Sean Cubitt

In an era defined by environmental crisis, artificial intelligence, and multispecies interdependence, what happens if we continue to ignore crucial nonhuman relationships that weigh so significantly on the future of the planet? Nonhuman Cinema explores how film can destabilize anthropocentrism and help us see and think

This article presents a translation of a study by Sean Cubitt, Professor at the University of Melbourne, titled For a History of Black, originally published in 2008 in Scan: Journal of Media Arts and Culture by the Department of Media, Music, Communications, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. The author explores the physiological, technological, and cultural challenges associated with the (non)color “black”. In his view, black represents the complete absence of color—an ideal that can never be fully realized. Across different media arts, black manifests in distinct ways. In numerous contexts—such as low-light cinematography, early television, and new media art—artists have creatively harnessed the limitations and artifacts arising from the specific ways production technologies engage with black. The detailed history of media as it relates to black is also connected by the author to questions of aesthetics. He considers the presence of black in the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt’s paintings, the physiology of color perception, and the use of black-and-white imagery in cinema. Specific examples analyzed include Alexander Korda’s film Rembrandt; the symbolic use of black in The Quatermass Experiment (1953); and the use of chiaroscuro in William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), as well as in Josef von Sternberg’s films with Marlene Dietrich: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), and others.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon’s 1948 definition of noise as the enemy of communication became hegemonic basis of polities, economies, emergent network technologies and their mutual dependence. This cybernetic conjuncture was initially characterised by its exclusion of randomness from an external environment, but a series of developments expanding Shannon’s engineering paradigm to almost every human science also changed the relation between system and noise. In the twenty-first century, the cybernetic precept of control over probabilities and risks has been attenuated as an emergent conjuncture discovered ways to extract value – significance and profit – from previously excluded randomness. Analysing the history of cybernetic theory and practice since 1948, we propose that as defining technologies became distributed, the site of exploitation shifted from control to contingency. The interdisciplinary expansion of cybernetics and its powerful model of an immediately applicable technoscience capable of driving political, economic and cultural change has led to the assimilation of randomness, once the driver of radical aesthetic and political movements, into the core business of contemporary rule and finance.

In a brief note on ‘Photography’ published in 1978, American documentary photographer Walker Evans offered principles for his practice. Close analysis suggests that the heart of his concerns lay in the photographers’ love for their subjects based in an unexpressed but significant ecological orientation. This analysis leads towards a critical reconsideration of the concept of ‘mass image’, a term developed to describe the production and management of a collective database of imagery uploaded to social media platforms. The article criticises the idea that this mass image is single and unified. Developing ideas of love and fantasy, the article argues that, in an era when the unconscious is structured not like language but like code, massed image databases lack a single present time, with consequences for photographic aesthetics.

Can the COVID pandemic be understood in any other than ecocritical and decolonial terms? It has brought nothing new except perhaps a certain fatalism in politics, borrowed from eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic visions of migration, the Anthropocene, pestilence, and neo-populism exacerbate longer-term trends. Religious fanatics with machine guns take whips to outsiders whose gender or skin colour they despise at the behest of billionaire warlords from the Texas border to Kabul. But COVID-19 coincides with some intriguing cultural novelties, most of all a plague of visibility traced here through Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, paired with a simultaneous mode of disappearance associated with the video image. Hegemonic transitions, the rise of financialization, and extractive postcolonization tie pandemic to fading (and therefore vengeful) American individualism and the rising (and therefore aggressive) Chinese command economy. The virus is occasion for profit: only a new and ecologically scaled cosmopolitanism can save us.

This chapter reviews visual representations of climate in art and film across the last few decades, exploring shifting artistic, cinematic, televisual and narrative practices that have more recently shaped the communication of the climate emergency. It explores the iconographies that artists and filmmakers have used in the shift from representing contemporaneous and local environmental challenges to depicting the future consequences of climate warming, including widespread biospheric change. The authors sketch the shifting screen media formulations that imagine climate catastrophes, observing how both documentary film, television and contemporary art draw on popular and professional media practices, including news formats and visual effects.

The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.

This article suggests that the conditions driving the still-unresolved global financial crisis that began in 2007 depend on a generalised condition of capitalist coloniality that profits from disasters. It proposes that the task of cultural studies is to convert these disasters into crises: critical and therefore history-making opportunities.