Scale and Detail: An Interview with Justin Morris and Matthew I. Thompson

Jennifer Baichwal’s latest film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (co-directed with and , 2018), begins with a stark juxtaposition. As the film opens, a deep rumbling is heard on the soundtrack. Shortly thereafter the visual field is engulfed in flame: an abstract undulation of orange and black that is beautiful, but ominous. A jump cut transports us from this anonymous and vaguely apocalyptic conflagration to a cliff face of vertically striated rock.

The soundtrack transitions from the roar of fire to the sound of small waves breaking on shore. In the first few seconds of the film this comparison between the immediacy of fire and the eternity of stone sets out the fundamental paradox of our current epoch: how do we reconcile the knowledge that, in a few short years, our collective combustion of fossil fuels will do such irreparable damage to the earth that our actions will be etched into the rock for millennia? Immediacy and eternity, scale and detail, economy and geology: these are some of the tensions that structure Anthropocene, along with Baichwal’s two other films on humanity’s collective footprint, (2006) and Watermark (2013). The co-editors of this special issue of The Neutral, Justin Morris and Matthew

I. Thompson, sat down virtually with Baichwal this past spring during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Matthew I. Thompson (MT): You’re somebody who thinks a lot about the Anthropocene and anthropogenic effects on the environment. Has this perspective filtered your interpretation of

COVID?

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Jennifer Baichwal (JB): This is a completely anthropogenic situation that we are in. I’ve been thinking about it because there’s a paradox. People describe the effects of the lockdowns as hitting the pause button. The environmental effects, the positive environmental effects, are outstanding: air quality up, CO2 levels down, oil prices bottoming out. We’re at an inflection point where there’s a chance that we could turn things around in terms of the cycles of consumption and waste that we are engaged in normally. I wonder if change is going to happen, or if everybody will be so relieved to get back to normal (and by normal I mean going right back into our completely unsustainable ways of living, especially in the Global North) that the opportunity will be missed? You know that

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? I know it’s an old argument now, but I still think about it: that liminal phase between structure and anti-structure and how it’s a very creative period but also possibly a violent period. A period where anything can happen. I know there are arguments, like the “shock doctrine,” that this is where bad agents rush in and create self-serving models in the chaos, but it’s also an opportunity for good to happen.

MT: It feels like a moment that is a perfect example of the potential of the Green New Deal: that we as various cultures and our different nations are all coming together with this collective will and simultaneously reducing our greenhouse gas output seems really promising, actually. When I’m feeling optimistic at least, I think of it as a roadmap for what we could achieve if we put our mind to it.

JB: Will we though? I mean, there are so many pressures. We were delivering supplies to relatives recently and I drove past Yorkdale Mall in , and for the first time since I can remember—

I’ve lived here for 25-30 years—the parking lot was empty. I was just overjoyed at all of the shopping that was not being done. I thought, okay, here’s the paradox (and that’s why I said it was a

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11 paradox), because it is this pause, and yet we’re headed for global economic collapse, and the people who will suffer because of that are not the captains of industry. It’s the people who work in the

Amazon warehouses who will feel the economic fallout: that’s the paradox. I don’t know how we turn it around without a lot of pain or a switch to renewables.

Justin Morris (JM): I wonder if this will change the individual’s thinking about what their own consumption means, or if the pandemic will produce a postwar-style glut of rampant consumption.

JB: Or will the law be so strong, which it already is in the places where it matters, that nothing can fight against consumption? If we look at anything that’s happening to the south, in the United

States—talk about violent revolution. I cannot imagine what is going to happen in the US in the next year given the protests that are already going on, the withdrawal from the W.H.O., the election

… those things are keeping me up at night.

Our films are always trying to create a space for reflection, a space for an extended moment. They are very deliberately edited like that where they’re contemplative in a way and they try to promote a kind of experiential understanding so that you’re not told what you’re looking at or what to think about what you’re looking at or what to feel, but just to be in that place. Normally, before screenings we say everybody should just slow their heart rate down—if you think about Manufactured Landscapes, that nine-and-a-half-minute shot is about slowing down to get to this point where your heart rate is at a place where you can enter a contemplative state. Right now, those of us who are fortunate enough to have housing are in a collective reflective moment, and if we could get to the point of realizing that we don’t need all of the things we are constantly being bombarded with, maybe some

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12 kind of revolution against late-stage capitalism could happen—against all of the massive problems and huge inequities in wealth distribution.

MT: We want to ask you about Anthropocene, and your work with Edward Burtynsky generally, and I was wondering if you could talk about the three films (Manufactured Landscapes, Watermark, and

Anthropocene) as a sort of trilogy? How do you use these films to think about translating Burtynsky’s photography into moving pictures, and whether or not that informs that contemplative mode?

JB: Manufactured Landscapes was very much an attempt to intelligently translate one medium into another. When I learned about Ed’s work, and when I first met him, I said, “I’m not interested in making a biography, and I’m not going to do an artist portrait with all the tropes that accompany that. We’re not doing the darkroom scene and the thoughtful sitting at the desk scene, or the walking away from the camera stuff. If we’re going to make a film about your photographic essay in

China, it is about that. We’re going to find a way of intelligently translating your photographs into a time-based medium.” And he agreed with me.

One of the things I learned in the making of Manufactured Landscapes is that there is an opportunity to explore the dialectic between scale and detail in cinema. It can be done in an intentional way in the time-based medium of film that is more subjective and particular. Because Ed’s photographs have such high resolution and they’re large format, when you stand in front of them you’re confronted by scale. It’s always the big picture first, that’s the thing you are overwhelmed by when you look at his work, but there are also hundreds of potential detailed narratives that are going on in that big, wide frame. What we can do in film is tease those narratives out, and that’s what I learned in Manufactured

Landscapes. Ed has this capacity to know where to stand to convey an entire place in one frame, he’s

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13 unbelievable at that. Having been in those places, it’s not the easiest thing to do, it’s not obvious to know where to stand. But going home with the rice paddy guard to have dinner with his family in

Watermark, or spending time with the women making spray mechanisms for irons in Manufactured

Landscapes, or even being with the other species, not just humans, in Anthropocene, that is something that can happen much more profoundly in film. So, while the working relationship began with the question of “how do you translate the meaning of a photograph into the time-based medium of film?” the project became more and more complex. By the time of Watermark, we were still showing photographs, but it wasn’t about representing photographs anymore. Then once we got to

Anthropocene the three of us were working flat out for five years, on the film, the museum exhibition, the books, the educational program, AR, VR, photography, motion picture… doing all of those in one context. We’d be on site and we’d be gathering for all of those things at the same time. Because of that, the primary relationship changed, and it became about using lens-based media to promote experiential understanding wherever it could happen the most powerfully.

JM: On that last point, I want to ask you more about intermediality, specifically in Anthropocene, because it seems to me that there’s even more going on than the intermedial relationship between photography and film. For example, do you imagine that the film prepares the viewer for the museum exhibit or the classroom activities you mentioned, or on a larger scale, does it make them ready to accept the idea of the Anthropocene and human-induced climate change? Does the film serve as a jumping off point for the other media elements of the project?

JB: No, no, they all stand alone, and they should stand alone, but they’re different iterations. Like, with Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark, Ed would have a private exhibition in his gallery along with a book, and then there was the film. There was this cross pollination that happened between

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14 the two mediums. In Anthropocene, we were trying to bring the relationship that existed between the photographs and the films into the context of the museum. In the museum exhibit for Anthropocene, you’d see the photographs which are static, and beside it would be some moving image footage of the same scene. For example, we mounted a camera on the front of a train and went through the longest rail tunnel in the world, and so you see that tunnel both static and in time, moving. Or, you see a photograph of the Bagger, the biggest land machine on the planet, and then you see in our video installation a detail of the bucket wheels turning, and you don’t quite know what you’re seeing at first, and then it telescopes out to reveal the scale of the largest land machine on the planet.

We’re documentary filmmakers, Nick [de Pencier] and I, but we’ve always been a little bit outside the traditional format. There are many different formats of documentaries, but in traditional journalistic documentary, visual language always seems to have a subordinate relationship to text that I resisted from the very beginning. My background is in philosophy and religious studies and I am always thinking about the many complex possibilities of the interaction between visual language and text.

The subject of the Anthropocene was so compelling for me because it is absolutely inspired by science; it’s interdisciplinary. We were inspired by the Anthropocene Working Group’s research, but we wanted to translate their claims into a medium that was accessible to ordinary people. When you look at their research, and you may have read their book—it’s utterly dense, it’s full of graphs, there’s nothing accessible about it for most people. So, we tried to make their research come to life by weaving together the most iconic examples of their categories of human impact on the systems of the earth. The idea is to bring you as a viewer into these environments that you are responsible for, but would never normally see. I think our default in the Global North in urban environments is to

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15 think of ourselves as disconnected from nature. We may go on a canoe trip, or go for a hike and think we are at that moment interacting with nature, but everything that I’m doing every day—even this computer that I’m talking to you on—is taking something from a natural landscape somewhere, and we don’t think about that all the time. We try to make those connections, allowing the viewer to be in the smelter in Norilsk long enough to get a sense of where the palladium in their cell phone comes from. That’s a long answer, but, in short, we were trying to use our production values and our exploration of the subject to make the scientists’ work come to life.

MT: I was wondering, going back to the scene in the tunnel, if you could talk a little about the use of abstraction or defamiliarization in your films. One thing I remember about that scene is that, about halfway through the tunnel, the camera tilts on its axis so that all of a sudden what was familiar and legible becomes unfamiliar and strange. That tilt on the axis really changes things, and throughout all three films there are moments where the viewer is wondering what they’re looking at, and then, either through a zoom out or a shift in perspective, all of a sudden it becomes clear. Could you say a little bit about the use of abstraction in your filmmaking?

JB: There’s a very deliberate attempt to destabilize the viewer at the beginning of the film. Not in a threatening way, but in an intriguing way. You’re drawn in because you don’t quite know what you’re looking at, you don’t know the scale of what you’re looking at. And then as it is slowly revealed, you get different perspectives on it. In the case of the Bagger working in the open-pit

Hambach coal mine, for example, we start with a close-up, slow motion, weird sci-fi shot of these buckets—you don’t know how big they are, you don’t know what they’re doing—and then the camera pulls out. Once you get a sense of how big the Bagger is, we introduce you to the operator who is obviously proud of these machines because they are triumphs of engineering. They are

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16 something to be marvelled at, but you still haven’t seen the whole mine. It is only later, with the juxtaposition of the scenes of the machine and the scenes of demolition in the town, that the viewer comes to understand that these communities and towns are being destroyed to make way for the mine, including the church in Immerath. Nicole, the carrot farmer, is the person who contextualizes the whole thing for us by explaining, as someone who is from that environment, what is happening.

Figure 1: Coal Mine #1, Hambach Mine, Germany, 2015 (photo: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto)

I’ve always resisted using experts to tell you what you’re looking at. As soon as you do that it becomes a subordinate relationship; what you are looking at is just illustrating what somebody is explaining to you. The expert in documentaries allows the viewer to turn off, whereas I think that

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17 destabilization and abstraction allows for an illumination of the centre from the margin. That also happens more effectively when you have somebody tell you the story of a place who normally would not be sought out for their perspective.

We interviewed Doña Inocencia in Watermark about the Colorado River Delta. She lived there, her

Cucupa community has been decimated by the fact that the river no longer reaches the delta, and her perspective is therefore in my opinion the most important, but if you look at any documentary on the Colorado river it will always be a water expert or a scientist who is telling you what is happening in that situation. So, I’m trying to resist that, but I am also trying to create a situation where you’re drawing the viewer in because they’re intrigued, and puzzled, and destabilized and then eventually the reality is revealed.

JM: I’m curious to know what sort of relationship you had with these various industries in order to get the film made? I have to imagine that a lot of them are not generally open to having people film.

But I also thought it was interesting that there are hints of the relationship between labourer and industry that are never made explicit. I’m thinking about the town in Russia, Norilsk, where they have company day, and you feature this really incredible musical performance at the celebrations.

The first time seeing it, I was thinking “oh, look at these people that are so deeply enmeshed in the ideology of this company town,” and yet it’s very beautiful. The interview with the women in the smelter talking about becoming romantics and seeing flowers breaking through the concrete. So, what was your relationship with the industries that you document? And can you also say a little bit more about actually interacting with the individuals who were on the ground?

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JB: Both of your questions actually go back to the ethics of engagement in documentary, because the ethics of how we engage with our subjects is the most important part of our work. We go all over the world in our work, and that in itself is an act of arrogance in some way, and then going into places, especially compromised environments, with a camera is another act of arrogance. The only way to mitigate that is through extreme humility, really. We never write a script, we do an enormous amount of research before we go somewhere and then we sort of forget about it when we get there and try to completely submit to that environment and learn the truth about that environment. I don’t mean to get mystical about it, but there really has to be an authentic exchange of vulnerability between you and whoever you are talking to, or wherever you are, for something real to happen.

That involves a relinquishing of control. As a director I’m constantly relinquishing control, which is the opposite of what people think a director is supposed to do, but it is absolutely crucial to this kind of filmmaking. We never lie about why we are coming, and it takes us forever to get access to places like the Hambach mine or Norilsk (which is a closed city even to Russians), or any of the places that we try to go because why would they let us in? We just keep asking and asking and asking. We say, “this is not indictment, we’re all implicated in this, this is not about blame.” In the case of the Hambach coal mine, we said “you have the biggest open-pit mine in Germany, and these are the biggest land machines on the planet, so we want to explore that, but we’re not going to castigate you for having this mine because we’re all partaking of this energy.” Eventually that message gets through. Sometimes it doesn’t and we don’t get access, that has happened a few times, but when we do, it is because we never misrepresent ourselves. That doesn’t mean that we are friends with everybody either, but we tell the truth about why we’re there.

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As for the second question, when you’re actually engaging with people in that context, it is really important to me that the story is coming from the people who are of that place, and not just the boss. In Manufactured Landscapes we got into so much trouble for not talking solely with the company representatives. In the ship building yards I talked to this young woman—I was fascinated by her.

She was 18 years old, she was a welder. For talking to her we got banned from the ship-building yards because she wasn’t the representative of that place. So, there are politics to negotiate all the time, but finding those real moments, like with those women in Norilsk, is always such a gift. So those are some of my ethics of engagement. As a documentary filmmaker there has to be a recognition of the power that you have, the imbalance of power you have in putting a camera in somebody’s face. You have to be very careful not to stray from empathy into voyeurism, even with people who you don’t agree with.

You know we are all stuck at home and my kids made us watch [Netflix’s] Tiger King. Oh my God, I just can’t—I don’t understand that kind of work. Yes, it’s entertaining and everything, but it is just endless cycles of exploitation and that feels incomprehensible to me.

MT: I was wondering if I could go back to something you mentioned earlier about being implicated in the ecological effects of the industries you document. I was really struck by the marble quarry scene in Anthropocene. It made me think of film itself as a method of extraction. Films are something that, although in a less tangible way than mines, take things out of the place where they exist and transport them around the world. I think this scene really beautifully expresses the relationship between art and industry, in that the quarry, like all mines, is an industrial site of extraction, and yet the marble that gets extracted is used primarily to produce art. I was wondering if you could talk about the quarry scene in general and then your thoughts on film as a form of resource extraction?

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Figure 2: Carbonera Quarry #1, Carrara, Italy, 2016 (photo: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto)

JB: The quarry scene was interesting because it was Roland [Schlimme]’s idea, our editor, to use the opera. At first, I thought, “it’s drawing too much attention to itself,” but then I grew to love it because there is something so epic about that environment. It took us many tries to get that original pull back with the drone. We were shooting in 4K and it took so many different takes to get that sense of revelation of just pulling back and seeing how big it is. It’s like a cathedral of stone. These places are stunningly beautiful. And yet, the rapidity of extraction has increased so much since the mechanization of marble quarrying. The guy who was the owner of the quarry said that it used to take them two weeks to get one slab and take it down the mountain. Now, they can do it in half a day. To see the machines try to work against the raw material, the struggle of that, it felt particularly poignant. The quarriers would argue that the mountains will never run out of marble, and then there

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21 are people who are totally against that resource extraction because it literally is levelling mountains all the time.

Speaking about film as resource extraction, one of the things that’s kept me up at night about this project is its carbon footprint. Somebody asked a Buddhist monk, “What can I do to save the planet?” and he said, “go to sleep.” Like basically, just stop doing anything. And so here we are in a situation where we’re all staying home and doing nothing and look at how the planet is thriving.

What does that mean? I’ve really thought about it: was the carbon footprint of Anthropocene worth the awareness raising? Our whole project is carbon offset: the release, the book, the museum exhibition, it’s a complex series of calculations, but I don’t think that’s an answer. I think it’s the beginnings of an answer, to at least mitigate your energy output.

So that’s one thing I think about in terms of resource extraction, the enormous footprint we have.

The other part I think about goes back to that ethics of engagement. If I was someone who was going in with a plan—a script—of what we needed from a place, and I was not allowing that place to reveal its own truth to us (I’m not talking about objective truth, I’m talking about a sense of that place), then I would feel guilty about thinking that I could have anything meaningful to say about these places. It’s about trying to be as much of a quiet listener for the truth of a place, and then finding out where conveying it fits into the bigger narrative of the Anthropocene Working Group’s research. So, when I’m editing, and really it’s Roland and I in a room for a year, we go through hundreds of hours of footage and slowly sift through and find that rhythm. The ethics of representation are always top of mind for me when we’re editing precisely because I don’t like the idea of parachuting in, getting footage, and repurposing it for a bigger project.

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JM: I love the story the mine supervisor tells about Michelangelo and then the sequence ends with this workshop of artisans recreating David. This leads me back to the question I wanted to ask you about intermediality beyond just photography. There are, for instance, many live musical performances in the film. There’s the church band in Lagos, the young man at the landfill site, the opening ceremony. Thinking about intermediality in those instances—it’s all live performance so it’s almost intangible in a way. There is this intangible medium that is represented, in each case, as an expression of the people who are in these situations and in these environments for better or for worse. Was this your thought process about the music? The use of opera, for instance. The music isn’t just a thematic add-on to put the viewer in a particular geographic locale; the sequence is constructed almost like an operatic performance.

JB: It’s actually quite deliberate in terms of films we’ve made in the past. The True Meaning of Pictures

(2002) is a film about the photography of Shelby-Lee Adams. All the music in that film is made by the subjects of the film. In the film we made about Paul Bowles, which is our first feature documentary, Let It Come Down (1998), all the pieces of music in that film are either Paul Bowles’s compositions, or music that he collected throughout Morocco for the Library of Congress. So, for me, music and sound design are hugely important. I always think it’s illegitimate in documentary when music is used to lead emotionally in a latent way. While we’re in these heavy industrial soundscapes we often do a lot of wild sound gathering. We work a lot on sound design so that the music emerges out of the soundscape that is already there and then subsumes back into that soundscape. At some points you can’t even tell, “Is that music?” or “What am I listening to?” It’s a rhythm, it’s music that is overlaying an industrial soundscape, but it has an organic nature to it because it emerges from the context.

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So, going back to your question about the tunnel, that moment where the camera does this acid trip twirling—which happened in post-production by the way, we couldn’t do that with the camera because it was literally strapped to the front of the train—the yodelling performance in the opening ceremonies was so powerful that we wanted to join those two things in a way that was visceral as well as conceptual. By allowing the yodeller’s voice to come in during the tunnel sequence, it really felt that you were almost going into another dimension.

One thing that we have always done from the very beginning is utilize music in a particular way. I never have temp music that we then replace or get a composer to approximate. We start working with our composers really early in the editing process, at the point of assembly. So, we send footage to them to start thinking about, it’s more of a conversation than a one-way relationship with a composer adapting to a locked picture. The music in films is often composed to the final cut, and it feels claustrophobic. I hate it when you can tell a documentary is scored. There’s just something contrived about it, something very self-conscious about it. I’m always looking for the moments where the music can emerge from the context itself and give an extra layer of meaning to it and be organically connected to it.

MT: You mentioned earlier that you studied religion and philosophy. Could you talk about your influences a little bit, whether that’s in the form of certain philosophers or certain filmmakers or other works of art? What are the texts that you draw on when you’re thinking about your films?

JB: In terms of philosophy, I’m kind of a Kantian at heart. There’s something doomed about the whole idea of a universal principle, and yet it’s a very noble idea. To think that there would be a theory of aesthetics with a definition of beauty that everyone could assent to. I love striving for that

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24 while recognizing that it is almost impossible. So, in philosophy, I was more along the line of the

Platonic-Kantian mind. In religious studies, I studied the contextual theologians and philosophers, people like Jürgen Moltmann and the Frankfurt School. My thesis was on Reinhold Niebuhr, who was an American Contextual theologian, and I think that my whole emphasis on ethics in our work really comes from that background. The politics of representation, the idea of representing and the enormous weight of responsibility that comes along with that, is always top of mind.

In terms of filmmakers, Donald Brittain is a big influence on me. His film Volcano [1976] was very powerful to me in terms of an organic and equal metaphorical relationship between visual language and textual language. Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman are influences on me as well. I turned to film because I was frustrated with the method of inquiry as an academic. I was on my way to becoming a teacher, and doing a PhD, and I thought, I just wish there was a more lateral way of exploring these questions. All of the questions of the human condition that preoccupied me in school, like metaphysics and ethics and epistemology and identity. How could you explore those questions in a medium that people could really respond to? I turned to film for that reason, and once I started doing it, I felt that I had found the thing I would do for the rest of my life. I felt so comfortable in that medium. I’d never gone to school as a filmmaker. I learned by doing it and my husband Nick [de Pencier] learned by doing it too; working on big sets, being a driver, then an assistant gaffer, and then an assistant camera while making short films of his own of his dancer friends. That’s how he learned, and I learned by just doing it. Making so many mistakes and learning how to edit, learning how to interview, learning how a camera works.

Anyway, that’s my answer but there are many more filmmakers. We were just watching this Alan

Pakula film, All the President’s Men [1976]. There’s such an economy in those films. They’re so elegant

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25 in the way that nothing is overblown, the gracefulness of that. Re-watching that film and thinking,

“Wow. I used to love all of his work.” I didn’t realize, but it was probably an influence in some way.

All of his films, not just that one.

MT: The staccato typewriter that opens and closes that film is so powerful.

JB: Oh my God! And all the things everybody would expect you would spend all the time on don’t happen at all. I love that. There’s an elegance in his work that I was remembering, I mean, there are so many filmmakers I admire. Every film that we make is like a whole universe in itself and it is such a struggle. Every time I go into a project I think: “this is never going to get finished, it’s never going to work. I never get to this point where I think, “well I’ve been doing this for 25 years so I probably can figure it out.” I never feel like that. I always think, “Oh my God, this one is never going to come together.” It’s often in the editing so it’s always intense.

JM: Speaking of good and evil, I was wondering if you could say a little bit about what you see, very broadly, as the role of religion—since you mentioned you studied religious belief—in the era of

Anthropocene? It struck me in the film that you have these two strong images of Christianity with, on the one hand, the powerful scene of the church in Germany being destroyed after these straight cuts away from the earth mover, and of course that amazing road sign [which depicts the machine eating the town] ...

JB: [Chuckles].

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JM: And for me that sequence really played as elegiac, a kind of: “oh of course we’re destroying everything, even human tradition that I might not necessarily be able to describe to you,” but it’s later counterbalanced with this beautiful sequence in the mega church in Lagos that I had to pause because I couldn’t image a structure that houses a million people. It’s a beautiful sequence in that it feels a little more handheld, and obviously there’s a lot of joy, religious revelry, but there’s still that kind of undercurrent of a million people. The idea that a mega church is itself a sort of anthropogenic product. So, again that’s another non-question question but, how are you thinking through those issues?

JB: You know, I’m just remembering that scene, Nick and I get into fights all the time and he did not want to shoot that sign. I just said, “Are you kidding? This is unbelievable. It’s a street sign showing the land bagger, the big jaws eating the town [laughing].” In fact, we drove there with a

GPS and it took us to the end of this road and there was the mine. The GPS hadn’t been updated for the town to have been gone. In a way that church is more about the destruction of the town. I didn’t think about it as religion at all. It was more an example of civilization in some way just being destroyed. That these are the lengths that we go to for energy, you know? And even shitty coal like lignite, which is dirty coal. It’s heavy, it’s got a lot of water in it, and it has to be burned close to the mine because it’s not worth transporting.

So, I thought of the destruction of the German church as more about the bulldozing of civilization.

But I do feel that scenes like that are counterbalanced by the exuberance and profound spirituality that happens in the church in Lagos. To me, the apex of the film, emotionally, is with the species that are extinct in the wild or critically endangered because you’re just spending an existential moment with these species that are effectively gone. Those two scenes were sort of balanced out for

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27 me by the joy that is in that church. It was important to show that moment of joy and not just the misery of overpopulation, and the Anthropocene generally.

Figure 3: Building Ivory Tusk Mound, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016 (photo: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto)

MT: I was wondering, actually—to pick up on what you were just saying about showing the animals that are going extinct—about your decision to open and close with the elephant tusk burning. I’m especially curious about the really powerful speech by the Kenyan woman who was (I assume) a conservationist. It seemed to me that you were sort of allowing her to be the spokesperson for the film in some sense. Justin and I were talking about this earlier: when we think of the Anthropocene,

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28 the first thing that comes to our mind is climate change, and not the poaching of elephants. Can you say a little bit about using her and the tusk burning as a framing device for the film?

JB: We watch a lot of work that is basically intended to exhort people to act, a kind of climate emergency porn. It’s really hard to penetrate, not the inertia, exactly, but the way that we read that kind of footage. We see it on the news, and it is this terrible thing that’s happening somewhere else.

We grappled with that and really tried to show climate change through coral, through Texas, you know, in these more oblique ways. But what is important about the tusk burn is that it appears to be an apocalyptic moment, there’s something apocalyptic about it, but it is a positive thing that has happened. That paradox and ambiguity was incredibly appealing to me. What the Kenyan government decided to do with their stockpile of ivory was an incredibly brave thing and it also led to some real change. Winnie Kiiru, the Kenyan conservationist, was to me the perfect person to contextualize that moment. You can imagine, there were so many different organizations and philanthropists that were part of the burn and it felt, I want to say this carefully, it felt as though there was a colonial element to it. Kiiru is the person who masterminded that burn, who recorded all of the tusks, and was clearly the authority there. And she was so powerful that I knew she was going to open the film somehow.

A lot of our films have a circular element to them where you return to the place where you began.

You return with a different understanding of it in some way, or, as in the case of Watermark, it is two different iterations of the same thing. In Watermark you begin with the silt release at the Xiaolangdi dam in China which seems like some terrible act of nature and then you realize that it is completely human-controlled. Then in the end you see a river in nature, you know, what does water look like when it is left alone? In the case of Anthropocene we didn’t know we were going to begin and end with

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29 the tusk burning scene. There were no drones allowed at the burn, especially because President

Kenyatta was there and it was a security issue, but in the end we got this last-minute permission to use the drone right when the light was dying. So, we pull up and you actually see all of the piles burning at the same time, which was very powerful. It is a return to the paradox that it feels apocalyptic but it’s actually positive. Extinction is one of the hardest things to represent in geology, because it is marked by absence—the species is no longer in the rock record. So the Anthropocene

Working Group grappled with how to represent it as a category. It just ends up that those species are not in the rock record anymore. So, extinction is one of things that they have most trouble talking about even though it’s the hallmark of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic change. From the very beginning I knew I wanted extinction to be a strong element, but it wasn’t planned; it happened when we were editing and putting it together.

Can you tell me about this journal a bit?

JM: Sure! Maybe this could lead to our final question. The subject of this issue of The Neutral is the

Anthropocene and periodization. Both in terms of geology and media history; both the bare geological fact that this whole concept is about periodization and also from a historiographical point of view, what it means for us to define a period of study and whether or not it is something we can really accomplish. Given that this issue is about the Anthropocene and periodization, and, more specifically, critiques of these concepts, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that subject? For example, there is a way in which the effects of the Anthropocene are felt differently by different groups of people. You know, we were talking about the apocalypse, and all of the markers that we have defined as the end of the world have already happened for Indigenous people. And yet we are constantly mediating the vision of what the end will look like as if others haven’t already experienced

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30 that. What does a term like Anthropocene actually mean for people who are already suffering its effects? And how do we move forward once we have put such a geological, finite point on it? I mean, if we are already inscribed in the geological record, doesn’t that mean we are already

“history”? The film, I feel, delves into this in that the Anthropocene signifies both that the crisis is ongoing and that it’s finished. I was glad there was a hopeful message at the end of the film because it feels like the hole in the ground in Germany is a metaphor for how we’ve already pushed our thumb down on Europe.

JB: There’s two things there. First, the periodization element, the formality of it. In the beginning, our film was going to follow the ratification of the term by the International Commission on

Stratigraphy and we watched as that whole thing fell apart because they’re still debating. There are many people who are part of that union who do not believe that the Anthropocene is a geological epoch and should not be ratified as such. And so, you can get into the politics and the science of that, these geologists saying, “it’s not in the rocks, it’s not in the strata, and why do we need it when we can already date everything, and why don’t we just think of it as a period like the Renaissance?

It’s a cultural period.” And then there is the point that it is very anthropogenic to name an epoch after yourselves, so that’s one side of it. Second, there is the critique of the Anthropocene as a concept that you touched on before, the universalization of it, the idea that we are all implicated.

The film makes a very specific point in saying that we are all implicated, but some of us more profoundly than others. There are many, many people on the earth who are recipients of the anthropogenic activity that is so carelessly executed by us in the Global North. And so, from an

Indigenous perspective, from a feminist perspective, from an economic perspective, these are all vital and necessary critiques and correctives. For example, some people argue that the epoch should be called “Capitalocene,” because that is essentially what brough us to this crisis. There is a tension

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31 between, on the one hand, the supposedly politically neutral, scientific argument of whether this is really a geological epoch, and, on the other, the superstructure of all of these elements that actually unpack what the Anthropocene means, what anthropogenic activity means and who is responsible for it. When we realized that the vote was not going to be ratified, we moved more towards trying to make those categories of research come to life.

The other element that is interesting is that there are critiques of representations of the

Anthropocene as being diagrammatic, often aerial: this sort of God’s eye view. This has always been a healthy tension in our work, especially as Ed began to do more and more aerial work, from

Watermark into Anthropocene. For Watermark, Ed argued rightly that the only way you can understand the watershed was from above, but then what ends up happening is if you stay at that level, you just float away. You have to be rooted in the particular in order for the bigger picture to have that meaning. And so, we embrace that tension between the general and the particular by having the diagrammatic view constantly punctuated in the film by individual voices; punctuated by the individual species, the details, the person dancing in the church, the guy singing in the Dandora landfill, the elephants. This is done very intentionally to undermine that omniscient perspective: in this context it was important for there to be that back-and-forth. And we even did that in the exhibition when Ed decided that he wanted to show these murals that are literally made up of perhaps 200 photographs, high-resolution photographs, all taken with the drone, one of which was of the city of Lagos. In the exhibition that felt very much like that omniscient perspective, and I said

“Well, if we’re going do that, then we have to have these film interventions that break into that mural” and you’re on the back of a moped with some guy on the street, or you walking through the marketplace or you’re in the church because it is the combination of those two things, those two perspectives, that gives the Anthropocene real meaning and that was a very deliberate thing.

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