written 05/2023
for Lana Lin’s class Decolonizing Documentary
Full essay here.
Cover photo by ari-duong nguyen
for Lana Lin’s class Decolonizing Documentary
Full essay here.
Cover photo by ari-duong nguyen
This essay surveys the implication of desires within three works of ecocinema: Latipa’s Perpetual Peace, Miko Revereza & Caroina Fusilier’s The Still Side and Laura Huertas Millán’s El Laberito.
Departing from Scott Macdonald’s definition of ecocinema as evoking “the experience of being immersed in the natural world”, this essay examines the construction of the human as a desiring agent within ecological networks. This is done in particular through investigating how the films portray quotidian labor work, anecdotal memories, and manufactured fantasies.
Looming in the background of these depictions of desires is the persistence of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism, in the way people are entangled in the global economy, as well as an omnipresent network of ecologies as resources, as hosts, as companion characters.
Methodologically, this critique is placed in conjunction with one of Nitasha Dhillon’s “principles for decolonial film”: decolonial film does not aim for representation but, instead, the facilitation of “spaces and enunciation as an event” or even “rupture into the field of the sensible”.
. Departing from Scott Macdonald’s definition of ecocinema as evoking “the experience of being immersed in the natural world”, this essay examines the construction of the human as a desiring agent within ecological networks. This is done in particular through investigating how the films portray quotidian labor work, anecdotal memories, and manufactured fantasies.
Looming in the background of these depictions of desires is the persistence of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism, in the way people are entangled in the global economy, as well as an omnipresent network of ecologies as resources, as hosts, as companion characters.
Methodologically, this critique is placed in conjunction with one of Nitasha Dhillon’s “principles for decolonial film”: decolonial film does not aim for representation but, instead, the facilitation of “spaces and enunciation as an event” or even “rupture into the field of the sensible”.
Therefore, this essay posits that within these eco-films, human desires are strategically non-representational, but an animating force in its spaces. These desires were not directly represented, but shaped the meanings of beautiful images and sounds, while simultaneously resist against complacent objectification under imperialism.
On a formal level, this lack of representation is also concretized through different techniques of (in)visibility, challenging the dominant complexes of visuality: while Latipa focused on objects participating in and driving human migration alongside with scenes of life and labor, Millán alluded to her characters mainly through verbal narration and substitute other-bodies from TV, and Revereza & Fusilier channeled human presence in decay and ruins, in fictional accounts of all-too-real idealism and escapism.
In surveying these three films by its commonalities and differences, an alternative landscape for imagining human presence within ecological sites emerges.
On a formal level, this lack of representation is also concretized through different techniques of (in)visibility, challenging the dominant complexes of visuality: while Latipa focused on objects participating in and driving human migration alongside with scenes of life and labor, Millán alluded to her characters mainly through verbal narration and substitute other-bodies from TV, and Revereza & Fusilier channeled human presence in decay and ruins, in fictional accounts of all-too-real idealism and escapism.
In surveying these three films by its commonalities and differences, an alternative landscape for imagining human presence within ecological sites emerges.