Eco Cinema
Alternative Ecologies
To comprehend aspects of the increasingly vast focus on film and the environment, perhaps it is best to offer a modest taxonomy, to see that many of the films fall into four categories. The first two are documentary; the latter fictional. What they all have in common is a focus, however direct or indirect, on the environment. Firstly, we have the eco-doc that frequently attends to statistical despair and talking heads pessimism, seeing in the numerical figures, and numerous leading figures in a given field, plenty of reason for despair, no matter the activist dimension often associated with them. Whether it is Al Gore taking to powerpoint to explain the risks of ignoring the environment in An Inconvenient Truth, or The End of the Line, about fish stock depletion, the eco doc wants to convince us with reason, seeing in the planet’s destruction a need for scientific facts and figures to set us once again on the right path. Just as Earth becomes ever more depleted, so this type of eco-doc proliferates, whether looking at the oil industry (A Crude Awakening), or food production (Food Inc.), polar cap erosion (Into the Ice) or coral deterioration (Chasing Coral). But usually these docs seem different from the observational accounts that are no less dismayed at what his happening to the planet. These would include Lessons in Darkness, Our Daily Bread, Working Men’s Death and Leviathan. Not all observational documentaries concerned with the environment will be polemically pushing its claims, with Nicholas Geyrhalter showing an almost mystified response to food production in Our Daily Bread, Michael Glowagger the arduousness of various jobs people are doing around the world in Working Men’s Death. Werner Herzog’s Lessons in Darkness can seem like a deliberate abstraction of the first Gulf War as it shows the horrors of that dirtiest of gold: oil. Some eco-docs fail to fall easily into one category or the other, with Darwin’s Nightmare a fine account of the problems around Lake Victoria. It initiallyappears to be a film about the Nile Perch introduced to the lake by outside interests and the damage this fish is doing to the lake’s ecosystem. But it broadens out to become an exploration of the lake and the people living near it more generally. Rather than seeing, say, an Inconvenient Truth and Our Daily Bread as distinct (for all our taxonimising), best to see them as two ends of a documentary spectrum, with one concerned with facts and the other preoccupied with showing us in long, aloof and narration-free images how our food is produced.
This leads us to the fictional: to the disaster film and the aesthetically ecological, Soylent Green and The Day After Tomorrow, for example, as opposed to Red Desert and Stalker. In the former, the planet or a community is hyperbolically in trouble and, whether this is because of a problem created by people, generally, or powers-that-be specifically, the films propose that large catastrophes demand expensive special effects. In The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich presents the tsunami that sweeps over New York with all the spectacular relish he had already brought to Independence Day and Godzilla, as if the climate crisis is merely an opportunity for what Geoff King astutely called an impact aesthetic, noting “the impact aesthetic style derived from Saving Private Ryan [and] was used originally to create an impression of ‘authenticity’ deemed necessary to the positioning of that production as a ‘serious’ and ‘responsible’ work.” (New Hollywood Cinema) But it was evident in a slightly different form before and after Saving Private Ryan in action spectacles that, as David Bordwell notes, that “…tend to employ an aggressive approach to shooting and cutting.” (The Way Hollywood Tells It) If the irony in the eco-doc rests on their ever-increasing number, a chance for filmmakers to make their financial way in the world while the world goes to wrack and ruin around them, the irony of the disaster film is that if the fears they play on are founded, then the most important thing is to watch the tragedies unfolding on the biggest screens available. We might call this from the filmmakers’ perspective bad faith; from the viewer’s interpassivity.
What the directors wish to do is raise money as readily as consciousness and find, in the grants they can receive or the big budgets they can demand, a way of making a living or of making a fortune. In recent decades, various funds have been in place to support eco-friendly work: like the Redford Foundation, The Fledgling Fund and the Environmental Media Fund that facilitate filmmakers to get projects made. Meanwhile Hollywood disaster can make someone very rich indeed. Emmerich is deemed one of the wealthiest directors in the world, with his films making about £3billion and his personal fortune estimated at around $200m, according to NME — who puts him an at number 18 behind Spielberg, Cameron, Christopher Nolan and others. We might not know specifically what Emmerich does with his money, but what we do know is that “the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%” (Guardian) and that Emmerich is in the 0.1 per cent. Filmmakers can become very rich making films about the subjects that are partly created by their exorbitant fortunes in a vicious circle: making the public that is far less responsible for doing the damage aware of the environmental consequences of actions the hyper affluent are far more responsible for creating. This needn’t be an excuse for the 66 percent to do nothing, but it would take a brave filmmaker to produce a disaster movie making clear that, in a metaleptic gesture, the terrors facing the many have been created by the filmmaker as an aesthetic object: that the rich create consumer items (expensive films) the general pubic watches as the rich get richer and the rest get to gawp at guilt-inducing disaster. It is why we talk about mauvaise foi, with Sartre’s notion pertinent when we think of how he distinguishes the liar from someone in bad faith. The liar lies knowing the truth; the person in bad faith lies to themselves. As Sartre says, “To be sure, the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.” (Essays in Existentialism)
If we also invoke the interpassive and the metaleptic, it is to try and work with the possibilities and differences evident in the disaster film and the aesthetically ecological. In the context of the former: “interpassive people don't have to read, watch or listen to the information proving someone or something exists — they just need to know that information about that existence exists.” (Frieze) In this sense, the viewer watches the disaster unfolding on screen all the better to accept the evidence of a fact they cannot change. They absorb climate catastrophe as impact aesthetic, and are neither active nor passive but interpassive. Perhaps, taking into account the idea that people merely need to know that information exists, this may too help explain the appeal of many a factually oriented eco-doc — with the viewer receiving facts about the state of the planet and this awareness is enough.
It would be a stretch to claim that the observational approach (as opposed to the informational) by Glawoggar and others, and the aesthetically ecological, make us active in the face of the planetary crisis, but they at least halt the interpassive from a certain perspective, especially in the aesthetically ecological, if we acknowledge the metaleptic. Gerard Genette looks at the term from various angles, but what interests us is when he talks of a “shifting but sacred boundary between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells.” (Narrative Discourse). In other words, it is a fictional world that doesn’t respect its containment and invokes the possibility that the fictional can leak into the actual, one that makes the reader aware of the book they are reading by revealing the components of its own making. When we offer it provocatively in the context of Emmerich, it needn’t seem so outlandish. Imagine if in The Day After Tomorrow we see the director signing a contract to make the film all the better so that he can spend the money on a yacht he wants to buy, or another house — he owns a hundred foot vintage yacht, a five-acre estate in Los Angeles and a London house in Knightsbridge. Not especially excessive by Hollywood standards, but probably not doing wonders for the planet. Emmerich seems like many capable of believing that the films he makes and the money he spends needn’t be reflexively acknowleged; he instead is vital to an interpassive one that views the environment as grist to the mill of the blockbuster machine. It provides as good an opportunity as any for spectacle.
Proposing Emmerich sign a check on screen needn’t be so eccentric; this is precisely what Jean-Luc Godard does with his stars in Tout va bien, showing how much of the film’s modest budget went to its two leads: Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. He insists on showing how a film is made and thus metaleptically implicates himself and the actors in the finances involved. Tout va bien might have little to say about the environment, but it does, like many an ecologically aesthetic work, want to resist passivity. It wishes to show that our relationship with film isn’t one of subject to object, just as it is important to understand our relationship with the planet isn’t either. In the aesthetically ecological (not just Red Desert and Stalker, but also Walkabout, The Devil, Probably, Safe and The River), the films share an aesthetic similarity with the environmental philosophies of, amongst others, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett and Michel Serre. Latour says “under the heading of science, then, we already find a rather complex mix of proofs and proof-workers, a learned community that acts as a third party in all relations with society…for them [ecological movements] science remains a mirror of the world, to the extent that one can almost always, in their literature, take the terms ‘nature’ and ‘science’ to be synonyms.” (Politics of Nature) In such a remark, we might notice how many eco-docs do the same, a failing that wouldn’t be applicable to Walkabout, Stalker and others. This doesn’t mean we have to dismiss most eco-docs, nor even most Hollywood disaster films, but to see how they often fall into the sort of divisions Latour sees, and that the observational documentary and the ecologically aesthetic try and escape.
In Walkabout, director Nicolas Roeg wants to establish not a hierarchy but a relationship between the urban and the desert, man and nature, history and civilisation. He chooses Australia as one of the most quizzical examples of our attempt to plonk on top of the natural world a modern reality. In the first five minutes, he shows us the leading characters in Sydney and contrasts the city with the outback the father, daughter, and son will be soon be picnicking in; all the while a didgeridoo plays on the soundtrack. It gives to the film an ominous hint of things to come, and while this is in the immediate context of a suicide that will catalyse further events in the film, it can also be seen as a broader recognition of environmental foreboding, as though Roeg wanted to show in the built-up Sydney world of brutalist architecture and cultivated gardens, outdoor swimming pools next to the sea, and mod-con kitchens, that our lives are precariously built on a natural world to which most are, most of the time, oblivious.
We will say far more about Walkabout and the other works that we think are most rigorously asking questions about ourselves in the context of the environments in which we live, but for the moment let us return to the eco-doc that is informationally heavy but ontologically light. Few eco-docs are quite so driven by facts as An Inconvenient Truth. But many would claim to be following the science in that all-too-trendy phrase of recent years. It isn’t our purpose to undermine the scientific; to offer a counter eco-doc narrative that it itself a growth area, with films like An Inconsistent Truth and The Great Global Warming Swindle. They are interested in the science too, albeit an alt-science that isn’t shy of the polemical: “what if everything you’ve been told about global warming is a lie?” An Inconsistent Truth bellows. "Yet as the frenzy over man-made global warming grows shriller, many senior climate scientists say the actual scientific basis for the theory is crumbling.” This seems to be countered by most sources: “the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists – 97 percent – agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.” (Nasa)
However, whether it is the generally rigorous and respected eco-doc, or the polemically inclined alt-doc, both turn to ‘science’ for justification. In the eco-documentary Ice and the Sky, Claude Lorius discussing having made over twenty Polar expeditions and looking at the graphs he notes: “I had before me indisputable proof that climate and concentration of greenhouse gases have always been closely linked…over the last 100 years, the CO2 produced by man is behind an unprecedented rise in temperatures on Earth. We are altering our planet’s climate at a rate never before seen in history.” In The End of the Line, the film notes:…”the scientists have projected that if the current trends continue, the stocks of fish which we now eat will have collapsed by the middle of the century.” We can see such solid and important documentaries as nevertheless potentially the inversion of the fictional disaster film. But while films likeSoylent Green, Planet of the Apes, Interstellar, The Day After Tomorrow, Wall-E and The Children of Men often rely on the quality of their special effects, the eco-docs rely on the quantity of their facts. Yet both would fall into the positivistic if we see in each the importance of the evidential. The alt-doc too wants evidence; it is just that many a scientist doesn’t take it seriously, and why should they when the film doesn’t take the science too seriously. As George Monbiot says: “The first thing I noticed about The Great Global Warming Swindle is how similar it is to The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast 17 years before. The two programmes made the same claims, using some of the same contributors. They were now a little greyer and fatter, but they repeated their line almost verbatim. A vast accumulation of evidence in the intervening years, contradicting the programme's thesis, was ignored…” (Guardian) In Planet of the Apes and The Children of Men what matters is the quality of the world it creates; it needs to convince us that a past catastrophe has led to the present horrors. In Planet of the Apes at the end of the film we realise the astronauts aren’t on a planet far away but on their own in the future: nuclear annihilation has destroyed it for human habitation and this is why the apes have taken over. In Children of Men, various environmental catastrophes have left the world a sorry place and humans infertile. In each instance, the works offer the imagination of disaster, in Susan Sontag’s phrase, but as consequence rather than spectacle. While many a big-budget S/F disaster film focuses on the collapse, these two fine films emphasise the desolate consequences. Sontag says that “certainly compared with the science fiction novels, their film counterparts have unique strengths, one of which is the immediate representation of the extraordinary: physical deformity and mutation, missiles and rocket combat, toppling skyscrapers.” (‘The Imagination of Disaster’) However, whether showing us astonishing feats or accepting terrible human defeats, the films elaborate through evidence as mise en scene. They usually convince us of a world other than our own through a world that is unequivocally transformed, just as the eco-doc tries to persuade us by presenting the viewer with incontrovertible facts.
Yet the observational documentary and more especially the ecologically aesthetic film usually insist on a more subjective or at least more ontologically challenging relationship with reality. One of the problems with eco docs and disaster films is that for all their interest in the human involvement in planetary destruction, they usually care little for what that means as aesthetic form. The films retain subject/object relations, while what is most pressing about the environmental crisis and one’s awareness of it is that these categories are far from resolute. If Timothy Morton, Graham Harman and others interested in Object Oriented Ontology have become significant figures in ecological studies, it rests on this relationship. As Morton says, when discussing the importance of a certain type of causality in the context of the wind we hear in the trees or in a chimney. “…Even when objects appear to touch one another physically, they are withdrawn from one another ontologically. This means that when an object is "translating" another one—when it is influencing it in a causal way—it is doing to that object something analogous to what I as a human do when I act on things.” (‘An Object Oriented Defence of Poetry’) Interviewing Morton, Ale Blasdel notes that Morton “believes that this constitutes a revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe on a par with those fomented by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. He is just one of thousands of geologists, climate scientists, historians, novelists and journalists”, Balsdel says, “writing about this upheaval, but, perhaps better than anyone else, he captures in words the uncanny feeling of being present at the birth of this extreme age. (Guardian) “There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” Morton writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. (Guardian)
Many who deny the climate crisis more specifically are interested in denying man-made global warming. Perhaps we are all going to hell in a handbasket, but this won’t be one woven by our own digits but by nature doing its thing. Thus, there is no point in wasting fortunes on trying to resolve a problem that is out of our hands. But by conceptualising the era as anthropocentric rather than helocenic, moving from 12,000 years of relative climate stability, to the erratic period after the Industrial Revolution, everything we do impacts the planet on which we live. One way of looking at this is to note that when a parent shouts at a child they don’t doubt this will impact on the little person, well aware that this figure is a tissue of cells capable of being affected by tempers and moods. The parent sees themselves in a subject-subject relationship and would usually apologise, ask if the child is ok and so on. Most people don’t have the same attitude towards things, and a central question for many contemporary thinkers is what constitutes thingness. This is more than just a Heideggerian problem of the thing, well explored by Graham Harman in Object-Oriented Ontology, where the thing gains status as a thing when it no longer functions as it should: when a hammer breaks, when a nail is bent. No, this is more about two aspects: what constitutes the causal and secondly, what constitutes a being. For Morton and Harman, what we usually define as causal are subjects to objects: the hammer remains where it is unless we move it; the hammer doesn’t move us. But of course, the hammer can be moved without human agency: a rumbling train might create vibration enough for it to fall from the table to the ground; an earthquake will do more than that. The train and the earthquake create the effect with no human involvement. Few will deny this is so, but many would resist a causal chain. While someone would seem mad if they were to say that of course the hammer could pick up the person as the person can pick up the hammer, and nobody would disagree that the earthquake could dislodge the tool, disputes arise over how far the causality goes and how much credit we can give to what has been traditionally perceived as an object.
One of the key questions concerning the climate crisis is how human made it is, how much of the ice caps melting, the forest fires burning, the presence of flooding, is down to human actions. Most scientists agree that it is, but there might be something stubbornly resistant in the mind that cannot quite see all these as causal, while most wouldn’t dispute the nuclear bombs going off in Nagasaki or Hiroshima as human choices. The cause and effect in the latter is direct: humans decide to drop atomic weapons; nobody so directly insists on the ice caps melting. But if we can accept that the planet is doing things to us because we have been doing things to it (if it is an it), then we can start to create a manifold agency that stops us seeing a clear division between subjects and objects. It also helps us to understand how impositional and presumptuous the human has been. As Latour and Timothy M. Lenton state when speaking of Gaia: “Gaia might be the name of a shift in understanding of how to approach many phenomena of what was lumped together before in the notion of nature. This is why we are both—one coming from social science and the other from natural science— joining forces to keep open the possibility that we are dealing here with a change in what could be called a world view, by which we mean a distribution of traits affecting science, as well as politics, morality, and the arts. In brief, a cultural paradigm shift comparable in scope to the one introduced at the time of the scientific revolution by Galileo Galilei.” (‘Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia Is So Hard to Understand’)
Gaia is James Lovelock’s notion that the planet is a living, self-correcting thing, left to its own devices. As Michael Ruse notes, “just as a human sweats and shivers as the temperature changes, so the living Earth adjusts its gaseous mantle to accommodate its temperature changes.” (Aeon) Lovelock and Lynn Margulis propose that it would seem the planet can act as a single being, which others believe is nonsense. Richard Dawkins believes this suggests a level of unselfishness and collective action that flies in the face off the Darwinian. “His objection to the theory was, not surprisingly, evolutionary. As an ardent opponent of group selection, he could not accept that things could happen for the good of the group simply because they were for the good of the group. Plants don’t produce carbon dioxide, he said, for the sake of the Earth. Either it was a byproduct of their functions, or it must be of immediate benefit to the plants themselves. Any other interpretation was contrary to a Darwinian view of life.” (Aeon)
We needn’t spend too much time with such arguments, but they might help us comprehend how film views our relationship with the planet, with some more inclined to play safe within the factual; others asking us to speculate on the possibilities of the subjective in offering a very complex intersubjectivity. When films like The End of the Line and Ice and the Sky argue for doing more to protect the ice caps or the oceans, they often propose practical solutions. Though Ice and the Sky is a more personal film as it works through the life of Claude Lorius and his polar expeditions, the documentary hinges on the importance of his scientific discovery. As the BBC noted: “His research into air bubbles trapped in the ice was published in 1987. It showed that for long periods levels of carbon dioxide varied slightly but after the Industrial Revolution concentrations of the greenhouse gas had rocketed as temperatures rose.” With such knowledge, the purpose would obviously be to reverse the damage done by industrialisation. In The End of the Line, someone notes that fishermen have to fish less for a period of time so that they can catch more when depleted stock have been replenished. The journalist on whose book it is based, Charles Clover, pushed for posh restaurants to stop serving endangered Bluefin Tuna.
Such films are very useful, they have a use value, just as in a different way the eco-disaster film has a use value of sorts as well, if we try to distinguish between usefulness and the aesthetic, accepting Morton’s adoption of its root meaning: “by aesthetic this essay shall simply mean having to do with appearance.” ('An Object Oriented Defence of Poetry’) In the observational documentaries and more especially in the aesthetically ontological films, the filmmakers wish for things to appear to us, to lose their value as assumptions and to gather meaning through our concentrated attention (usually in the former), or through juxtapositional provocations in the latter. In Our Daily Bread, the film shows a woman feeding thousands of chickens in a warehouse; in another scene live chicks, like tennis balls, get pumped out of a machine. In Working Man’s Death, Glawogger shows sulfur workers carrying 100 kilos down a volcano; miners working in a shaft 40 centimetres high and 100-159 metres underground in areas where mines can easily collapse. Geyrhalter and Glawogger make nothing of these things polemically; Geyrhalter offers facts and figures about the lives of animals and the people he shows us; we are chiefly shown how work operates in various parts of the world by Glawogger. Glawogger wants to ask questions that don’t possess containable answers. As he says: “In journalism there are six basic questions to be answered before a story can be considered “watertight.” Who was involved? What happened? Where did it take place? When did it take place? Why did it happen? And how did it happen? Documentary filmmaking often takes the same approach. A new film project usually starts with questions like these: What is the story? Where does it take place? Who is in it? Why do you want to make it? And how are you going to structure it?” Glawogger insists, “‘I want to reduce these basic questions to the concepts of ‘theme’ and ‘perspective.’ They [the basic questions] can act in a friendly manner, providing the filmmaker with a framework within which to construct his film. They can, however, also twist your perspective of what is happening around you and reduce the actual events to a pre-formulated thesis. If this is the case, they demonstrate not only unfriendly behavior but even animosity.” (Sedans)
The eco-doc is in this sense journalistic as it uses what it films to illustrate what its thesis happens to be. But Glawogger tries to minimise the notion of a thesis and maximise the space for the question. In this, the question will be too great for the facts, which might be very close to the definition of the philosophical — and thus to questions about being that numerical data cannot contain. When we hear how workers can carry so much sulfur, or that miners can work in shafts so low, the figures he offers are there to register the difficulties and risks involved in the job — they aren’t there to make any broader statement about socio-political action. To do so would be to fall into the pragmatic when what matters more is the enigmatic, even when it contains such practical matters as the terrible jobs people do. What Glawogger sees are jobs that he himself couldn’t possibly do being done by men (as with the sulfur workers) so slightly built that the gap between their weight and the amount they are carrying is almost inexplicably pronounced. We watch these nimble and lithe men with a mixture of pity and pride, despair and admiration, with Glawogger capturing their lives in detail rather than offering them up as examples of statistical data.
Clearly, the disaster film isn’t concerned with data either, but this is where we complicate things all the better to arrive at a later clarification. Speaking of the Gaia hypothesis, Michael Ruse sees one reason why it isn’t taken very seriously by scientists is because of the difficulty in scientific verification and the problem of teleological claims. The idea that the planet has an end goal instead of immediate problems it is constantly in the process of solving is generally alien to modern science, and that a scientist’s purpose isn’t metaphysical speculation but the hard-headed resolution of problems. As Ruse says, “the hand and the eye have no point other than the ultimately purposeless activity of helping their possessors to survive and reproduce. In the eyes of science, organisms too are simply matter in motion. Dawkins refers to us as ‘survival machines’.” (Aeon) It could be a good way to describe characters in a disaster movie. It would cover Charlton Heston in Omega Man trying to get by in a post-apocalyptic society, and it would describe the state of society Heston finds himself in in Soylent Green, where clean water, quality housing and good food are reserved for the wealthy, with everyone else scraping around to get by. It would describe the title character in Mad Max and ever more so the sequels, and those trying to survive after various natural disasters in Twister, Earthquake (again Heston) and Volcano.
How natural a disaster happens to be in these films is often moot: some disaster films make clear the situation has come about through human fallibility: Mad Max through nuclear war and ecocide; Omega Man because of biological warfare, and The Day After Tomorrow due to the climate crisis. But some would argue that this distinction is increasingly blurry, with Kyle Piscioniere looking at the problem through the legal notion, Act of God. “Broadly, two criteria qualify an event as an act of God: 1) No human agency could have stopped the event, and 2) no human agency could have exercised due care to prevent or avoid the event’s effects. In other words, acts of God must be unpredictable, and their damage must be unpreventable.” He notes that “on that basis alone, the act of God is nearly obsolete, or at least it should be. While specific weather events such as hurricanes or fires may seem to be acts of God, our growing knowledge of climate systems challenges any vision of weather divorced from human activity. Humans meddle with the climate, which meddles with weather, and the two can’t be disentangled.” (Slant) Fracking can lead to earthquakes, forest fires are more likely as general temperatures rise, and tsunamis can be triggered by the climate. The question in disaster films might not be which ones are man-made disasters and which aren’t, but how far on a sliding scale can humans be held responsible? A film about Chernobyl is very clear; a film about Fukushima less so. A movie about the 2004 tsunami (The Impossible) might show it as a natural disaster with the film concentrating on a family holidaying in Thailand, but another could potentially propose that very indirectly the family are responsible for their fate: western families having a Christmas holiday on the other side of the world and contributing to the climate crisis. The climate hits back with an enormous tidal wave. This potentially suggests that whatever divisions filmmakers might wish to make when it comes to eco and general disaster films, ever-greater knowledge of the climate suggests that maybe this distinction no longer holds.
But whether a disaster film makes the man-made central to its premise or not, most fall into the Dawkins notion of the characters as survival machines. While scientists may be reluctant in many instances to accept the possibility of Gaia, it might be a very useful way to try to understand the broadest possible cause and effect. When Dawkins says he reckons that plants producing carbon dioxide must be doing so for selfish reason or as a by-product, we can see the logic of many a disaster film. How often are they predicated on a person trying to save their own family and consequently saving the planet? Sure, they also often contain a man’s gotta do mindset. But even this will often be couched in seeing that the only way to save the family is to save the planet. When in Volcano Mike, who is in charge of emergency services, focuses on the volcano over his daughter, with whom he has been holidaying, he will then before the end of the film save his daughter from damage the volcano has caused, as a man doing what a man’s gotta do meets with familial insistence. In The Day After Tomorrow, Jack is a paleoclimatologist who professionally wishes to save the world from ecological collapse, but he personally has to rescue his son when, after the catastrophe, the latter finds shelter with others in a New York building. Our purpose isn’t to go into the plots of many a disaster film; it is to suggest that their focus is consistent with Dawkins’ claims for survival.
Yet what about our fourth category, that hovers over the other three and more than any other gives justification to our title, alternative ecologies? This is a cinema that makes ambiguous subject/object, cause and effect, and makes, too, often absurd or epistemologically troublesome the relationship we have with the natural world. The most important would include The Red Desert, Walkabout, Solaris, Dersu Uzala, Stalker, The Devil Probably, Safe and The River. In The Red Desert, central character Giuliana describes someone (who happens to be herself) being told by a doctor: “Love someone or something ... your husband, your son, a job, even a dog. But not husband, son, job, dog, tree, river.” Potentially, the doctor is insisting on the selfish, while the latter is closer potentially to someone ‘loving the planet’ — to encompass within themselves all that the world contains and not only what they need for their immediate well-being. From a certain angle, loving the planet isn’t only fatuous; it is psychologically dangerous. When we note that the disaster film often shows the hero (and it usually is a hero) doing what they have to do while making sure they do right by their family, we can see in it also a sense of personal health. If Freud may or may not quite have said love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness, we can see that they are the cornerstones of the disaster movie — and why the films, no matter the apparent despair, are often happy works. The centre holds as the character needn’t equally love a husband, a son, a job, a dog, a tree and a river. But there is in Antonioni’s film a desire to register this tension in filmic form. Set in an industrial early sixties Italy, in and around Ravenna, the film shows Giuliana purposeless; whether opening a shop or having an affair, looking after her child or attending to her husband’s needs, nothing has for her any immediacy. Antonioni all the while shows the industry in the area with some ambivalence, musing over its terrors and admiring its unusual beauty. Antonioni says that “I’m not passing judgment, not at all. Ravenna, near the sea, has a stretch of factories, refineries, smokestacks, etc. on one side and a pine forest on the other. Somewhere I’ve written that the pine forest is much the more boring feature.” (The Architecture of Vision)
Cinematically that may be true, and certainly true of Antonioni’s work, where much of its interest comes from the presence of the modern world. To show on screen a forest is to risk falling into, in painterly terms, landscape, while Antonioni was always much more interested in abstract expressionism, and seeing in what he shows us the potential to invigorate the image with colours and shapes he could make his own. When Giuliana and her future lover Corrado walk along a street, the vendor is as grey as the cobbled road and buildings. The cart is grey, the basin, the man’s cap and jacket — but also the fruit and veg he sells. Moments before, in the shop she hopes to open, again the predominant colour is grey, but Giuliana and thus Antonioni offer blocks of colour as he shows her indecision in what colour to choose in his own decision-making. She puts half a dozen possible colours on the wall and they become in Antonioni’s aesthetic hints of abstract expressionism. Part of a wall is green, another bit pink, another blue as she wonders what colours she should use for the shop, as Antonioni openly acknowledges the influence of Rothko.
It is as though the director was searching for a place between the importance of nature and the significance of the human to find a way of living with a changing world. To fall into nature as solace was never going to be of interest to Antonioni, perhaps because it would seem as platitudinous as saving the planet, like it was a house on fire, and you think that as well as the dog and the goldfish, you could take the curtains, the cutlery and the bed linen too. When Corrado and Giuliana discuss what he will take with him when he leaves for South America, she says she would have to take everything: even the ashtrays. This might sound like the height of selfishness, but it is also the depth of despair, as though Giuliana’s identity resides everywhere and nowhere at all. While she speaks, she moves indecisively, as if even a movement through space forces her to think of all the movements she could make instead. For someone like Corrado, saving the planet would be to make specific decisions; for Giuliana, the overwhelming sense of how much would need to be saved.
Speaking of his interest in her character, Antonioni says, “Giuliana was more important to me than the others because she represents an extreme version of them. When I was searching locations for Red Desert I found myself among whole families of neurotics. One of them, for example, lives near an electric works whose turbines were going day and night. I found that noise almost unbearable, so that by the end of the day I thought I was losing my mind.” However, he adds, “the woman of that family never complained. Yet when we started up our generators, she came to the door and began to scream at us. Our generators were nothing compared to the turbines, but you see, they produced a new noise. That woman was a neurotic without knowing it. One day she will explode, just like Giuliana. In her, there is that basis for the environment to work on. Who knows why? Hereditary defects, maternal or paternal? There are a thousand reasons why a person is neurotic. Then one day the neurosis explodes. That explosion is what interests me.” (Scraps from the Loft)
One notices the individual subject responds to the object differently and what interests the director is the complexity of the subject/object relation, one that disturbs the categories of subject and object in a way that can make tangible Oriented Ontologies’ abstractions and the eco-documentaries assumptions. This is not at all to say that a film isn’t correct to explore the depletion of the oceans or the melting of the ice caps. However, there is the risk in the certitude of their presentation that, for all the talk in ecological studies about displacing a given hierarchy, the hierarchy remains epistemologically and ontologically. The scientific method becomes the way of explaining what needs to be done, and the human the species that needs to do something about it. This is why we have seen similarities between typical eco-docs and disaster films. But if, as Sean Cubitt and others have explored, there have been major developments in eco-studies, then how many films have absorbed these new thoughts? As Cubitt, Stephen Rust and Salma Monani note: “new intellectual currents have been influenced by environmentalism and influenced ecocritical thinking. The actor network theory associated with Bruno Latour…makes a powerful philosophical and sociological case that humans never act alone, but are always caught up in networks that include both environmental features and technologies, which Latour calls ‘“non-human actors.’ “Taking off from Latour’ they note, “a recent movement in philosophy sometimes called object-oriented ontology, is shifting the traditional anthropocentrism to recognizing an ecosphere of what one leading figure calls simply 'things' (Harman 2005) or others call new materialism.…” ('Ecomedia: Key Issues’) Many of the ecologically aesthetic films we are discussing have been made independently of such thought, but often coincide with it.
Near the beginning of Politics of Nature, Latour says “…if we concede too much to facts, the human element in its entirety tilts into objectivity, becomes a countable and calculable thing, a bottom line in terms of energy, one species amongst others. If we conceded too much to values, all of nature tilts into the uncertainty of myth, into poetry or romanticism; everything becomes soul and spirit.” Many an eco-doc would seem to concede too much to facts, but does that mean Stalker, The Devil Probably, Walkabout and others fall too far into the uncertainty of myth and poetry? Perhaps not if we accept the works don’t get lost in soul and spirit, but expect from them the tempering of the factual, of the assumptions behind science that assumes it possesses nature. We now have phrases like understanding nature and the earlier-mentioned following the science, as if to understand something is merely to quantify it. That has specific purposes and only an idiot would want to deny the importance of lab verification, for example, or the sort of glacial research undertaken by Lorius. But these research projects shouldn’t be turned into terms like saving the planet — with the scientific meeting the hyperbolic. Saving the planet with science is the sort of things bad science fiction films do; the best science can hope for is incremental realisations that ask us to change our consumer habits for a specific set or reasons with a specific set of results. One reason why climate deniers score points off climate scientists is that the latter will sometimes make a prediction that doesn’t come to pass. As the American Enterprise Institute notes, “in 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.” Meanwhile, AEI points out that “Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.” The AEI may have its own agenda — it is partly funded by Exxon Mobile. But there is no doubt scientists sometimes exaggerate their claims all the better to achieve publicity for books and articles they wish to promote, and Ehrlich’s and Watt’s predictions are well known. This gives climate deniers the chance to point out that the discussion over the climate is hysterical, and we should ignore many a claim. The problem arises when people who often know a little (the scientist) make a prediction that doesn’t come true, and the climate denier (who often has no scientific background, like Christopher Brooker and Nigel Lawson in the UK) points out that the future hasn’t quite turned out as the scientists predicted it.
One reason why these types of disputes take place is because of such notions as following the science, saving the planet and understanding nature: big, broad abstractions everyone argues over and nobody can understand because they lack specificity. As Latour notes, “let me put it bluntly: political ecology has nothing to do with nature….the belief that political ecology is interested in nature is the childhood illness of the field, keeping it in a state of impotence by preventing it from ever understanding its own practice.” (The Politics of Nature) If nature as we usually define it falls into the scientific or the mythical, into an overly quantitive or qualitative set of assumptions, then one way of understanding this problem isn’t to try and resolve it, but to look at films acknowledging the complexity of the problematic, as we find in the ecologically aesthetic. In Stalker, director Andrei Tarkovsky asks us to see the world as neither quite subjective nor objective but as a complex interweaving that can lead to one person’s suicide, to another person’s salvation. The Zone the characters can go to, and the Room within the Zone they might risk entering, exist as physical entities but also as psychically amorphous. Early in the film, the stalker takes two characters (the Professor and the Writer) into the Zone and the Professor discusses Porcupine. The Professor says Porcupine entered the Zone, became incredibly rich and took his life a week afterwards. The Writer asks why, and we don’t find out till much later in the film. Porcupine entered the Room where one's deepest wish comes true. Porcupine thought his greatest desire was to bring his dead brother back; what he really desired was wealth. Aware of the savage selfishness of his unconscious, he thus took his life.
Stalker takes us into a semi-post-apocalyptic world and insists that we see it as a product of technological catastrophe and personal hubris. The professor acknowledges that his aim is to destroy the Room with a 20 kiloton bomb, believing that the Room has been responsible for all the social unrest and environmental disasters that have beset the world. But will the detonation of a bomb be likely to help? And how will he know that his apparent desire will be met with his unconscious demand when he enters the Room? Tarkovsky’s film is an environmental work from one perspective but an investigation into the intricacies of the unconscious from another. If we have invoked Sartre’s bad faith, then how might it play out when a character is given the chance to believe they are consciously making a decision while their unconscious is the main mover? Someone lying to themselves rather than to others often does so because their conscious self might think they are acting for a moral good, yet their unconscious is acting with a different set of motives. While we wouldn’t want to cast aspersions on climate scientists, nevertheless there is understandably a professional wish often to become successful, while there is a moral need to do work that limits climate catastrophe. A scientist can become established by playing up disaster (as we have seen with Ehrlich and Watt) all the while trying to undermine its impact. The scientist may insist they hope that the data isn’t too alarming, but for the purposes of publicity, the more catastrophic the better. Tarkovsky’s film manages with a constant awareness of the form his inquiry takes, to create a textured relationship between culture and nature, between self and society, integrity and compromise. When the Professor first speaks of Porcupine, it comes just moments after the three characters have arrived at the Zone. The film has moved from monochrome to colour, and the camera moves in slowly on the characters as they are filmed from behind. Human nature and nature are dense in Tarkovsky’s film as he finds a form to suggest that density, while refusing to see the environment as secondary to the characters. It is as though the milieu acts on the protagonists while the characters can act on the environment without any idea of how or why they might be doing so. Tarkovsky believed: “Humans are the center of the world, the center of the universe. Yet not in the sense that you consider yourself more important than someone else, but in fact the opposite.” (Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews)
Tarkovsky sees film as an exploration of the problems of time. Cinema “…emerged at precisely the same time that humans began to sense a deficit of time. We have already grown accustomed to living in a terribly compressed world” and, like other works of the ecologically aesthetic, he wants to create a temporal expansion as opposed to the contraction we find in different ways in the eco-doc and the disaster film. Disaster films can offer the most exaggerated form of what David Bordwell and others call the “ticking-clock climax”, a Hollywood mainstay which, as Bordwell says, is “as common in romcoms and family dramas as in action films.” (Observations on Film Art) It is a simple narrative technique that loads the story with great import, whether it is a bomb going off in a few minutes (Blown Away), a lovelorn figure trying to stop a loveless marriage from taking place (The Graduate), or intervening in the destruction of the planet (Armageddon). Equally, the eco-doc often has a similar sense of urgency: if we don’t stop polluting the earth now, we are all doomed. This isn’t to underestimate the magnitude of the crisis we are facing. It is to make clear however, the tropes of film narrative.
How then to invoke catastrophe without falling into cliche, how to propose the seriousness, the unimaginability, of the climate crisis without turning that crisis into the expectations of conventional narrative form? Reviewing The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh, Alexandre Leskanich reckons his “attempt to comprehend climate change by necessity aligns with every other effort to do so: one must outline a historical narrative of how we came to be where we are – without history’s categories, remember, the historicised mind couldn’t make sense of anything. Certainly, Ghosh tweaks the emphasis of his narrative, attributing more weight to imperialism than is usual, but the result is much the same – yet another incarcerating historicisation.” (LSE) By the same reckoning, we have found films often also create this incarceration with a get-out-of-jail-free card, through an individual’s heroism or a series of political measures that are very unlikely to come to pass. When watching an eco-doc, we might wonder if for many years businesses and politicians have been extracting oil and gas, depleting fish stocks and intensively farming beef, whether the film’s approach doesn’t too closely resemble the logic the given film attacks: that quantitative problems demand quantitative solutions. The aims might appear antithetical, but the problem they are caught within is the same; a little like two opposing political parties who don’t arrive at a new politics but give the impression of one by ostensibly being adversaries. Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably a couple of minutes in offers as a film within the film an eco-doc, with fields getting sprayed by chemicals and effluent spilling out of oil tankers. We hear that the earth is ever more populated and ever less habitable, and see images of rusted cars. Whole species are destroyed for profit, with birds, elephants and Rhinos lost to the workings of capital. In another film, the three opening scenes would show strong cause and effect. A young man protests against the platitudes at a large, group meeting, proposing social change, watches a documentary and this galvanises his desire for a fundamental societal shift. But that isn’t quite what Bresson shows. The young man is our central character, Charles, and he isn’t watching the film, yet it will be Charles who will so radically express his disgust at planetary destruction, he will indirectly take his life — as the film’s opening proposes, with a newspaper headline stating that his suicide was assisted.
What drives this man to suicide may be an alternative logic well diagnosed by J Hoberman when saying “…The Devil, Probably is a drama of faith so formally rigorous and uncompromising as to border on the absurd — a Dostoyevskian story of a tormented soul presented in the stylized manner of a medieval illumination.” (Mubi) Hoberman encapsulates well the reversal of historicism; a young man willing to be out of his time and trying to understand the complexity of the human being, over the immediate problems of the planet. To save the planet is surely to destroy oneself - to accept that if humans are responsible for the damage, what better way to alleviate it than to take one’s own life? Very understandably, most people don’t go down this route. Even eco-fundamentalists are more inclined to harm others rather than themselves, to become eco-terrorists as Kelly Richard’s Night Moves and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed explore. The latter is, not surprisingly, a Bressonian-inflected tale, given that Schrader has long been influenced by the director’s work and wrote a book Transcendental Style in Film, with a third of it focused on Bresson. The Devil, Probably’s provocative claim is what if ecocide becomes suicide, and so Charles gets a friend to shoot him. It is one less person to pollute the planet, yet it seems Bresson’s solution isn’t as simple as that. Charles’ choice has the radical force of a Dostoevskian character like Kirilov in The Devils, who wants to die but will wait for the moment most conducive to the terrorist cause others support. Charles is also like the medieval figures that Hoberman invokes, with Bresson’s prior film focusing on Lancelot du Lac. What is dignity the Medieval figure may ask and, in 1977, Charles would answer, dying not to save the planet but perhaps just a little to save one’s soul; refusing to be part of the consumerist destruction. While the film focuses loosely on the Parisian hippie milieu of the time, Charles wants to take it further: not so much tune in and drop out, but tune out and drop dead.
Few people would admit this is the answer to the environmental crisis. But Bresson’s purpose isn’t to proselytise for mass suicide. That might even become part of a bigger problem, which would suggest brainwashed people rather than a cleansing of the planet. The Devil, Probably does insist, however, that if humankind is to continue it must ask very basic questions rather than assume money can allow us to buy our way out of the crisis. There is often much talk of green new deals and putting billions into green energy, but where will much of this money come from if not from a capitalist economy that refits itself to an ostensibly greener planet? Many of those who support such policies are the super-rich. We even now have a new term: the Green Billionaire, an oxymoron surely, but one delivered with a straight face. For some, going green can mean a lot of greenbacks. “With interest in clean energy surging — President Biden’s infrastructure plan calls for $174 billion in investment in the electric vehicle industry and a goal of reaching 100 percent “carbon-pollution free power” by 2035 — trailblazers in the green revolution are getting richer,” Jennifer Wang notes. "There are now 34 billionaires whose fortunes stem from clean energy products, ranging from electric scooters and electric trucks to solar panels and wind turbines. (Forbes) But as Bresson says, “money is an abominable idol. It is everywhere. The only things that matter are invisible. Why are we here? What are life and death? Where are we going? Who is responsible for the miracle of animal and vegetable life?” (Projections) In The Devil, Probably, we could say Charles takes responsibility for the planet in a crazy inversion of the Green Billionaires who claim to be saving it while making fortunes. Charles wishes to save do his bit as a subjective gesture over an objective claim: it won’t be billions spent on creating green energy, but based on the logic that the planet cannot better be saved than with the removal of the human from it. Charles is one such human, and now the Earth has one fewer person contaminating it.
If this is not the answer, it might be a useful principle question. How does the human live on the planet with the least disturbance and Bresson is merely asking the question in its most fundamental form. Rather like Tarkovsky, not only in Stalker but in The Sacrifice, Bresson puts Charles’ subjectivity at the centre of the world by making a gesture that may or may not transform it. In Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, central character Alexander sets fire to his home after promising he would give up all he possesses if nuclear annihilation were avoided. It seems it has been, and he sets fire to his house in a gesture that looks like madness. In each instance, in The Devil, Probably and The Sacrifice, the films impractically muse over whether the personal gesture has any validity; not so much as a deed to transform the world but as an attempt at saying the individual is of utmost importance in an act of faith that if nothing else turns around the threat of bad faith. If bad faith would suggest that nothing can be done, that who is one person to try and change the nature of nature, then Charles and Alexander possess good faith even if it might be close to madness and certainly to the absurd. Yet this is the type of absurdity Dostoevsky and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas make much of when the Russian novelist says in The Brothers Karamazov, “each of us is guilty before everyone and for everything, and I more than the others.” Levinas says that “the attitude of the other in no way intervenes in my responsibility a priori…” (Is it Righteous to Be), and we see how Levinas’s claim is often ignored or secularised, even de-moralised. How often have we heard people say that why should one country ween itself off fossil fuels if other countries are not doing as much. Levinas’s philosophical reply would be that this would demand a symmetry that reveals more one’s bad faith. One does nothing because the other is doing nothing. In contrast, we have the person who does something even if it seems like nothing, and is certainly the tiniest of gestures within the need to minimise polluting the planet. It is what Kathryn Kellogg sought to achieve with the Zero-Waste Movement. “Her trash for the past year – anything that hasn’t been composted or recycled – fits in an 8oz jar.” (Guardian)
If The Devil Probably absurdly proposes a way of doing something for the earth; Safe and The River look at what the planet might be doing to us: how the environment we have transformed may very subtly be working on the individual in a way that makes it hard to distinguish between personal neurosis and impersonal disease. In Safe, Carol White starts showing a number of symptoms that seem to be environmentally dictated; coughing at a passing truck’s fumes; getting nose bleeds, skin rashes. But one doctor reckons there is nothing he can do about it and recommends a psychiatrist. When Director Todd Haynes was asked if Carol brings the illness upon herself, he says: “There’s no easy way for me to answer that. No, I don’t think Carol brought it on herself simply to get attention or in some false way. I think, if it was self-induced, it was at a completely unconscious level. Or that there’s a susceptibility to being made vulnerable by the world that she carries with her, that some people carry with them. (BFI) At the beginning of the film, she is ensconced in a plush home in LA and by the end is living frugally at a retreat in the desert. Is she on the mend or going round the bend? Haynes doesn’t say and there is nothing to suggest that the eschewal of comfort is doing her any good, even if Haynes is wary of proposing that it is doing her greater harm. The film’s purpose is more to leave us with questions about an environmental impact that shouldn’t ignore how different people will react to it in different ways; susceptible both physically and psychologically. One scene in the film shows a character who is besuited and bewildered, wandering around wearing clothing that makes him resemble a mummy. Carol asks about him and is told “Lester is just very afraid, afraid to eat, afraid to breathe…”
In The River, a young man (Hsiao-Kang) finds himself agreeing to lie in the Tamsui of the title after the dummy used in a film being shot doesn’t look realistic. Afterwards, he becomes struck with a strange neck problem that leads him to fall off his motorbike and to his mother and others seeking various remedies, including religious and superstitious ones. Unlike Safe, The River starts with a probable cause, but is no closer than Safe to finding a cure. Like Haynes, director Tsai Ming-Liang films in long takes, usually resisting close-ups, reaction shots, and point-of-view shots, as if determined to remain within the realm of curiosity and concern, rather than assertion and narration. If neither director resolves the problems the characters are suffering from, it is because they are both aware it is part of a broader ecological conundrum. It is one that leaves the human in a terrifying version of Object Oriented Ontology. When Graham Harman says that “objects are not identical with their properties, but have a tense relationship with those properties, and this very tension is responsible for all the change that occurs in the world…” we may link it with a statement he makes much later in the book. “…Common is the experience of taking things for granted, not noticing them until they go wrong. The floor in our home, the air we breathe, the grammar we immediately understand, or the bodily organism upon which we silently rely. (Object Oriented Ontology). Both Haynes and Tsai seem interested in what goes wrong, in how objects that are identical with their properties create a confusion for the characters that the directors insistently extend to the viewer. Usually, when something goes wrong, we can locate it, whether it is a hammer that breaks, or a leg, and we can extend this to food that goes off and bodies that decay. Some things break; other things decompose. We notice that whether deemed a subject (a person) or an object (a leg), both can be described using the same language. Food perishes and so do people. How far into this comparison one may choose to go might rest on sensitivity at one end and professional pragmatics on the other. Few would describe their recently deceased grandmother as a perishable object. But someone whose priority is to keep the body from smelling will indeed, as grandma gets refrigerated.
Such comments, however ostensibly callous, are nevertheless not epistemologically troublesome. The doctor resets the broken leg; the food goes in the bin, and granny gets put in the fridge. Our relationship with subjects and objects, however conflated on occasion, is comprehended. However, in both Safe and The River, it is hard to know whether the illnesses the characters suffer from are products of the environment or problems in their head. Many other people are breathing just fine in the Los Angeles Carol cannot tolerate, and not everyone who is daft enough to take a dip in the Tamsui river will find themselves with a very sore neck. When in Safe the doctor proposes a psychiatrist, he assumes the problem isn’t his, and he is half-right. But also half-wrong. Carol is hard to diagnose generally, and he assumes to try to do so specifically is no longer a medical problem but a psychiatric one. Haynes says, “there’s a history of inexplicable illnesses, that established medicine can’t confirm as absolutely physiological, that have affected women. I think they are diseases of identity that force you to see that identity is a fragile and basically an imaginary construct that we pretend to carry around. The more unexamined it is, the more vulnerable you are.” (Sight and Sound) What is it in the world that affects some women and, in this instance, more especially Carol White, and how complex are the circumstances that would have to be understood to offer a decent diagnosis? Both Safe and The River don’t offer medical solutions but aesthetic ones, as if chiming with Harman’s claim that Object Oriented Ontology “holds that philosophy generally has a closer relationship with aesthetics than with mathematics or natural science.” (Object Oriented Ontology) The filmmakers propose looking at a person’s life, their immediate environment, and the social contacts, the personal relationships, the work they do, and arrive not at a diagnosis of the disease, more a comprehension of the variables involved in it. If the films seem difficult, obscure works, it rests on their refusal to see a problem as one of cause and effect; subject and object. When, In The Day After Tomorrow, the dad helps save the world from disaster and rescues his son, we aren’t asked to question our presuppositions of what subjects and objects are, and the same is often the case with the eco doc. Facts and figures, hard data and so on, are doing what they have to do.
Carol White can seem like a distant cousin to Giuliana in Red Desert, a woman who has lost the ability to see the world based on causal practicalities. If Giuliana finds that all things are of equal value when she describes all she could potentially love, Carol could list all the things of which she might be fearful. Red Desert is also an environmental film of course. But there is in Antonioni’s work a greater sense that Giuliani needs to adjust to the world, to cope with living in the environmentally transformed. Antonioni turns the factory into an object that has to be understood, not destroyed. (That would be for a different problematic; when we see the luxury home blown to pieces in the director’s Zabriskie Point.) Antonioni said: “Giuliana lives through a profound crisis because of her inability to adapt to the modern world….I am in favour of progress, and yet I realise that because of the disruption it brings, it also causes trouble.” (The Architecture of Vision) Antonioni believes we shouldn’t halt progress because Giuliana and others cannot quickly change, but we can make artworks that help us understand the difficulty. However, Safe and The River propose more strongly the polluting factor and how it might be destroying the lives of quite a number of people. A World Health Organisation report, John Vidal says, “suggests environmental risks now contribute to more than 100 of the world’s most dangerous diseases and injuries, and kill 12.6 million people a year – nearly one in four or 23% of all deaths.” (Guardian) These may be facts and figures, but part of understanding the relationship between subjects and objects is complex causality. Film can allude to such complexity in a form that refuses the immediacy of cause and effect. Were Hsiao-Kang to fall in the river and drown, few would be wondering how water can lead to drowning, but how being in the river can lead to some obscure symptoms is both a cinematic enigma and potentially a medical solution. The filmmaker’s purpose, though, isn’t to find the readily resolved but the contemporaneously inexplicable.
What we find in the ecologically aesthetic films is an interest in form that cannot be reduced to fact or statement. When James Reich says, reviewing Walkabout, ”indigenous knowledge will be contrasted frequently with that of the private school system, or colonial knowledge: the youth’s bush skills against the boy’s useless knowledge of multiplication tables, for example” (Substack) he is right. But it wouldn’t have been enough for Nicolas Roeg to leave his two school children stranded in the Outback before coming across an aboriginal boy who can help them find their way to what they regard as civilisation. Roeg wants constantly to find images that can play up the gap and show the uncanniness of each world according to a perspective that he dissolves in constant comparison. Roeg’s is a juxtapositional approach, while most of the aesthetically oriented films have in different ways relied on long takes. Tarkovsky and Antonioni especially have been interested in the metaphoric and the metonymic, seeing in the worlds they offer meaning that needn’t be literal, whether it be Zone and the Room in Stalker or the use of colour to express moods tones in The Red Desert. But Roeg’s purpose is to use editing to draw out the similarities and differences between the human being and nature, all the better to suggest the intricacy of their intertwining. We have noted this during the film’s early stages as Roeg shows us shots of the outback and scenes of city life, but though the city recedes as the boy and his sister are lost in the desert, the juxtapositions continue. It might be a cut to an echidna or a decomposing animal, to the daughter swimming in the pond and images of a tree similar to her limbs, to a maggot-ridden carcass compared to numerous animal bones.
The film collapses its tentative plot into an examination of the environment into which the characters have found themselves. It is a hostile one in many ways, though Roeg doesn’t film it with the narrative consequences of that danger. Rather than focusing on a series of trials to overcome (evident in brilliant nature films like Dersu Uzula and mediocre ones like The Way), Roeg proposes the hostility is everywhere and nowhere. At one moment, the film shows snakes up in a tree while the boy and the girl are sleeping and cuts to a wombat nuzzling up to the boy. Roeg makes little of this, though snakes can be deadly and even wombats aggressive, as if were he to play up the tension he would put us into an anthropocentric narrative, with a clear division between humans and nature. All a filmmaker has to do is cut from a snake or a scorpion to a human, and that division will be assumed: that the person is in danger and the equivalence between man and beast dismissed. Whether it is a snake in Anaconda or a tarantula in Dr No, film’s purpose is often not to suggest we are at one with nature, but at war with it.
Roeg proposes it is neither war nor peace but a constant negotiation between species of which the human needs to understand its place. When late in the film Walkabout shows a hunter taking out various animals while others scarper at the sound of rifle fire, it also shows us the aboriginal boy looking on. The boy isn’t afraid to hunt and kill either, but this is deemed on a par with animals killing other animals for survival, not for sport. It might seem that the many films showing humans up against the threat of animals is quite distinct from humans shooting animals for leisure, but proportionately they reflect similarities. In each instance, they emphasise the division between humans and other animals, with the creatures distinct from the human. Murdering them before they kill us, or killing them without fear, may represent quite different states for the person doing the killing. However, in both, the animal is Other. Roeg refuses to show animals as an especial threat because to do so would be to create a hierarchy he wants to resist, except as pointless power — when we see the hunters’ murderousness. Instead, he wishes to make clear that the outback isn’t an alien environment; it is simply one that the son and the daughter don’t understand until the aboriginal boy shows up while on the walkabout of the title: an aboriginal rite of passage for male adolescents. It is more a hostile place for the other two because they are city folk oblivious to the natural world. It isn’t especially that nature is hostile to them.
One of the dangers of many a film that shows humans overcoming threats by the animal kingdom, is it gives the impression that we have more to fear from animals than animals have to fear from us. Phoebe Weston notes that “surveys from Australia, North America, Europe and Asia have shown humans kill prey at higher rates than any other apex predator — partly due to the adoption of guns, and hunting with dogs — which is why they have gained the title of “super predator." (Guardian) The irony is that humans seeing animals as Other, and destroying other species, potentially leads to a broader self-destruction. “Livestock farming has a vast environmental footprint”, say Francis Vergunst and Julian Savulesco. “It contributes to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, acid rain, coral reef degeneration and deforestation.” (The Conversation) Whether eating meat, taking out animals for sport or out of a perceived fear, in each instance the animal is presented antithetically. Yet this relies on a narrow notion of being which has long-term detrimental effects for the human who wants to save themselves in various manifestations, but not the planet on which it relies to exist at all. When we think about how animals are presented on film, they are at best pets, often beasts of burden, frequently served on a plate and, on quite a few occasions, subject to hunting fodder — and more often, still, killed within the narrative parameters of self-protection. Walkabout feels exceptional because Roeg insists on placing the characters into a world that hums with diversity rather than threatens with menace. It would be an exaggeration to say that the characters are minor within the story, but that its initial script ran to fourteen pages indicates how much the director wanted nature’s presence within the work. Roeg says his writer, the playwright Edward Bond came to him and said: “I've finished the script - I think you'll be rather pleased.” “That's perfect,” (Guardian) Roeg replied.
If screenwriter Walter Bernstein can say “there should be some kind of interaction between the people and their milieu” (The Tools of Screenwriting), then that would still be within a script of a hundred pages. Walkabout shifts that balance between people and milieu so far into the latter, the film becomes about our two initial characters swallowed up by the environment in which they find themselves, with the story finally about the aboriginal boy who has the capacity to transform the milieu and not merely be lost within it. If most films, according to scriptwriting demands, are about protagonists with goals, we might say that the son and daughter are the protagonists. But if the protagonist is the character who is capable of impacting on the environment, it is the aboriginal boy who would more accurately be thus described. “A screenplay is like a suspension bridge, with one end anchored in what the protagonist wants, and the other end anchored to the disclosure of whether or not he gets it.” (The Tools of Screenwriting) Yet if scriptwriting proposes impacting on the environment, so to speak, and climate scientists tell us we have to minimise that impact, then Walkabout works with that contradiction better than most. The aboriginal boy is equal to the milieu and, whether hunting, fishing, or leading the son and daughter to safety, he simultaneously impacts on the environment and, at the same time, is aware of his environmental impact. The Australian hunters are not. Like the trapper in Dersu Uzalu, he sees nature as neither worthy of appreciation nor appropriation and lives within its demands and expectations. Roeg respects nature by showing it in its manifold existence and finds a form to contain it.
If we have found the observational documentary, and especially the ecologically aesthetic films, most useful in understanding questions concerning nature and our relationship with it, it rests on those works that seem to ask questions without arriving at ready contradiction. It is all very well for eco-disaster films and informationally, activist-oriented docs, to say something must be done, but there is often a quantitative dimension that contains a potentially greater problem within its solution. The films seem trapped in a can-do spirit that might be part of the very problem: that doing and quantifying have led to the climate crisis in the first place. As Latour says in an interview with Ulrich Becker, “the notion of nature – invented for lots of political reasons in the 17th Century was never very good at capturing the Earth. I mean the nature of naturalism was something that was never very good for registering natural history, evolution, biology, climatology and so on. It is good for a dead planet and dead bodies but it is not very good for what we have to live through.” (Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung) In different ways, the disaster films and the eco-doc seem often part of that limited, rationalist creation of the 17th century, one that has given us developments in science which has led to industrialisation, which in turn has led to climate chaos. It might not be possible to think the planet. Therein lies the sort of neurosis that befalls and bedevils Giuliana in The Red Desert. But there is a difference between the character and the film, and Antonioni’s purpose, like Tarkovsky’s, Bresson's, Roeg’s and others, is to get us to think within the widest possible parameters rather than within the narrowest of immediate solutions. An aesthetic object, after all, is an object of contemplation rather than a ready solution, which isn’t the same as saying that by attending to art we eschew active involvement in doing anything about the climate crisis. Yet maybe worse than doing nothing is doing something that is too cognitively associated with the creation of the problem in the first place. As Latour says, “one of the reasons why we feel so powerless when asked to be concerned by ecological crisis is because of the total disconnect between the range, nature, and scale of the phenomenon and the set of emotions, habits of thoughts, and feelings that would be necessary to handle those crises – not even to act in response to them, but simply to give them more than a passing ear.” (Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung)
What a complex approach in film form can help us towards is comprehending the magnitude of the problem, by trying to show that it isn’t enough to think in Dawkins’ narrow Darwinian terms, even if it is almost impossible to think of the planet as an holistic whole. It is the place between these two poles that we find the work of Antonioni, Tarkovsky and others navigating and negotiating. The science we are often expected to follow could do worse than look at some of these films to understand the scope of the task and the modesty of our place in the world. Out of this modesty may come the wisdom to survive on it on diminished terms, but also more realistic ones. To save the planet isn’t only an impossible abstraction; it is also a hubristic claim — putting the human once again at the centre of things. Better to see ourselves as peripheral pests, gatecrashers at a party we cannot easily leave. But it is one where we can at least quieten down and make ourselves less of a nuisance. As Tarkovsky once proposed: “it seems to me that before trying to alter the world, man needs to alter himself; he needs to change his spiritual existence, his own inner world, quite harmoniously, in synchronicity with his other activities.” (Tarkovsky Interviews) Tarkovsky may be gender-centric here, of course, but the point holds, with a person, if they must put themselves at the centre of the universe, doing so as a fallible self and not as an omnipotent force armed with the scientific as a neutral, objective value. Many an eco-doc often gives the impression of that untenable objectivity; some of the other films we have looked at are aware much more of a precarious subjectivity and are all the better for it.
© Tony McKibbin