INTERVIEW: ‘Anthropocene’ doc examines reengineering of planet Earth
Photo: Elephant tusks burn in Nairobi National Park, Kenya. Photo courtesy of Anthropocene Films Inc. © 2018 / Provided by Kino Lorber with permission.
The human footprint on planet Earth has proved to be destructive and life-changing. In fact, increasingly it has become fatal, for both flora and fauna in the world, and the new documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch details the ravages upon the natural world by the most powerful species spread throughout the land.
The new film, which played the Sundance, Berlin and Toronto film festivals, is running a series of special screenings throughout the United States, courtesy of Kino Lorber, and Kanopy brings the documentary to streaming services Jan. 1, 2020.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is the third part of a trilogy by co-directors Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky. Their previous cinematic efforts are Manufactured Landscapes from 2006 and Watermark from 2013. There’s a long gap between the projects because the filmic demands of each movie are immense. Anthropocene alone took several years to develop and shoot.
In the documentary, viewers receive unparalleled access to the destruction and influence of humans. The filmmakers look at concrete seawalls in China, psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains and the devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia, among other locations.
“Jennifer and Edward Burtynsky, the third in our triumvirate of co-directors on this, were touring with our previous collaboration called Watermark, and lots of environmental discussion led to the idea of the Anthrpocene as a possible central organizing principle for our next project,” de Pencier said in a recent phone interview. “It was with some trepidation because obviously it’s a word that certainly then five years ago was not part of the vernacular, and not a lot of people knew. But we thought everyone that we talked to were interested in the concept once they understood it, and it provided an increasingly rare big panoramic view of the human project and the effect on the planet.”
The Anthropocene has generated debate in the scientific community, according to a recent article in Nature, but the Anthropocene Working Group unanimously voted to formally advance the naming of this geological stage. These new changes have been caused by rapid industrialization and use of agricultural chemicals, among other factors, and how they have impacted the planet. The last epoch is known as the Holocene, dating back 11,700 years when glaciers of the last ice age receded. Supporters of the Anthropocene, including the entire AWG, believe humanity has left the Holocene behind and entered uncharted geological territory.
“And the scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group, their research was a really interesting way of trying to provide that big picture,” de Pencier said, “and so we embarked on what proved to be a very ambitious five-year project.”
Although the filmmakers’ trilogy explores various environmental issues, it was not planned out from the beginning. Baichwal said the team doesn’t think that far in advance.
“We thought we hadn’t had enough of each other, so we just kept working together,” she said. “And Anthropocene is the culmination of all the conversations we’ve ever had about art and planetary change and art’s capacity to be a change agent, which is what we’re trying to do.”
The new documentary is very much a wake-up call and an example of activist filmmaking. The team hasn’t simply shot these diverse locales for their beauty (or lack thereof); instead, the directors want the film to advance a conversation and change policies and perspectives.
To that end, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch took part in the recent U.N. Climate Action Summit and Climate Week NYC. They employed the help of Edward Norton, the actor and U.N. Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity, to moderate discussions at New York and Los Angeles screenings.
The fruits of the team’s labors are the culmination of a long, rigorous process.
“We spent the first year doing research and engaging the various vectors that the scientists were embarking on for their research to try and officially ratify this idea of the human epoch in the geological timescale, but also to think about how we as photographers and filmmakers could respond to it,” de Pencier said. “When you try and show the scale of human impact, you’re necessarily going to try and get access to places that are not usually amenable to letting in camera crews like … coal mines in Germany and the closed city of Norilsk in Russia, with the biggest colored metal mine and processing plant in the world. And we wanted it to be a portfolio of locations, so that it was really shown to connect all of these things as a global phenomenon and to point fingers at certain places. So that was an enormous amount of work to identify the places and then to work out the logistics of how we might be able to get access and bring back authentic representation of those places.”
All along the way, the scientists working on understanding the Anthropocene were the guide for the filmmakers. Baichwal said they were also their inspiration.
“We followed their research very closely, and their research categories became our research categories,” Baichwal said. “So the film is organized according to their research. And that was a helpful thing because after Watermark, which was again a very big picture film and kind of had the rhythm of a river, it was kind of meandering, I thought I can’t do this again because I’m the editor. I work in the edit room with our editor, and we edit for a year, just like we research for a year. It was daunting absolutely to think about how to put something like this together, so the template that [the scientists] gave us was a lifesaver.”
The team members were quick to point out that they have not made a “science” film that presents evidence, metrics and empiricisms. Instead, they wanted the scientists to inspire with their research, and that impacted the way Anthropocene: The Human Epoch was developed. De Pencier said this approach had the effect of breaking down silos and engaging with the audience in a different way.
“It’s very much a response to often specific research but not slavishly following that research at all,” he said. “It’s our subjective artistic response to these things. Having said that, the scientists did [go over] any statistics that were presented in the film so that we were scientifically accurate. I think that just strengthens what we were trying to do in the more creative realm.”
Baichwal added: “I think the time for debate about whether we are such a big influencer is kind of over. I say that from the U.N. Climate Week, and we’re here in New York. And the film is part of the official events of Climate Week, and I think that we’ve wasted time debating whether these things are true or human influenced, perhaps very strategically so with people who would stall the possibility of moving forward and finding solutions to these things. … [Scientists are] passionate about what they do, but they’re also very rational. And they’re evidence-based. Science will give you the closest thing to truth that we have, and when that many people after 13 years of research come to a conclusion that we as a species now change the Earth more than all natural processes combined, I think we have to listen to them.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is now playing in movie theaters and will be available to stream Jan. 1, 2020. Click here for more information.
