Nonhuman Images: Environment and Emotion in Two Films by Viera Čákanyová

Abstract

Two films by Viera Čákanyová portray the momentous yet fragile landscapes of Antarctica. Frem (Slovakia 2019) depicts vast and arid vistas from the perspective of a drone whose movements are based on artificial intelligence algorithms. White on White (Slovakia 2020) was shot during the same expedition; this time the camera is held by Čákanyová. We see two quite different types of cinematography: one is a neutral, emotionally detached, machine-like view; the other is embodied, vulnerable and affective. A seal bleeding on an ice floe, a melting iceberg crumbling into the sea, a human seeking shelter in the biting cold – the scenes provide the viewer with very different potentialities for emotional responses depending on whether the camera is held by a human hand and guided by a human eye, or the gaze is that of a drone guided by computational algorithms. In this paper, I will examine the following questions: What role does imagining the non-human, the superhuman or the beyond human play in our visual culture? Does the gaze of the machine provide us with something useful? Or does it deprive us of something that is needed for us to understand our position in the world? Čákanyová’s films are my main discussion partners in investigating these topics. My conclusions are inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s redefinition of our relationship with nature. He writes about the non-human, not as a result of transcending human experience but rather as an acknowledgement of our kinship with and immersion in nature.

Keywords:

• AI
• Anthropocene
• Viera Čákanyová
• Environmental Phenomenology
• Merleau-Ponty
• Non-human

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (London: Routledge, 2005), 89.

2 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14, no. 3 (1988): 581.

3 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.

4 Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 89; Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 588–90.

5 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 596.

6 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, issue 40 (1992): 83.

7 Etienne-Jules Marey, quoted in Daston and Galison “The Image of Objectivity,” 81.

8 Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), vii–xi.

9 See, for example, Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 1–2.

10 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 149.

11 Marks, Touch, 153.

12 See Antony Fredriksson, Vision, Image, Record: A Cultivation of the Visual Field (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2014), 90–4.

13 Henry Fox Talbot, “The Pencil of Nature,” in History of Photography from Original Sources (Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc., 2016), 13.

14 André Bazin, What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13.

15 Germaine Dulac, quoted in Hannah Landecker, “Microcinematography and Film Theory,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 934.

16 Donald Evans, “Photographs and Primitive Signs,” Aristotelian Society Proceedings, New Series LXXIX (1978/79): 229.

17 Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 142.

18 Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality”, Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 35.

19 Stanley Cavell, “What Photography Calls Thinking,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothmand. (Albany, NY: State of New York Press, 2005), 116–17.

20 See, for example, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993), 128; Bazin, What is Cinema?, 13; Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography, 64.

21 See Marks, Touch, 148.

22 Evans, “Photographs and Primitive Signs,” 217.

23 Jules Janssen quoted in Christoph Hoffmann, “Representing Difference: Ernst Mach and Peter Salcher’s Ballistic-photographic Experiments,” Endeavour 33, no. 1 (2009): 22.

24 Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn, xvii.

25 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 582.

26 The track is Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark was the night … ”. In White on White Čákanyová talks about the Golden Record, which features this tune, carried by the Voyager spacecraft as a message. The 12-inch gold-plated copper disk contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of human life and culture on Earth.

27 Fredriksson, Vision, Image, Record, 110.

28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 61, 141.

29 Molly Hadley Jensen, “‘Fleshing’ Out an Ethic of Diversity,” in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, eds. Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 197.

30 Maurita Harney, “Merleau-Ponty, Ecology, and Biosemiotics,” in Cataldi and Hamrick, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, 139.

31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), 307.

32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 16.

33 Fritz Novotny, quoted in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 337.

34 Dylan Trigg, “The Flesh of the Forest: Wild Being in Merleau-Ponty and Werner Herzog”, Emotion, Space and Society 5, no. 3 (2012): 142.

35 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 336.

36 Trigg, “The Flesh of the Forest,” 143.

37 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 16.

38 Werner Herzog and Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 81.

39 Trigg, “The Flesh of the Forest,” 141.

40 Trigg, “The Flesh of the Forest,” 142.

41 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 4.

42 Robert Kirkman, “A Little Knowledge of Dangerous Things: Human Vulnerability in a Changing Climate,” in Cataldi and Hamrick, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, 21.

43 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 138.

44 For an overview of theories on emotional scaffolding, see Laura Candiotto and Roberta Dreon, “Affective scaffoldings as habits: A pragmatist approach,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 1–14.

45 Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn, vii–x.

46 Kenneth Liberman, “An Inquiry into the Intercorporeal Relations Between Humans and the Earth,” in Cataldi and Hamrick, Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, 44.

47 See Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.

 

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grant no. 22-15446S of the Czech Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Antony Fredriksson

ANTONY FREDRIKSSON, PhD, is an assistant professor in environmental ethics and aesthetics at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. His areas of interest include aesthetics, attention, ethics, film and philosophy, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, philosophy of perception and Wittgenstein. He has taught philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, University of Helsinki and the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His most recent work focuses on existential questions concerning the faculty of attention, including the book A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar: Encounters with the Unknown (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and the articles “Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (with Silvia Panizza), in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2020; and “The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog,” Film-Philosophy, 22, issue 1(2018).