Hyperstition Trailer Who? RSS Feed. Video Audio. So this is the Anthropocene : An historical time, perhaps even a geological time, in which what we think of as separate entities, the human and the natural, find their fates entwined. What was once a separate nature or environment is no in place to ground us as us. Not only is God dead, so too is ecology, that pantheistic place God went into hiding.
The biosphere is no longer a self-correcting, homeostatic deity. The later civilizations, said Valery, know they are mortal. This last civilization know the Earth is mortal too. Nobody really wants to know that the world we inherited, the world of our ancestors, is already something unreal. People shrug it off, change the subject. Cinema knows it. Maybe cinema is not about desire at all, or even anxiety. Maybe it is about seduction, of turning us aside from unacknowledged feelings, and slipping us into worlds of objects and relations that displace those feelings onto something else.
Thus: perhaps all cinema is now about the Anthropocene. Its all about a sense that this is not a Never Ending Story. There is already a cottage industry starting up which reads cinema as cinema about the Anthropocene. Before joining that little workshop, I want to add another frame. Perhaps cinema is not just about the Anthropocene, but of it.
Cinema is made of the same stuff as the rest of this civilization. It is part of the very thing that can and will be made into something else. Unlike architecture, what is built for it is temporary. Its sets and props and vehicles are made to appear rather than to be. Sometimes there is a veritable potlatch of all these beautifully but temporarily made things staged for the film itself. Cars crash, towers explode in fireballs. Cinema is an allegory for the fiery ends of the world.
There are archeological ruins of ancient cities in the Nevada desert. Cinema is also a prodigious consumer of energy. In New York, and I imagine also in Toronto, you can often see the mobile generators parked on the street to make the 3-phase power to run the show. Cinema, like pretty much everything else, is congealed fossil fuel. The deep time of the earth is quite literally strip-mined to make the quick-time movies of our era. Not to mention the trash-heaps where all our devices end up.
