Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human

304 Pages·2013·2.44 MB·English

by  Anat Pick

Screening nature

S n
creening ature
Cinema beyond the Human
Edited by
Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 2013 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2013 Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Screening nature : cinema beyond the human / edited by Anat Pick and
Guinevere Narraway.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-226-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-227-0
(institutional ebook)
1. Nature films--History and criticism. 2. Environmental
protection and motion pictures. 3. Nature in motion pictures. 4.
Environmentalism in motion pictures. 5. Ecology in motion pictures. 6.
Environmental films--History and criticism. I. Pick, Anat, 1955- editor
of compilation. II. Narraway, Guinevere editor of compilation.
PN1995.9.N38S38 2013
791.43’66--dc23
2013022519
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78238-226-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-78238-227-0 (institutional ebook)
╰
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction. Intersecting Ecology and Film 1
Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway
PART I. ECO-POETICS: FILM, FORM AND THE NATURAL WORLD
 1. Three Worlds: Dwelling and Worldhood on Screen 21
Anat Pick
 2. Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools – Structure, Immanence and Eco-
aesthetics in The Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films 37
Silke Panse
 3. Land as Protagonist – An Interview with James Benning 60
Silke Panse
-
PART II. ZOE-TROPES: ENVISIONING THE NONHUMAN
 4. Anthropomorphism and Its Vicissitudes: Refl ections on
Homme-sick Cinema 73
James Leo Cahill
 5. Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of
Apichatpong Weerasethakul 91
May Adadol Ingawanij
 6. Was Blind But Now I See: Animal Liberation Documentaries’
Deconstruction of Barriers to Witnessing Injustice 110
Carrie Packwood Freeman and Scott Tulloch
 7. Filming the Frozen South: Animals in Early Antarctic
Exploration Films 127
Elizabeth Leane and Stephen Nicol
PART III. ECO-POLITICS: ENVIRONMENT, IMAGE, IDEOLOGY
 8. Dirty Pictures: Framing Pollution and Desire in ‘new New
Queer Cinema’ 145
Sophie Mayer
vi • 
 9. Utopia in the Mud: Nature and Landscape in the Soviet
Science Fiction Film 162
Elana Gomel
10. Animals, Avatars and the Gendering of Nature 177
Claire Molloy
11. Buried Land: Filming the Bosnian Pyramids 194
Steven Eastwood and Geoff rey Alan Rhodes
PART IV. ECO-PRAXIS: FILM AS ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICE
12. Strange Seeing: Re-viewing Nature in the Films of Rose
Lowder 213
Guinevere Narraway
13. The Art of Self-emptying and Ecological Integration:
Bae Yong-kyun’s Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? 225
Chia-ju Chang
14. An Inconvenient Truth: Science and Argumentation in the
Expository Documentary Film 241
David Ingram
15. Planet in Focus: Environmental Film Festivals 257
Kay Armatage
Notes on Contributors 275
Index 281
╰
Illustrations
2.1 Neddy Merryl (Burt Lancaster) looks at the sky in The
Swimmer (Perry and Pollack, 1968) 39
2.2 Leaves and plane in Ruhr (Benning, 2009) 47
4.1 Screen capture from Bernard l’ermite (Painlevé and Hamon,
France, 1931): rendering the charming monstrous and the
monstrous charming 83
4.2 Screen capture from Bernard l’ermite: a hermit crab
wearing a sea anemone . . . 85
4.3 . . . is ‘swallowed’ through trick photography. Screen
capture from Bernard l’ermite 85
4.4 Screen capture from Bernard l’ermite: hermit crab football 87
5.1 Tropical Malady. Once upon a time there lived a Khmer
shaman 93
5.2 Uncle Boonmee. Tong’s gesture of hospitality to the ghost 98
5.3 Tropical Malady. The tiger is a hungry and isolated spirit 100
5.4 Uncle Boonmee. The photo that Boonsong has never shown
to anyone 102
5.5 Uncle Boonmee. For the nation . . . for what? 104
5.6 Uncle Boonmee. The pose of capture 106
11.1 The Bosnian pyramid 196
11.2 Buried Land 199
13.1 Hyegok in Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? 236
13.2 Haejin in Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? 237
╰
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the two anonymous readers for their invalu-
able comments and advice. Specifi c portions of the book, as well as
its overall structure, benefi tt ed signifi cantly from their observations
and suggestions. We also thank the staff at Berghahn, in particular
Commissioning Editor Mark Stanton and Production Editor Charlott e
Mosedale, for their patience and support in bringing the project to
fruition. The contributing authors have helped us broaden our critical
and cinematic horizons in pleasantly unexpected ways. It has been
instructive to work together. We are grateful to Rose Lowder for kindly
permitt ing the use of a series of frames from her 1994 fi lm Bouquet 4 on
the book cover.
My thanks to Richard Twine, Tom Tyler, Bob McKay, and Silke Panse
for tips, references and suggestions along the way. – Anat Pick
I want to thank my family – Mark, Agatha, and Willem – for their love
and support as I have worked on this volume. Most of all, thank you
to Mark for stepping into the domestic void I occasionally leave when
writing. – Guinevere Narraway
• Introduction
i e F
nterSecting cology and ilm
Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway
In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton opens up reflection to an
all-encompassing ecological dimension; the ecological thought is, in
fact, contemporary thought proper, thought beyond narrow thematics,
perspectives and disciplines:
The ecological thought is a virus that infects all other areas of thinking.
(Yet viruses, and virulence, are shunned in environmental ideology.) . . .
ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power – and
also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and
nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. It
has to do with depression and psychosis. It has to do with capitalism
and with what might exist after capitalism. It has to do with amaze-
ment, open-mindedness, and wonder. It has to do with doubt, confusion,
and skepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do
with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with
consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique.
It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with race, class, and
gender. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of self and the
weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with
coexistence. (Morton 2010: 2)
Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human brings together contribu-
tions in the area of film that welcome the kind of viral and virulent con-
tact between film and ecology – in Morton’s sense – as part of a broader
shift in the ways we speak and think about cinema, its theorisation,
production and reception. What does the ecological thought bring, or
do, to film and to the discipline of film studies?
Morton’s point is not to explode the various disciplines into one
thoughtful blob, but to work from within disciplines, deepening their
scope and reach, tuning into their ecological resonance. Though the
task is ultimately a vast one – it entails reconfiguring all branches of
knowledge – it can be pursued in a more modest fashion, too, within a
specific area of enquiry. We take Screening Nature to be one such pursuit
within the area of film studies: exposing the field to ecological thinking
not as an exclusive substream or strand, but absorbing every aspect of