Winnie L.M. Lee, September 2018 Issue<\/p>\n
Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene<\/em>(Oxford University Press, 2018), 272pp.<\/p>\n \u201cConsider these and many other major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term \u2018anthropocene\u2019 for the current geological epoch. The impacts of current human activities will continue over long periods.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2013 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Debates on climate change and environmental sustainability, and critiques of human destruction of nature focus on the pressing and imminent. As many scholars have noted, our understanding of these issues can be informed by analysing the correlations between ideas and representations; facts and fiction; texts and contexts. Jennifer Fay\u2019s Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of Anthropocene<\/em> is such an analysis: it transcends time, space, and cultural contexts to unveil the interconnectedness of the natural and cultural. Fay applies an ecocritical perspective to the understanding of film \u2013 its production process, ideological input, and sociohistorical circumstances. Working with examples of feature films, documentaries, and digital photography, Fay succeeds in illuminating the intricate connection between filmmaking and the Anthropocene. More importantly, Fay successfully charts the evolution of American film genres within the contextual framework of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n With reference to Bill McKibben\u2019s concept of \u201cEaarth<\/em>\u201d (a planet that uncannily appears to be our home but with a difference), Fay argues that the cinema creates a similarly supernatural experience. As a technological product of the Anthropocene, cinema illustrates the way an \u201cunnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful\u2026 is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film.\u201d (4) In a broader sense, in order to come to terms with the Anthropocene, cinema \u201cenables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design\u201d (4).<\/p>\n In formulating her argument on the intricate relationship between filmmaking and the Anthropocene, Fay creates an assemblage of theories of film scholars such as Siegfried Kracauer, Miriam Hansen, and Vivian Sobchack; philosophical meditations of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Sloterdijk; and ecocritical insights of literary critics such as Rob Nixon. In particular, the presence of Siegfried Kracauer is the most prominent in Fay\u2019s framework. Fay maintains that \u201cWhat Kracauer helps us to fathom is that cinema mirrors the practice of human worlding, inclusive of its natural environment and thus, in a sense, he theorises a world concept through a production design that is unique to cinema\u201d (7). By linking cinema\u2019s materiality more closely with the formulation of socio-cultural imaginaries (world-making), Inhospitable <\/em>suggests a new perspective on the relationship between cinema and ecocriticism. Against this rich theoretical backdrop, Inhospitable World <\/em>broadens the scope of film criticism to include reflections on the materiality of cinema and the carbon footprint of filmmaking. Fay finds and demonstrates persuasive parallels between film production and the role and responsibility of human impact in the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n The discussion also goes beyond textual analysis of representation and highlights the underlying connections between history, politics, and our vision of the world. The notion of \u201chospitability,\u201d referenced in the title, is crucial. The world has become an inhospitable place; it has not always been so. Different readings of hospitality provide the organising principle for Fay\u2019s chapters. \u00a0If we need to learn how to live and die in an unpredictable and inhospitable world, the cinema has something to teach us about how and why we got here and how we envision our unthinkable future. \u201cHospitality\u201d echoes the Enlightenment ideal which assumed the hospitality of the world and humans\u2019 liberation from nature. \u201cThe Anthropocene means that the subject, the home, and the planet at the heart of hospitality (and the Enlightenment subject it once placed at its center) are already past\u201d (15). Many of Fay\u2019s examples illuminate inhospitable conditions such as homelessness, dispossession, estrangement, alienation, and destruction. Fay traces the etymological roots of \u201chospitality\u201d to show its connections with the \u201ceco\u201d of \u201ceco-cinema.\u201d \u201cEco\u201d originated from \u201coikos<\/em>,\u201d the word for home or dwelling. In each chapter, Fay focuses on specific filming locations \u201cin which earth and world, hospitality and its negation are in acute and destructive tension, places that bring to the fore cinema\u2019s world-making powers and its denatured, unhomely optics\u201d (16).<\/p>\n In Part I, Fay looks at American filming locations that reveal the exploitation of natural resources that enabled America\u2019s rise to become the world\u2019s greatest economic and military power. In films such as Buster Keaton\u2019s slapstick comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr<\/em>. (1928), acute weather conditions are simulated for the sake of popular entertainment. For Fay, these portrayals of extreme weather reflect an \u201cinterwar awareness that \u2018natural\u2019 disasters were often attributable to industry and war, that \u2018nature\u2019 was already a product of \u2018culture\u2019 (26). Such films foreground the human attempt to control and manipulate the environment and thus make our world even more inhospitable. Using the example of Keaton and others, Fay locates the beginning of the acceleration of environmental destruction at a much earlier point in modern history and popular memory.<\/p>\n Nevada\u2019s atomic testing site serves as yet another example of human egotism and drive to \u201cproduce predictability and repeatability against (and with the effect of effacing) the unpredictability of nuclear materials and the consequences of the planetary radioactive fallout\u201d (17). Fay argues that these atomic films transform \u201cexplosions in to aesthetic experiences, turns the chaos of fallout into comprehensible narratives, and train viewers to survive or endure the culture of nuclearism\u201d (17). As opposed to films that show extreme weather, the atomic bomb films anaesthetise the audience to the long-term and unpredictable effects of nuclear arms. This distracts them from the realisation that its devastation is the consequence of deliberate human choices. Proceeding from the Cold War imagination of nuclear apocalypse, Fay turns her attention to film noir<\/em> to further critique the postwar urban plight. Fay maintains that noir<\/em>is a way of encouraging people to submissively accept their fate, as most of the characters live at the edge of poverty, with no permanent residence, uprooted as the result of consumer capitalism. The world is becoming inhospitable given humans\u2019 increasing urge to control it. \u201cShelterlessness is the new global condition either intellectually, as in the experience of exile, or materially, as in the fate of most of the world\u2019s impoverished citizens\u201d (109).<\/p>\n Part II titled \u201c\u2026 at the End of the World\u201d contains two chapters dealing with two extreme filming locations \u2013 Three Gorges Dam in China and Antarctica \u2013 that expose the influence of human action on nature. Comparing Jia Zhangke\u2019s film Still Life <\/em>(2006) to Liu Xiaodong\u2019s oil paintings and Yang Yi\u2019s digital photographs, Fay presents a shared vision of the manipulation of nature and the displacement of villagers during the creation of the Three Gorges Dam. Fay references to Rob Nixon\u2019s view of the mega-dam as a kind of \u201cnational performance art\u201d (133). \u00a0For Nixon, the mega-dam instantiates the \u201cmonumentality of national modernity\u201d and \u201ca country\u2019s power to alter the world and move its people\u201d (133), rather than pursuing the betterment of human lives. Fay observes that the world has become increasingly inhospitable now that development worsens, rather than improves life and draws attention to the emergence of the \u201cdevelopmental refugee\u201d as a consequence of massive construction projects. Together with Liu Xiadong\u2019s oil paintings Hotbed <\/em>(2005) and Three Gorges Displaced Population <\/em>(2003) and Yang Yi\u2019s Uprooted <\/em>(2007-2008) photographs, Still Life<\/em> shows homes completely destroyed. The \u201cstillness\u201d of the Chinese people\u2019s lives are reflected in the style of each of the three artists, who position their subjects against the backdrop of reckless development. Describing Yang\u2019s digital photographs, which feature residents posed in front of deserted ruins and devastated \u201crubblescapes,\u201d Fay notes that \u201cYang takes flexibility and finitude to an extreme fantasy of human extinction represented as Anthropocene adaptability \u2013 digital anagenesis. If these are human subjects, they have already learned to be at home in a submerged world of ruination with no intent on (or capacity for) rebuilding what is gone\u2026 Without a home to return to, Yang invites us to take up residence in the image, to find refuge in the digital ruins\u201d (159). Once again, Fay draws attention to how art can reveal the fatalism that accompanies overdevelopment in today\u2019s Anthropocene.<\/p>\n In the final chapter, Fay returns to Siegfried Kracauer\u2019s theories on film and photography to explore the ways in which the way the Antarctic provides an alternative and denaturalised history of the present. Kracauer\u2019s ideas, particularly in his later writings, are applied to early films about Antarctic exploration, highlighting \u201ccinema\u2019s relationship to brute and brutal physical reality and, more pointedly, to a vanishing natural history that marks the experience of living in the time and place of catastrophe\u201d (167). By defamiliarising the world, technologies such as cinema and photography enable viewers to experience life as outsiders. Fay argues that \u201cKracauer helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us\u201d (20).<\/p>\n Hannah Arendt\u2019s meditation on the theoretical\/political differentiation between Earth and world also reinforces Fay\u2019s argument. According to Arendt, the world is \u201crelated to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together\u201d (10). Cinema has taught us how to understand the way our world is being created by us. It also suggests the paths for us to take in order to make the world hospitable again. Jennifer Fay\u2019s work compels us to reflect on the massive environmental destruction in the age of Anthropocene and to strive to create rituals of hospitality.<\/p>\n
\n