My PhD Project- Introduction

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

Introduction
Fig. 1. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Oil Tankers Leaving Fort MacMurray, Alberta,
Canada (2013).

The creative outcomes produced during this research are two video works. The first, Flight, is a series of filmed passenger jet stream or contrails — forming a database of a particular type of human presence and movement. The work seeks to evoke a space of contemplation, uneasiness, and sadness by engaging with the residual and stratified signs of our collective impact on our environment. Flight is accompanied by Crude, an essayist film that attempts to see and hear some of the elusive signs of anthropogenic climate change in order to make what is invisible, visible, to evoke contemplations on the subject of ecological crisis, through affective cinematic devices.[1]

This exegesis presents a range of contextualising theoretical and critical investigations that have influenced the direction of the research and the outcomes of the practice. These include engagements with writers and thinkers whose discourses are focussed on the subject of the ecological crisis. Chapter One, situates the subject historically with the help of Felix Guattari’s transversal ‘ecosophy,’ while Timothy Morton’s ‘Ecological Thought’ and Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialist’ positions are enlisted as methods for reflecting on the ‘uncanny’ experience of living in a time of ecological emergency.

Chapter Two locates the theoretical provocations that have contributed to my thinking and making, with the objective to reveal the political potential of grief (Judith Butler) and the ‘politics implicit in aesthetics’ (Jacques Rancière). Rancière’s notion of the invisible becoming visible at a moment of rupture and Butler’s argument configured by Levinasian ethics and her post-9/11 experiences of living in the United States have been important influences on this project. From Butler, the conversation folds into Erin Manning’s and Brian Massumi’s line of inquiry that locates in the practice affective experiences of collecting, making, and rendering the material, in a ‘capture–see–sense–emote–reflect–select’ nexus.

As such, what guided me from the very beginning was the belief that the sensate realm held greater political potential for filmmakers than tactics that used didactic means to tell a ‘story’ about the crisis. Thus, I explore in some detail the concepts of affect and sensation, through the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, providing a platform for thinking about affective modes of cinematic investigation. I focus in particular on the ‘affection-image’ in its various manifestations, using the 1920s avant-garde city films of Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens as illustrations of Deleuze’s cinemas of perception and affection and his use of ‘any-place-whatevers.’

To a greater or lesser extent each of the theorists, reviewed in Chapter One and Two, have overlapping interests across three core concerns of this project: the ecological emergency, art, and politics. They therefore make their presence felt throughout the various chapters in this document, in varying degrees of concentration, borrowed and deployed as needed to discuss, position, and contextualise the research.

Fig. 2. [Diagram] Art, Politics, Ecological Emergency Nexus.

To support these philosophical discourses, Chapter Three presents and discusses a range of practitioner-theorist, artists (‘Earthworks’) and filmmakers, identified as having linkages with my practice. From the position of thinking through the poetic and political potential of art, I have turned to the artists, Robert Smithson, Agnes Denes and Buster Simpson. Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, and Werner Herzog provided insights into essayist modes of cinema through their distinct methods of practice. Chris Welsby’s and Richard Mosse’s films and installations are reviewed in relation to their capacity to extract the invisible and make it seeable through the creative constraints they impose on their practices; Welsby’s a structuralist method of material rigour, Mosse relying on the conflict that can arise when aesthetic ‘beauty’ is paralleled with the horrific imagery of war.

Chapter Four positions the practice through the discussion of the test project, Aspects of Trees (2015). The film was used as a leaping off point to experiment with the affective materiality of moving image in the development of practice based methods, and how these manifested into approaches and decisions during the production of the final exhibited videos, Crude and Flight. The investigations ranged from ‘objective’ documentation to more poetic interventions. I discuss how these processes developed through the production and post-production processes, and how interfaces with the contextual influences reviewed in Chapters One, Two and Three, invoked a fundamental shift in my thinking and making practices.

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 around anthropogenic climate change?^[2] (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. This exegesis maps and communicates the pathways in and out of this making, thinking and feeling process.

[1] Timothy Corrigan offers an insightful definition on the essay film as a form that resonates with my own understanding of its dynamic if elusive characteristics. He says, “the essayistic stretches and “Modernity is the story of how oil got into everything.”[1]

Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency was initiated in response to subjective experiences of ecological devastation, which induced a personal state of melancholy. The project works from the position that another tactic for progressing discourses around anthropogenic climate and geological change might be poetic or affective modes of cinematic inquiry. It aims to eschew ‘fact’ based representational modes, for contemplative, expressive and ambiguous registers of image and sound. John Rajchman distils from Gilles Deleuze this thought: “To extract sensation from representation, making it a matter of experimentation rather than judgment, is also to free the art of seeing from its subordination to prior concept or discourse.”[1]

In September 2013, I watched Neil Young on the news compare Fort McMurray, the centre of oil sands mining in Northwestern Canada, to Hiroshima after the bomb. Local radio stations soon stopped playing his music and outrage at the singer’s comments filled the talkback commentary from the region.^[1] I decided to visit the town as part of my early field investigations. The sands operations in Northern Alberta are devastating in a spectacular way. Images of these otherworldly landscapes are all over the Internet and at times on the nightly news. It was not my aim to film the sands – others have already done that. I was more interested in the outside edges and fragments of their presence. I attempted to sense what those elements were. Is it the roads, the melting tundra, the machinery, or the trucks? Maybe it is somewhere in the lingering melancholic emotions that thinking through the crisis evokes in me.

The mining and drilling operations bring a significant amount of money into Canada and a lot of people rely on them for jobs. What becomes emblematic during the drive, and in my time in Fort McMurray, is the high volume and density of trucks and machines that support this industry, an endless flow; a moving symbol.

A part of me knows the human narrative in this mining town. This is primary industry at full operational capacity, in an economy that relies on a transient workforce. Roughnecks, loggers, miners, truckers, foresters, fisheries workers, surveyors and geologists might not start out cut from the same cloth, but they inevitably develop a survival demeanour. In an earlier life, I lived an itinerant life of a reforestation worker in British Columbia, Canada. I have trudged in mud-caked boots frozen to the bone; my hands have been scarred and dirty. I know what it feels like. It’s hard and it makes you a little hard as well if you are to protect yourself from its hardness.

When I stayed in Fort McMurray the trees were shedding their yellow and orange leaves. I could smell and taste the tar mixed in with the grit in the cool fall air. The hotel where I stayed is a ‘flea-pit’, and yet due to demand, it is more expensive than a four-star hotel in Los Angeles. The windows were covered in a silt dust that seemed to be on everything…

I set up the camera as soon as I got into the room. I wanted to film the multitude of trucks entering and leaving town from a fixed and repeatable position. I started to experiment with filming at high-speeds (so the shots were all in slow motion). To get an exposure I needed a lot of light (eight times more) to hit the chip in the camera. The highway was backlit by the sun, which meant because of the silt on the window that the air would cause a strange disruptive affect in the image. The direction of the late afternoon light cast a rim around the trucks (a high contrast effect), while the oil sand residue on the window softened the light into a ghostly refraction (a low contrast effect)…

Lost in the technical aspects of the shoot, taking light readings and setting the menus, I had been taken off guard by the physical reaction that overwhelmed me when I first looked through the lens. The anxiety I experienced at this moment surprised me. A single affective moment of connection with the subject tapped into me. I realised how depressed I was. I was unable to leave the room for several hours. I just kept hitting record. Such an experience, where I became physically altered by the instant in the lens, happened often during the filming of this project: these moments when I saw and felt the world in strange and perplexing ways.

balances itself between abstracted and exaggerated representation of the self (in language and image) and an experiential world encountered and acquired through the discourse of thinking out loud.” Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15. I discuss how I problematise the genre in my practice in Chapter Four.

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