My PhD Project- Conclusion

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

Conclusion
“We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming.”^[1]

One of the hunches that activated the creative practice is that the ecological emergency is a crisis of perception; that in our day-to-day experience it is invisible to us. I hear about climate change on the news, or watch a documentary about it but for the most part it appears ‘over there’, not in my sphere of existence, or it feels statistically abstracted in its mode of representation.[2] Maybe I feel like I am being told off but do not know what for, which shuts me off to the world and the problems. What cinema has the potential to do is to draw out the image in such a way as to actively connect with the viewer through the uncanny experience of seeing a familiar object rendered slightly but jarringly unfamiliar. There is in the cinematic experience an encounter with objects captured in the frame by the mechanics of the form that is at once sensational while at the same time non-human.[3] “Only with cinema can we think of a mode of ‘seeing’ that is not attached to the human eye. Cinema, then, offers something like a ‘percept’: a reception of data that is not located in a subject.”[4] In this way, “affective techniques mobilise gaps and fissures in image content.”[5] Affection is what happens in the “interval” between the perception, or action, and reaction. The moment between seeing and thinking is what occurs in our unfolding encounters with the world.

As a filmmaker I think about time more than anything else. I time my shots and cut after a time; I adjust exposure because of the time of day or because of the frame rate that alters the temporal register of the recording; depending on the lens I am using I have to time my breathing and slow it down so it does not ruin the shot; sometimes the limitations of the material only allow me to film for a certain amount of time. In the edit suite the rhythm of the film is made by thinking through the temporal register of the film and knowing how to find it through cutting or not cutting the shot.

Reading theory and theorising about climate change also make me think about the world differently. Contemplating and concentrating through someone else’s lens affects my mode of perception — this in turn is activating. Morton helped me think about the thing we tend to ignore in our day-to-day existence, that is the weather: it is never just weather anymore.[6] Bennett made me to think about non-human vitalities and I drifted into intermittent modes of seeing things in this light. I don’t need to agree with their positions absolutely because they, like the other theorists and practitioners discussed in this exegesis, all worry about the world we live in and want to make it better, which is common ground enough to start with.

These are the intercessors to the creativity. The theorists and theorist-practitioners who have activated the investigations dancing across my senses as I make the work; the melancholy, then grief, which has seeped into the sounds and images of the works as a mode of acuity and reflection; and of course the subjects too. The dying forests became looking glasses into a present past. The rotting stumps already dispersed, gone from the present, but still able to be seen, their absence burning a negative hole on the retina. This led to the final phase of the study, an investigation into the present-present and the present-future of our ecological emergency the creative outcomes a collection of networks and visual databases, of our current circumstances, as seen through a concentrated lens.[7]. However, what Butler allowed me do was to move beyond a disabling state of melancholy by encouraging me find a potential political and artistic activation in grief.

[1] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 69.

[2] I’m referring to a style of documentary that has emerged in recent years from the British Broadcasting Corporation, which find interesting ways to present climate change, but in doing so the subject gets further abstracted, or sometimes breathlessly trivialised by the treatment. See as examples: Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 149. And Climate Change by the Numbers, (BBC, 2015).

[3] I can’t help but think of Vertov’s vision of cinema here: “The main and essential thing is: The sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space.” Climate Change: A Horizon Guide, directed by Ben Wilson (BBC, 2015).

[4] Vertov and Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 14-15.

[5] Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 29.

[6] “In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an ellipsis.” Anna Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 3.

[7] They are the intercessors of thought that come from the outside, “complex singularit[ies] that activates a process, a force that acts as a differential within an ongoing movement of thought. The intercessor: the felt force that activates the threshold between thinking and feeling.” Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience, 65.