[Commlist] CFP: Making Ecocinema.

*Making Ecocinema. Ecological Politics and Processes of Experimental 
Cinema.*
(Fabriques de l'écocinéma. Politiques et processus du cinéma expérimental).

16 and 17 November 2023/ Aix-Marseille University

(Site St Charles, Turbulence Building or by Zoom)

The budding idea of an ‘Eco-Cinema’ was first proposed in an article 
from 2004 by Scott MacDonald, which examined avant-garde, non-commercial 
film productions, where the filmmaker’s experience of being immersed in 
the natural environment was poetically attuned to the material 
vulnerability of the film medium. Over the years, this concept of 
‘ecocinema’ has become a widely discussed object of study by ecocritics, 
including a large spectrum of styles and media. MacDonald’s text is 
pioneering in several ways, first because it posits experimental films 
as privileged sites for ‘ecocinema’, an intuition that seems to be 
confirmed by the significance given to experimental films in ecocritical 
studies since then. However, the article also focuses ecocinematic 
research towards issues of reception, examining film’s capacity to 
affect the spectators: the slow contemplation of the world is posited as 
an essential aspect of ecocinema. In other words, the text inaugurated 
an ecocritical approach, which has since become the dominant one, which 
privileges the way in which cinematic images can ‘re-train perception’ 
differently and thus interrogates the manner in which they represent the 
world ‘ecologically’ (or not).

In his text ‘Ecoaesthetics - A Manifesto for the XXIst Century’, the 
artist Rasheed Araeen asserted that for art to be properly ‘ecological’, 
it must move away from the paradigm of representation and turn rather 
towards processes of transformation and creation. Similarly, the 
neo-materialist philosopher Karen Barad has written extensively about 
the need to move beyond ‘representationalism’ (‘the belief that 
representations serve a mediating function between knower and known’) 
and instead focus enquiry on the practices and ‘performances’ that 
sustain these representations. It is in this sense that Timothy Morton 
has consistently maintained that a properly political ecocriticism must 
take into account the fact that our actions are integrated into - or 
confronted with - the material processes that surround us. Cinema, like 
all art, is ‘made of the materials’ of the world and ‘exist[s] in the 
world’. If indeed experimental cinema does seem to be a privileged space 
for ecocritical thinking, it is not only because of what it can 
represent of the world, quite the contrary: what it experiments with in 
the first place are the very practices of cinema itself according to its 
own material existence.

An ecocritical and non-representational perspective on experimental 
cinema thus opens up a new field of interrogation in the genetic 
approach to films. Who manipulates the ‘materials of the world’ during 
the making of a film? According to which political engagements, 
temporalities, and inscriptions in collective environments? In what ways 
does ecological consciousness displace the filmmaker’s experience? And 
finally, how does it reshape perspectives on the artistic process and 
pedagogies of art? In relation to ecological uses of tools and materials 
by filmmakers, ecological thought can therefore examine the ways in 
which experimental cinematic creation exists in the world, in the sense 
of situating its practices within a framework of ethical, social, 
educational, non-hierarchical and non-competitive positions, a framework 
that is far removed from injunctions to produce quickly, to comply with 
any ‘imperative of newness’ and to distribute as widely as possible 
according to commercial prescriptions. Cinema’s existence in the world, 
and no longer an its existence in the media economy, an ecology of 
production and ‘not an economy’, in the words of the independent 
filmmaker Pip Chodorov (2014).

The hypothesis of this two-day conference is therefore to investigate 
experimental filmmaking from the perspective of an ‘active ecology’, the 
ways of acting and transforming the world that accompany experimental 
filmmakers’ creative gestures: political and social ecologies, ecologies 
of technique, and processual ecology. The question could therefore be 
summarized in dialectical form: in what way does the awakening of an 
ecological consciousness affect and transform the experiences and 
processes of experimental filmmaking? In turn, in what way do 
experimental and artisanal approaches to cinematic creation reshape our 
relationship with the world and call for a new ecological consciousness? 
Ecopolitics and creative processes will therefore be explored in their 
multiple interweavings.

*1. Genealogies of techniques and ecological processes in experimental 
cinema*

We encourage studies of a /genealogy of techniques and ecological 
processes/, concurrent with the evolution of film media since the 
artisanal beginnings of cinema. This genealogy leads to the possibility 
of interdisciplinary links between cinematic experimentation and 
research in the natural sciences: vegetal or animal biology, 
biochemistry, optics, climatology, geology, botany, naturalist 
practices, etc. The following (non-exhaustive) list of subjects could 
also be presented in this context:

a.Artisanal emulsions and the creation of celluloid materials;

b.Organic direct practices on photosensitive media (photo or celluloid);

c.Ecoprocessing;

d.Environmental /dispositifs/: image and sound recording, exhibition, 
projection;

e.Practices of reuse and recycling of film materials.

Alongside this history of techniques, historians and philosophers of 
political ecology from Jacques Ellul to Bruno Latour, through André 
Gorz, Ivan Illich, Tim Ingold and Isabelle Stengers, could be called 
upon for their different ways of ethically reinterrogating issues of 
tools, techniques and technology (for example, Ivan Illich's "convivial 
tool" (Illich, 1973) or André Gorz's ‘open technologies’ (Gorz, 2008). 
To what extent have these ecological discoveries transformed filmmakers' 
relationship to tools and know-how? How have they offered alternatives 
to industrial productivism? Does the rediscovery and pursuit of pioneer 
craftsmanship invite us to reformulate our historical relationship to 
film technology?

*2. Ecological resistance in experimental cinema*

**

We define ‘ecological resistance’ in this context as the forms of 
individual or collective engagements of filmmakers who /activate 
commons/ through ecological awareness, manifested as an alternative to 
the injunctions of hegemonic and polluting industries. We thus encourage 
participants to explore these forms of ecological engagements, which 
could include:

a.Various /spaces of production and distribution/: heterotopias or 
eco-utopias, laboratories and shared spaces, farms and open-air festivals;

b./Alternative pedagogies/: workshops, research programmes, knowledge 
sharing, etc.;

c./Decentred approaches to experimental film practices/: attention 
ecologies, ecologies of care, ecofeminism, non-human practices, 
indigenous knowledges, etc.

The proposals could establish filiations between gestures of ecological 
resistance and the active diversity of thought related to political 
ecology: deep ecology, radical ecology, ecofeminisms, decolonial 
ecologies, etc.

*3. Digital experimental processes*

If the processes linked to photochemical productions have a large place 
in our conception of ecocinema, we also look to extend the scope to 
studies of new media. This opens possibilities for reconceptualizing 
ecocinematic creative processes with digital materials:

a.The ways in which material processes of photochemical and digital film 
are brought together;

b.New modes of perception and projection that can emerge from fusions of 
the two media;

c.Materialities and infrastructures that are obscured or revealed by 
digital media, etc.

While artists working with photochemical film position themselves more 
immediately in terms of resistance (the choice to use a medium deemed 
'obsolete' is often culturally inscribed as working outside the norm 
from the outset), interactive and immersive media also offer the 
potential to explore what Morton describes as 'ecological thought' and 
the 'mesh'. Furthermore, the specificities of digital media provide an 
opportunity to reflect on the role of flux and networking practices in 
the conceptualization of creative processes. Does new media allow for 
deeper investigation of cybernetic processes, so prevalent in systemic 
theories of ecology?

**

*Conference organisers*

Elio Della Noce (LESA, Université Aix-Marseille)

Charlie Hewison (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)

Kim Knowles (Aberystwyth University)

Panagioula (Julie) Kolovou (LESA, Université Aix-Marseille)

*Submitting a proposal*

Proposals for the conference should not exceed 500 words and include a 
bibliography and a short presentation of the author (100 words maximum).

The submission deadline for proposals is the *30 June 2023* (reply by 
mid-July 2023) to the following address: (fabriqueseco /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(fabriqueseco /at/ gmail.com)>

The conference will be accessible by Zoom and open to English-speaking 
papers.

*“Phytography” Workshop*

https://kareldoing.net/phy/Phytography.html 
<https://kareldoing.net/phy/Phytography.html>**

A Phytography workshop - an introduction to vegetal printing on 
celluloid - will be given by the independent filmmaker Karel Doing on 
the morning of 17 November and will punctuate the two days. It will be 
followed by a public screening at the end of the conference. Please let 
us know if you would like to participate in the workshop.

*Bibliography*

**

ARAEEN Rasheed (2010), /Art Beyond Art, Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for 
the XXIst Century/. Third Text Publications.

BARAD, Karen (2007), /Meeting The Universe Halfway/. /Quantum Physics 
and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. /Duke University Press.

CHODOROV Pip (2014), ‘The Artist-Run Film Labs’, /Millennium Film 
Journal/, Vol. 60.

DELLA NOCE Elio et MURARI Lucas (eds.) (2022). /Expanded Nature - 
Écologies du cinéma expérimental/, Light Cone Éditions.

GORZ André (2008). /Écologica/, Éditions Galilée,

ILLICH Ivan (1973). /La convivialité/, Éditions du Seuil.

KNOWLES Kim (2020). /Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices/, 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

MACDONALD Scott (2004). ‘Toward an Eco-Cinema’, /ISLE: Interdisciplinary 
Studies in Literature and Environment/, Vol. 11, no. 2, 2004, pp. 107-132.

MACKENZIE Scott et MARCHESSAULT Janine (eds.) (2019). /Process Cinema: 
Handmade Film in the Digital Age, /McGill-Queen’s University Press.

MORTON Timothy (2019). /The Ecological Thought/, Harvard University Press.


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