MIRAJ: The Moving Image Review & Art Journal - Ecologies, Sept 2021

How to address and cope with the complexity of the ecological breakdown as a documentary moving image artist? This text contends that the causes and the consequences of the current ecological situation create some challenges for documentary-orientated artistic practices. These challenges are on the one hand related to the overwhelming complexity of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, as addressed in this text, these challenges are connected to dominant assumptions related to the label ‘documentary’. By revisiting the roots of the documentary this article examines how the documentary mode can be productive for the planet’s present and future challenges. This endeavour will be illustrated by the way Belgian artists Hannes Dereere and Silke Huysmans use and present documentary footage in their documentary-performance Pleasant Island. Their thoughtful use of today’s most omnipresent device, the smartphone, problematizes the traditional responses of the documentary mode on climate emergency, whilst at the same time, their use of moving images and the instrument that produced these images insists to think today’s emergencies together.

This article considers the value of the leftist filmmaking collective Ogawa Productions’ interdisciplinary practice, which combined filmmaking and farming as an activist project of advocacy for social and environmental justice in 1980s Japan. It argues that Ogawa Pro, as the collective was known, integrated agriculture and film culture to construct a radically inclusive ecosystemic understanding of humans, plants, animals and the climate. Viewed today, their approach exemplifies an early model of ecological thinking that speaks to the recent multispecies turn in the arts, humanities and social sciences. But Ogawa Pro’s turn to the land is also riddled with ambivalence: the films harbour agrarian romanticism bordering on a politics of nostalgia and ethnic environmentalism. Torn between what we might today call progressive and reactionary traditionalist politics, Ogawa Pro’s enmeshed filming and farming practices constitute an important example of what I call Land Cinema – that is, film entangled in territorial, ecological and aesthetic aspects of land. Though the collective’s earlier and more militant films have received critical acclaim in recent years, its later land-based work merits further attention for the way it exposes political tensions over how to cultivate, represent and share space responsibly.

Review of: In Fading Light: The Films of the Amber Collective, James Leggott (2020)

New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 268 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78920-651-7, e-book, £25.00

Review of: Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, Kim Knowles (2020)

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 270 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03044-309-2, h/bk, £69.99

Review of: TEN SKIES, Erika Balsom (2021)

Australia: Fireflies Press, 168 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-98191-868-7, h/bk, €11.00

Review of: Radical Mainstream: Independent Film, Video and Television in Britain, 1974–1990, Colin Perry (2020)

Bristol: Intellect Books, 190 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-192-4, h/bk, £90.00