherwise not see. Film essayist Patrick Keiller articulates the complex perceptual and emotional possibilities residing within the encounter of landscape, which links the viewer with objects in them as well as the geography itself:

…the viewer is always surrounded, and so the business of picturing is infinitely more complex both technically and conceptually. This, and it is this distinction between modes of viewing that differentiates the parallel analogies between an object and an idea, and between one’s surroundings and a mood, atmosphere or state of mind. Landscape functions in all these ways in the cinema, perhaps more so that anywhere else. The tragic-euphoric palimpsest; the reciprocity of the imagination and reality; pace seen in terms of other place; setting as a state of mind – all are phenomena that coincide in films.[43]

Affective Cinematic Devices:

As noted throughout this exegesis, I have set formal constraints on the collection and final distribution of the recorded materials. Part of the reason for this was to apply a structure of visual and aural continuity, as a method for encapsulating the disjointed collected imagery. Of course, as with the fraction of a moment with the blinking eye in La Jetée (1962), and the deviations seen in most Dogme 95 films,[44] even one’s own rules are made to be broken. Thus, I marginally pushed the edges at times. I leave it to the viewer to work out where. The limitations imposed were:

Extreme telephoto lenses
Slow motion cinematography
Linear camera movement (horizontal and vertical) with wide-angle lenses
Extended duration of shots (a resistance to classical montage)
No post-production effects
No composed music

For the compositions, I wanted the images to have consistency so they would cut together elegantly and not appear out of kilter with the other formal choices. As well, because I film alone, I needed ways to get in and out of sensitive sites quickly, before being ejected. Therefore, as much as it being an aesthetic choice, the linear compositions developed out of a practical need for consistency and expediency. One solution was to mount a small wide-angle prime lens to the camera so it looked like a consumer video camera. On location, I could then place it on solid objects for stability instead of using a more conspicuous tripod. Alternatively, I would shoot handheld where necessary. For instance, I used this method in commercial locations such as the West Edmonton Mall. Another solution was to mount the camera inside my vehicle and drive into restricted areas, such as train depots and refineries, while recording. By the time Security got to me I was usually rolling up my window and heading out. I framed the images with strict horizontal lines using wide-angle lenses to capture expansive compositional elements, but also to absorb camera shake caused by the rough surfaces on which I was often travelling.

A telephoto image is a compression of space. The longer the lens the more compact that space appears between distance and the closeness. Further distortion occurs through the shallowness of the focus. The camera operator must choose where to align the soft with the sharp and where to find in the image that spot where those elements are most in harmony with the intent of the image. Placement of the camera is also a factor. The further away the camera is from the subject the wider the focal plane and, therefore, the deeper the focus around that subject. The quality, amount and direction of the light determine not only the depth of focus achievable, but also the atmospheric elements in the image. These lenses force the viewer to look at the subject in the image from a different spatial perspective and it makes visible elements that are invisible such as dust, heat, moisture, colour and texture. These all effect how light reaches and shapes the image as it connects with the film or the chip in the camera, presenting an image of the subject that cannot be seen by the naked human eye.

Fig. 32. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] I5 Highway, California, U.S.A. (2013).

High-speed cinematography slows the world down, producing a contemplative register in the images. There is something about its capacity to change the way we see the world, providing clarity but also a languid quality, which is compelling to view and draws the eye into detail. While filming the shots and sequences I found my whole demeanour had to adjust to a different temporal state of being. These affects on me not only became apparent in the material but also, as I filmed, my acuity for seeing the subject sharpened. Some examples: rolling camera at an oil train passing by, I saw the bugs flying between the cars, a helicopter circling above, and heat shimmering off the black tanks carrying the crude and surrounding power lines. Hisses and clanks from the refineries interrupted my thoughts. Months later I filmed rubbish sticking to weeds in an empty lot behind Wal-Mart, intensifying my sense of strangeness. Something moved in the grass and I realised there were people living and sleeping in this lot. I had not noticed this before I rolled the camera. A few weeks earlier I shot mirages on a Mojave Desert road and looked up for a fleeting moment to see a contrail. I filmed it, and then hundreds more over the following year. They become symbolic gestures for the whole project. Each captured moment in the field takes about ten seconds, which results in a take of about 90 seconds when rendered. Walter Benjamin said that movement is extended in slow motion cinematography…

And just as enlargement [in telephotography] not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly ‘in any case,’ but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them-aspects ‘which do not appear as the retarding of natural movements but have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.’ Clearly, it is another nature, which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye.[45]

Fig. 33. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Jetliner and Contrail, California, U.S.A. (2013).

The companion works, Crude and Flight, use telephoto lenses and slow motion in two divergent but collaborative ways. The compression of the image in Crude is essential for extricating the forensic perceptual elements I seek to draw from the image. The collapsing of space and elongation of time extract compositional cacophonies of converging visual data, which because of their contained slowness allow viewers to absorb them and therefore think them.[46] In landscapes, stratified lines of space are accentuated so that linkages between geography, subjects, and objects, with implied ambivalent meanings emerge. These “haptic visualities”, as theorised by Laura Marks, via Deleuze and Guattari, “graze across” the frame;[47] a child playing in water, during an excruciating heat wave, becomes a vibrating image of play turned in on itself; the Thanksgiving traffic gridlock from Palm Springs to Los Angeles exudes boredom in waves of exhaust fumes, and a lonely figure working on a construction site embodies the brutal toil of it all.

Fig. 34. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Child Playing in Heatwave at Drought Affected Lake
Mead, Nevada, U.S.A. (2013).

Fig. 35. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Heading Home After Thanksgiving, Palm Springs California, U.S.A. (2013).

Fig. 36. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Worker on Construction Site, Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada (2013).

This hapticity in the image also emerges in the video installation Flight, but operates into the realm of minimalist-abstraction rather that the spatial-temporal compression that bends a subject out of shape in order to think it differently. The contrail lines that rupture the clear blue skies are repetitions of the same act over and over rendered ever so slightly differently. In this way it drifts more towards what Deleuze infers is a cinema of the body than of the brain. The two video works are designed to transmit across and through those opposite poles, interdependent yet reaching towards the same discourse. The essayist mode of Crude, scans the world capturing an array of images, while in Flight, the almost same image of the contrails plays out over and over again. Both films are made in exactly the same locations and at the same time, yet they transmit their messages in dynamically different ways interdependently.

Body or brain is what cinema demands be given to it, what it gives to itself, what it invents itself, to construct its work according to two directions, each one of which is simultaneously abstract and concrete. The distinction is thus not between the concrete and the abstract (except in experimental cases and, even there, it is fairly consistently confused). The intellectual cinema of the brain and the physical cinema of the body will find the source of their distinction elsewhere, a very variable source, whether with authors who are attracted by one of the two poles, or with those who compose with both of them.[48]

Fig. 37. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Flight] Contrail #2, California, U.S.A. (2014).

While the road unfolded beneath me between my sites of interest, I found myself listening to radio. In a time of satellite the regions of thought tend to blur. NPR bleeds into Fox and out into CNBC via CNN. The discursive conversations and discourses, sometimes breathless in their efforts to make something out of nothing radiate out from a plethora of anonymous strangers. The experience made me think about how I might weave these other subjectivities into the creative outcomes as both a critique of the reasons we continue to talk instead of do, and as a method of breaking away from the subjective voice of the essayist form. I decided to eschew the usual trope of voiceover, to instead to use the sounds and voices of these strangers. To accompany these abstracted threads of commentary and commercial interests, location sounds were recorded using devices to alter perceptual experiences of the places filmed and imagined. The sound was collected using contact microphones to record the earth and the objects filmed. Droning ambiences were resisted over a mode that captured layers of sound in the environment across a range of distances, replicating aurally the thinking behind the visual methods. In post-production these elements were constructed to weave across the images as languid companions, drawing the video works together and away from each other as a shared sonic composition.

When I started filming the project I imagined a large-scale multi-screen installation.[49] However as I started to collate the footage I was reminded of my intent to draw out affects into contemplations. This required a softer touch, which was already organically arising from the collected materials. Eventually I thought about two types of encounter with the subject. One, constantly searched and sampled the world for more and more slivers and clues, the other fixated on a single symbolic element reiterated.

[1] Matthew Gandy, “Landscapes of Deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, no. 2 (2003).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Eileen Joy noticed this element of Giuliana’s acute sensations of insanity in the world in her essay “Blue.” “…only she, suffering from feelings of anxiety and dreams of drowning in quicksand, seems to understand how sick the landscape is, and wants to flee from it, saying at one point, ‘I can’t look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what’s happening on land.’” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (2013), 217.

[4] See Chapter Two for more detail on this: “The neurotypical has at the ready a procedure for reconstituting something after the fact from the phases of experience’s fielding whose immediate entertainment was skipped: the procedure of reflective consciousness. The shortening of experience by habit and its reconstitution by reflection go neurotypically hand in hand with the greatest of fluidity. What falls out between habit and reflection, leaving a gap they work in concert to smooth over with the aid of language coming from the field of memory, is the coming alive of the field of experiential immediacy, in its emergent dance of attention.” Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience, 17.

[5] “Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without them nothing happens. They can be people – for a philosopher, artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists-but things too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators.” Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, 125.

[6] Laura Rascaroli offers a definition of the essay film drawn from Hans Richter’s seminal ‘Der Film Essay, eine neue form de Dokumentarfilm.’ [In the 1940 text he] announced a new type of intellectual and emotional cinema, able to provide ‘images for mental notions’ and to ‘portray a concept’. ‘In this effort to give body to the invisible world of the imagination, thought and ideas, the essay film can employ an incomparably greater reservoir of expressive means than can the pure documentary film. Freed from recording external phenomena in simple sequence the film essay must collect its material from everywhere; its space and time must be conditioned only by the need to explain and show the idea’” Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London Wallflower Press, 2009), 24.

[7] “This constant interaction and transfer of analogue to digital and vice versa is changing the relation the filmmaker has with his tools. Do the tools he uses affect the filmmaker’s subjectivity? Obviously they do, and the films made now reflect these new tools. In this change, what have we filmmakers gained, and what have we lost? And is it a question of gain or loss? Or is it that the new technologies and market forces that shape what the future holds for us constitute an historical change that other forces try to reverse?” Annette Michelson et al., “Afterward: A Matter of Time,” Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, Film culture in transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 262.

[8] “The idea that creativity can be stimulated by constraints that may be imposed, invented, or chosen.” Paisley Livingston and Carl R. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Routledge Philosophy Companions (London Routledge, 2009), 631. See an example of this in action in: The Five Obstructions, directed by Jørgen Leth, Lars von Trier, and Carsten Holst (Koch Lorber Films, 2003).

[9] “Sound design is the careful composition of three main types of film sounds—spoken words, music, and sound effects. While some of these sounds are produced while the camera is rolling, most are recorded after a scene is shot and then synched with the visual track in postproduction.” Jon Lewis, Essential Cinema: An Introduction to Film Analysis (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2014).

[10] As Brian Massumi notes: “Philosophies of affect, potential, and actualization may aid in finding counter-tactics.” “The Autonomy of Affect”, 106.

[11] From 1992-2002 I worked as a tree-planter and reforestation manager in British Columbia and Alberta.

[12] “Around Williams Lake, the whole country dissolved into a ghostly red hue.” Andrew Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation: Greystone Books, 2011), 73.

[13] The beetle, as with forest fire, is a natural part of the forest ecosystem – but now it is acting in a way not seen before. Usually it comes and goes every 30-40 years to cull out the older trees – thus opening up the forest for second storey species or juvenile stands to emerge. When the beetle’s job is done it is killed off by a combination of fire and at least one winter that has extended temperatures of -25C° temperatures. The bark beetle’s blood acts like anti-freeze. It hasn’t been that cold for more than a decade so the beetle hasn’t died off. From an interview with Bill Layton, a local (William’s Lake) forester, who has worked in the backwoods of BC for 30 years and now works with First Nations bands on forestry and pine beetle projects in the area. June 19 2012.

[14] “Kino-eye makes use of every possible kind of shooting technique: acceleration, microscopy, reverse action, animation, camera movement, the use of the most unexpected shortcomings – all these we consider to be not trick effects but normal methods to be fully used.” Vertov and Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 88.

[15] “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine show you the world as only I can see it… Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from object, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations. Ibid., 17.

[16] Vertov and “his editor Yelizaveta Svilova, who later became his wife, and his brother Mikhail Kaufman formed a ‘Council of Three.’ The Council of Three gathered around them a group of devotees, calling themselves kinoks, or cinema-eyes.” Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40.

[17] Reflection on this method found that in recent times it has become a trope of high-end fact based nature films such as those made by the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC). It is also used as a transitional device in narrative TV shows such as Breaking Bad, or in titles sequences such as in House of Cards (USA). In such context, in most cases aesthetically, it was not deemed appropriate as a technique that aligned with the aims of the project.

[18] Long takes which take many hours to capture.

[19] This process at work can be seen in a composition of recently attacked pine stand in the Merrit Region (see fig. 26).

[20] 18 megapixels on a Canon 5D MkII DSLR.

[21] Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, 120.

[22] “As if in an internet fever dream they inhabit liminal spaces between races and genders, switch guises fluidly and double themselves with hallucinatory abandon through a cacophony of digital effects, hyperactive editing and candy colored face paint. Communication occurs in text-message style non-sequiturs.” Massimiliano Gioni, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico: Biennale Arte 2013/The Encyclopedic Palace, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Venice: Marsilio, 2013), 417.

[23] I walk with the camera to my eye through the forest and then out into the clear-cut.

[24] “Following Bergson we might say that as beings in the world we are caught on a certain spatio-temporal register: we see only what we have already seen (we see only what we are interested in). At stake with art, then, might be an altering, a switching, of this register. New (prosthetic) technologies can do this. Switching temporal registers: time-lapse photography producing firework flowers and flows of traffic; slow-motion film revealing intricate movements which otherwise are a blur. And switching spatial registers too: microscopes and telescopes showing us the molecular and the super-molar. Indeed, at this point the new media coincide with art: indeed, the new media take on an aesthetic function (a deterritorialising function).” Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 6, no. 3 (2001): 127.

[25] Despite spending many years working in thousands of clear-cuts I am still struck by their effect on me. Each time I am in one I am taken back to the very first time I looked out across the landscape to see only stumps on the ground reaching all the way to the horizon.

[26] On site time-lapse experiments of the clear-cut were recorded and rendered on a laptop for review. These shots did not convey the trauma or scale of the place. The technique was not working the way I hoped and decided to play with the Casio FH-20. I discovered the Casio, a consumer camera that shoots very high frame rates (240-480 frames per second) at very low-resolution (640×480 or 320×240) on a collaborative live dance and projection project, Girl with a Movie Camera (2012). It is small, cheap and lightweight. The intimate footage that emerged from recording dancers is compelling. Later experimentation with land and cityscapes for connecting sections of the show reminded me that slow-motion cinematography could have an alluring quality.

[27] The three shots composite into an extreme cinematic aspect ratio of 4:1. This is a very wide presentation format. As a comparison, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) has an aspect ratio of 2.20:1.

[28] Off-the-shelf camera models, like the Casio, fit into the palm of your hand. Their portability allows for a unique and fluid capability. This quality redirected my experimentation, temporarily, down a pathway reminiscent of early avant-garde visual music works. “The notion of ‘visual music’ can be seen as a useful way of understanding the significant number of abstract animated films produced in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. For each filmmaker the term can be understood in a slightly different manner: for Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling music served purely as an analogy of interrogating the qualities of visual media without recourse to representation. In contrast Walther Ruttmann integrated music into his film in attempt to synthesise them, to cross sense boundaries in a manner analogous to the medical condition synaesthesia.” Malcolm Cook, “Visual Music in Film, 1921-1924: Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman,” in Music and Modernism, C. 1849-1950, ed. Charlotte De Mille (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2011), 220.

[29] Installed as an installation at the Balance-Unbalance (2013) conference in Noosa, and projected with a live performance of the sound and music at the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium (2013).

[30] This version of Aspects of Trees, which screened at The New Zealand International Film Festival, and Jihlava International Documentary Festival,is included as an appendix on DVD at the end of this exegesis.

[31] Published in Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema.

[32] Ibid., 107.

[33] Teresa Connors.

[34] Eduard Artemyev’s scores for Solaris and Stalker have been influential in their application of non-diegetic/diegetic sound elements that merge into score elements. “Tarkovsky was

interested in Artemyev’s electronic music, believing that it was the way to dispense with a conventional score altogether, which he felt that films did not really need.” Sean Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky (Harpenden, Herts, England: Kamera Books, 2011), 33.

[35] “…software programs such as Max/MSP/Jitter have been used widely as real-time interactive systems to respond minutely to the actions and voices of actors (or interactive installation users), transforming the data into metamorphosing video projections and sonic effects.” Baz Kershaw, Helen Nicholson, and ebrary Inc., Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, Research methods for the arts and humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 44.

[36] Dunn became a tree whisperer after New Mexico started to lose half of its famed pinyon trees to an unprecedented beetle outbreak. Anxious landowners wanted a clear diagnosis on their trees before they pulled out their chain saws. Because Dunn had the listening tools, he got recruited to do the job. Whenever the sound engineer heard noises that resemble running water or creaking winds in a pinyon he’d give the tree an all-clear for beetles. Such a diagnosis inevitably invited two possible prescriptions: the landowner could water the tree more often, to build resin resistance, or he or she could spray the pinyon tree with the pesticide carbyryl. If Dunn heard squirrel-like pops and clicks, that meant the beetle had taken up residence and was now building its own magical sound universe. Such a diagnosis inevitably resulted in someone pulling out a saw.” Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests, 144-45.

[37] “To have ecology, we must give up Nature. But since we have been addicted to Nature for so long, giving up will be painful. Giving up a fantasy is harder than giving up a reality.” Morton, The Ecological Thought, 95.

[38] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 54.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 171.

[41] Ibid., 171-72.

[42] Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 70.

[43] Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (2013), 31-32.

[44] “Dogme 95 is a rule-governed, manifesto-based, back-to-basics film initiative that was intended from the outset to generate a movement. More than a decade later, the official Dogme website (http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm) provides evidence of the successful realization of von Trier’s intentions, with more than two hundred films…”. Livingston and Plantinga, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, 483.

[45] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 37.

[46] This type of cinematography is popular in sports and nature reportage for this very reason.

[47] “While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image. Drawing from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinesthetics, haptic visuality involves the body more than is the case with optical visuality. Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body: thinking of cinema as haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole.” Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 162-63.

[48] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 210.

[49] Influenced no doubt my experience of seeing Richard Mosse’s Enclave at the 55^th Venice Biennale.