Planetary history, the natural contract, encountering earthly pasts
This is the first of four chapters of film analysis which constitute the remainder of the book. It proceeds by: outlining the type of time-image evident in the films analysed (the chosen two being key examples from a broader trend); considering the type of transnational history which they together illuminate if read distantly; and drawing out the type of contract that is evident in the encounter with the past on offer. Then, the films in question are analysed to illustrate the argument textually. This same structure remains across Chapters 3–6.
In this instance, the two films indicative of a broader transnational trend are Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands, 2010) and Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light (Chile/Spain/France/Germany/USA, 2010). Both films are marked by the time-image which Deleuze describes as the any-space-whatever. They indicate the qualities and powers of expression of the landscape as though it were communicating on behalf of the Earth – enunciating the memory of the Universe, stored by the Earth – rather like a human face might when speaking of its recollections. These temporal landscapes provide entrances into the Earth’s 4.54-billion-year (Uncle Boonmee) and Universe’s 13.7-billion-year (Nostalgia for the Light) histories. In doing so they address how this nonhuman history is intertwined with that of human history. These any-space-whatevers illuminate planetary history, then, but emphasise in so doing the intertwined human/nonhuman nature of this past in the Anthropocene. Thus this transnational history emerges from humans or former humans who are depicted as integral to their environment. Situated within the landscape, they temporarily become the mouthpiece for the Earth (or Universe) as gigantic archive of matter in which is stored away nature’s memories. The films thus provide the viewer with encounters with the intertwined past of the Earth (in the Universe) and humanity, otherwise obscured by colonial modernity’s exploitation of nature. They offer a chance to consider the need for (after Michel Serres) a natural contract.
In Uncle Boonmee, which I interpret as an ecocritical story, it is through darkness that we are invited to understand this archival property of the Earth and the intertwining nonhuman and human memories it stores away. In Nostalgia for the Light, conversely, it is through light. In both, any-space-whatevers construct ‘faceified’ (visagé ifié e) (Deleuze 1983, 90) landscapes – dark and light respectively – which provide ecological encounters with the intertwined nature of human and nonhuman history. In these films, then, the memory of the Earth greets us from the landscape. We do not learn about the Earth’s or the Universe’s history per se (see the Introduction), but rather, we encounter the awareness that colonial modernity denies coevalness to all nonhuman pasts, creating a one-sided history of the Anthropocene. This is a hesitation-inducing revelation with regard to what we may otherwise think we know of our own place in world history.
Time-images: Planetary pasts
There is a global trend for films which explore the intertwined human and nonhuman pasts of planetary history via affective landscapes. This includes the Norwegian monster movie Trolljegeren/Troll Hunter (Norway, 2010), the Australian thriller The Hunter (Australia, 2011), the independent US film Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA, 2012), the Chilean postcolonial shamanistic slasher movie Gritos del Bosque/Whispers of the Forest (USA/Chile, 2014), amongst others (Martin-Jones 2016). In each case, landscapes address the viewer, often via the temporary mouthpiece of an endangered or extinct species, a shaman, mythological creature, spirit, ghost, or other being – whether human, part human, nonhuman, or former humans. Such landscapes function as, following Deleuze’s taxonomy, any-space-whatevers, affective spaces which provide entrances to time. The characteristic time-image, then, is the affection-image as any-space-whatever.
Affection-images function slightly differently in movement- and time-images. As noted in Chapter 1, in Cinema 1 (1983), Deleuze outlines the sensory-motor logic of the movement-image, charting the progression from perception-image (what is perceived), to affection-image (how what is perceived produces affects) and action-image (the consequences of these affects). Affection-images express powers or qualities. They express feelings in their as-yet non-actualised form, prior to the moment when ‘power becomes action or passion, affect becomes sensation, sentiment, emotion or even impulse. [… ] These are qualities or powers considered for themselves, without reference to anything else, independently of any question of their actualization’ (1983, 100). The affection-image is thus an image which illustrates possibility, the potential of the virtual (whether of the unthought, the unfelt, the untimely), ‘potentiality considered for itself as expressed’ (101). Affection-images inhabit the pause between perception and action within which hesitation can occur.
The affection-image, epitomised by the close-up of the face (see Chapter 4), also includes images which are faceified. Faceification occurs when objects or places take on the quality (a reflective surface with the ability to marshal several features to express a single affect) or power (the micro-movements of different features that shift expression from one quality to another) of the face. A faceified image, including any-space-whatevers, can be defined as such when ‘it looks at us [… ] even if it does not resemble a face’ (Deleuze 1983, 90). A landscape, then, can be faceified.
In the movement-image, the any-space-whatever grants limited access to the virtual realm of duration which subsists with the actual world we perceive (after Henri Bergson, see Chapter 2). The close-up of the face, for example, may reveal a subjective flashback, or ‘recollection-image’. However, this conventional device is clearly signalled, and does not break the movement-image’s linear sensory-motor continuum. Instead, it only looks to posit a causal explanation for the present from the past by actualising a linear pathway through time, one that clearly connects past (cause) to present (effect) (1985, 46). It is when affection-images become abstracted or deconnected from spatial-temporal coordinates – as they do in the time-image – that they become entities in their own right (Deleuze 1983, 98). It is now that spaces can become any-space-whatever, with the (virtual) potential for conjunction with any other space (Deleuze 1983, 106).
When Deleuze discusses his categories of time-images, the any-space-whatever re-emerges as an idea identifying emptied spaces, no longer connecting up what came before and after (as per a sensory-motor logic or a linear sense of temporality as in the movement-image), but as ‘an amorphous set which has eliminated that which happened and acted in it. It is an extinction or a disappearing. [… ] It no longer has co-ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of things of milieu which actualise them (have actualised them or will actualise them, or neither the one nor the other – it hardly matters)’ (Deleuze 1983, 123). In the time-image, the ‘virtual conjunction’ between any-space-whatevers enables the viewer to ‘enter a “system of emotions” which is much more subtle and differentiated, less easy to identify, capable of inducing non-human affects’ (113).
Prior to the Cinema books, Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘faciality’, in a manner which helps unlock Deleuze’s discussion of faceified landscapes in film. They argue that the face in human beings is the ‘inhuman’, and as such human beings must look to ‘escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible [… ] by quite spiritual and special becoming-animals, by strange becomings that [… ] make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face’ (1980, 171). Deleuze and Guattari argue for such a decomposition of the face, due to its association with the iconic figure of Christ in the development of the category of ‘the White Man’ (182), a representative of what we might consider (bearing in mind the influence of Christianity on colonial modernity) the coloniality of power1 (see further in the Conclusion).
The faceified any-space-whatever of the time-image, then, would imply that the viewer is encountering an other in this affection-image (consistent with the idea of the face, in close-up, as paradigmatic of the affection-image), or rather, they are engaging in a mutually imbricating deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation with the image (1980, 174). Indeed, existing critiques indicate how, via any-space-whatevers, time-image films offer an encounter with a becoming-animal, or becoming-imperceptible, a chance to deterritorialise away from the face (e.g. Jeong 2013, 144–183; see further below). Yet, what we find in the two films analysed is not quite this. The material conditions explored in these landscapes, especially the intertwined human and nonhuman histories which are archived in them, render such an idea of becoming-imperceptible more akin to a forcibly violent disappearance. After all, in both films the recent histories of place include those of the Cold War, whose disappeared victims haunt the landscapes we encounter. This virtual presence is, by turns, equated with the extinction of various species (including, ultimately, humanity) attendant on the Anthropocene since 1492.
Instead, then, a temporary (anthropomorphising) reterritorialisation of the landscape into a face is undertaken by the films, to stave off any sense that becoming-imperceptible may mean an eradication of endangered histories (this is the opposite of the merging with otherness of Deleuze/Deleuze and Guattari’s position). What is identified in these time-images, rather, is another form of faceified landscape altogether. It cannot be adequately explained by a Levinasian approach (it is not a face opening onto infinity), nor a Deleuzian/Guattarian one (it is not a face on a line of flight towards a becoming-imperceptible), but it can by a Dusselian one (it is the face of the Earth, retelling the memories of those excluded by colonial modernity during its many phases – as is emphasised by the equation of Cold War political disappearances with species extinctions due to the Anthropocene).
I thus consider the films in question – as I have argued elsewhere of other contemporary time-image films (Martin-Jones 2006; 2011) – to capture the moment in which the virtual is becoming-actual. I analyse how their faceified landscapes briefly reterritorialize into a humanoid face, to provide a mouthpiece through which the Earth can speak of the need for a natural contract which can regulate (the historical condition of) human/nonhuman interaction in the Anthropocene. In contrast to Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s desire to avoid anthropocentrism, I will draw on Steven Shaviro’s work to argue that these films deliberately anthropomorphise nature to this effect.
With this anthropomorphising in mind, what the viewer encounters in a faceified any-space-whatever landscape is an expression of the pure powers and qualities of world memory. These any-space-whatevers are shown to populate the surface of the planet, and through them we can encounter the archived memories of the history of the planet. The reterritorialised faces, then, are nonhuman centres of indetermination (as a Bergsonian/Deleuzian understanding of time suggests humans are, cutting out their experience of the world as images, making linear sense of the passing of time through perception, affection, and action-images), but adrift in the virtual whole of time which forever threatens to disrupt this actualised progression via the opening offered by the affection-image. The Earth, then, becomes the contingent centre of nonhuman indetermination which, momentarily, has the potential to speak to us: it temporarily becomes-actual to give voice to the 4.54-billion-year planetary history of the Earth (and indeed, its place within the 13.7-billion-year-old Universe (Marshak 2015, 12–35)), in relation to the human/nonhuman intertwining of history in the Anthropocene.2
Transnational history: Planetary – intertwined human/nonhuman
The Anthropocene debate offers various possible ways of identifying the origin of this epoch in geological records (see Chapter 1). It is concerned, then, with how the Earth, as material archive, provides evidence of the planet’s nonhuman/human past. This is perhaps unsurprising. Jussi Parikka, drawing on John Durham Peters’ work, notes how in the Nineteenth Century scientific advances in astronomy, geology and evolutionary theory led to the Earth being considered ‘a sort of a recording device’, in which the planet’s history within the Universe was stored (2014, 2). As Durham Peters has it, in terms which evoke Deleuze’s description of the any-space-whatever as ‘an extinction’ or ‘disappearing’ devoid of the co-ordinates of linear history: ‘For Darwin and Lyell, the Earth is a recording medium – a profoundly fallible one. At best it inscribes ruins, enigmas, and hieroglyphics; at worst, blank sketches of oblivion’ (2003, 402). Such a view can inform analysis of filmic depictions of the Earth as storage device, in their engagement with the planet’s (by definition) transnational history.
This engagement takes place, in the films analysed, via the landscape. As noted in the Introduction, my approach to a world of cinemas shares much common ground with that of Lú cia Nagib. However, there are also differences, and they illuminate how I uncover this particular transnational (planetary) history on film via any-space-whatever landscapes. Nagib draws on Alain Badiou to provide a unique take on ethical filmmaking, studying ‘filmmakers who use the film medium [… ] to produce as well as reproduce reality’ (2011, 8). Following Badiou’s inclination towards fidelity or faithfulness to the event, Nagib seeks to explain how certain films are able, due to the filmmakers remaining faithful to ‘the truth of the profilmic event’ (12), to, literally, make ‘history’ in the production of an ‘ethical reality’ (15). Discussing what she calls the ‘end of the other’ in cinema (19–73), Nagib identifies certain shared characteristics in films from different contexts, in particular exploring how casts and crews ‘drive to merge with the phenomenological real’ (10). Here, Nagib argues that lengthy scenes of running – in Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (France, 1959), Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol/God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun (Brazil, 1964), Yaaba (Burkina Faso/Switzerland/France, 1989), and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Canada, 2001) – are ‘related to recognizing, experiencing, demarcating and taking possession of a territory, and, in so doing, defining a people and its culture’ (19). A commitment to realism when filming the physically demanding event places ‘a people and its culture’ at the centre of the film and its story and thus refuses the position of ‘otherness’ for cultures often marginalised cinematically. For Nagib, what is at stake in the foregrounding of the ‘actor’s bodily existence as it slowly migrates from fact to fiction’ (29) is the placing of bodies at the centre of the event being filmed. This is important in films from postcolonial or neocolonial contexts, where the refusal by filmmakers to see the self as an exotic object is a politically charged geopolitical issue (32). There is a strong sense in Nagib’s argument, then, of a (re)connection of people with their histories, which have been recorded in the landscape.
Yet, if we shift the focus from the running figure in the landscape to the very landscape against which their journey is figured, then suddenly things seem different. The way in which these landscapes function as repositories of human memories becomes the subject of an ethical encounter, this time one on the part of the viewer. As a result, a different grouping of films also suggests itself from amidst a world of cinemas. We might consider Huang tu di/Yellow Earth (China, 1985), Yeelen/Brightness (Mali/Burkina Faso/France/West Germany/Japan, 1987), Seopyeonje/Sopyonje (South Korea, 1993), Ten Canoes (Australia, 2006), Seachd: The Innaccessible Pinnacle (UK, 2007), La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (Spain/Peru, 2009), amongst others. In this grouping, the running figure is not always present, but we always find the landscape alive with the memories that it stores. For example, in Yellow Earth, a Chinese soldier is sent to a remote rural area in Shaanxi province, to collect folk songs, for repackaging as communist rallying anthems. As he surveys the landscape he hears singing, but there is no discernible human source for the sound. It is, literally, as though the landscape were singing.
Again, the opening of Ten Canoes depicts the Australian outback from an aerial perspective whilst the voiceover explains that: ‘I am going to tell you a story. It’s not your story, it’s my story’ Thus, before the story descends to the level of humans walking the land, the opening suggests that the tale is told by the very landscape itself. The opening of this film, especially, is less about what happened when (at least in any linear sense of history), than what happened where. The union between a story (or song) and the landscape, emphasising its role in materialising memory, is a feature of oral culture in which – as in Ten Canoes – stories store knowledge of how landscape can maintain life (for instance, by recording the places where the best hunting or fishing can be found during different seasons). This suggests the spatial, rather than temporal, understanding of history of some indigenous cultures, providing a view of humanity amidst nature (Deloria 1972, 81–89). Various African films, including Cissé ’s Brightness have also been considered in relation to oral storytelling traditions (Ukadike 1994, 254–262; Nagib 2011, 53–54).
Approached from a Dusselian perspective, this engagement with the storing of the past in place, akin to that of oral cultures, indicates that place, understood as a temporal memory bank, retains the occluded histories of colonial modernity. Distinct from Nagib’s view that these are films in which a people ‘are sovereign over their land before time’ (42), this analysis suggests instead that the interaction between humans and land is determined by an ethics of reciprocity that intertwines humans and cosmos (as in indigenous cultures in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans (Maffie 2013, 11; see the Introduction)), if not that the very land may be sovereign over the people whose pasts it stores.
Ultimately the films explored in this chapter go further, offering an encounter with the memory of the Earth, or Universe, as archive or recording device. Here, landscape is not, or not solely, the repository of orally recorded pre-modern pasts. Rather, it is the archive of nonhuman history, which landscapes give voice to directly, using humans or former humans (in the broader trend we also find animals, spirits, shaman, or mythological creatures) as its mouthpiece. Thus the transnational history evident here is that of the intertwining of humanity and nature, as has become more apparent in consideration of the impact of the Anthropocene (however we determine its origin) on the planet.
Encountering the Earth: The natural contract
This encounter with the Earth brings us to the first of the four contracts discussed in the remaining chapters: the natural contract. Serres argues that humanity is at war with nature. ‘We so-called developed nations are no longer fighting among ourselves; together we are all turning against the world’ (1992, 32). In contrast to the idea of the social contract through which we can understand how humans organise society, humanity can similarly be understood to lack, or deny, a natural contract with the Earth. Indeed, Serres notes that the origins of humanity’s conflict with nature lie in the same Cartesian rationale critiqued by Dussel for propelling several centuries of colonial modernity (32). In such a state of affairs, Serres argues, a natural contract between humanity as a species (rather than a collection of nations) and the Earth, is of the same necessity as a social contract (1992, 15; 2008, 83).
To be sure we don’t know the world’s language, or rather we know only the various animistic, religious, or mathematical versions of it. When physics was invented, philosophers went around saying that nature was hidden under the code of algebra’s numbers and letters: that word code came from law. In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract.
(1992, 39)
Although there is much that is debateable in Serres’ argument, not least whether humanity attacks nature or rearranges it for profit (as Jason W. Moore argues, see Chapter 1),3 in the films discussed in this chapter an ethical encounter is provided with the Earth, illustrative of the link between human and ecological histories now found in works addressing planetary history (e.g. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), see the Introduction). The encounter provided is suggestive of the need to acknowledge the tacit, structuring nature of an absent natural contract, allowing the devastation humanity wreaks on the planet. For this reason, in standout moments, the world memory archived in the landscape is temporarily given a face and voice in the any-space-whatever, as, for Serres, ‘the Earth speaks to us’ (1992, 39).
Amongst the rapidly growing field of ecocinema criticism, although there have been very few attempts to engage with Serres’ ideas (Barker 2012), nevertheless much analysis already considers how humanity is integrally connected to nature, or able to communicate with nature. My work aligns with these predecessors. For example, Sean Cubitt analyses the complex imaginings of ecological themes and environmental politics in film and television, placing such issues in relation to the human (economic, industrial, technological) aspects of the earth as ecological system. Exploring the mediation between humanity and nature, our biopolitical existence within the world’s eco-system, Cubitt states:
Nature communicates with us as surely as we do with it, but to do so it must mediate. Nature cannot tell us the idea behind a volcano in any way other than through a volcano. In this case it is not so much nature, nor even the volcano that speaks, but the same physical processes that work in the human body and its sensorium.
(2005, 134)
It is this message, as much as this process, which the films in question visualise – that nature requires a conduit through which to mediate its history, its memories, its request for a contract.
With regard to how such encounters might be offered by films, most useful is the position of Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, who argue that ‘film screens nonhuman nature as both revelation and concealment’ (2013, 2). Thus,
reading films with an ecological eye partly means learning to see beyond the confines of narrative and story, whose natural tendency, as it were, is to suppress the nonhuman elements by relegating them to the role of setting, background or prop. At the same time, it means no longer viewing landscape – itself already a laden human construction – as passive or mute.
(8)
In determining our ability to view films with an ‘ecological eye’, ecocinema criticism is engaged with the same questions which concern recent developments in philosophy, such as speculative realism and object oriented ontology. These new trends attempt to understand how humanity might conceive of the world without adhering to the so-called ‘correlationism’ of Western philosophy since Descartes (and most especially since Kant), which posits that the only way humanity can know the world is imperfectly, through its human experience of it (the correlation between thinking and being (Meillassoux 2006, 5)). A speculative approach is attempted instead, to understand what the outside world might be thinking or feeling, independent of a human filter.4 Ecocinema criticism and speculative realism, then, indicate the rejuvenation of ways of understanding the existence of ‘mind in matter’ (Skrbina 2007, 2) found in the Western philosophical tradition of panpsychism, or the animist traditions from which panpsychism attempts to distance itself (19). All such thinking serves to focus our attention on the existence of ‘mind in nature’ (223) which is deliberately anthropomorphised in the films under discussion.
Hence, I am not claiming that the Earth actually attempts to communicate with humanity. This would seem unlikely. Even if it did, how could we possibly understand what was being said? As Tom Sparrow (2013) observes of the idea that Levinas’s concept of visage might be applied to ‘the face of nature’, whilst the otherness or the infinity of the face in Levinas’s visage may evoke the similarly unknowable character of nature, nevertheless amidst the interconnectedness of everything which ecological thought emphasises ‘there is no adequate perspective on the environment that would enable us to look it in the face. The environment faces us from every angle; it is everywhere we look, and everywhere we don’t’ (Sparrow 2013, 81). There can be no doubting, then, that when faceified landscapes appear in films, there is a filter mediating between humans and nature: namely, humans have made these films, have anthropomorphised nature.
Indeed, anthropomorphism can be a useful feature for decentring too humanist a worldview. As Steven Shaviro notes, a ‘certain cautious anthropomorphism is necessary in order to avoid anthropocentrism. I attribute feelings to stones in order to get away from the pernicious dualism that would insist that human beings alone (or at most, human beings together with some animals), have feelings, whilst everything else does not’ (2014, 61). He continues: ‘the accusation of anthropomorphism rests on the prior assumption that thought, value and experience are essentially, or exclusively, human to begin with’ (90).5 John Mullarkey even argues that an ‘absolute anthropomorphism’ might enable humans to realise their parity with animals, and vice versa (2013, 24).6 The anthropomorphism of the films discussed here, then, considers a message sent to the species that is destroying the environment (a call to remember the intertwining of nature and humanity in the Anthropocene, a call for a natural contract), or rather, it is as some filmmakers imagine the Earth might look were it to try to send such a message to humanity.
The transnational history of human and nonhuman entanglement in planetary history (in particular during the Anthropocene), and the encounter with nature depicted as though it were looking for a natural contract, is clearly by human design. Filmmakers have anthropomorphised the Earth, attributing communicative powers or qualities to its nonhuman representatives via faceified landscapes. Yet, this does not detract from the importance of these films asking humanity to understand the Earth’s ability to record the past, to consider the need for a natural contract. In a situation where human and nonhuman histories intertwine, these films suggest that it is possible to deny the denial of coevalness by relativising the centrality of human history amidst planetary (or Universe) history.
If this sounds fanciful, then consider again Timothy Morton on ‘hyperobjects’, phenomena like global warming which require of us ‘thinking on a planetary scale’ (2013, 119) (see the Introduction). As Morton observes: ‘The reality is that hyperobjects were already here, and slowly but surely we understood what they were already saying. They contacted us’ (201). This is the reason for the anthropomorphisation we see on screen, the attempt to visualise what it means, for humanity, to have such a revelation with respect to its own contemporary existence within the Anthropocene.
The encounters staged in these films, then, are not best understood as a speculation on what the world is like beyond or outside humanity, as this is (precisely as is the case with other histories, or ‘lost pasts’ more generally) something we can never attain. Rather, they offer a critique of humanity’s ignorance of its own place in the world by providing a glimpse of nature’s precarious relationship to an exclusive colonial modernity. For Shaviro, after Thomas Nagel, ‘Likeness-in-human terms, if it is projected imaginatively enough, may work to dislocate us from the correlationist position of understanding [… ] other entities only in terms of their resemblance, and relationship, to ourselves. But it can never actually attain the inner being of these other entities’ (2014, 91). Thus the films meditate on how, as Serres observes, humanity might learn ‘the world’s language’, and resituate itself as one animal amongst many (one history amongst many) in the context of the Anthropocene (Serres 1992, 39).
In the analysis which follows, then, I consider how any-space-whatevers speak to us of the world’s memories, of transnational history (a planetary past reaching back long before nations and, indeed, humans) which has relatively recently entwined with humanity. The Earth is depicted asking for a natural contract (via temporary apertures which it opens in the landscape through which to speak of its memories via human/former human mouthpieces), to save it from the ravages of colonial modernity. The encounters the any-space-whatevers offer with world memory, then, necessitate the reconsideration of the centrality of our own (understanding of) history and, indeed, of the exclusionary relationship between colonial modernity and nature.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Uncle Boonmee begins with one of the most captivating images in cinema history. The initial scene follows a water buffalo escaping from its human owners, being recaptured, and led out of shot. The camera lingers on the seemingly empty jungle at dusk. A cut then reveals, framed in the trees, a humanoid silhouette: dark black against the foliage, with two burning red eyes.
Or, is this what the viewer sees initially? Having seen the entire film, the viewer knows in retrospect that this is a (once human) monkey-spirit. Yet it is hard to recapture the moment of surprise and cognition during which the image was first processed. Perhaps one does immediately see a humanoid shape. Or perhaps one sees a patch of shadow in the trees, with eyes, which is then reconstituted as a humanoid shape. Or, just maybe the viewer’s first expression may be of a pair of eyes looking out at them from the jungle itself. Uncle Boonmee, then, confronts us with a landscape that produces nonhuman creatures who will speak to us of the entwinement of humanity within the Earth’s longer nonhuman history, providing a glimpse of the Earth as virtual centre of indetermination amongst loosely connected images (see Figure 3.1).
FIGURE 3.1 Encountering earthly pasts, in Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010).
Uncle Boonmee has an episodic narrative, many of the scenes being interspersed with, or internally fragmented by, a prolonged shot of the countryside. The film begins with a slow-paced introduction to the life of Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar). He is suffering from kidney disease and receives medical attention from a Laotian immigrant in his employ, Jaai (Samud Kugasang). Boonmee is visited by Auntie Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) and Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) from Bangkok. That night, at dinner, the ghost of Boonmee’s wife, Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk) (also Jen’s older sister), materialises slowly before them. They are then joined by monkey-spirit Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), the human son of Boonmee and Huay, who disappeared years previously. Boonsong describes his discovery of monkey-spirits living in the jungle through the lens of a camera, his decision to join them, and his transformation after mating with one of them.
The episodes that follow include: a scene at Boonmee’s tamarind farm during which he wonders whether his health is suffering due to karma brought on by killing too many communists during the war and too many bugs on his farm; a scene set in an unspecified moment in the past concerning a lonely princess (Wallapa Mongkolprasert) who mates with a talking catfish (again, entwining humanity with another species); Boonmee in the present, being nursed by the ghost of Huay; a womb-like cave where Boonmee unexpectedly encounters Boonsong and other monkey-spirits (Boonmee states that he was born in that cave in a previous life he does not recall, but is not aware whether it was as a ‘human or an animal, a woman, or a man’); a photo montage accompanying Boonmee’s recounting of a recent dream of a ‘future city’ where ‘past people’, if caught, are made to disappear through the shining of a light on them until their past lives have been played out on a screen behind them (as though the eradication of their histories erases their existence as other, in a scene conflating both those who disappeared into the forest to avoid state violence during the Cold War7 with all the species other than humanity who are now disappearing in the forest – the captive is a man in a gorilla suit, evocative of monkey-spirit Boonsong – due to the cultivation of the land by Uncle Boonmee and others); Boonmee’s Buddhist funeral, after which Jen, Tong and Roong (Kanokporn Tongaram) meet in a hotel room where, as they prepare to go out for food, they leave behind alternate (seemingly temporally virtual) versions of themselves, sitting watching television.
Weerasethakul has variously discussed the importance of the village of Nabua to the film’s evocation of memories of the Cold War stored in place (Weerasethakul 2009; J. H. Kim 2011). Indeed, in existing works on this much-analysed film, various scholars have explored this link: by considering the film to meditate on the history of the region (including its staging of the repression of communism from the 1960s to the 1980s) via ‘dream, time travel, reincarnation and transformation’ (Chung 2012, 217–218); as ingeniously melding ‘a slice of Thai history with that of the fictive life of Uncle Boonmee’, in which the animals and spirits dwelling in the forest are seen as obliquely referencing the victims of the region’s troubled history during the Cold War (Suter 2013, 51); and as depicting the jungle as a haunted space which ‘during the Cold War [… ] became a space of flight, danger and the habitation of spirits [… ] insofar as its density and depth could conceal communists, insurgents and others fleeing the security apparatus’ (Ingawanij 2013, 96), as well as part of a broader argument about ‘presentations of animism’s historicity’ in Weerasethakul’s films (91).
However, other scholarly views reach beyond the national: situating Uncle Boonmee amongst Weerasethakul’s transnational, hybrid cinema which ‘seeks to reconstitute itself in the shadow of modernity by excavating an alternative vision of “Thainess” not only in local folklore and popular culture, but also in new and contemporized conceptions of the sacred’ (O’Hara 2012, 188); as illustrative of a queer sensibility (producing a ‘queer disturbance of meaning’, a ‘refusal to make sense’) which exists across many national cinemas within contemporary global art cinema (Galt 2013, 65–66); and as a meditation on memory and time (Lovatt 2013, 61; Deamer 2016, 317–319). This is before we consider the various pieces about the Primitive project art installation, out of which Uncle Boonmee grew, and, indeed, the many pieces on his other movies.8 Thus there would seem to be a productive tension in the film between its situatedness in a specific place where history is very much alive, and the broader, global processes with which this local/national history converges.
It is a little surprising, then, that amongst such varied writings on Uncle Boonmee, one interpretation is absent: an ecocritical one focusing on two of the influences which Weerasethakul identifies for the film (one literary, one cinematic). Whilst many scholars mention that the film was influenced (in part) by Buddhist monk Phra Sripariyattiweti’s book A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives (1983) (and whilst this seems to fit Uncle Boonmee neatly alongside the engagement with Buddhist thought in Weerasethakul’s previous films (Quandt 2009, 25–26)), nevertheless, another book also influenced the film’s conception, Terry Glavin’s Waiting for the Macaws (2006) (Weerasethakul 2009, 192). Again, whilst the range of modernist and avant-garde influences on Weerasethakul’s cinema are often discussed (e.g. Chris Marker’s La Jeté e (France, 1961)), the inspiration he took from the Amazonian adventure, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest (UK, 1985), like Glavin’s book, is rarely if ever mentioned. Both of these influences on the film’s development, however, would indicate the importance of ecological concerns in the film.
In Waiting for the Macaws, which discusses how the earth archives ‘stories’ (14) (and contains a chapter entitled ‘The Ghost in the Woods’ about humanity’s ability to drive species to extinction throughout history), Glavin explores the rapidity of species extinction in the modern world (around one species being lost every ten minutes (3)), and, simultaneously, humanity’s attempts to preserve, catalogue and archive rapidly disappearing pasts in zoos and botanical gardens (40–41).9 For its part, The Emerald Forest provides a loose template which Uncle Boonmee reprises: both films are about fathers reunited with sons long lost to the forest (living with an Amazon tribe in Boorman’s film, a monkey-spirit tribe in Weerasethakul’s), from whom they learn that the profit they make from exploiting nature, whether as a US engineer building a dam in Boorman’s film,10 or a Thai farmer expanding his land in Weerasethakul’s, also effects those who live in the forest. Both films foreground a choice between a capitalist view of the natural world (as suitable for (re)organisation for productivity, as per Jason W. Moore) or an alternative possibility involving reciprocal living arrangements with those in the forest, for a more sustainable future.
Accordingly, an interpretation focusing on the film’s engagement with the ecological exclusion of the Earth by colonial modernity seems extremely pertinent. Uncle Boonmee, like the other films in the transnational trend outlined at the start of the chapter, considers how humanity, through the engine of colonial modernity, pushes animals and spirits to the edges of the Earth, forcing many to extinction. The Chris Marker–style photo montage of the future, a clear homage to the post-apocalyptic La Jeté e, is a prime indicator of this. Thus an interpretation with an ‘ecological eye’, as Pick and Narraway advocate, does not reside apart from those listed above, but rather includes the excluded other of nature (its endangered species) amidst the many ghosts in the woods (including the mysterious and legendary beings of pre-modern myth), subsisting in the shadows along with colonial modernity’s more political outcasts (the lost imperial subjects, the disappeared of the Cold War).
Such an approach also illuminates how Uncle Boonmee establishes an ethical encounter with the Earth as it calls for a natural contract, especially in the instances where the monkey-spirit Boonsong appears. In these moments, any-space-whatevers provide glimpses into the Earth’s planetary past, and reveal that this is the virtual centre of indetermination which belies the loosely connected episodes which constitute the narrative. As in the opening scene, these are encounters, ultimately, with blackness, from which a humanoid shape emerges to indicate the relatively recent importance of humanity to planetary history, and the need for it to re-engage with nature as contractual partner.
The landscape, as archive, thus provides the coherence to the episodic narrative. Before we see any images, the opening epigraph to Uncle Boonmee reads: ‘Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.’ Thus this film about memory, oral history, and reincarnation, which unsettles the boundaries between humans and animals (and indeed, Cartesian selves and themselves), is inextricably linked to the landscape as repository of nonhuman history. The various episodes, often seemingly disconnected, rely upon the notion that within the surrounding landscapes there are nonhuman memories which can be encountered by humans.
Firstly there is the ghostly Huay and the arrival of Boonsong from the jungle (analysed further below). The latter informs Boonmee that ‘There are many beings outside right now [… ] spirits and hungry animals.’ Then there is the scene of inter-species copulation between the princess and the catfish, which begins with an establishing shot of the countryside. For its part, the death of Boonmee occurs in a cave which he travels to through the jungle, as though returning to the depths of the Earth to become a part of its memories (there he encounters ancient cave art, fish evocative of the talking catfish, and the monkey-spirits). Boonmee’s confessions with regard to the communists he killed during the war relates to the ghost- and spirit-inhabited environment on which his tamarind farm now sits, but seems to be mentioned only to pointedly interweave this level of human history amidst the many other nonhuman histories with which it overlaps in the forest. It is precisely as Boonsong says: ‘There are many beings outside right now’ – many past histories of exclusion which become resurgent when ‘facing the jungle’. Thus the centre of indetermination which holds the episodic string of stories together – themselves evocative in their varied styles of a cinematic archive, from a tribute to the Thai ‘Royal Costume Drama’ genre (the tale of the princess and the catfish), to the evocation of other cinematic jungles shot in day for night (like Boorman’s), to the Chris Marker–influenced ending (J. H. Kim 2011, 52) – is the virtual archive of the Earth’s entwined human and nonhuman histories, stored in the landscape.
Darkness: Seeking a (nonhuman) natural contract
Two standout instances directly equate Boonsong and his fellow monkey-spirits with dark holes in the landscape, suggesting they are temporary mouthpieces through which the forest speaks. These affection-images consist of a dark shadowy space, the reflective quality of the Earth’s face. The darkness emphasises the Earth’s ability to absorb light, to store matter as world memory. The red eyes that appear from the darkness, staring out, are the Earth’s affective power, its ability to desire an encounter with humanity, its hope in seeking out a natural contract.
Firstly, when Boonsong appears at the dinner, his arrival in the house is preceded by two shots of the surrounding landscape. A prolonged long shot of an image of a nearby hillside is first, a shot akin to those which often precede shifts in physical and temporal location throughout the film. Then, a medium shot follows, of the jungle immediately outside the house. It is an image of, quite literally, darkness. Just an opening in the trees from which we cannot detect light: we see only shadow, with the faintest of movements in the leaves which frame the gap. In this image of darkness, the any-space-whatever expresses the Earth’s virtual potential to archive the nonhuman past, enabling its return at a later date in the form of nonhuman history. This potential to record world memory is what the any-space-whatever enunciates. This is its affective quality. The mouthpiece it uses to enunciate its affective powers is Boonsong, who emerges as though from the darkness of the jungle to tell us how he transformed from human to monkey-spirit, thereby indicating the intertwining of human and nonhuman history. Notably, as he enters the house he is again depicted as eyes emerging from darkness.
Boonsong tells of how his first glimpse of his (now) fellow monkey-spirits was in a photograph he took, the leaping form he magnifies being barely distinguishable from the leaves of the trees they inhabit. His attempts to create a photographic record of the monkey-spirits led him to become a part of the natural archive himself, by mating with one of their number. When Boonmee brings out his photo albums at this precise moment, to show his acquisition of land for his bee farm, there is a stark contrast created between the natural archive of the Earth and its threatened nonhuman inhabitants (Boonsong himself) and the scientifically produced photographic record of human expansion into nature (Boonmee’s photo album). The affective power of the Earth, its desire for a natural contract is missed by Boonmee, who stays focused on human history and the colonising of the land. But the film is clear about the intersection of these histories.
The Earth’s affective quality, its potential to archive, is emphasised even more clearly in the scene in which Boonmee dies in the cave. Amidst the ancient cave paintings and the tiny fish in their rock pool (suggestive of the stories stored in the landscape which we have been watching until now), a completely dark cavity within the cave is punctuated by the appearance of Boonsong’s red eyes, moving across the darkness. They evoke at once the shimmering points of luminescence, so evocative of far-off stars, previously encountered as the humans make their way through the cave, and the image of the moon seen through the opening in the roof of the cave: they are, again, points of light which give expression to a reflective surface of the Earth’s face, eyes providing the micro-movements across the faceified image, a demonstration of its affective power as it seeks out humanity to establish a natural contract. Once again, then, in the cave scene the Earth is rendered as an any-space-whatever with the potential to record the nonhuman in its depths. As the eyes appear, Boonmee is comparing the cave to a womb, a place from which the lives he remembers (and does not) are born, whether as human or as animal. Then, as he recounts his dream, the monkey spirit appears again in the Marker-esque photo montage. The future sees the death of the last of its species, after it is captured by soldiers and its image retold using a cinema-like projection machine.
As we return to Boonmee lying dying in the cave, we are shown the landscape outside, standing vigil, as though regarding him or bearing witness to his death. Slowly, five sets of red eyes appear in the darkness, the black bodies of the monkey-spirits blending in with the darkness such that the image appears to be simply a landscape full of eyes. In this way, the Earth appears to speak, through the darkness, of its ability to store the stories of human and nonhuman lives alike. It asks for humanity to recognise this quality.
A similar conclusion to this is reached by Seung-hoon Jeong, with regard to Weerasethakul’s previous films. However, the difference between our final viewpoints is telling. As part of a sophisticated intervention into the debate surrounding ‘suture’ (a several-decades-long discussion about the extent to which viewers can be said to be ‘stitched’ into narrative film via its aesthetic techniques), Jeong explores how certain of Weerasethakul’s films provide us with glimpses of the ‘unsutured unconscious of the world itself’ (2013, 108). Sang sattawat/Syndromes and a Century (2006), for instance, is viewed as a ‘civilizational suture of the impersonal desire and relationship between any disparate types of being’, which enables us to ‘sense inhuman eyes viewing all human desires from an ontological ground’ (108). Again, in Sud pralad/Tropical Malady (2004), a film that features an ambiguous relationship between humans and animals manifest in the shamanistic transformation of man into tiger, ‘the tiger [… ] seems to remember even thousands of years’ impersonal desires shared by former lives’ (108). Of the film’s close-ups on the tiger’s face in the Thai jungle at night, Jeong writes: ‘while the steady panoramic camera unfolds ecological space, a crucial shift often occurs through cut-in or zoom-in that guides the viewer unaware to the face of a nonhuman gaze’ (120).
Yet, crucial to Jeong’s exploration of suture are what he terms ‘quasi-interfaces’ which, Jeong argues, ‘evoke but do not represent the medium interfaces of camera, filmstrip and screen’ (14). These ‘quasi-interfaces’ include a range of objects on screen, such as a solar eclipse for a (quasi-)camera, a strip of windows for a (quasi-) filmstrip, and the sky as a (quasi-)screen. The last of these in particular, which we might consider in terms of landscape, is pertinent for this discussion.
For Jeong, the sky enables the viewer to encounter the plane of immanence created of ‘the open whole of all screened images in ceaseless change. [… ] Pure memory is that of this immanence in multi-layered temporality, and it appears as already actualised and always present in the case of the sky positioned behind molecularly moving images; it is the case of pure matter’ (112). This very specific sense of the plane of immanence (outlined in Cinema 1 as ‘the infinite set of all images [… ] the Universe as cinema’ (Deleuze 1985, 61)), appears onscreen, for Jeong, through the ‘quasi-interface’ of the sky as screen, rendering the ecological environment analogous to cinema. Through such quasi-interfaces ‘the actual state of the world is desutured into its virtual verso’ (Jeong 2013, 110). However, whilst brilliant intercessors in terms of what they offer Jeong’s argument regarding what cinematic suture may mean in the Twenty-First Century, Jeong himself acknowledges that these analogies may not be ‘intended’ or ‘clearly convincing’ (111). As it is debateable whether they are intended to function as such, or whether all viewers will be convinced that they do, an alternative conclusion is worth considering.
The darkness of the black holes in the jungle in Uncle Boonmee do not evoke a camera, filmstrip, or screen, or any such ‘quasi-interface’. Rather, they indicate something of the Earth’s ability to archive nonhuman history, a function which contrasts with humanity’s attempts to record the history of its own expansion and the everyday extinction of nonhuman species that trails in its wake. Here Weerasethakul’s debt to Glavin’s Waiting for the Macaws is most evident, as he grapples with how cinema can engage with the recording of the rapid disappearance of nature due to colonial modernity. This is perhaps not yet a million miles away from Jeong’s conclusion. However, let us think on further. It is noticeable that Uncle Boonmee contains a foregrounded emphasis on ecological concerns which is absent from Tropical Malady. If we were to explore the any-space-whatevers of Uncle Boonmee using Jeong’s ideas, this would be to catch a glimpse of a human or animal centre of indetermination (de)suturing back into the plane of immanence, via the any-space-whatever: a face ‘decomposing’ as it were, becoming-virtual. As Jeong puts it with regard to the becoming-animal of the man confronting the tiger’s face in Tropical Malady:
he enters the uncanny plane of infinite, immanent connectedness to the animal, the ghost, namely all virtual life, while becoming naked, imperceptible, and clandestine. Cinema then stops facializing the landscape. We see not a film but rather a cinematic interface that amalgamates the ontological others, staring blankly into the disappearing traces of faces.
(Jeong 2013, 183)
Jeong thus follows Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the need to escape the organisation of the (inhuman) face, which, as noted previously, I depart from in my analysis of anthropomorphised faces becoming-actual (organising into faceified landscapes) on screen. My own position finds similarly in aesthetic terms to Jeong, then, but with regard to the broader picture I look to bring into focus (concerning the transnational histories emerging across a world of cinemas, and the negotiation of different contracts via which they become visible), my interpretation is, literally, the opposite of this. The encounter is not with a decomposing but a composing ‘face of nature’. One which, after Sparrow, we can understand to be effectively impossible (due to the environment’s ability to regard us from every angle), unless anthropomorphised. Whilst Jeong is careful to avoid anthropomorphising cinema in his emphasis on becoming-virtual, by contract, to realise Uncle Boonmee’s engagement with humanity’s place in planetary history it is necessary to depart from a strict Deleuzian or Deleuze and Guattarian theoretical position, so as to accurately describe what is happening on screen. Rather than a human or animal centre of indetermination decentring back into the plane of immanence (becoming-virtual), in Uncle Boonmee we see instead the Earth as centre of indetermination (becoming-actual, making a face), to request a natural contract.
For the Earth to address us in the anthropomorphising cinematic form (that which gives the illusion of agency to the Earth), it must take a form which we can recognise. Thus the any-space-whatever composes a faceified landscape, central to which is a becoming-actual humanoid form that acts as its mouthpiece. As Jeong’s reading of Weerasethakul’s earlier films is so compelling, the importance of this distinction is not immediately apparent. Yet when we remove Uncle Boonmee from Weerasethakul’s oeuvre, to view its similarities with other of the cross-border examples from the transnational trend, it becomes apparent that Weerasethakul’s approach is different in this later film than it was in Tropical Malady. The choice of former human Boonsong as aperture through which the Earth can speak provides an agency and purpose to the Earth in its attempt to make contact with humanity.11 Boonsong, after all, appears in order to tell his father of his life since he disappeared into the forest and to try to gain recognition for the history of the rapidly disappearing spirit-monkeys which has been obscured by human development of their land. Through Boonsong we do not learn much, if anything, about the history of the monkey-spirits as a species. Rather, the point is to provide an encounter with a lost past (in this case, of another species) which prompts either the realisation, for some viewers, or remembrance, for others, that there is such a history intertwined with others: a transnational planetary history of entwined human and nonhuman pasts.
Due to the presence of this anthropomorphising focus, the Earth is not so much caught in the act of becoming virtual, desuturing into its cinematic verso, as Jeong argues. Rather, it is caught in the act of becoming-actual. Not the disappearing traces of faces in the landscape, but precisely the opposite, their temporary appearance – from the virtual world into the actual – seeking an encounter. Like the man-becoming-tiger in Tropical Malady, Boonsong is also becoming-animal. Yet, whereas in the former film the encounter we are offered is with the fully transformed tiger (the complete dissolving of the human into becoming-animal, as Jeong observes), Boonsong pauses in, or temporarily retreats from, his trajectory towards the monkey, to communicate with humans. He briefly reterritorialises again, to return as a humanoid form able to explain his history. In a context where, to reiterate Serres, ‘we don’t know the world’s language, or rather we know only the various animistic, religious, or mathematical versions of it’ (1992, 39), Uncle Boonmee uses Boonsong as an anthropomorphised aperture through which to request a natural contract.
Jeong’s interpretation could be said to illustrate how Weerasethakul’s earlier films indicate, as Bruno Latour famously has it, that we have never been modern (in that they disrupt the idea of the separation of human and nature upon which colonial modernity rests). But, in Uncle Boonmee, a more direct address appears to the viewer who is, in many cases, likely to believe that they are in fact separate from nature, and thus that for modernity there is no contract with nature. The latter film, then, is perhaps more evocative of Vilé m Flusser (2014, 98–104) in its attempt to clearly differentiate between, but also show the importance of realising the coexistence of, on the one hand, those planting the land (Uncle Boonmee’s tamarind farm) as a way for humanity to control history, and, on the other hand, those living in relationship with nature (Boonsong and the monkey spirits) as a means for understanding the world ecologically. To provide nature with a voice, it is rendered familiar. The interface provided (to use Jeong’s term a little against the grain) is not cinematic (or an inhuman eye in the sense that, say, the black hole of an air vent is (Jeong 2012, 211)), but rather, is that of a becoming-actual, becoming-human form that emerges out of the darkness to (impossibly) constitute the ‘face of nature’. In summary, instead of seeing humans deterritorialising away from the face, towards a becoming-animal or becoming-imperceptible (as Jeong illuminates of Tropical Malady), in Uncle Boonmee, animals momentarily reterritorialise as humans so as to relay the Earth’s message that human and nonhuman histories are interlinked in world memory.12
In Uncle Boonmee, the encounter offered is with the occluded ecological past, suggesting the need for a natural contract to rescue nature from colonial modernity. The becoming-animal of the one confronting the face, the ‘dissolve’ of the human into nature which Jeong observes in Tropical Malady, can now be reassessed as the relativising that such an encounter enables of any too central a sense of human history informing their being. The reason to consider what is on screen to be such a faceified landscape is the Dusselian ethical position from which this reading stems (see Chapter 1), that which places nature amidst all those in the excluded underside of colonial modernity. From such a position, why would we not think it capable of asking for its past to be recognised along with ours, for a natural contract that would deny the denial of coevalness? Or, more accurately, why would we not think filmmakers capable of depicting it as such?
Nostalgia for the Light
The documentary Nostalgia for the Light, whilst very different to Uncle Boonmee, also explores the connection between human and nonhuman history, putting human history in perspective by encapsulating it with the billions of years of existence of the matter of the Universe (see Figure 3.2). The film positions the Earth in a dynamic encounter with the Universe, recasting the concern with the natural contract evident in Uncle Boonmee (of the Earth addressing humans through Boonsong) into the broader arena of Universe memory (of the Universe speaking through humans). Once again the any-space-whatever provides the entrance to this nonhuman archive of memory in matter, exploring the virtual temporal connections between the Earth (humanity being but a part of the matter it archives as world memory) and the Universe. This time, however, the ethical encounter offered is not with the Earth per se, but with the matter of the Universe of which the nonhuman histories of the Earth, and humanity, are intertwined aspects.
FIGURE 3.2 Enunciating disappeared pasts, both recent and long ago, in Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmá n 2010).
In Nostalgia for the Light the any-space-whatevers also express the Earth’s ability to record, store or archive memories as an affective quality. This time, however, rather than darkness, this is evidenced through light. Indeed, rather than their affective powers expressing a desire for interaction with humanity, instead their wish is to reveal what has been recorded to the Universe as a whole. This includes, most recently, the intertwined human and nonhuman histories of the planet. As opposed to the darkness of the recording surface and the micro-movements of red eyes across them of Uncle Boonmee, in Nostalgia for the Light the red desert earth becomes the plate, which offers up world memory into the light of Universe memory. Thus a film ostensibly about history conceived of as national (recent Chilean history, including in particular the recent Pinochet dictatorship) and regional (Latin America’s history of colonial extermination of indigenous peoples and diasporic settlement) ultimately opens up onto the Universe in its exploration of how the intertwined human and nonhuman history of the world (conceived of as a heritage of universal matter that stretches back beyond human origins) encounters its other in the Universe.
Unlike the national focus of many of Guzmá n’s previous documentaries, Nostalgia For the Light (the first part of his third trilogy) quickly establishes that it will meditate on how the personal (Guzmá n’s memories of childhood) connects not only to the history of the nation (or not solely of the nation), but also the history of the Universe. The opening segues from an old German telescope, which Guzmá n’s voiceover credits for his personal interest in astronomy, to a domestic setting evocative of his childhood. The montage moves us, via a graphic match, from the cratered surface of the moon to the play of light and shadow caused by the movement of the leaves of a tree. The tree is situated outside the window of a house with sufficient period detail to remind Guzmá n (the voiceover indicates) of his youth (White 2012). Guzmá n describes this period of his life in a way that seems idyllic, before, during the Cold War, a ‘coup d’é tat swept away democracy, dreams and science’. As Guzmá n’s voiceover relates this personal story, the house evocative of his childhood is gradually obscured by dust, blowing across the screen, reflecting light back at the camera in twinkling patterns against a black backdrop. It is described as ‘star dust’ by Guzmá n.
This non-anthropocentric force, that of the matter which constructs the Universe, reappears at several points during the film to illustrate the all-consuming nature of Universe memory – the stuff of which humanity is created and to which they return in death. We are pointedly informed by scientist George Preston that the calcium in our bones ‘was made shortly after the big bang’ and that accordingly: ‘We live among the trees but we also live among the stars. We live among the galaxies. We are part of the Universe. The calcium in my bones was there from the beginning.’ The matter in the landscape, then, from meteorites to the bones of the dead, is part of a giant archive which at its broadest limit encompasses the Universe. The memory, of which Chile’s past is a part, is thus considered to be a much larger phenomenon. This, not only due to the film’s introduction of the transnational movements of diaporas and exiles in the present, through to the nomadic, pre-national movements of prehistoric man, but back even further, to the origins of all life in the big bang. The personal extends into a universal (in the literal sense) concern with a nonhuman view of history and humanity’s place within it.
As with Uncle Boonmee, Nostalgia for the Light is a film which has captured the imagination of many scholars: Patrick Blaine explores the film as the latest entry in Guzmá n’s oeuvre’s political analysis of events in Chile, including a foregrounded examination of the complexities surrounding time, memory and absence in national history (2013); Shohini Chaudhuri, as part of an examination of how films about state terror worldwide ‘foster audience identification with memories they have never had’, examines the film’s ability to ‘summon us to remember and make connections between different violent histories’ (2014, 20 and 104); Selmin Kara, similarly departing from the national context, places Nostalgia for the Light amidst a cross-border (on the American continent at least) grouping of films evocative of a ‘speculative realist aesthetic’, mixing human and nonhuman temporalities (Kara 2014); and Asbjø rn Grø nstad, drawing on the first iteration of the following analysis (Martin-Jones 2013b), argues that Nostalgia for the Light promulgates ‘a planetary ethics’ which is ‘mostly materialist, as evidenced in the film’s suggestion that memory resides in matter’, and as such indicates the potential for a cinematic ‘ethics of the Anthropocene’ (Grø nstad 2016b, 224 and 13).13 As with Uncle Boonmee, the position I take on Nostalgia for the Light makes common cause with aspects of these predecessors, but does so in order to emphasise its place in the broader transnational trend of films exploring the intertwining of human and planetary history via an encounter with the Earth’s past.
Nostalgia for the Light is set in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and interweaves two narratives. One details the activities of astronomers watching the heavens from the desert’s arid landscape. The other explores the desert landscape for the traces of its lost history, both as part of a nation called Chile and for thousands of years beforehand. The desert is first introduced as a landscape as alien as that of the planet Mars, before the documentary focuses on the history contained within its barren expanse. In both aspects – looking up to the sky and down into the ground – the documentary meditates on what it means to research the past.
On the one hand, astronomer Gaspar Galaz, who features as a talking head throughout, explains his view that to scan the Universe through a telescope is to explore the past, because it is to examine light which takes a long time to reach the Earth. He compares astronomers to archaeologists, historians, and geologists. Galaz extrapolates, further, that due to the time it takes for light to reach us, even from objects very near to us, we all exist in the past.
On the other hand, at ground level, the various people whose lives cross the Atacama Desert are shown to belong to the past. This ranges from the artefacts and physical remains of people who inhabited the region 10,000 years ago, to former political prisoners of the Pinochet regime who were held captive in the desert, to the elderly women (the Women of Calama) who routinely search the desert for fragments of the remains of the disappeared (the political victims of the Pinochet dictatorship from the 1970s and 1980s, executed and buried in the desert).
Due to this weave, in the film’s final moments a crystal of time is constructed to encapsulate much of the film’s play with memory, landscapes, and the past seen in light. Guzmá n’s voiceover states:
I am convinced that memory has a gravitational force. It is constantly attracting us. Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none don’t live anywhere. Each night, slowly, impassively, the centre of the galaxy passes over Santiago.
The words are spoken over a panoramic image of the city of Santiago de Chile as a nightscape of shimmering neon lights against a black backdrop. It is as through the city were reflecting back to the Universe its own glittering firmament, as seen in so many impressive shots of the Universe scattered throughout the film. The city becomes a star-scape, crystallizing with the Universe. In such a crystalline structure, the virtual and the actual facets of the crystal are Universe and Earth (or, if you prefer, Earth and Universe). The indiscernibility of these two sides, as they reflect each other, makes sense of the two related narratives of the film. They are crystalline facets of the same story. One is a search into the past through astronomy, looking up into the sky through telescopes (the Universe as ‘mobile archive’, as John Durham Peters would have it (2003, 404)), the other a search into the past through archaeology (looking into the ground for buried histories) (for Peters, the Earth as ‘recording medium’ (402)). In both instances, the landscape – whether the Universe or the Earth – is the virtual past as archive through which we search. The Earth archives world memory, within a much broader archival process of Universe memory.
Thus Nostalgia for the Light notes the need to focus as much on the history of the planet as we do on that of the stars above, so as to realise that the past below our feet, whose ‘voice’ also comes to us from afar, is also that of the Universe more broadly. In this respect the film’s treatment of the landscape is key, because, as in Uncle Boonmee, it is from the landscape that the call comes to recognise the Earth’s archival qualities, its need for a natural contract and the recognition of humanity’s place amongst the other histories occluded by colonial modernity. In the opening, the landscape’s position as an enunciator of the Earth’s archiving qualities emerges when, over a montage of striking images from the desert, Guzmá n states:
I imagine that man will soon walk on Mars. This ground beneath my feet bears the strongest resemblance to that faraway world. There is nothing. No insects, no animals, no birds. And yet it is full of history. For 10,000 years this region has been a transit route. Rivers of stone provide natural paths. The caravans of llamas and men came and went between the high plains and the sea. It is a condemned land, permeated with salt, where human remains are mummified and objects frozen in time. The air, transparent, thin, allows us to read this vast open book of memory, page after page.
Here there is a literal evocation of landscape as archive (‘page after page’) which is explored in more detail thereafter. We are told that there are meteorites below the surface. We see the remnants of petrified fish and molluscs amidst the dunes, which are depicted in close succession with the ruins of an indigenous American fortress. We are introduced to rock carvings by archaeologist Lautaro Nú ñ ez, significantly of faces, from ‘pre-Columbian shepherds’ who used the desert as a transit route over 1,000 years ago. Nú ñ ez notes the layered nature of this landscape by observing how the modern road they drive down is laid directly atop a prehistoric one. The desert also contains a Nineteenth Century graveyard of dead miners, a former mining complex later used as a prison during the Pinochet era, and perched atop these layers of history are the astronomers, in the latest high-tech observatories, searching the sky for the Universe’s past. The desert landscape, then, is introduced as a giant archive constituted of the same matter as the entire Universe – as Guzmá n argues, ‘our roots’ are ‘up above, beyond the light’ – within which the human and nonhuman coexist.
Like Uncle Boonmee, Nostalgia for the Light permits access to the material archive of the desert through a recurring faceified any-space-whatever. The film cues us towards such a reading through the various images of faces in the landscape: from the ancient rock carvings to the pictures of the disappeared laid upon the desert floor, to Guzmá n’s use of cinematography to conflate planetary landscapes with a human skull. However, the standout moments are those in which one of the women searching the desert for the remains of a loved one, Violeta Berrí os, is depicted against the desert landscape, speaking of her quest for the bones of Mario. It is here that, via a human mouthpiece, the intertwined human and nonhuman histories of the planet are most clearly evident.
Light: Revealing the archived world memory to the Universe
Several times during the film, Berrí os is framed against a distinctive backdrop of desert rock (see Figure 3.2). She speaks with great emotional sincerity about her quest for Mario’s remains. This can be a very difficult moment to watch, and I do not wish to detract from its importance in terms of national history or, indeed, gender politics. There is clearly a level of interpretation of this scene in which Berrí os’s testimony is integral to that of the survivors of the Cold War military regime and those they lost. After all, at several points, Guzmá n depicts the people he interviews in tableau, as though bearing witness to their struggles with the past.14 However, as noted previously, this is a film which does not look to reterritorialise its story in the nation, but in the Universe. It is immediately noticeable, for example, how different Nostalgia for the Light is from Guzmá n’s previous trilogies, which very directly explore Chile’s recently traumatic national history (Martin-Jones 2013b, 708). Nostalgia for the Light, for its part, commences with the auteur’s memories of childhood and broadens out into a meditation on the nation of Chile’s place within the history of the Universe. In this process, national history and politics remain integral, but are seen from a perspective which relativises the centrality of humanity to the nonhuman history of the Universe. It is with this in mind that the following interpretation is offered, with an ‘ecological eye’.
Through choice of location and framing, Berrí os’ form blends with the landscape to suggest that her human story also belongs to the desert, and also speaks from the nonhuman landscape’s historical archive. Berrí os is filmed in medium shot, seated cross-legged on the ground. She is interviewed about her continual search for Mario. Behind her the uneven desert landscape closely frames her body, such that no horizon is visible above her head. The pink hue of the rock blends with Berrí os’s tanned face and her pink shirt, as a result of which she seems to blend in with the colour palette of the shot. The landscape which frames her is a striated section, in which layers of the past are visible. The effect of this closely framing background, which places Berrí os literally within the ground, suggests on one level that her human life has become one with her search for graves. However, her place within the red earth equally emphasises her role as a voice that speaks from and for the nonhuman desert. Barrí os’s seventy-year-old face is extremely animated at points as she expresses the anguish she feels at never having recovered Mario’s body. The darker sunken cavities of her face (eye sockets, nostrils) and those created by the folds of skin on her neck, echo the pitted and pockmarked cavities in the rock wall behind her. There is a clear sense here that the landscape speaks through Berrí os, whose emotional strength is apparent, the affective landscape thus appearing as a face talking of the occluded past whose secret it keeps.
The choice of Berrí os as the human voice piece for the Earth is similar to the way in which Uncle Boonmee uses Boonsong to draw equivalence between the recently disappeared of the Cold War, and the broader species extinction of life in a jungle which is being increasingly colonised as farmland. Berrí os, as someone who seeks recognition for the disappeared histories of the Cold War (the bones of Mario in this case), is similarly of those recently excluded by colonial modernity, and so her plight aligns with that of transnational history (of colonial modernity’s much longer exclusion of the Earth from a natural contract), which the Earth enunciates with and through her. She is thus the most appropriate voice piece through which the Earth can tell of its disappeared pasts. Her personal past opens up to a Cold War history, which is but a recent phase of the broader history of colonial modernity, and so we track back through time to the former mine workers, to the indigenous history of the landscape, and then further still, until we reach the limit of history in the origins of the Universe itself. This is, after all, precisely the same journey on which Guzmá n takes us at the start of the film – from personal history, to Cold War, to Universe.
With this in mind, it is clear how the film’s depiction of the desert landscape expresses its capacity, as an any-space-whatever, to archive Universe memory. In the early montage sequences, the Atacama Desert is introduced in all its weird and wonderful rock, sand and salt formations: from its isolated rocks to its mountain ranges, its hard-packed dry and flat-ridged surfaces to its wind-blown dunes, its ruined fortresses (whether evidence of the indigenous human past, precisely, or whether of the colonial destruction of the coevalness of other pasts) and its 1,000-year-old carvings to its high-tech observatories. In these sequences the desert is rendered precisely as any-space-whatever, ‘a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible’ (Deleuze 1983, 113). Hence, Berrí os’s testimony, as one whose own past has been denied coevalness by colonial modernity, gives voice to the Earth as centre of indetermination via a faceified landscape. Thus the any-space-whatever of the desert attests to the virtual layers of archived matter that exist in time and to the potential for virtual conjunction in new formations throughout the ages past and to come.
Yet this is not to say that Berrí os’s moving speech, nor her terrible grief, should be considered somehow absent from the faceified landscape. This is where viewing with an ‘ecological eye’ needs to be considered with care. Guzmá n does not, to be clear, attempt to obscure or subsume Berrí os’s personal history, or the political history of the disappeared, within the history of the Universe. Rather, these scenes indicate precisely the intertwining of human and nonhuman histories since 1492. There is no attempt to render human histories – such as those of the disappeared of the Cold War – somehow less important or relevant by aligning Berrí os’s voice with that of the Earth. I do not think Guzmá n is trying to say that once we all return to dust, we will be forgotten (albeit the film does indicate that this is part and parcel of the recording of life’s passing in the desert). Rather, in this instance, ‘an ecological eye’ leads to the realisation that human and nonhuman histories are entwined in planetary, and Universe, history.
This does not necessarily entail the annihilation of humanity. Instead, the choice of Berrí os has the opposite effect. Berrí os, a woman whose (human) life has seemingly been irrevocably damaged by a recent phase of colonial modernity (the Cold War), is aligned with, gives voice to, the same denial of acknowledgement that the Earth has suffered during the Anthropocene. It is precisely because of her personal trauma and grief that Berrí os can represent the Earth’s request for a natural contract, via a human form. In Berrí os, human history is shown to be closely intertwined with the nonhuman history of the Earth, indeed, with the Universe.
It is not only the composition of the shot that creates this effect. Berrí os’s story appears as though spoken by the landscape precisely because Berrí os has physically become a part of it through her repetitive actions. Of her perpetual searching she says:
I no longer count the times Vicky [Saavedra] and I have gone into the desert. We set out full of hope and return with our heads hanging. But we always pick ourselves up, give ourselves a shake and set off again the next day even more hopeful and more impatient to find them.
Berrí os is shown to be a physical repository of the past, of memories of searching the desert which have been stored up through repetition.15 Berrí os exists in a habitual relationship with the landscape, as though her identity were becoming-nonhuman, through repetition, to the point where she merges with the desert. Her personal testimony demonstrates how entry into the archive of the Universe’s memory is offered by human bodies, which are physical repositories of memory, just as the landscape is. Contrary to the subtitled translation (‘heads hanging’), here Berrí os uses an expression usually meant to describe an avoidance of the truth, ‘con la cabeza metida en la tierra’ (‘with my head in the ground’). This phrase indicates an ostrich-like retreat from reality, as Mario’s remains will likely never be found. Yet it also illuminates that she is searching so hard that she has become subsumed within the ground. Her head has effectively been forcibly pushed into the ground by the unremitting search for Mario (his remains have likely been removed from the dessert by the military, to unknown whereabouts). Berrí os, again, is at one with the landscape: human and nonhuman history intertwined.
Through Berrí os, then, the landscape speaks its oral testimony, of its secrets and lacunas (e.g. where is Mario?), but also of its desire to archive, to record history (Berrí os cries in her most emotional moment: ‘Some people must wonder why we want bones. I want them. I want them.’). Here, in addition to her moving personal need to have the forgotten history of Mario recognised, Berrí os also gives a voice to the landscape, which equally seeks recognition for its own archival qualities: a natural contract to preserve its planetary past as part of the Universe. The choice of Berrí os to speak both for herself (and those traumatised by the Cold War) and also for the Earth, in the any-space-whatever, thus ties the desert’s wish for bones back to the documentary’s construction of a Universe memory which archives matter: the calcium in Berrí os’s bones, and those of her lost Mario, are the same as that which was formed shortly after the big bang. This Universe memory reaches out, then, through a human mouthpiece, to indicate humanity’s implication in this broader nonhuman archiving of history during the Anthropocene.
To conclude this chapter: a landscape of red eyes addressing us from the darkness, telling of the immanent eradication of the histories of endangered species with which humanity is intertwined. A voice emerging from within the landscape, enunciating the lost pasts of those excluded by colonial modernity which are archived underground – from the disappeared, back in time to the miners, then back again to the indigenous, and even to the very minerals of the Earth itself. This chapter has explored these cinematic encounters with the transnational history of humanity’s entanglement with the planet: a history now of great import due to the Anthropocene debate, but one which only further foregrounds the history of ecological exclusion that is colonial modernity (from 1492 to the Cold War and beyond). These are key examples from a category of films about the natural contract. In the next chapter I focus on the transnational history of the world since 1492, on colonial modernity’s origins, and their imbrication with the racial contract.
Notes
1. It may be that Deleuze intended visagé ification (1983, 90) to evoke Emmanuel Levinas’s visage (discussed in Chapter 2), or indeed, considering Deleuze and Guattari’s equation of the face with Christ, as a critique of it. I thank Bill Marshall for pointing this out.
2. This idea, that films provide an encounter with a nonhuman landscape, has featured in previous Deleuzian analyses, albeit my argument is distinct from these predecessors (Beugnet 007, 137–139; Pandian 2011, 53; Deamer 2014, 38–44; Jeong 2013, 104–110; McMahon 2014, 2–6).
3. As outlined in Chapter 1, Jason W. Moore’s conceptualisation of modernity as ‘capitalist world ecology’ (2015, 4), like Serres’ position, proceeds from a critique of Descartes’s creation of an artificial separation of humanity from nature. Yet Moore positions his idea of intertwined humanity and nature (capitalism being a way of organising nature (2)) in contrast to ideas surrounding ‘capitalism’s war on the earth’ (Foster, Clark and York 2010), which is also Serres’ position. Moore indicates how the emergence of differentiations such as modern class, gender, and racial relationships are all forged in the intertwining of capitalism in the ‘web of life’, as ‘bundles of human and extra-human natures, interweaving biophysical and symbolic natures at every scale’ (9). What links Serres and Moore are their respective critiques of humanity’s banishment of nature to the past (whether understood as a war or a re-organisation), denying it coevalness. This is typified by contract theory’s recourse to a long-departed state of nature out of which the social contract supposedly emerges (Lessnoff 1990, 7).
4. There have been speculative realism-inflected considerations of how contemporary films speculate as to what a nonhuman world or Universe might look like (Kara 2014), but they have not managed to provide a comprehensive argument with respect to the ethical consideration of humanity’s engagement with nature found across a world of cinemas (Martin-Jones 2016).
5. It is not unusual for scholars to discuss films with respect to their anthropomorphisation of landscapes (Prager 2010, 97).
6. See also the contributions to Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman’s Thinking with Animals (2006).
7. The sequence is set in Nabua, situated in the region where state security and communist forces first fought in the 1960s (Weerasethakul 2009, 196–197; Ingawanij 2013, 106–107).
8. Uncle Boonmee relates to the installation film A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) (Kim 2010). Writings on Weerasethakul’s other films, which explore the reception of his films in Thailand (Anderson 2009), emphasise his work’s position within a ‘contact zone’ between Asia and the West (Ingawanij and MacDonald 2006), its Buddhist view of human reintegration with nature (Ferrari 2012, 173–174), its status as an ‘itinerant cinema’ of the ‘nation’s under-represented others’ (Teh 2011, 609), and the role still images and stillness play in the aesthetic in the context of the slow cinema debate (Davis 2016).
9. The archiving of species undertaken by London’s Kew Gardens (one of Glavin’s examples of an ‘ark’ for botanical preservation (2006, 207)) is not an altogether altruistic enterprise. For example, in Kew Gardens, British imperialists looked to cultivate rubber seeds stolen from the Americas, which would then provide them with a secure supply of the plant with which to produce rubber in their Asian colonies (Mann 2011, 335–341).
10. Part of Brazil’s economic expansion, including the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway (Franco 1993, 82–83).
11. This is not unlike the agency which Jonathan Burt considers film able to give to animals, in relation to humans, due in particular to the capacity for the encounter with the animal’s gaze to position the viewer within nature – as opposed to outside, looking in (2002, 15 and 47). This specific point emerges within Burt’s broader argument regarding the potentially ‘transformative aspect’ of cinematic depictions of animals (15).
12. This technique is again evident in Weerasethakul’s later film, Rak Ti Khon Kaen/Cemetery of Splendour (Thailand/UK/Germany/France/Malaysia/South Korea/Mexico/USA/Norway, 2015). To emphasise the coexistence of the present along with the spirits of those who lived before and the virtual layers of the past they inhabit (from ancient warrior kings, back as far as the dinosaurs), the film multiplies its use of humanoid mouthpieces: sleeping soldiers, a psychic medium, the spirits of dead princesses, etc.
13. For further background on the development of the scholarly idea of a cinematic ethics for the Anthropocene, prior to this book, see also an article I published in the same year (Martin-Jones 2016).
14. In other works, I interpret several Latin American films which consider recent history in terms of their memorialisation of this traumatic past (Martin-Jones 2011, 69–99; 2013b).
15. This is as Bergson described in Matter and Memory, of the storing up of pasts through repeated habitual actions (1896, 77–131).