by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier. For release details, see
“THIS film was shot without a traditional script,” runs a statement after the credits of Anthropocene: The human epoch. It is there just in case there is any doubt left after viewing a film outside the usual norms.
Whenever the film-makers set up in a mine or near a landfill, they waited for a story to unfold. In bearing witness and not leading with an agenda, writer and director Jennifer Baichwal, cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky equip the audience to do the same.
Advertisement
The result is a visual tone poem reminiscent of the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, the first of a trilogy by director Godfrey Reggio, with music by Philip Glass. Thanks to an editing pace that echoes the slow pan of de Pencier’s camera, the audience is neither jolted out of a gripping scene before its import sinks in, nor tipped into despair due to overexposure.
Anthropocene is part of a trilogy: Manufactured Landscapes was released in 2006, Watermark in 2013. All feature sweeping shots across altered landscapes, little narration (actor Alicia Vikander lends her voice to Anthropocene) and spare, evocative music.
The film is a contribution to the argument about adding “the Anthropocene” – coined by Nobel prizewinner Paul Crutzen in 2000 – to the geological timeline. A final decision by the International Commission on Stratigraphy is pending.
The current epoch, the Holocene, began some 11,000 years ago. The main evidence for the Anthropocene is the “fossilisation” of human artefacts such as plastics, radionuclides, concrete, “technofossils” and quadrillions of chicken bones from factory farming. Scientists also cite unusual levels of nitrogenous compounds, a spike in carbon seen in ice cores and a precipitous drop in many species.
The most striking segment of the film is on the transformation of the planet. To create consumer goods, we gouge and scar Earth’s surface to extract ore and oil. One startling example from Germany shows the erasure of villages, cropland and forests for open-pit coal mining, leaving many square kilometres of post-apocalyptic devastation.
In Chile, vast fields of lithium ore dry in the sun. In the marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, workers remove large sections of stone with hand tools and machinery. In the aerial view, it looks like a gargantuan, blue-veined white nougat with giant teeth marks. It is either comforting or distressing to learn that it is old enough to have supplied Michelangelo.
Then there is landfill. At a site in Nairobi, Kenya, coloured plastic lies stacked in layers as if readying itself for millennia of stratification. Children wander, scavenging with their bare hands, watched over by scores of sentinel-like storks.
The results of gratifying our desires are everywhere. In 2009, Kenya ceremonially burned ivory from 10,000 African elephants in a bid to slow the trade. Nothing could restore the magnificent creatures, but it did prevent even one trinket being made from those tusks. At the start and end of the film, we see the ivory carvers surrounded by their work: exquisite but searing images of a world literally carved by us.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Carving up Earth”
