Sinkholes, the Other on Asbestos – the Geological Has Revealed Itself to Be Inextricably Tied to Socio-Economic Processes
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Litvintseva, Alexandra (Sasha). 2020. Geological Filmmaking. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, Uni- versity of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28638/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] Geological Filmmaking Alexandra (Sasha) Litvintseva Goldsmiths University of London, 2019 PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies 1 I, Alexandra Litvintseva, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signature: Date: 2 Acknowledgements There are a number of people to thank without whom this project would not have been possible. First, my deepest gratitude goes out to my supervisors Joanna Zylinska and Rachel Moore — thank you both for seeing the potential in me and for your infinite patience. I am truly indebted to you for your sustained commitment, consistently meticulous advice, occasional tough love and generous support. You have taught me to be the scholar I hope to be for the rest of my life. I am also deeply grateful to my mother, whose belief and patience spans many more years, and without which I would never have embarked on this endeavour. Thank you for trusting me to follow my curiosity down a career path you didn’t always understand, and thank you for bringing me up to have the necessary strength. In more ways than I could name — you made this possible. Thank you to my PhD colleagues and now lifelong friends, Roberto Mozzachiodi, Annie Goh, Sandra Kazlauskaite, Mihaela Brebenel, Chris Law, Scott Wark, Alex Coupe, Ifor Duncan, Jon Gunnar Olafsson for being there through it all and making it such a rewarding process in so many unexpected ways, with an extra special thanks to Peter Rees for our remote productivity club. Your solidarity and encouragement have been invaluable. A special thank you to my collaborators and dear friends Graeme Arnfield and Daniel Mann — without our conversations and shared obsessions this project would have looked very different. Your thoughtful and committed approaches to your practices have been a incredibly meaningful to intersect with. And finally I would like to offer my deepest heartfelt thanks to my partner Beny Wagner. Thank you for your unwavering support, your intuitive understanding, your generosity and curiosity, for being a fan of this project even when I wavered, for our growing intellectual and creative enmeshment, provocation, inspiration, occasional confusion, as well as for the deepest friendship and love. You are my target audience. 3 Abstract In recent years, media studies has developed theoretical models which consider the material aspects of media technologies. In the context of the widespread ecological crisis, such studies have included analyses of media as products of the extraction of geological materials. My doctoral project of ‘geological filmmaking’ contributes to this growing set of discourses by experimenting, on a conceptual and artistic level, with the reciprocal relations between geology and film. Building on existing theoretical studies of the geological materiality of the filmic medium, it explores formal and temporal intersections between film and geology in order to engage with some of the representational challenges posed by the ecological crisis. ‘The geological’ here acts as a perceptual and cognitive extremity of the human (in)ability to grasp processes unfolding across vast spatio-temporal scales. Through an integrated theory-practice methodology my project takes two specific geological phenomena as prisms through which to explore the greater philosophical problems encountered at the intersections of human and geological timescales. In the process of making two films – one focused on sinkholes, the other on asbestos – the geological has revealed itself to be inextricably tied to socio-economic processes. It has thus become an urgent demand, requiring a response here and now. This study is an attempt to offer such a response. By reading film and geology through each other, I have staged an encounter between the moments in which their reciprocity illuminates key issues surrounding the anthropogenic ecological crisis, both in its vastness and proximity, its longevity and immediacy. I have also taken some steps towards outlining an artistic methodology for engaging with planetary ecological issues via the medium of film. 4 Contents Introduction 7 Methodology 15 Structure of the written thesis 23 1. Literature review: Thinking, narrating, imaging an mediating a geophysical crisis 28 Thinking geology and thinking geologically 29 The Anthropocene narrative(s) 35 Imagining and imaging the ecological crisis 43 Media geologies and moving image ecologies 50 Seeing geologically 55 2. Depiction: The verticality of landscape and the depth of the image 63 Tracing landscape: from object to medium 68 Verticality of absent landscapes 73 Sinkholes: surface and depth 80 3. Perception: Sensing the (in)visible in ecological crisis 92 On the relationality of (in)visibility 96 Seeing and being seen by radiation 100 Asbestos: haptics and optics, inside and outside 106 4. The Future: Material debt and ‘the deep now’ 118 The multiplicity and relationality of cinematic duration 123 Thick time and ‘the deep now’ 127 Material debt and the entropy of unintended consequences 131 Conclusion 139 Links to Salarium and Asbestos 153 Bibliography 154 5 List of figures Fig 1. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 2. Still from Radiant Temperature of Openings (2015), Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, courtesy of the artists Fig. 3. Still from Radiant Temperature of Openings (2015), Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, courtesy of the artists Fig 4. Installation shot from Radiant Temperature of Openings (2015), Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, courtesy of the artists Fig. 5. Installation shots from Radiant Temperature of Openings (2015), Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, courtesy of the artists Fig 6. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 7. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 8. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 9. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 10. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 11. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann Fig 12. Still from sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014), Tomonari Nishikawa, courtesy of the artist Fig 13. Still from Asbestos (2016), Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield Fig. 14. Still from Asbestos (2016), Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield Fig. 15. Still from Asbestos (2016), Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield Fig. 16. Still from Asbestos (2016), Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield Fig. 17. Still from Asbestos (2016), Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield Fig. 18. Still from Asbestos (2016), Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield Fig. 19. Documentation of Asbestos exhibition, Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield, Roaming project, London, UK, 2017 Fig. 20. Documentation of Asbestos exhibition, Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield, Roaming project, London, UK, 2017 Fig. 21. Documentation of Asbestos exhibition, Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield, Roaming project, London, UK, 2017 6 Introduction 7 Fig 1. Still from Salarium (2017), Sasha Litvintseva and Daniel Mann 8 ‘Nature’s cultural hall’ reads a solitary sign in an arid desert landscape. A mountain range obscures the horizon and the sky is a cloudless milky haze. My camera is on a tripod capturing this scene, while the rental car idling behind me blasts the air-conditioning. Over the last three days I have calculated that I can keep the camera rolling for exactly ninety seconds before it overheats, shuts down and corrupts the file. The sun blinds me as I remove my sunglasses to set the exposure on the camera. Even within these ninety-second intervals the scorching sun dehydrates my body and burns my skin. To the naked eye this landscape does not betray any visible signs of what we tend to call life; without the slightest movement, the shot that emerges from this moment will be practically indistinguishable from a photograph. By now I’ve learned to sense when to end the shot without having to rely on the camera’s clock. I run back to the car to cool the camera and myself before we can once again take another shot. We are in the Judean desert just off the Dead Sea shore. It is late July and the temperature is 48 degrees Celsius. In July, it never drops below body temperature. Even in the middle of the night, it stays in the high thirties, and soon after the sun comes up, it is already in the upper forties. The sun here is in such excess that it obliterates its harnessing as a precious tourist commodity. In the extreme heat this tourist area is deserted, and my collaborator and I are able to park and shoot anywhere without obstruction. We have come here to make a film about the sinkholes that have been ravaging the Dead Sea coastline over the last forty years. The sinkholes are caused by anthropogenic interventions into the hydro-geophysics of the area, where over-extraction of minerals and the diversion of water from 9 River Jordan to irrigate desert orchards has lowered the sea level, leading to the creation of cavities under the surface of the earth. As we film just off the side of the road, there is a latent fear that the ground might collapse and swallow us, the camera, or even the car.