Suchergebnisse

This article discovers politically productive ambivalences in the film, audio, written, and horticultural work of the Massachusetts gardener-filmmaker AnneCharlotte Robertson (1949-2012). Robertson suffered mental health issues throughout adulthood and sought solace by documenting her gardening on film and paper. Such activities were her form of ecotherapy, unlike the hospitalisation and medication she described as 'drug chains.' Using nature as a refuge, and gardening-filmmaking as an alternative, agroecological form of citizenship and lifestyle, was also Robertson's means of resisting the financialisation and social dislocation she felt transform her surroundings during the 1970s and80s. Robertson's work demonstrates a radically inclusive empathy towards her environment. But it reveals more than ecological, personal, and political protest; it is riddled with ambivalences. Robertson's interest in self-help, for example, plays into what we may now recognise as neoliberalism's promotion of individual responsibility. Likewise, her voluntary work in local community gardens critiques an increasingly prevalent emphasis on private property and globalisation, but risks papering over the cracks caused by welfare cuts, by providing vegetables and greenspace for those the cuts hit hardest. Robertson's refusal to distinguish work from life also exposes a tension between her holistic approach and the pervasive influence of a 'flexible' worker model—that is, whatCatherine Malabou identifies as an economically productive subject willing to blend work and life. Robertson's body of work, and her own body (which she films bingeing, dieting, holding handfuls of Valium, handfuls of seeds),foreground these tensions. Responding to her historical moment, Robertson's work anticipates debates over social and environmental responsibility today.

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.

This chapter discusses aesthetic representations of Japanese landscapes produced by Marxist filmmakers, photographers, and theorists around 1970, whose work came to be known as fūkeiron or 'Landscape Theory.' Fūkeiron films document modern landscapes of commerce and transportation. They resemble crime scenes in which perpetrators are invisible in human form, and omnipresent in oppressively homogenised architectures of capitalism. The chapter argues that fūkeiron necessitates reading landscape in a dialectical mode that identifies contradictions in its concrete forms — manifesting as tensions between individual and institutional forms of violence, for example — in order to name the political and economic forces operative in it.