Viewing with the Nonhuman: Time, texture and extinction in Carlos Casas’ Cemetery (2019)
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh &
University College Dublin
Biography
Deborah Schrijvers, originally from the Netherlands, is a third-year Ad Astra doctoral student in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. For her PhD project, she researches extinction narratives with an emphasis on gender, race and decolonisation through analyses of contemporary and transnational video installations and experimental film. Additionally, Deborah is a Research Assistant for the University College of Dublin’s Environmental Humanities strand and copyeditor at the journal Humanimalia.
Showcase
During her EARTH Scholarship exchange, Deborah was based at the University of Edinburgh, to investigate the role of time and conceptualisation of temporality in contemporary extinction narratives, specifically the experimental film Cemetery (2019) by director Carlos Casas. She investigated the way in which this film reacts to the colonial and hierarchical human-animal tropes in adventure films and wildlife documentaries and produces an anti-colonial alternative to these popular visualisations. She examined how film can create a human-animal relational gaze that folds the gaze of colonial and animal mastery in adventure films and nature documentaries to reimagine human-animal relations through the gaze and enable the viewer to experience this new form of relationality through film. Deborah also looked at the way in which the film formally suggests non-linear extinction temporalities that include colonialism, capitalism and extraction. She conducted research into the tension between visibility and invisibility of animals in extinction narratives and their political repercussions in relation to colonialism and extraction. Deborah has been able to discuss these questions and present her ideas through the numerous possibilities created by the networks EEHN and CRITIQUE, that organized many opportunities to discuss her research with a broad range of scholars.
Introduction
During her EARTH Scholarship exchange, Deborah was based at the University of Edinburgh, to investigate the role of time and conceptualisation of temporality in contemporary extinction narratives, specifically the experimental film Cemetery (2019) by director Carlos Casas. She investigated the way in which this film reacts to the colonial and hierarchical human-animal tropes in adventure films and wildlife documentaries and produces an anti-colonial alternative to these popular visualisations. She examined how film can create a human-animal relational gaze that folds the gaze of colonial and animal mastery in adventure films and nature documentaries to reimagine human-animal relations through the gaze and enable the viewer to experience this new form of relationality through film. Deborah also looked at the way in which the film formally suggests non-linear extinction temporalities that include colonialism, capitalism and extraction. She conducted research into the tension between visibility and invisibility of animals in extinction narratives and their political repercussions in relation to colonialism and extraction. Deborah has been able to discuss these questions and present her ideas through the numerous possibilities created by the networks EEHN and CRITIQUE, that organized many opportunities to discuss her research with a broad range of scholars.
Research
In my PhD project, I am investigating alternative visual extinction narratives to the popular extinction narratives in the form of wildlife and nature documentaries. I am looking at film installations and experimental films, filmmakers and artists that work on and transgress the border of visual art and cinema through expanded cinema. Although mass extinction is gaining traction through popular scientific books and documentaries, animal extinction is often registered in popular media as a product of the homogeneous anthropos in ‘Anthropocene’ and remedied through breeding schemes. My PhD project intervenes in these conversations by highlighting the sociopolitical dimensions of extinction, focusing on the roles of gender and race and effectively the histories and ongoing practices of colonialism and extraction. My theoretical framework consists of an interdisciplinary approach to art, informed by extinction studies, animal studies, film studies, critical theory, critical race theory and queer theory.
Extinction as a concept and materially unfolding event of the Sixth Mass Extinction is intricately linked to time. This is an important aspect of the extinction debate, formulated in the humanities, sciences, and by activist groups like XR as a ‘race against the clock’. This type of rhetoric urges new environmental policies to protect species and limit their losses. As such extinction histories are histories of the end of the future (Jørgenson 2022). Both Dolly Jørgenson, Matthew Chrulew et. al (2017) and Michelle Bastian (2012, 2017) demonstrate the inability of conventional, linear time to fully engage with extinction and environmental catastrophes. Leading theorist Bastian (2012), forcefully pleads for replacing linearity as absolute time telling towards ways of coordinating actions to the world. However, popular media often considers extinction temporalities to be linear, progressive and inevitably apocalyptic. My PhD project investigates the way in which popular extinction temporalities which conceive of extinction as linear and progressive emulate imperial temporality and therefore need to be decolonised to think about extinction productively by acknowledge both its social and environmental aspects. My PhD project also looks at the formal qualities of the medium film, both how and why it is able to conceptually offer alternatives to linear and imperial extinction temporalities.
Image credit: Winish Chedi
During the EARTH Scholarship, I have researched and discussed my work on the experimental film Cemetery (2019) by director Carlos Casas. Cemetery follows the old Asian elephant Nga, the last of his species, on a journey to a mythical elephant graveyard to die. The elephant is accompanied by his mahout Sanra. They are hunted by poachers, in search of both Nga and the elephant graveyard with its promise of ivory. The film comprises myth, documentary, fiction and visual experimentation and in this process, becomes a form of visual thinking about extinction and time. Formally, Cemetery is an anticolonial reaction to adventure fiction and film, a genre that emerged during European colonialism in the 18th and 19th century. Cemetery is also an anticolonial reaction to nature documentaries that narrativize animal life from an exclusively ‘scientific’ angle that fetishizes animals as specimens. Due to its audiovisual richness, Cemetery re-imagines multispecies relations in an affirmative sense grounded in the South-Asian context of the film, but with global implications for human-animal relations. Thematically and formally, the film suggests that time is not linear, visualising time alternately from a human, animal, plant-fungal, and eventually mineral point of view, implying cyclical or deep time. I therefore argue that Cemetery as artwork is able to visualize a new way of telling time and therefore functions as a ‘new clock’ for extinction temporalities. Additionally, Cemetery critically examines the effects of colonialism and capitalism; sociopolitical forces that are not held responsible in the sciences for their roles in mass extinctions, and only partially in extinction studies.