Cinema and Enviroment 2
Ways of Seeing beyond the Anthropocene
Summary
“Cinema and Environment 2: Ways of Seeing beyond the Anthropocene” consolidates our work on the previous project, “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene,” advancing knowledge on the relationship between the ecological crisis and the 21st century Anglophone cinema. It proposes to interrogate, from a post-anthropocentric perspective, the extent to which cinema can offer non-human or more-than-human visualities, blurring our human-centred and human-limited ways of seeing the world.
Within the context of the climate and other crises we are currently experiencing, anthropocentrism is often posed as the problem but at the same time the only solution that could lead us to a different future. Questioning this discourse and analysing other ways of approaching our ecological engagement with the world, we return to John Berger’s reflection on “ways of seeing” as a conceptual tool from which to think about the post-anthropocentric in cinema and to question the visual objectification of the environment and its more-than-human inhabitants. To this theoretical tradition we add the revision of the ocularcentric paradigm, which allows us to address different types of visuality, including non-anthropocentric ones.
Instead of asking questions about ways of seeing (or visualizing) the Anthropocene, the project aims to address ways of seeing beyond the Anthropocene, through the study of films that problematize the dominant imaginaries of the “end of the world”, that displace the formal hierarchies inherited from Western modernity, or that imagine alternative forms of relationality and more-than-human kinship.
The project proposes an interdisciplinary approach that intertwines methodological tools from film studies, new materialisms, critical posthumanisms and affect theory, as well as decolonial theories, critical race studies, Indigenous epistemologies and studies on animality, among others. Our main objective is to develop new perspectives on film and the environment that would challenge an anthropocentric worldview, by offering both theoretical reflections and disseminating our research through seminars, courses, film series and video essays.
Work Packages
Foto: Brett Meliti. Yellowstone National Park, United States.
Rethinking Genre for the Climate Emergency
WP1 focuses on the study of popular fictions that address the climate emergency. It directs attention to the intersection of anxieties surrounding the environmental crisis with various markers of differentiation (primarily gender, sexuality, racialization, species, and social class), which delineate which lives are deemed worthy of salvation and which are not from a hegemonic perspective. Dystopian imaginaries will be placed in productive tension with more utopian and parodic interventions.
Ethics and Aesthetics of More-than-Human Kinship
WP3 is dedicated to identifying and analyzing posthuman and multispecies alliances in dialogue with ecocinema studies. Special emphasis will be placed on the concepts of posthuman and more-than-human kinship, offering a reflection on how these terms enable the redefinition of the boundaries of what it means to be human.
Cinema and Other-than-Western Ontologies
WP2 addresses the disruption of hegemonic discourses on the Anthropocene in relation to non- or other-than-Western ontologies. From a critical perspective grounded in intersectional feminism, decolonial studies, critical race theory, and Indigenous epistemologies, we will explore afrofuturism, Indigenous ecocinema, and animist cinema, among other cinematic forms.
Pedagogies of Cinema Beyond the Anthropocene
WP4 will focus on designing an innovative approach to sustainable pedagogies through advancements in videographic research. The theoretical reflections on ecocinema and discourses on the Anthropocene will here be given a practical component through the creation and dissemination of video essays.