Cinema and Environment 2: Ways of Seeing beyond the Anthropocene

“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.