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  • Toward a History of French Ecocinema: Nature in Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Modernity
  • Brian R. Jacobson (bio)

“We need to imagine the future, to dream it, before implementing it. And to achieve this, nothing is more powerful than cinema.”1 So propose Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent in the crowdfunding pitch for their box office hit documentary Demain/Tomorrow (FR, 2015).2 Selling environmentalist cinema as technoutopianism, Dion and Laurent insist that the solution to today’s environmental problems is another modernity, a “Third Industrial Revolution.”3 It’s an enticing idea that rests upon the too often unquestioned assumption that technology, despite being the very source of so many environmental problems, still remains the best solution.4 This paradox has a film-specific variant, one that goes beyond the widely acknowledged fact that cinema, especially in popular industries like Hollywood, depends upon resource extraction and consumption.5 As many already recognized in the 1930s, film was itself a product of the materials and processes of the Second Industrial Revolution. In the words of Lewis Mumford, it was a “specific art of the machine.”6 What kind of environmentalist imaginary can such a machine art be expected to produce? Can a medium sourced from and uniquely qualified to represent the world in the image of industrial modernity also, as Dion and Laurent propose, be the best tool available for imagining an alternative to it?

To answer such questions, we need to revisit that earlier moment and the so-called “modernity thesis” that has often defined cinema’s place in it. That thesis emphasizes urban industrial life and new technologies with little attention to the ecological relationships that defined modernity from the beginning.7 If we want a cinema capable of generating a new environmentalist worldview, we need histories that both account for the ecology of modernity and highlight earlier efforts to [End Page 52] generate just such a cinema—call it an ecocinema—in the heart of modernization itself. In short, environmentalist filmmakers and “ecocinema” critics must not miss the opportunity to build upon film’s long engagement with ecological concerns.

How might we write a history of cinema that makes those concerns as central to the narrative as technological and stylistic innovations or the worlds of machines, technologies, and urban life?8 This is the film-specific version of a response to climate change problems aimed at “unthinking” deep-seated modern narratives that privilege technological development, “progress,” and human ingenuity—that is, the work of the “Anthropocene” or “Capitalocene.”9 What new optics and historical narratives would such an unthinking create?10 Film scholars can start by extending histories of ecocinema to trace the cultural markers of the Anthropocene beyond films like Demain or even those made in the early days of institutionalized environmentalism in the 1970s.11

This article offers one such history of a French ecocinema by reconsidering the career of Dimitri Kirsanoff, an Estonian immigrant who investigated Parisian modernity from his arrival in the 1920s to his death in the 1950s.12 Kirsanoff ’s work, especially his best-known film, Ménilmontant (FR, 1926), has often been read as the reflection and formal outgrowth of modernity’s urban, industrial, and technological features. But his films were also shaped, in both content and form, by a concern for the ecological conditions of a modernizing world, nature in urban settings, and the environment in all of its changing meanings.

Taking cues from Bruno Latour’s long-standing challenge to the separation of nature and culture in the very idea of modernity and Jacques Rancière’s more recent re-reading of modernity and the avant-garde, here I propose an eco-cinema modernity based on an alternative reading of what Rancière has described as art’s “distribution of the sensible.”13 My point of departure is Kirsanoff ’s interest in the persistent presence of nature and its temporalities, or what he theorized as “mouvement-temps,” or “time movements.” My argument turns on differently inflected readings of two aspects of Rancière’s re-definition of modernity: 1) the fabric of the sensible that Rancière finds expressed in the montages of daily life in Dziga Vertov’s...

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