May: Ecologies II
May: Ecologies II, FLMTQ Releases 240-243
During the month of May Filmatique presents Ecologies II, a series of films that explore green activism, the natural world, and the effect of human intervention on ecological systems.
Jerry Rothwell's stirring documentary How to Change the World examines the evolution of Greenpeace in 1970s Vancouver into one of the most influential green activist groups on the planet, while Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens's Goodbye Gauley Mountain charts an ecosexual journey into West Virginia, as two women protest the practice of MTR, or mountain-top removal, a form of surface mining. Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky's sweeping Anthropocene: The Human Epoch documents in studied visual and sensorial detail various sites on earth that serve as evidence that the planet's sixth mass extinction is underway, as a result of human activity. Rahul Jain's debut film Machines delves into a textile factory in Gujarat, India, elucidating how ecological resources and human labor are mutually, if differentially, exploited in the pursuit of capitalist progress.
By employing various aesthetic and narrative techniques, Filmatique's Ecologies II series aims to awaken our consciousnesses, to attune our perception to the multitudinous causal patterns of human behavior on the natural world. If the present ecological crisis can be conceptualized as a crisis of imagination—a collective failure to see ourselves as capable of damage on such a scale, much less capable of remedy—we must begin to see and act on more diverse and specific dimensions.
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How to Change the World, Jerry Rothwell (2015)
How to Change the World, Jerry Rothwell / Canada-UK-Netherlands, 2015
In 1970, Bob Hunter was a reporter for the Vancouver Sun. His passion for environmental issues aligned him with local activists at the time—a wily gang of artists, scientists, and draft-dodgers—who had set their sights on halting a series of atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska. While Nixon cleared the explosions to proceed as scheduled, the group garnered enough negative publicity to ward off any more tests on the island. With the whale-hunting industry as their next target, this nascent group staged high-risk and high-visiblity interventions on the open sea. Thus began the modern Greenpeace movement—activism rooted in an understanding of mass media, the power not only of the act but of the image.
Assembled from nearly 1,500 reels of archival 16mm footage, How to Change the World examines the genesis and long-lasting impact of one of the world's most influential ecological organizations. Jerry Rothwell's fifth documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Editing Award; Sheffield, where it won the Sheffield Green Award; and Reykjavik, where it won the Environmental Award.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier & Edward Burtynsky (2018)
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier & Edward Burtynsky / Canada, 2018
In 2016, a group of scientists known as the Anthropocene Working Group declared the end of the Holocene—a geological epoch that had characterized existence on earth for the past 12,000 years. We have, they argued, entered the Anthropocene, a new epoch in which humans are the primary cause of permanent planetary change. There is no return to life as we know it, only the opportunity to mitigage our damage. Surveying a series of human-manufactured landscapes across the globe—from concrete seawalls in China to combat rising waters, which comprise over 60% of the country's coastline; to lithium pools in Chile's Atacama desert; potash mines in Russia's Ural Mountains; the devastated Great Barrier Reef—the extent of humanity's damage to ecological systems becomes startlingly, poignantly clear.
The last installment in a trilogy including Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky's documentary renders the extent of our species' damage in stark visual detail, delegitimizing any incrementalist approach to our current ecological crisis. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch premiered at Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, Seattle, and Sydney, and is narrated by Alicia Vikander.
Goodbye Gauley Mountain, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens (2014)
Goodbye Gauley Mountain, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens / USA, 2014
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have returned to the former's home state of West Virginia. Mountain-top removal, a form of surface mining that destroys local peaks to get at veins of cheap coal below, has devastated the Appalachian mountains, an environment teeming with biodiversity. Determined to stop this practice, eco-sexuals Stephens and Sprinkle preach their philosophy in which 'earth as mother' is transformed into 'earth as lover.' Their immersive, corporeal activism endeavors to incorporate levity and sensuality into the otherwise taxing pursuit of environmental justice.
An offbeat, heartfelt embrace of the natural world, Goodbye Gauley Mountain examines the productive intersection between protest and sexuality in one of America's most exploited landscapes. Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens's film premiered at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival.
Machines, Rahul Jain (2016)