Miles Horner
STS412: Decolonizing Ecocinema
Elaine Gan
05/19/24
TRANSLATION IN ECOCINEMA: INTERCULTURAL/INTERSPECIES
In The Ecocinema Experience, Scott Macdonald writes, “‘Ecocinema’ … is the inverse of the fundamentally hysterical approach of commercial media … The job of an ecocinema is to provide new kinds of film experience that demonstrate an alternative to conventional media-spectatorship.”(20) Through looking at the qualities of cinema, and determining what is “conventional media-spectatorship,” we can see how “Ecocinema” presents an alternative. Alternatively, we can explore how multimodal methods of communication can help us achieve that alternative, allowing for effective translation between cultures and species.
Cinema, as a medium, lends itself to many interpretations. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoiré(s) Du Cinema, he posits that this is due to the nature of the medium of video — it is the closest form of communication we have to how we experience the world. Since it reminds us so much of our reality, we project personal associations and feelings onto it. Quinn Georgiac, in their A Concert in the Rainforest: Sound in Multispecies Ethnography, talks about how audio, when paired with video, can accomplish the same thing, asking, “In what ways can our recordings act agentially, surprising us and reorienting our work? In what ways might they offer new openings that words don’t?” We will think of cinema, or any assembled work of audio and video, as agent — something that can provide us with new orientations and perspectives upon every viewing. This quality of recording, to consistently offer different interpretations, allows cinema to translate cultures; extending beyond language and towards the senses.
This ability of cinema to translate must have been noticed by early filmmakers since early documentary approaches to film were ethnographic. Movies like Robert Faherty’s Nanook of the North, or Margaret Mead’s Trance and Dance in Bali revolve around a single person visiting a native culture with their camera, recording their rituals and commenting on their lives. These films try to present a single, unified narrative about the particular indigenous group they’re studying, attempting to “capture” their culture, in a manner similar to traditional ethnography. These films are ineffective at communicating that mission and are dangerous in what they do. Scott Macdonald points out in The Ecocinema Experience that our enjoyment of nature through art (and video) invariably contributes to its destruction and transformation (19). Since these things have already been recorded, and are as accessible as reality is, they need not remain. This is how I interpret Nanook of the North or Trance and Dance in Bali – not as accurate representations of the native culture they’re studying, but as “salvage” ethnography, a style of filmmaking that attempted to capture native cultures before they were wiped out. Macdonald might argue that the act of recording expedites this process of destruction and that the tradition of salvage ethnography, therefore, is more aligned with the hegemonic values of colonialism than the values of the colonized people they’re attempting to portray. Importantly, these movies rely almost exclusively on language to communicate information – nothing about the frame is interesting, and the only knowledge communicated is through a disembodied narrator.
Films like Behemoth by Zhao Liang or Forest of Bliss by Robert Gardener are examples of ethnographic documentaries that, instead of trying to ‘objectively’ capture the culture/experience of the people they’re filming, use multimodal and durational cinematic techniques to encourage multiple interpretations. Both films use sound to their advantage – in Behemoth, it’s to occupy the soundscape and mental state of the workers in the mining facilities the film is situated in. In Forest of Bliss, sound is used as a replacement for language – there are no subtitles, yet the rituals and emotions felt by those within the film are apparent through Gardener’s use of repeated sounds. These films are more successful at situating us within the area they’re studying because they focus on the multiple sensations that video and audio can translate, not a unified or objective narrative. Because these films leave so much room for interpretation, they also give more agency to those they’re studying. To return to Georgiac, recordings act agentially, constantly reorienting the viewer, which, seemingly paradoxically, allows for those featured within these recordings to show more dimensions and meanings, deepening the accuracy of their depiction, and the agency they receive. This is how film can truly translate culture; not through disembodied narrators explaining that culture, but by allowing the camera to occupy the space, and letting the viewer interpret and the actor demonstrate meaning. Forest of Bliss is doubly useful here in how it, through its use of sound as the primary method of communicating information, gives the animals and humans within it similar agency. This shows another aspect of ecocinema in its goal to create new film experiences: the ability to translate multispecies experiences.
Forest of Bliss, Sarah Christman’s Swarm Season, and Shaunauk Sen’s All That Breathes are all fantastic examples of films that translate multispecies experiences. In Swarm Season, the film’s soundtrack is a continuous ebb and flow of the buzz of bees, reminding us of their presence as we traverse through Hawai’i, showing parallels between human song and bee song, or human architecture and bee architecture. In All That Breathes, Sen masterfully interweaves three stories about the city of Delhi together, all relating to the experience of the kites that fly through the deeply polluted air of the city. The birds are given agency - Sen explores how they are mentally and physically affected by the environmental and social degradation of the city, demonstrating how social and environmental collapse go hand in hand. Both films spend much of their time situating us alongside the animals within the film; showing similarities in our experience. Through this, they demonstrate the falsity of the ideological border between humans and animals, a necessary realization if humans are to overcome the unabashed destruction of the environment that permeates capitalism.
Compare these multiplicitous, slow-moving films that encourage viewers to occupy multispecies and multicultural perspectives to the most popular form of environmental entertainment: David Attenborough’s Planet Earth. Planet Earth, in form, resembles these early ethnographic documentaries. There’s a disembodied narrator, a soundtrack that’s meant to evoke a specific feeling, and a separation between “wildlife” and “human life” that mirrors the separation between “primitive” and “advanced” cultures. This could be seen as colonial ecocinema, the “pro-environmental narratives shot in a conventional Hollywood manner (that is, in a manner that implicitly promotes consumption)” (20), as Macdonald would say. This is emphasized by how the ultimate point of these documentaries is usually to call attention to our conserved lands, and not to call upon an end to the forces that are endangering those conserved lands. Even in its message, it wants nature and humans to be separate. Ecocinema is more than simply environmental cinema, it’s ecological – an important distinction since it recognizes that humans are a part of the system, not outside of it. Films like All That Breathes show us how entangled our cultural and environmental realities are, while films like Swarm Season challenge human exceptionalism, both in service of looking towards a better future, one where humans, animals, and cultures are not viewed as separate, but as simultaneous. Importantly, this is best communicated through the medium of film with durational and multimodal techniques, since it gives more agency to the actors, both human and non-human, within the film, and more agency in interpretation to the viewer.
Bibliography:
All That Breathes. Directed by Shaunak Sen, Submarine Deluxe, 2022.
Behemoth. Directed by Liang, Zhao, Grasshopper Film, 2015.
Forest of Bliss. Directed by Gardener, Robert, Documentary Educational Resources, 1986.
Georgic, Quinn. A Concert in the Rainforest: Sound in Multispecies Ethnography | Platypus. https://blog.castac.org/2022/12/a-concert-in-the-rainforest-sound-in-multispecies-ethnography/. Accessed 20 May 2024.
Ginsburg, Faye. “Decolonizing Documentary On-Screen and Off: Sensory Ethnography and the Aesthetics of Accountability.” Film Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1, Sept. 2018, pp. 39–49. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.1.39.
Histoiré(s) Du cinema. Directed by Godard, Jean Luc, Celluloid, Gaumont, 1980.
Nanook of The North. Directed by Flaherty, Robert, Silent, Pathé Exchange, 1921.
Planet Earth. Directed by Allan, Doug et al., Nature Documentary, BBC One, Present 2006.
Rust, Stephen, et al., editors. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Routledge, 2013.
Swarm Season. Directed by Christman, Sarah, Grasshopper Film, 2019.
Trance and Dance in Bali. Directed by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Short, 1952.
Documentary, Nature (Sorted by Popularity Ascending) https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?genres=documentary&keywords=nature
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