The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources

Introduction

1™ Introduction This book is about the inextricable relationship between moving images and the natural resources that sustain them. The terms of this relationship between oil and cinema, the biosphere and the cinema’s need for its energy, are contained in a photograph taken by Robert Flaherty in 1922 of an Inuk hunter Allakariallak, known now as “Nanook of the North.” Let this book begin here, with the Inuk hunter and the movie camera, and the resource energy embedded therein (frontispiece).I could not have arrived at this image without the inspiration of Dudley Andrew’s essay “Roots of the Nomadic.” It is here that Andrew sees in Nanook a man directly tied to the seal he hunts, and in that seal a “mobile, subaqueous source of oil,” whose caloric energy and economic value, Andrew states, would have burned in Nanook’s lanterns and in his body and so given life to the film itself,energizing the very projector and screen where Flaherty’s Arctic images premiered in New York in 1924.1 “Roots of the Nomadic” was written some years before the present book was conceived of, and it was not read until some time after it was set in motion. That Andrew’s reading of Nanook came before resource politics, ecology, and carbon footprints had so saturated the imagination testifies to two things: the essayist’s perspicacity, first, and, second, that energy has always been discernable in cinema. Indeed, cinema is intricately woven into industrial culture and the energy economy that sustains it. The terms set by Andrew’s essay and this image are uncommonly applicable to this book’s structuring aspiration: to locate the energy in cinema. From there, an explicitly environmental line of inquiry can be broached, namely how cinema, thus energized, impacts upon Earth. This book asks how an awareness of movie making as an industry, one that is as plugged into“nature”and the resources it yields as any other, reconfigures our interpretive and practical approach to the cinematic image throughout film history, from its photographic beginnings to its digital 2 the cinematic footprint present. This image of Nanook asks the questions at the heart of this book; and as it also supplies its“answer,”it will be revisited in this book’s conclusion. But as we make the journey to get there, I ask the reader to tuck Flaherty’s photograph into memory and return to it as a visual point of reference—a reminder of this book’s premise, as well as an ideal example of what will be called in the chapters that follow the “resource image.” Industrialization,mass-production,andthereproducedimageare,asWalter Benjamin’s famous essay maintained,mutually informing social determinants. Before “carbon-neutral” cinema (or Rupert Murdoch’s mandate to “green” his media empire by 2010) made the connection between moving images and such things as fossil fuels and global warming so palpable,“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”set the terms necessary to intersect filmmaking technology and the biophysical world. Take, for example, Benjamin’s evocation of poet and philosopher Paul Valéry, who wrote, and Benjamin quotes, “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our homes from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear with a simple movement of the hand.”2 Pumped in, piped out—water, natural gas, electricity, images, and sounds—where do these resources come from? Arguing that mass production at once democratized the image and aestheticized politics, Benjamin’s focus is on a work of art’s reproduction and transmission and, specifically, the ways in which these processes dictate aesthetic parameters and reception, finally contributing to the political organization and ideological ordering of society at large. But before these dimensions are explicitly registered, we can push them back even further than the site of reproduction, transmission, or reception and ask by what processes are image-making mechanisms themselves generated? With processes requiring “a minimal effort,” as it was and is still assumed, the ease of which is facilitated by energy resources such as gas and fuel and electricity which were in Valéry’s 1930s being mainlined into most urban dwellings. What is immediately important here is that Benjamin foresaw that industry is embedded in the image itself, and, in Valéry’s terms, accessing images at all means tapping into a complex system of...