Cinema Wears the Mask: The Metaphysics of Animism in Une histoire de vent

In response to ongoing ecological crises, recent turns to animism in ecocriticism have celebrated a materialist dimension of this worldview that understands the world as a relational mesh collectively formed by agential entities, human and nonhuman alike. But as animism increasingly gets grounded in contemporary concerns and materialism rather than indigeneity and the soulful metaphysics behind the term's etymology, critiques of its politics emerge as well. By analyzing Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan's Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988), this article demonstrates how animism does not need be secularized in order to be ecopolitical.