Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie in Experimental Film and VR (360-Degree) Nature Videos

Boczkowska, Kornelia. 2021. "Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie in Experimental Film and VR (360-Degree) Nature Videos." Papers on Language and Literature 57 (1): 27–49. Special issue: Landscape, Travel, and the Gaze in Experimental Film and Video.

Abstract:

Despite the growing popularity of ecocriticism in avant-garde film studies, most publications in the field still downplay numerous links between experimental film practice, slow ecocinema and online nature videos. This remains in a striking contrast to the increasing potential of slow eco-media to offer viewers an alternative model of how to reflect on and interact with the natural environment and environmentalism-related issues on screen. Likewise, this paper puts four stylistically distinct works, ranging from selective, self-aware 16mm and digital experiments of individual artists to environmental 360-degree videos, in the context of slow eco-cinema and discusses the ways they engage with an environmentally conscious discourse through embodying a sense of the eerie. Even though they resist adopting an activist imperative, Aspect (Richardson, 2004), Nightfall (Benning, 2012) and two VR nature films, Walking in the Woods (2016) and the 360 degree video, Relaxing Walk in the Forest (2017), evoke the eerie in their meditative rendering of the forest land- and soundscape, seen as one of the key sites of environmental humanities, and consequently fit in with the broader context of slow and ecocinema. While all works encourage the practice of perceptual retraining, Nightfall and Aspect provide a psychically charged and emotive experience of landscape and nature videos offer a more complex form of an ecologically-oriented gaze through voyerism as well as the conflict between the virtual and the real…