My PhD Project- Chapter Three

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

Chapter Three – Contextual Review of Practice
The longer we look through a camera or watch a projected image the remoter the world becomes, yet we begin to understand that remoteness more. Limits trap the illimitable, until the spring we discovered turns into a flood.[1]

As a way to contextualise Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency in its field of practice, this chapter offers a close examination of a range of creative works that have influenced my own decision-making as a filmmaker. They are examples taken from both cinematic and sculptural practices, in particular sculptural earth works and environmental artworks. The films could be loosely bundled into categories such as poetic, subjective, or essayist, sitting inside the conflicted territories of the documentary genre (Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, Chantal Akerman). The artworks were chosen for the way they engage poetically with the earth itself (Robert Smithson), or for the way they offer poetic possibilities within practical solutions for resolving ecological degradation (Buster Simpson, Agnes Denes). I view all of these makers as theorist-practitioners, so where possible I have drawn from the filmmakers’ and artists’ own discussions on their works.

Each practitioner, to some extent, ruptures our everyday experiences of the world by favouring affective registers over factual registers as a method of enquiry, seeking out complications in their subjects, and producing images as rich territories to locate ‘truth’ beyond statistical facts. They also take a political and/or ethical position in their work. Thus, these works that influence my own, are not works that try to distance or detach the viewer’s emotional response. They are not purely conceptual or aesthetical experiments; rather they immerse the viewer into intense encounters with the world through the intricate fabrications of their cinematic languages.

Land and Environmental Art – Influences:

Buster Simpson engages with social and ecological crisis as subject matter. His site-specific installation, Hudson River Purge (1992), is part of a series of installations Simpson has being mounting since 1983, in which he seeks out rivers and waterways that have been affected by acid rain that has increased acidity in their pH levels, thus threatening the ecosystems they support. The series is both evocative and active, ever changing and decaying as it heals (albeit temporarily) a poisoned waterway. Simpson’s method is to drop limestone tablets, sixty-one centimetres in diameter, into the river – “tums for rivers,” deposited as impermanent sculptures that “sweeten the acidic water for a limited time.”[2] His performance of the work has a ritualistic quality to it that ties science, art and politics together.[3] The act is a simple one, and yet it cleverly highlights the complexities and sometime absurdities of the ecological problem. The acid in the water is invisible to the eye – the river still looks like a river – but is it? Human intervention has fundamentally altered the ecology, a folly that can only be responded to through another kind of pointless folly — that of a temporary band aid.

Fig. 10. Buster Simpson. [Photograph] Hudson River Purge (1992).

“We have,” as Bill McKibben points out “changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.”[4] Simpson’s work is playful and political at the same time. “As a metaphor it dramatizes the crisis of person and planet as one; acid indigestion, acid rain – a connection the media picked up on when they coined the titles ‘River Rolaids’ and ‘Tums for Mother Nature.’”[5] The political dimension of the work emerges in the painful realisation that this river is no longer a river any more in our normative memory of what a river once was. The problem is communicated through the alien limestone object. The work washes into the consciousness forcing a recalibration of the notion of river and nature. The crystal clear water imbued with new meaning disrupts perceptions of what and how the world is.

Similarly playful and political at the same time are the large-scale environmental works of Agnes Denes. Her earth work, Wheatfield — A Confrontation, was mounted in Battery Park in Manhattan in 1982 on a piece of property made from rubble accumulated during construction of the World Trade Centres, then dumped into the Hudson Bay. The reclaimed land was valued at 4.5 billion dollars at the time. For several months Denes, and a small team of irregular volunteers, cleaned the rubbish covered land, ploughed, seeded, irrigated and tended to a two-acre plot of wheat, which was eventually harvested.[6] Denes’ intent was for the harvest to be ground, made into bread, and fed to the homeless and poor, but unsurprisingly, the site was deemed too toxic for the wheat to be eaten.[7] “Some of the grain travelled around the world in an exhibition entitled ‘The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.’”[8]

Fig. 11. Agnes Denes. [Photograph] Wheatfield: A Confrontation “Harvester and Twin
Towers” (1982).

As a reference for my own work it serves as a reminder of the potent potential of a practice that is visually compelling, simple and complex at the same time. As a metaphor it operates as a reminder of the gap between rich and poor, the fed and the unfed, and notions of value as a critique on capitalism, as well as the reversal of the urban encroaching on farmland. Despite only seeing the work as documentation, I have always been captivated by Denes’ loaded images that are so compelling in their blunt trauma impact on my senses. As a practitioner she is a constant reference for me because she manages to harness, through ambivalent visual linkages, a shock moment of politics as I encounter the work. As a practitioner Denes is acutely aware of the political and ethical agenda that locates her work: “wasting valuable precious real estate, obstructing the machinery by going against the system, was an effrontery that made it the powerful paradox [Denes] had sought for.”[9] The documentation of the project is striking in its graphic juxtaposition of well-known landmarks of New York’s skyline, set against the romanticism of the agrarian past from which the United States emerged. The familiarity of the Towers and the Statue of Liberty are pushed up against a landscape tradition, eschewing expectations with an uncanny acuity that is arresting and perplexing in its encounter.

Fig. 12. Agnes Denes. [Photograph] Wheatfield: A Confrontation “and Statue of Liberty”
(1982).

Robert Smithson’s The Yucatán Mirror Displacements (1969) comprised of a series of mirrors mounted in sites along the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. This area is a significant cultural, social and geographical location, but Smithson frames his project as a travelogue essay, retracing the movements outlined by John Lloyd Stephens in his book, Travels in the Yucatán (1843). The mirrors, as with the traveller, intrude upon the landscape, albeit momentarily, to be returned to be stored somewhere in New York.[10] “Nothing remains of these works but two dozen or so images ‘entombed’—Smithson’s term—in his Instamatic camera.”[11] His art and writing have orbited this project from the beginning. From one perspective his work and essay documentation of the Yucatan Mirror Displacements initiated my intensive field excursions, helping me to construct ways to approach sites of interest for my own project. From another perspective, Smithson’s descriptions and photos of the temporary works, offered fragmentary contemplations, situated outside of cinematic discourses, which guided me towards further experimentation with the material aspects of my project.

The placement of the mirrors in the landscape is a moment for perceiving concepts of time, space, light, colour and memory. Also, “Smithson exemplifies the tendency to engage in a reading of the site, in terms not only of its topographical specifics but also of its psychological resonances.”[12] Along with Smithson, I find the experience of the time travelling between sites a rich contemplative space for conceptualising my subject.[13] As he gazes at the horizon, through his windshield, he thinks as he travels to each site, that “a horizon is something else other than a horizon; it is closedness in openness, it is an enchanted region where down is up. Space can be approached, but time is far away. Time is devoid of objects when one displaces all destinations.” [14] At the end of each journey Smithson constructs another ‘displacement’ of the site, and through the nine mirror installations he says he has “sabotaged perfection” and “rationality” through a dozen, sometimes dirty, mirror reflections of skies, water, forests, and landscape.[15] “The pictures they show are fragmentary by nature, and when placed in the landscape, they add more fragments to an already broken world, producing a montage without boundaries.”[16]

I imagine the mirrors as slices of real time unfolding alongside each other, linear temporally, displaced spatially, never able to be absorbed fully, then dismantled and moved elsewhere, gone forever except as ghosts in the archive of Smithson’s descriptions and photographs.^[17] “The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an on-going abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure.”^[18] Perceptions of time and space are altered through both the fragmentary nature of the reflecting surfaces and the weight of real time, that is, lived duration. Nothing or very little appears to happen; yet small things happen, then the objects move on. The displacements are thought experiments on time that are not beholden to the structures of the film frame. But they do hint at the cinematic in their capacity to evoke sensations of memory and in their capacity, like cinema, “to take perception elsewhere.”^[19]

Fig. 13. Robert Smithson. [Photograph] Seventh Mirror Displacement:
Yucatán (1969).

In 2013, I made a pilgrimage to Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty (1972), as part of my investigations; I was struck as much by the location as by the monumental structure itself. The site, as Smithson himself noted, “gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.”[20] Finding it requires a map. Invisible on GPS, it is situated at the end of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, 17 miles south of the Golden Spike Monument.^[21] According to Clive Owens, site selection is part of Smithson’s allegorical inclinations.

The site-specific work often aspires to a prehistoric monumentality; Stonehenge and the Nazca lines are taken as prototypes. Its ‘content’ is frequently mythical, as that of the Spiral Jetty, whose form was derived from a local myth of a whirlpool at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake…[22]

Spiral Jetty reaches out into a toxic, salt-baked wasteland, surrounded by abandoned rotten piers and jetties from the past, rusting machinery, debris from industry, the obligatory predator crows, and a few anonymous other pilgrims wandering around and on the sculpture.

The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory. The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud.^[23]

Fig. 14. Andrew Denton. [Photograph] Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Utah (2013).

The landscape shimmers and hums in the heat of the day. It is impossible to look out at the lake and the sculpture without squinting. While I silently filmed, a young couple debated with each other on the safety of stepping out onto the lake and climbing onto the sculpture. They were not concerned about falling off the rocks, but rather with the toxicity of the lakebed itself, which is riddled with poisoned tailings from a copper mine on the opposite shore. It was here in this place, eavesdropping on a private conversation, that suddenly all of my wanderings and lengthy landings on my chosen sites of enquiry started to congeal. Spiral Jetty emphasises the context of the space around it. Everything penetrating into the spiral and out from it had meaning related to the placement of the object in this space. Counter to this, I started to think about the camera and how I was pointing it out to the world into “any-space-whatevers,” as Deleuze has conceptualised such places.[24] From the perspective of the camera and the collection of all of these discursive elements, all places had meaning to the subject I was chasing. From my experience looking out and listening from Spiral Jetty I decided, finally, that it didn’t matter where I pointed my lens; I was receiving the same message. My receptors were attuned to reading, and making linkages, in a world awash in the encoded symbols of oil and capital. I had started to see everything in this light.

Smithson produced a film about the process of making and installing the work. In his writing on Spiral Jetty [the film] (1970) he reflected thoughts on the cinematic thoughts that stick to me, probably evoking twangs of nostalgia for celluloid, but also eliciting insights about his thinking-making approaches, and how I think aboutmine.

The movie began as a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving… a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels… outtakes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt, buries in lengths of footage.[25]

Cinematic Influences:

It is no accident that I was drawn to Lessons of Darkness (1995), Werner Herzog’s film about the burning oil fields of Kuwait just after the first Gulf War. Herzog focuses his camera on the destruction caused by the war in an expansive and deliberately weighty treatment that soaks the screen in the destructive capacity of humanity, in a brutal context of oil and national disagreements about who ‘owns’ resources. The film highlights/critiques ethical challenges or considerations about the documentary form in its complete disavowal of documentary as the presentation of some kind of factual truth. Herzog asserts, “we have known for a long time [that] the poet is able to articulate a deep, inherent, mysterious truth better than anyone else.”^[26] He backs this position by opening the film with a falsified quote:

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour.^[27]

Fig. 15. Werner Herzog. [Film Still: Lessons of Darkness] Burning Oilfield, Kuwait (1992).

The line attributed to Blaise Pascal was actually made up by Herzog, one sleight of hand of many, in a film that is an expressive exercise in artifice.^[28] For him there is not much truth to be mined from the factual, referring to it as an “accountant’s truth.”[29] He says: “We must ask of reality, how important is it, really? And: how important, really is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges.”[30] Lessons of Darkness brings to light the problem of representation when working with the ecological crisis subject. The film agitates an ethical debate about how this type of destruction should be presented. The images are deliberately seductive in their capacity to aestheticize the violence on the landscape. Aside from the linkages that can be made with the ecological subject in Herzog’s film, the technical filmmaking in Lessons in Darkness, is also a lesson in mastery over the mechanics of cinema. “We are meant to be impressed, awed, and seduced by the scale of the oil disaster, its stark colours (red on black, white on black), and the dynamic visual energy of shooting flames and roiling clouds of smoke.”[31]

Herzog has been criticized for this approach, accused of being “dangerously authoritarian,” specifically by his German critics, who are likely sensitive to the potential fascist aesthetics in the imagery. At times he has been accused (I believe unfairly) in recalling the spectacles of Leni Riefenstahl.[32] He defiantly opposes this critique, citing Dante, Goya, Brueghel, and Bosch as equivalents in their practices,[33] falling back on his position that “in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth – a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.”[34] Baroque images, supported by an operatic score, guide the viewer into theshocking, aestheticized, landscape of the decimated Kuwaiti oil fields. “The stylization of the horror in Lessons of Darkness means that the images penetrate deeper than the CNN footage ever could.”[35] Herzog cuts the night-scope bombing news footage, alongside his own.[36] The speckled dots and grain, spliced against panoramic aerial footage, highlight the subjective abstractions that can emerge out of the many possible representations of war. “The film progresses as if aliens have landed on an unnamed planet where the landscape has lost every single trace of its dignity.”[37] Herzog narrates the film’s eye-of-God helicopter shots that dominate the photography with a fictionally constructed voiceover that lurches from an alien “struggl[ing] to make sense of what it sees,”[38] to biblically weighted references:

And the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star fall from Heaven onto the Earth. And to him was given the key to the bottomless pit, and he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace. And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die… And Death shall flee from them.[39]

In Lessons of Darkness, wide-angle establishing shots of burning oil fieldscontrast with intimate images of fire fighters compressed into their surroundings by telephotography. The wide-open desert any-space-whatevers,[40] as seen through Herzog’s lens, render his characters as alienated within a claustrophobic frame.

Text Box:

Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Fig. 16. Werner Herzog. [Film Still: Lessons of Darkness] Fire Fighter and Burning Oilfield,
Kuwait (1992).

In contrast, half a century earlier, in a similar mode but with a different intent, Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic Man of Aran (1934), created an intimate portrait of an isolated island community, through its use of telephoto cinematography. Flaherty continues his “romantic quest for an ahistorical past unpolluted by modernity,”[41] attempting objectivity, and a sense of authenticity,[42] through the distancing and compressing effects of long lenses. In doing so he fuses the landscape to the people, accentuating both its threatening qualities and their reliance on it for survival. The images are perplexing because they are both wide, in the sense that they capture the expanse of the ocean and the landscape, and they are tight in that they use long lenses to close in on the human subject, suturing the background to the foreground. I applied this technique throughout the construction of images that include human presence for the same aesthetic effect as Flaherty, but with an alternate intent, which emphasizes human alienation from the landscape instead.

Text Box:

Image removed due to copyright restrictions. Fig. 17. Robert Flaherty. [Film Still: Man of Aran] Woman Collecting Seaweed (1934).

Flaherty worked in the field, as did I. He “followed his subject rather than roping it in where it could be filmed in controlled conditions.”[43] This approach undoubtedly added to the authenticity he sought, which is strangely amplified by his use of the telephoto lenses to construct the film’s notorious artifice. “He encouraged the islanders to revive activities that they no longer practiced — such as the use of harpoons in the shark hunt depicted in the film.”[44] The film offers, through its aesthetics, an expressive experience of the island community. The ocean seems to press into the island’s rocks, its ever-present presence menacing and central to life and existence on this isolated locale. Shots of islanders collecting seaweed and layering it on the rocks, as a bed to grow their potatoes demonstrate how Flaherty slowly stratifies his images until a larger picture of the community and the island emerges.[45]

In Lessons of Darkness and Man of Aran, the filmmakers are not enlarging their subjects through the lens for amplified distorting effects, nor do they assume the close-up or tight framing is only applicable to the human face, since they use it on landscape to great effect.[46] The nature of telephotography is that it compresses space in relation to the foreground versus the background, but the human figures and faces, in Herzog’s and Flaherty’s films, are still recognisable as human and the landscape as landscape. Their images are not the abstracted fragments of locations, faces, or pieces of the body that you may see, for example, in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). Here the lens alienates the viewer through a disengagement with the location, the body and the face to the point that it is rendered as abstracted form; landscape as skin, the body as landscape, the hand as genital; subject and object confused. “During [the] sand-centred montage sequences [in Woman in the Dunes], the viewer is often not sure exactly what material he or she is

looking at; it shifts and changes form so steadily that even the material properties are put in flux.”[47]

To further emphasize the ever-encroaching threat of the natural world on the human, and to isolate visual motifs in the interior space of the woman’s cave, Teshigahara adjusts the alienating effect that his wide-angle cinematography achieves in the open spaces of the desert to another alienating device, the use of telephoto lenses. As the sand continuously drifts into the woman’s house, the layering of repeated or similar shots underlines one of the film’s themes. The male etymologist, Niki, trapped by the woman, engulfed by the landscape, grapples for some “coherent understanding about the properties of the universe. This discursive theme is deeply environmental and concrete-material in its descriptive aspects.”[48] Yet this is achieved through dislocating and disorienting the viewer from time, space and character through collected interior fragments isolated by the long lenses in contrast with the vast exteriors. The opposite is the case in both Herzog and Flaherty’s films where the human and the landscape are simultaneously isolated and connected to their surroundings — compression as method of expressing links between the human and non-human, rather than that of nature suffocating the human, as horror.[49]

Lessons of Darkness, Man of Aran and Woman of the Dunes present ethical provocations for my own practice. I am drawn, as others have been, into the shock and awe aesthetics of Herzog’s film, which elevate my sensations but also makes me queasy at the same time. Therefore, for me, the film operates as an influential work of cinematic craft that prioritises the poetic over the factual. This aligns with the positioning of my practice. At the same time, the work provides a cautionary counterpoint to my own intentions by submerging the viewer in the distractions of spectacle. Man of Aran pulls me into its subject through its aesthetic manipulations, which perplexingly make me feel closer to the subject, despite knowing the artifice. Woman in the Dunes presents the female form and subject in tight, closed off frames so we only get pieces of the body, with the landscape filmed likewise, to unravel in our reception of the images. Nina Cornyetz argues that this articulation of a technological gaze deflates erotic readings of the film, arguing it is a “distortion” of Japanese erotic cinema of the time. “The woman’s body is simultaneously decentered as spectacle and spectacularized as landscape to be viewed with disinterest – that is, severed from ethical or utilitarian (hence also erotic) interest.”[50] The film is a reminder of the power of selective framing to excise information in order to invoke a constant quiet terror of the ‘Woman.’ It remains a lesson in composition through its evocative constructions of mise-en-scène, and its use of lens compression to tease out visual metaphors.

Fig. 18. Hiroshi Teshigahara. [Film Still: Woman in the Dunes] Close-up of the
Woman’s Eye (1964).

Chris Welsby’s film Sky Light (1988), wields its politics with gentle sadness that also refracts and complicates notions of nature in a post-nuclear world. The work is a turn from Welsby’s earlier ‘structural’ landscape films, which relied on direct environmental influences on the material as participants in the production of the works, and are influenced by complex systems theories.[51] A fluid deprioritizing exchange between mind, material, and landscape drive films such as Seven Days (1974),and the Windmill III (1974).[52] The “landscape was not secondary to filmmaking process or filmmaking process to landscape, but process and structure, as revealed in both, could carry information and communicate ideas.”[53] Sky Light breaks away from these structural works sharply in a number of ways. It was filmed soon after the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, in the Ukraine in 1986. The images are made up of lush nature images, such as reflections in pools, montaged against optically printed, colourfully enhanced, cobalt blue skies and magenta clouds, intercut with rocky landscapes covered in snow. The soundscape is a combination of landscape sounds of wind and water, radio frequencies and a gradually emerging Geiger counter. At the end of the film we are left with dust speckled end roll and the sound of the Geiger counter penetrating across the material emptiness of the reel spooling out. It is a haunting and agitating work when held up against Welsby’s earlier canon. One senses the pain in the artist who for the first time is using the splicer and the edit suite to construct a nightmare glimpse of a post-Chernobyl world,[54] forced to break with the self-imposed constraints of a method that resisted montage. It was a pivotal moment in his practice.

As new father living in Great Britain, Welsby stood under the drizzle thinking, ‘that isn’t safe anymore.’ Abandoning his teaching jobs, he spent a year roaming Great Britain, shooting the film and behaving so ‘irresponsibly’ that his marriage fell apart. Echoing Adorno’s famous dictum that ‘after Auschwitz, it is impossible to write poetry,’ Welsby declared after an early screening of the film, ‘It is not possible to look at landscapes in the same way after Chernobyl.’ The next year he moved to Canada, where he lives today.[55]

The film is both a rupture in his process and an evocative eulogy to the now absent notion of nature. The landscapes that informed his practice are no longer. It is here in the work where the invisible emerges. The poisoned snow and the forever-altered skies are irradiated and articulated in the film by the click-clack modem-like sound of the Geiger counter. “The visible is no longer a guarantee of absolute knowledge.”[56]

Fig. 19. Chris Welsby. [Film Still: Sky Light]Cobalt Blue Sky and Cloud (1988).

Welsby draws the viewer into a contemplative state of engagement with both the subject and the technical construction of his works. They are neither kinetic nor frenetic by design, nor are they constrained by narrative structures; rather the works afford “the viewer the time and space to consciously engage with the moving image, with its production and its presentation.”[57] His installation, At Sea (2003), resonates with concerns that are woven through this exegesis. The film is made up of long shots of fog on the sea and sound recordings of the surrounding activity in Vancouver harbour. “The incomprehensible vastness of the ocean, may be read as a metaphor for cognition,”[58] challenging spatial orientation, raising questions as to what is visible at all. Is that the ghostly outline of a cargo ship or do I just think it is because I hear a foghorn? Where is the horizon? Meditative and languid, extended duration shots, and use of repetition in the construction of the image, the images force a perceptual shift in the viewer that alters an experience of time and opens the mind to other thoughts. “Viewers are encouraged to slow down, take back control of their own thoughts and perceptions; forget about the constraints of beginnings, middles and ends, and enter instead, a state of mind in which reverie and contemplation can play a creative role in the process of conscious thought.” [59]

Chantal Akerman’s works also induce contemplative states of engagement with her subjects. Of specific interest to [this project] is her film D’Est, which drifts its lens across the people and the landscape of Eastern Europe, soon after the fall of the Berlin wall. The film is made up of a series of long duration cinematic tableaux, which capture quotidian life in the recently emancipated from totalitarian communist ruling forces. Tracking shots across landscapes and faces of people in landscapes unfold in extended duration takes that pick up fragments of everyday life during this portentous historical moment in time. One of the film’s identifying features is its capacity to engage with a distinctly political and social topic without explicitly focusing in on facts to tease out another kind of truth of the moment. Rancière argues that the “political impact” of her work emerges “in the way it turns an economic and geopolitical issue into an aesthetic matter.”[60] Akerman says of her approach:

I will not attempt to show the disintegration of a system, nor the difficulties of entering into another one, because she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preoccupations. This undoubtedly will happen anyway; it can’t be helped. But it will happen indirectly.[61]

I encountered the film late in my research, long after the majority of my footage had been shot, and my decisions on the creative restrictions had been formed. However, Akerman’s methods have provided a reflective sounding board from which to consider those decisions and a reminder to be faithful to the original intent and tacit sensations of the making that are embedded in the work. In short, her work is a call to be brave, and to continue to try and harness the feelings I attempted to capture during the shooting phase into the post-production phase. In addition the work has a hybrid quality in regards to its distribution, which has seen it screened in cinemas, as well as installed alongside other works she made to accompany the film. This is a likely scenario for the creative outcomes developed for this research. While I don’t find it helpful to categorise other filmmakers’ methods as having a direct relationship to my own choices, I think it is helpful to cite the identifying factors in Akerman’s film that resonate with my own practice as well as to define the core differences in my intents and approaches. The material choices will be further fleshed out in the following chapter, so I will focus on the conceptual choices with limited reference to actual techniques, except in order to illustrate points.

Akerman’s use of extended duration takes is one of her aesthetic tropes. She says of this approach: “I don’t want it to ‘look real’, I don’t want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes.”[62] In her work “one has the sense of passing time, of waiting, and of the uncertainty born of daily life that continues in the midst of despair.”[63] In D’Est the camera rolls and rolls either in static portrait or landscape compositions or in long tracking shots across people lining up for trains and buses or food. The toil of the day-to-day unfolds at the social and political indicator of this time and place. The images are also steeped in the memory-images of historical Europe, strange and familiar at the same time, in colour when they could as easily be monochromatic.[64]

The film has its own way of looking, not only in terms of aesthetics, the way it looks as a film, but in respect to the active engagement of its (visual) subjects, and the way it looks at its subject. The look in the film, as opposed to the look of the film, is more penetrating than a glance and less entranced than a gaze. There is an intensity in the manner of looking; but at the same time, there is a sense of looking beyond what one sees to the unseen.[65]

Fig. 20. Chantal Akerman. [Film Still: D’Est]People in Snow at Dusk (1993).

Akerman uses the duration of the shot rather that extending captured time. If she shows five minutes on the screen it has been filmed in five minutes. I have been more interested in extending experiences of time through the slowing down of captured time, although when it comes to the edit, the inherent rhythmic choices of when to cut in relation to the tone and composition of the shot make themselves felt in either approach. The time to cut is a felt and subjective experience. Counterpoint to earlier approaches in my work I wasn’t looking for the graphic moment in the frame as an opportunity to move on, rather allowing the shot to run its course or feeling the moment rather than seeing it.

She says: “When you’re editing, something happens that tells you this is the moment to cut. It’s not theoretical, it’s something I feel. Afterwards, explaining it is always very difficult.”[66]

As in her other films, Akerman directs the camera in D’Est at landscapes and material objects; taking time to relish in their banality and temporal fixedness in order to draw out meaningful digressions. Fundamentally though, her films are always about people. The extended duration of her shots of things are in the service of extracting contextual tensions and historical memories. She explains how this works in a description of a shot from Sud (1999) set in the American South. The shot of “a tree evokes a black man who might have been hanged. If you show a tree for two seconds, this layer won’t be there – there will just be a tree. It’s time that establishes that, too, I think.”[67] In another film De l’autre cote (2002) Akerman uses the fence that crosses the Mexican/American border as a metaphorical reference point to return to the social impact it has as an object, without resorting to factual analysis. “Sometimes she has the camera move along the fence, making us feel its inhuman strangeness, especially under night lighting. The rest of the time, however, she uses it to present either the hopes, attempts and failures on the Mexican side, or the concerns and fears on the American side.”[68] In D’Est the landscape seems to evoke, metaphorically, the struggle of the people. The rugged rocks, snow covered, cities, wheat fields and lonely roads recall both another time and the passing of the present.[69] Alisa Lebow captures the essence of how people and landscape populate the frame in D’Est:

In her scanning pans, the people are treated as landscape, part of the scenery, as the camera passes by. As such, the landscape becomes human; it adopts a corporeal form. It is this embodied landscape that reveals aspects of its face to us, at first appearing homogeneous, presented as unspecified terrain. Yet as the long takes unfold, this living landscape yields an expressiveness more commonly associated with the portrait than the landscape.[70]

In the case of my project I approach the human in the landscape as alienated rather than connected. Rather than faces I prioritise silhouettes, as suspended contemplations that cannot be seen via expressive emotion, rather through postures and movement vocabularies pressed against their milieu. The affective is drawn out of the suspension of things. Where “Akerman meditates on images of the landscape as a bridge for memory”[71] I am more interested in the clues the landscape holds for the ghosts of our future rather than the ghosts of our past.

Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983)returns to his themes of history and memory, their unreliability and the unreliability of the image to represent them.[72] The film is grounded by the letters of an itinerant cameraman, Sandor Krasna, sent to his friend, narrated by the actress Alexandra Stewart. This structural device of filtered subjectivities scaffolds the overall concerns of Marker’s stratified film. The cameraman wanders the globe commenting on what he sees, using the literary convention of the letter narrative. His alien-like observations are post-colonial and post-modern – social, political, philosophical – open questions on the state of the world as he sees it at this time of touch down for him. The artifice of cinema is further critiqued, in Sans Soleil, as Stewart languidly reads his words, selectively digressing over what may or may not be his images, “offer[ing] her own reflections on the letters she is receiving, becoming more than a dutiful mouthpiece and subtly placing the viewer at a distance from the cameraman,” thus adding another layer of “tension” and unreliability to the narrative. [73]

Rancière’s partage du sensible and his writing on the politics of aesthetics provide some insights into Sans Soleil through a lens that informs the process discussed in this exegesis. Dissensus emerges from the aesthetics through the blurry “lines of division,”[74] which develop over the length of the film. For Marker it is the tiny stories of the unheard that intrigue his lens. He reveals, and revels in, stories of the common people, uncommonly perceived, and dreams of their dreams and aspirations on celluloid. This is subjective cinema, with unreliable subjectivities, seeking an inner truth through external means, via the filmmaker’s wandering between the “locating poles” of Japan, Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco. Names on a map that only come alive when their dēmos is pondered upon and montaged into a dynamic and rhythmic non-linear trajectory, constructed by the practitioner as a locus for him to negotiate his observations on the human condition. The fictional character Krasner summarises this intent through his letters to his friend. The emergence of the “invisible” – that which is not normally represented – finds its way into the film through the layering techniques of image, voice over and sound; kaleidoscope impressions of the world that collapse onto each other.

Over images of WWII warplanes we hear:

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor’s court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians.[75]

Marker cuts to street celebrations in a Tokyo suburb.

Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of ‘elegant things,’ ‘distressing things,’ or even of ‘things not worth doing.’ One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of ‘things that quicken the heart.’ Not a bad criterion I realize when I’m filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighbourhood celebrations. [76]

The economic powerhouse, social and cultural moment that is 1980s Japan, pushed up against a core sample of macro-history. But Marker’s attention cannot hold on this for long. He prefers the micro-history of the commoner. Through this layering he is able to parcel feelings of memory and at the same time ask: what is memory? In the filmhe cuts away from the imperialist warplanes from another time. A broad-brush stroke of history then descends into the Tokyo streets and into the rituals of the Japanese people. We are told, in voiceover of a common woman in the employ of an imperialist ruler from another time and place. She makes lists to structure her perceptions of her existence. Krasna is touched by her list of “things that quicken the heart.” In a short sequence a thousand years is collapsed into a conceptual cinematic crystal of memory. Rancière says of Marker’s techniques: “[He] is not just having a little FUN by confounding those well established temporal systems, the simple chronological order or the classical narrative told in flashback. He is working out a narrative structure that creates a memory in the present as the intertwining of two histories of the century.”[77]

“The real must be fictionalised in order to be thought,” Rancière argues, then qualifies, “it is not a matter of claiming that everything is fiction. It is a matter of stating that fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction.”[78] In the opening of the film we see a shot of the three children from Iceland and hear Krasna’s thoughts about the strip of film: “One day I’ll put it at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader – If they don’t see happiness in the picture at least they will see black.”[79] In a single sentence the Marker’s intent and mechanics are framed for the viewer. Krasna shot the film and so he has his memory of the circumstances, as read by another. The mechanism of cinema, and its central relationship to time, is rendered through musings on the instability of memory. And Sans Soleil is traced with tailings of his own memories and processes from the genealogy of his other films, “fleeting glimpses of the trademark signs and obsessions that signal Chris Marker.”[80] The cat and the owl make a return, this time reframed against a Japanese cultural context.

The film enacts a process of sorting things out and linking them together, while continually addressing itself to the nature and function of this process. Some passages of the film unfold in the form of logical argument and exposition, others via associations motivated by the cameraman’s playful and incisive intellect, and others still through the haphazard drift of memory.[81]

Fig. 21. Chris Marker. [Film Still: Sans Soleil]Lucky Cats (1983).

In Sans Soleil, filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Zone from Stalker, are adduced alongside contemplations on history and memory. In a sequence where Krasna describes the experience of witnessing a Japanese protest march, as he watches “his pal,” Hayao Mananeko, process the images of sixties protesters rioting in the streets, on his visual synthesiser, “claiming that [processed images] break down the illusory presence of the past normally created by archive film, and allow the depiction, in ‘non-images’, of things that either do not officially exist in history, or have ceased to exist.” [82] The actress Alexandra Stewart reads Krasna’s letter over the footage:

[Hayao] has found a solution. If the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past. He showed me the clashes of the sixties as treated by his synthesiser. Pictures that are less deceptive – ‘he says’ – with the conviction of a fanatic – ‘than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are. Images. Not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality’. Hayao calls machine’s world the Zone – a homage to Tarkovsky.[83]

Fig. 22. Chris Marker. [Film Still: Sans Soleil]Hayao Mananeko’s Processed Image of
Man (1983).

Marker allows images and sounds to breathe in differing registers. He understands when to adjust the rhythm of his cinematic temporal space and allow his audience to take pause, pleasure, and reflect on “what it is all about?” During a hypnotic, even tiring sequence, Sans Soleil gently draws us into the day-to-day world of Japanese workers as they travel to work by train. In the scene he is referring to in Stalker the protagonists slip away into their thoughts, as they are absorbed into the Zone on a rail car. In Sans Soleil the Japanese drift to work, en masse, into their own zone, and Marker imagines their dreams, nightmares, and memories as constructed from images drawn from the television screens of the nation. There is no voice-over. “The tension between the ‘images that speak for themselves’ and the words that make them speak is, when all is said and done, the tension between the idea of the image and imaged matter.”[84] Sans Soleil is about the possibilities of cinema as a form, as an influence on our memories and on our perceptions of the world we live in. Sans Soleil is not closed down by concrete resolutions, rather it circles and layers its topics and ideas so that they converse with and provoke each other. The making of the work is as important as the underlying philosophies of the film. It is mischievous and serious at the same time, thought provoking and poetic.

Sans Soleil and the other works discussed in this chapter have all drawn strands into the thinking-making processes behind Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency. The Earthworks opened up pathways to meditate about the poetic in art, Welsby initiated thinking about how to draw out the invisible, Akerman encouraged sustained modes of duration in relation to the recorded materials, as well as inciting a call to hold true to course. While, as a constant refrain, Marker lured me into his essayist methods of filmmaking, which have most richly informed the practice, outlined in the next chapter.

[1] Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 141.

[2] Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, Abridged, rev., and updated. ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 2010), 166.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1989), 54.

[5] Buster Simpson, “Hudson River Purge,” accessed December 9th, 2011. http://www.bustersimpson.net/hudsonriverpurge/.

[6] See: Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 160.

[7] Michael Lailach, Land Art, Basic Art Series (Germay: Taschen, 2007), 40.

[8] Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 160.

[9] Denes, as cited in Lailach, Land Art, 40.

[10] “Smithson made his first mirror displacements in the spring of 1969 while he was traveling in Mexico. By repeating some of the activities of a nineteenth-century predecessor to Mexico, the explorer and travel writer John Lloyd Stephens; by repeating many of his own previous artistic practices; and by consciously anticipating some of the actions soon to be performed by the first explorers of the moon, Smithson attempted to provide his own artistic postcards of an indisputable present tense in between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.” Ann Morris Reynolds and Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 172.

[11] Ibid., 173.

[12] Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (1980): 71.

[13] Robert Linsley, “Mirror Travel in the Yucatan: Robert Smithson, Michael Fried, and the New Critical Drama,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 37 (2000).

[14] Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 119.

[15] Ibid., 121.

[16] Linsley, “Mirror Travel in the Yucatan: Robert Smithson, Michael Fried, and the New Critical Drama,” 7.

[17] “If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing but memory-traces, for the mirror displacements were dismantled right after they were photographed. The mirrors are somewhere in New York. The reflected light has been erased. Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities. It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found.” Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 132-33.

[18] Ibid., 122.

[19] Ibid., 138.

[20] Ibid., 146.

[21] The point at which the transcontinental railways first joined, connecting the East to the West.

[22] Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” 71.

[23] Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 144-45.

[24] “A perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible.” Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 109.

[25] Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 150.

[26] Werner Herzog and Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog (London ; New York: Faber and Faber, 2002), 253.

[27] Lessons of Darkness, directed by Werner Herzog (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1992, DVD 2004).

[28] “What the Pascalian pseudo-quote does is lift you from the first minute of the film to a level that prepares you for something quite momentous. We are immediately in the realm of poetry – whether or not the audience knows the quote is a fake – which inevitably strikes a more profound chord than mere reportage.” Herzog and Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 243.

[29] Ibid., 240.

[30] Werner Herzog and Moira Weigel, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17, no. 3 (2010): 7.

[31] Imre Szeman, “The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 40.

[32] Timothy Corrigan, The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (New York: Methuen, 1986), 169-70.

[33] Herzog and Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 245.

[34] Herzog and Weigel, “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” 9.

[35] Herzog and Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 245.

[36] Butler notes that the US media’s own “’shock and awe’ strategy seeks not only to produce an aesthetic dimension to war, but to exploit and instrumentalize the visual aesthetics as part of a war strategy itself. CNN has provided much of these visual aesthetics.” Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 148.

[37] Herzog and Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 249.

[38] Szeman, “The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files,” 40.

[39] Herzog, Lessons of Darkness.

[40] Any-space-whatever: “…a space that does not yet appear as a real setting or is abstracted from the spatial and temporal determinations of a real setting.” Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 63.

[41] Sharon R. Sherman and Mikel J. Koven, Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007), 68.

[42] Flaherty’s “contract to deliver rare and presumably authentic images, increasingly difficult to fulfill, led him to take shortcuts, staging or restaging the lives whose authenticity he had originally sought.” Andrew, “The Roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa,” in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, 223.

[43] Ibid., 221.

[44] Sherman and Koven, Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture.

[45] “On the Aran Islands, a minimal ecology links people, land, and the surrounding ocean: the ocean washes up seaweed that the islanders gather into soil beds just thick enough to hold the roots of the potatoes on which they subsist. But potatoes are unheroic, and their growth undramatic; and so Flaherty focused instead on the ungovernable sea, and on a complex assemblage involving men, boats (with oars, harpoons, and nets), and the great sharks that intermittently feed off the coast.” Andrew, “The Roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa,” in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, 222.

[46] “The close-up is not an enlargement and, if it implies a change of dimension, this is an absolute change: a mutation of movement which ceases to be translation in order to become expression.” Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 96.

[47] Nina Cornyetz, The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire, Routledge Contemporary Japan Series (London: Routledge, 2007), 77.

[48] Ibid., 80.

[49] In a way, because Lessons of Darkness exists already, I could resist temptations to look for the horror, and choose rather to search out the traces of oil, the banality of it, rather than be drawn into its brutal spectacle.

[50] Nina Cornyetz, “Technologies of Gazing in “Woman in the Dunes”,” U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, no. 26 (2004): 40.

[51] “The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen. Very seldom will one find all four characteristics in a single film, and there are structural films which modify these usual elements.” P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 348.

[52] “Seven Days may be described as an emergent property, a result of the continuous interplay between the cinematic process and the environment.” Chris Welsby, “Films and Installations: A Systems View of Nature,” in Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology, ed. Jackie Hatfield and Stephen Littman (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Pub., 2006), 31.

[53] Ibid., 29-30.

[54] Welsby’s structural works are constructed using single cans of film with no cuts to the material actual; in camera cuts only.

[55] Fred Parker, “Blowin’ in the Wind: Films by Chris Welsby,” accessed 2011. http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Welsby.html.

[56] Manohla Dargis, “Chris Welsby,” Village Voice (April 25 1989), accessed December 9 2011, http://www.sfu.ca/~welsby/Voice.htm.

[57] Welsby, “Films and Installations: A Systems View of Nature,” in Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology, 35.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 150.

[61] Kristine Butler, “Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’est,” Postmodern Culture 6, no. 1 (1995): 7.

[62] Chantal Akerman, “Chantal Akerman: In Her Own Time an Interview with Miriam Rosen,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), 195.

[63] Butler, “Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’est,” 5.

[64] “Dreams of the past pervade the air, and it is not entirely clear where the dream ends and the waking present begins.” Lebow, “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akermanis D’est,” 45.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Akerman, “Chantal Akerman: In Her Own Time an Interview with Miriam Rosen,” in The Cinematic, 195.

[67] Ibid., 197.

[68] Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 150.

[69] “D’Est is almost a surrealist work, as it engages time in a way that pertains to our daily experience yet is not of that time.” Lebow, “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akermanis D’est,” 45.

[70] Ibid., 58.

[71] Ibid., 65.

[72] “…one of the widely acknowledged triumphs of the [essayist film.]” Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker, 8.

[73] Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 156.

[74] Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 98.

[75] Sans Soleil, directed by Chris Marker (Criterion Collection, 1983, DVD 2007).

[76] Ibid.

[77] Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Berg Publishers, 2006), 161.

[78] Rancière and Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible, 38.

[79] Marker, Sans Soleil.

[80] Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 181.

[81] Ibid., 154.

[82] Ibid., 150.

[83] Marker, Sans Soleil.

[84] Rancière, Film Fables, 170.