Interweaving Realms: Exploring Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism in an Artistic Filmic Narrative

Abstract

This paper explores the ideological struggle between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism using an in-production documentary project as a case study. In particular, it unveils the ways the directorial team works developing the scenario, so that such anthro- and eco- parameters interweave or contest on screen.

The film wishes to stimulate citizens’ imagination about solutions and opportunities by unpacking the respective epistemic vocabularies in (terms of) everyday social, habitual and economic interactions. Partially modelled on Aldo Leopold’s essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ (1949), it is envisioned as a procedural hybrid of documentary realism, fiction and AI images, operating as a form of ‘animation’ to explore the realized potentials of the mise-en-scène in articulating such key arguments. It intends to be an assemblage of scenes constructed via montage editing, but distending discontinuity as a vehicle for thematic tension.

Considerably more evocative – especially as it treats artists as a class of being alongside the human, animal and plant – the film symbolically presents the preparations for an imaginary ‘Council of All Beings’, scheduled to start at exactly midnight, by all invited species. Observations of mundane life, dystopian landscapes and animal behaviors alternate. In parallel, tracing the preparations of two artists, one crafting a mask representing development, technology and the industry, and the other denoting nature and the non-human, the film hints at the classic Adam and Eve binary. The film’s tone is developed to be self-referential, presenting itself as a kind of poetic social commentary while also adopting a narrative mode of commentary on climate change and technological progress.

Characteristic dynamics and micro-tensions, representative of the “human vs nature” conflicts are revealed, whilst the ways these are incorporated in an under-production film, are thoroughly discussed.