Navigating the Anthropocene Through a Cinematic Lens
“Cinema is not only about making people dream. It’s about changing things and making people think.” Nadine Labaki
Cinema has the power to efficiently project an audience in what they see through the mobilisation of various axes of perception. It can act as a mirror, one of ourselves and of our world: it seems it is already acting as a guide to navigate our geological epoch, whether we are conscious of it or not. Here, I want to expose how it is indeed intrinsically shaping our view of the environment, and how a wide range of movies can change our anthropocentric and western understanding.
The objective of this project is to show how this art form can destabilize the Grand Narrative of the Anthropocene by proposing a new one. If cinema is about “making people think”, this guide invites you to reflect on how images, character representation (human or non-human), perspectives and narration shape our perception of the Anthropocene.
My project is divided into four main sections: Filming and Installing, Watching and Interpreting, Hacking through Visual Exposure and lastly Repairing and Refilming. Each is a step towards building an alternative guide to the Anthropocene, though they do interconnect: the structure of this guide is not linear.
You can freely navigate through each section to discover different directors, movies, and genres and how each participates in modeling a new kind of viewer, a new kind of cinematic and environmental look. You’ll be able to see where technical, narrative and generic innovations succeed in dismantling the Grand Narrative of the Anthropocene, and where they paradoxically reaffirm it.
By the end, I hope you’ll have reshaped your understanding of cinema as a tool to understand our epoch in alternative ways. And next time you enter a movie theatre, I hope you’ll think about what kind of spectator of the world the movie pushes you to be.
Enjoy!
This page has paths:
- Navigating The Anthropocene Through A Cinematic Lens Aurore Landman