An Interview with Jennifer Baichwal Justin Morris and Matthew I
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Scale and Detail: An Interview with Jennifer Baichwal Justin Morris and Matthew I. Thompson Jennifer Baichwal’s latest film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (co-directed with Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier, 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, Manufactured Landscapes (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? Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 10 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 Toronto, 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 Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 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 Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 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 Period: Media and the Anthropocene (Issue 2, 2021) 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.