A Human Gaze: Supply Chaining The Power of the Dog Seán Cubitt Ecocinema Materialities Panel

A Human Gaze: Supply Chaining The Power of the Dog Seán Cubitt Ecocinema Materialities Panel SSC2023 Glasgow My contribution to Ecocinema 2 concentrated on the ecological implications of production and, to a limited extent, distribution, tying together ecocritical studies like Bozak’s on production with supply chain studies like Steinhart’s Runaway Hollywood. Taking a cue from Mezzadra, Neilson and Rossiter’s work on logistical software, a longer version of this paper will look at the dynamic history of codecs and protocols, especially in streaming services that include feedback channels so that viewing is now so integrated into the codec that viewing, and viewers, are becoming software. Today I want to concentrate on anthropocentrism in producers’ supply of images and spectators’ supply of attention. Hence the addition of the phrase ‘human gaze’ to my title, evoking both the structure of gazing in audiovisual content and the shaping of the audiovisual (information) economy around a distinctively human spectatorship. I’ll begin with a simple and I think uncontroversial assertion, already presaged by Jennifer Ladino and Claire Parkinson inter alia. There is a human gaze. As in Mulvey’s male gaze, protagonists look at animals and landscapes but landscapes and animals don’t get to look back. Like gender, the human has to be constructed. When locations look, perhaps in the manner developed in Atanarjuat and Yeelen, how do they see, and do they see humans? The question is not only about wavelengths – animals see in ranges humans cannot perceive, at speeds we cannot match and scales we overlook, with senses we have never had or which have become attenuated. Camera positions, extreme close ups, ultra-violet photography and under- and over-cranking emulate those inhuman senses but from and for human, often anthropomorphic, viewpoints. Camerawork (and audio technique) alone don’t disrupt the human gaze. Framing and editing’s attempt to construct an exclusively human gaze in human terms is interminable, never complete, leaving open the possibility of filming ecologically: with other eyes. If Mary Ann Doane is correct in saying the close-up is central to a humanist cinema, is the extreme long shot the characteristic framing device of a non-anthropocentric cinema? What kind of continuity would an ecological cinema demand, if no longer restricted to the construction of space in ways that conform to human sensibilities? Would the temporal problem of ellipses and overlapping cuts between shots in a sequence appear differently to a more-than-human sensibility? Judith Butler notes that a medium relays to us some version of reality from the outside; it operates by means of a series of foreclosures that make possible what we might call its message and which impinges on us, by which I mean both the foreclosure – what is edited out, what is outside the margins – and what is presented. Butler’s foreclosure – the excised, the off-frame but also technological displacement – is integral to the to-and-fro between being in front of the screen and being immersed in the diegesis, the struggle between isolating and connecting human and world. The screen experience constantly struggles to displace a spectator into and out of a world that exceeds the human. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, in many ways an ordinary, narrative, human-centred film, without recourse to multi- and extra-sensory technologies, doesn’t relinquish or resolve that struggle but intimates how it might play out otherwise. After the credit roll, the opening sequence begins with a title, Montana, 1925, placing the movie’s action in time and space, marking a colonial history. We are in narrative space, narrative time. We begin in medias res, cutting in from a black screen to restless cattle, seen at their own height before a horse and rider enter frame right, positioning the animals in a human setting. The auditory and tactile impact of this first shot heaves us into the storyworld of a hundred years ago, as if zooming into a close-up on a face. The animals are absolutely recognisable, even though generations have passed, reinforcing the sense of a present shared between the two periods, the then of the diegesis and the now of viewing, without which we would scarcely care about the human drama about to unfold across the film’s runtime. Enquiry into the ecocritical significance of supply chains begins with the logistics of production, leaving the question of how that might shape the audiovisual experience of viewing via the streaming service that commissioned it. Of interest in the present enquiry is the supply of land for the film’s landscapes. The Ida Valley in Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island subs for Montana, a hemisphere away. Their shared histories make the translation acceptable. Much of the colonial architecture is broadly comparable. Both Montana and Central Otago were sites of gold rushes in the 1860s, inviting ecocritical reflection on the role of gold as a substrate in film and streaming technologies. Otago substitutes for Montana in what might, in a certain light, seem to be a mendacious manner. Cinema lies: of course it does. Otago pretends it is Montana, and 2019 pretends it is 1925. But when cinema lies, it lies to and for humans using human techniques. And even when it lies, film also speaks a certain kind of truth: that these performances occurred, and these terrains existed. Otago is Ngai Tahu country, has been from about the ninth century. Montana was populated by the Clovis peoples from about twelve thousand years ago, and subsequently by Crow, Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Blackfeet and others. There were no cattle in North America before Columbus’ second voyage. Montana cattle ranching only dates back to the 1850s. The first cattle arrived in Aotearoa in 1814. If we are to see the cattle drive from the perspective of the land, we see an activity only a few hundred years old over ground thousands of years older, land cleared of its previous occupants and all but their most hidden traces, a land marked by erasure rather than remembering, marking this on-screen drive as ephemeral, and thus unique. To the extent that it indexes a world, cinema is particularly gifted in singling out unique, ephemeral moments – but tends to do so for a human perspective. A characteristic of the human (anthropogenic) gaze is that it tends towards the horizontal – etymologically, aligned with the horizon. Unlike the view from above, which may connote liberation but equally surveillance and colonial domination, the horizontal view scarcely needs explanation (a sure sign of its ideological operation). A vertical view is inhuman unless it is supplied with what narratology calls ‘motivation’: a previously established human viewer with access to the privileged, elevated view from above. A horizontal view sets up an ideal human, ostensibly culturally and gender-neutral. Even small modifications like tilts have to be placed carefully in the edit to ensure the space of a sequence is not only continuous, but camera angles are explicable in terms of the relative position of – typically – European male eyelines. There is no magic bullet to be had from shifting to a vertical view. Yann-Arthus Bertrand, for all the elegance and persuasive power of his views from above, is also in his way anthropocentric, in the tradition of cartography, the master-discourse of colonialism. Even the view upward, so deeply imbued with the history of star-gazing and star-walking, is, in cinema, a human view from a human here – something that makes Guzman’s Nostalgia de la Luz so convincing as parable. The horizontal is constrained and the vertical isn’t an answer. The secret, then, isn’t in the shot but in the cutting, and potentially also in camera movements, and in both instances, not a question of spatial orientation alone but – as Guzman’s film insists – of a time or times, a temporal experience, at scales apart from those that govern visual experience and storytelling. While there do exist experimental works with ambitions to become wholly non-anthropic, The Power of the Dog invites instead a quest not for rupture but for potential: for disturbances, affordances, capabilities, imaginations of another gaze. Ari Wegner’s cinematography for Power of the Dog captures action at close-up and distant scales. These terms also suggest a humanist ‘foreclosure’. At some points we are invited to observe the cattle drive from so far away that individuals are indistinguishable, and land and sky become protagonists while the cattle, who have been observed previously in their complex interactions, are reduced to the herd. Even at distance, nonetheless, there is a sensation that – at least in part – we are being placed as human observers, distant from or close to, according to human scales. There is a tension, in the shots and especially in transitions between them, that allows a hint of what non-human others might see. We see the land as landscape, that is from the perspective of the drovers, but we also see the cattle drive from the point of view of the land, and when we watch calves head-butting, we see them not only zoologically but from the height and perspective of other cattle. Seeing animal lives and landscapes in more or less horizontal framings may equate animal with human views, an anthropomorphising gesture, but one that simultaneously has the potential to estrange the privileged human view. In her account of the David Attenborough Planet Earth series Mikki Kressbach argues that simulations, however achieved, can disturb the pre-eminence of the human gaze, noting that ‘the final edit of the golden eagle sequence in the “Mountains” episode repeatedly denies a sense of identification’. Similarly, the footage of calves may read as a human view, as zoological observation in the service of science and animal husbandry, as allegory for the human action, or, and this is its redeeming feature, either the world of cattle as calves might see it, or at least an intimation of the limits of human-centred cinematography. After the opening montage of cattle and cattle-wrangling, a travel shot from inside a ranch house parallels Phil’s walk across the yard. The housekeeper is otherwise engaged, and brother George is in the tub upstairs. Neither of them motivates the shot. The house is watching, without the tremor of the uncanny that a similar shot might have in a horror film. The camera move doesn’t quite match Phil’s walk, with a blurred foreground of dining table accoutrements and a sharp, deep focus across the sunlit yard to the sunburnt hills beyond. The dialogue of interior/exterior, dark and light, animate and inanimate, privileges Phil and, while it pushes the hills into a background setting for his walk, gives them a role larger than the dark domestic space. Interspersing window light with dark interior walls, like frame lines travelling across the screen, not precisely timed with Phil’s walk, creates an autonomous time, like the twenty-four frames per second of cinema itself. The two actions – walk and track – and two settings – house and yard – are relatively autonomous: relative because the shot is framed to be presented on screens to humans. And autonomous because the shot intimates that there are other-than-human agencies involved. The consistent inconsistency of revealing and hiding oscillates between the view revealing itself and resisting making itself seen. It is the interruptions that deliver the non-human. As enterprise (for hire, for Netflix, as intellectual property protected and captured), the film is alienated and alienating. The integration of land into landscape alienates the land. Phil will become, verbally and in his inability to control himself, alienated in a land that would embrace him. As creative enterprise, the film attempts to overcome this alienation by embracing the animal which, narratively, Phil fails to become. The land supplies what film cannot: a place, although that place is overwritten, as location, by the fiction: the role it must play, its alienation from its own place and time. As suppliers of environmental services, the hills of Central Otago provide times at multiple scales: diurnal, seasonal, geological, times of history and mortality, bovine and human, all assimilated into the twenty-four fps of the autonomous mechanical time of cinema. This supply of place and duration raises new ecocritical questions for supply chain analysis. The transition of streamed films from goods to services, the environmental services of the Central Otago hills, and the spectator’s service role of supplying attention to information and affective economies, closes a logistical circuit of making and consuming, moving from the formal to the real subsumption of consumption under capital. Against it, the specificity of this film lies beyond its economic role in subscription services and the data economy of swipes, clicks and likes. To escape the enclosure of streaming and attention supply, this specific film must operate at a threshold of the representable when it tries to picture Otago as the fictional face of Montana 1925. It must represent, because it is a film. But it can advance to a border of representation, and gesture towards what cannot be represented. Spectators can supply the missing point of view of the hills, but only on condition that their attention cannot be completely and coherently captured in the closed system of logistical supply. Production supply chains tend to objectify environmental services that pass in front of the camera. Spectatorial supply chains objectify viewer reactions as representable data. As a Netflix product, The Power of the Dog must operate within these constraints. It also disrupts, however marginally, the alienated anthropocentric border between ecological and social processes. That border can be intuited from Aldo Leopold’s adage in Thinking like a Mountain: ‘Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf’. The mountain hears wolves howl without being afraid of dying: without the motivation of mortality that is so emotionally powerful a driver of narrative tension for humans. Ecocritically, on the other hand, considering who or what is subject or object and whether the distinction makes sense anymore, is a question of supply, as land supplies services and viewers supply data. Leopold’s word ‘objectively’ also asks whether mobilising empathy, the power to feel with rather than about or even for, is enough to unpick human privilege. Jean-Luc Nancy gives ‘objectivity’ a different spin when he observes that the filmic image ‘is not the projection of a subject, neither its "representation," nor its "phantasm": but it is this outside of the world where the gaze loses itself.’ The world leaves this ‘outside’ behind as it withdraws from vision and knowledge. Images capture not the scene but its disappearance, a trace of what precedes the attempt to grasp, order or even remember it. Viewing likewise cannot be captured as data other than in the moment of its vanishing. It is not only the animal that, despite everything, we still are, that eludes capture but the becoming-otherwise that accompanies escape from harvesting. Today it may be enough to say: even small logistical glitches disturb sufficiently to elicit the outside, that edge where appearance and significance, order and control, vanish into their disappearing past and future becoming, leaving only an empty present, where a mainstream ecocritical cinema might become possible. 1