Lorenzo Ferrarini (University of Manchester) "Filmic Relationality: Towards an Eethnographic Ecocinema"

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Abstract: Rooted in ecocriticism and ecomedia studies, the field of ecocinema counts by now a significant volume of scholarship analysing works as diverse as Hollywood catastrophic movies, environmentalist documentaries and experimental slow cinema. In this presentation I cross the main ideas from this literature with anthropology’s recent turn to multispecies ethnography and socialities beyond the human, with the aim of suggesting ways of making ethnographic films that explore relationships between humans, animals, plants and animated things. Through examples from my own films and other works in documentary and fiction, I highlight ways in which ecocinema can subvert the primacy of the human, enact relational ontologies and make visible unintentional post-natural designs. I touch on the ethics of spectatorship, the role of filmic sensoriality and in particular of soundtrack design, and of editing and structure in the case of my latest film on ecosystems of extraction in Burkina Faso. Ultimately, I argue that ethnographic ecocinema can complicate viewers’ conceptions of nature by pushing them to think through interconnectedness and interdependence. Lorenzo Ferrarini is Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.