The Anthropocene Project and the archiviolithic imaginary

Cinema and Environment: The Arts of Noticing in the Anthropocene

“…From this perspective, it would be tempting to celebrate sensory-driven cinema and tactile vocabulary as inherent to the sustainable, "caressing gaze" (Marks 2000), in contrast to the objectifying, optical viewing, epitomized according to some scholars by films such as Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018), part of the transmedia Anthropocene Project which investigates human influence on the state of the earth. As Selmin Kara (2020) notes, this project leans on a visual rhetoric that reinstates a transcendental perspective in representation, what Haraway (1991) famously calls "the gaze from nowhere", and thus perpetuates the binary opposition of nature and culture and its underlying power relations. 20 Yet it could also be argued that such distanced cinematic framing can offer an affective, rather than purely contemplative or transcendental, worldly resonance, or at the very least it prompts a de-anthropocentric/de-anthropocentralizing looking, if only by virtue of rescaling our perception.…”