Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

PhD Exegesis, 2016

Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency is situated within a moving image practice that applies methods aligned with essayist cinema and video installation, as well as historical avant-garde film. The project was initiated in response to subjective experiences of ecological devastation, which induced a personal state of melancholy. It works from the position that another tactic for progressing discourses around anthropogenic climate and geological change might be poetic or affective modes that are often present in the aforementioned moving image practices. The research aims to eschew ‘fact’ based representational modes, for contemplative, expressive and ambiguous registers of visual and aural inquiry. The iterative studio practice is composed of a range of moving image experiments and approaches, including extensive field investigations in locations linked tenuously or specifically to fossil fuel production and consumption. Through research into a variety of cinematic devices, conclusions were reached, which led to the application of creative constraints in the composition of the works. These techniques include, high-speed cinematography, ultra-long or ultra-wide lenses, formal composition and camera movement. The project has been guided by the belief that the sensate realm holds greater political potential for filmmakers than tactics that use didactic means to tell a ‘story’ about the crisis. Thus, the project has explored in some detail the concepts of affect and sensation, through the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze. In addition, it locates theoretical provocations that have contributed to my thinking and making, with the objective to reveal the political potential of grief (Judith Butler) and the ‘politics implicit in aesthetics’ (Jacques Rancière). Rancière’s notion of the invisible becoming visible at a moment of rupture and Butler’s argument configured by Levinasian ethics and her post-9/11 experiences of living in the United States have been important influences. Writers and thinkers whose discourses are focussed on the subject of the ecological crisis situate the subject historically with the help of Felix Guattari’s transversal ‘ecosophy,’ while Timothy Morton’s ‘Ecological Thought’ and Jane Bennett’s ‘vital materialist’ positions are enlisted as methods for reflecting on the ‘uncanny’ experience of living in a time of ecological emergency. From the position of thinking through the poetic and political potential of art, Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency has turned to Robert Smithson, Agnes Denes and Buster Simpson. Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker and Werner Herzog provided insights into essayist modes of cinema through their distinct methods of practice. Chris Welsby’s and Richard Mosse’s films and installations are reviewed in relation to their capacity to extract the invisible and make it seeable through the material. The creative outcomes produced during this research are two video works. The first, Crude, is an essayist film that attempts to see and hear some of the elusive signs of anthropogenic climate change in order to make what is invisible, visible, to evoke contemplations on the subject of ecological crisis, through affective cinematic devices. Crude is accompanied by Flight, a series of filmed passenger jet stream or contrails — forming a database of a particular type of human presence and movement. The work seeks to evoke a space of contemplation, uneasiness, and sadness by engaging with the residual and stratified signs of our collective impact on our environment.

Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series, 2013), 2013

"Moving images move us. They take us on mental and emotional journeys, at the end of which both we and our worlds have changed. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images have moved viewers over the last 120 years in ways that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality always withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage, to YouTube’s expanding audio-visual universe. Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers including Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media." (If you cannot afford a print copy and would like a free PDF, please write to the author at aivakhiv@uvm.edu.)

The Goose, 2015

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2020

Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are fraught with emotion. And since, as neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, cognition is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, our physical environment influences not only how we feel, but also what we think. Importantly, this also holds true when we interact with artistic representations of such environments, as we find them in literature, film, and other media. For this reason, our emotions can take a rollercoaster ride when we read a book or watch a film. Typically, such emotions are evoked as we empathize with characters while also inhabiting emotionally the storyworlds that surround these characters and interact with them in various ways. Given this crucial interlinkage between environment, emotion, and environmental narrative in the widest sense, it is unsurprising that, from its inception, the study of literature and the environment has bee...

The research project and essay film Road to Utopia seeks to film changes to the ecology, in poetic or affective cinematic registers, with the aim to evoke an emotional response in the Viewer. Working from the position that fear-inducing documentary polarizes popular opinion, might a poetic and affective mode of visual and aural inquiry offer another method of communicating anthropogenic climate change? The project is focused on late-capitalist human addiction to fossil fuels, and the infrastructure that supports our ever-escalating dependence on oil. The project was filmed over three months, in 2013, from Northern Canada (Fort MacMurray and Edmonton) to Southern California (Palm Springs and the Salton Sea). The presentation will look at three images from the film and attempt to unpack what is affective and/or poetic about them as individual shots or as core samples of temporal space and altered place.

Acta Academica, 2018

The aim of this paper is to raise questions about how cinema can allow us to rethink our relationship with the environment in the context of what is known today as the Anthropocene. In the discussion, I chart the current debates about the ecological in the humanities, with a particular focus on new materialisms, to argue that cinema can be fruitfully thought of as part of what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) calls the "arts of noticing". I then turn to a consideration of the potential influx of affect theories on ecocriticism and film studies, before sketching out possible approaches to studying film from an affective, new materialist and postanthropocentric perspective. These approaches might have wider implications for rhetorical perspectives on cinema, especially for those investigating emotional appeals.

2021