Lakshmi Padmanabhan — Anthropocene anxiety, or, what is a world in cinema?
A still from Earth (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2019)
Recent debates within postcolonial literature and criticism (Chakrabarty, Ghosh, Nixon) have raised the problem of representing the anthropocene, or the epoch of human-made climate change, through the medium of the moving image, pointing to impossible scale of representing disaster that is too slow moving for the speed of contemporary culture. Within film studies, the "world" is often a qualifier in the category "world cinema," itself seen as a watered down attempt at unthinking Eurocentrism (Salazkina, 2020) or a phase in film history (Andrew, 2010) perhaps superseded by the growing emphasis on the category of "global media." This talk begins by putting pressure on the concept of the "world" in the category of "world cinema" to argue for an understanding of the world as a cinematic object. In the first half of the paper, I begin by synthesizing several contemporary approaches to the problem of the "world" that are indebted to the Arendtian definition of a world as that which is produced through shared meaning and the efforts of human action. In contrast to this liberal promise of a world created through human action and its dystopian end in the era of the anthropocene, I argue that the "world" is an object of desire (a structuring absence) and anxiety, where anxiety is understood as the affect attuned to the overpresence of an object that has not yet risen to the level of signification, or to put it more colloquially, that we know something is wrong but its exact contours are not yet articulated. In the second part of the paper, I propose this mode of anxiety as an affect that is palpable in the rise of slow cinema aesthetics in world cinema. Here, I argue for the rise of slow cinema aesthetics not only as a kind of respite from the speed of popular media or contemporary life (Lim, Koepnick, de Luca, etc.), but rather as a mode of attunement to the exhaustion of surviving in the dystopian present, attentive to the anxiety of living in a world that is already inhospitable. Here, I discuss recent examples of films where the reality of environmental disaster or "slow violence" is the very world in which one must survive.
BIO
Lakshmi Padmanabhan is assistant professor in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. Her teaching and research focus on world cinema and experimental film, postcolonial theory, feminist theory and queer theory. She is co-editor of "Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform," a special issue of Women & Performance. Her academic writing has been published in journals including Camera Obscura, New Review of Film & Television, and Art History, and she has contributed reviews and criticism to venues including Seen, Public Books, and Post45. She held a research fellowship with the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College, 2018-2020, and earned her Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.