Month: April 2019

‘Creations of the Mind’

creations of the mindFilmmaker James Murray-White reviews A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. In this scholarly work, Rupert Read advocates an ecological approach to film-philosophy analysis, arguing that film can re-shape the viewer’s relationship to the environment and other living beings.

1,830 words: estimated reading time 7.5 minutes 

It’s a real pleasure to engage with Rupert Read and this stimulating work – particularly as my previous knowledge of him was when he stood as the Green Party candidate for Cambridge, and more recently as an energetic advocate with Extinction Rebellion, where passions run politically high and our frustrations against climate inaction and political corruption are creating cultural shift.

In this new book, A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment, creativity and imagination are at the fore, coupled with the author’s strict academic discipline. The opening line sets the agenda wonderfully — “film is the great form of our time” — while the concluding lines from the final paragraph of the introduction get to the heart of his enquiry: “The real question may be: can films help wake us up in time? What have we learnt or could we learn [from these films], have we learnt enough; and can the learning be shared quickly and deeply enough?”   

Read has selected a range of films to dissect — from Waltz with Bashir, Solaris, and Lord of the Rings, to Avatar — and touches many others, following strands and threads as he expands and deepens his theme.

The human journey

At a launch event for the book in Cambridge, he spoke of his life-long love of this medium, and mused on how best now to tell the younger generation about the existent and deepening climate crisis we are in: “through art you can get closer into the guts of a story.”

A Film-philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment, by Rupert Read
A Film-philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment, by Rupert Read

I resonate deeply with this last phrase, as for fifteen years I’ve attempted to dive into stories — mainly human, but always wrapped up in the theme of human/s within a particular landscape. I work principally through the genre of documentary, although with a background before that in theatre and the wonderful stories inherent in stagecraft. Finding the art in both the telling of the story, and the artfulness of the story itself, is always the issue to work on using lens-based media, coupled with the deep dive into the vast jigsaw of accumulated footage allowed in the editing room.

I haven’t yet met anyone who hasn’t loved Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (2001-03), featuring the great Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf. Not having read the books when young, I came to the films fresh, with no expectations other than slight frowning at a big screen, big box office movie, against my preference for small arthouse indies.

Read goes right into the core of the power of the story and Tolkien / Jackson’s vision, interpreting it as “an exploratory allegory of serious mental suffering”; and yes, I can resonate with that. It is less about good and evil, more about the human journey, as those familiar with the ‘men’s work’ movement will know; in particular, Robert Bly’s book Iron John (1990), based on a German fairy tale, explores in myth the path to adulthood and fuller humanness that men must travel.

Read describes The Lord of the Rings as a “post-theological Buddhist world”, and as a call to go towards our demons (viz the right-wing governments of our time, Trump, the Brexit fiasco, and the oil companies and businesses that exploit this planet and all forms of life upon it). By facing them, we can then see them dissolve. But first we must go on the entire journey, as laid out within Lord of the Rings in a bigger mythological sense — leaving the Shire, into the heat, the battle, chasing the ring, and meeting Sauron — or the path of critical appraisal and engagement with the screen media oeuvre that Reed lays out within his book. And respond. And absorb. And re-feel the world.

Ancient stories 

My filmmaking was greatly enhanced by an eighteen month MA in Media at UWE Bristol, which balanced a light academic dusting with opportunities to explore our practice and to collaborate. My great joy was access to the archives of artists’ films that were the early meanderings in places: estuaries, and mountains framed in long slow shots and sudden effects, and the different ways of telling.

One of my favourite films remains the Inuit film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (2001), directed by Zacharias Kunuk, which shifts rapidly through time and dimensions within the frozen lands and mythology of Northern Canada / Independent Nunavut. It revealed to me new ways of telling: old, ancient ways and ancient stories, but using this newer medium to tell them in modern ways, layered in time, space, and snow. I am looking forward to new Canadian-Haida release from director Gwaai Edenshaw, SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife) (2018), which is based on a Haida myth about a man who, weakened by an accident at sea, is taken over by supernatural beings.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk

My personal recommendation for one of the most interesting makers working today — more on a theme of humans stranded within the time and space of a landscape than a directly ecological dilemma (although I’ll take this up in a review of his work at some later stage) is British artist Ben Rivers. Two Years at Sea (2001) and A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (2013) will both be seen as urgent films of our time — in years to come! In the Holocene, his current project (with Anocha Suwichakornpong), may well be the film we activist/artists get blown away by, due to its creative telling of predicament.

There is such a deep analysis and reflection within A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment that it is challenging to fully do it justice within a short review. In an early chapter that analyses both Waltz with Bashir (2008) and then Apocalypto (2006), Read’s dissection cuts deep, and these beautiful lines I feel sum up his approach:

“One’s sense of safety and of complacent identification with the victims is swept away, and one is left with something much more challenging and unsettling, forcing one to think again about one’s place in the world — and about our responsibilities to preserving this beautiful place of ours.”

Building hope 

Read is a skilled ‘bringer together’ of different plots and themes in seemingly very different films, chewing them together — Never Let Me Go (2011) and The Road (2010), for instance. In one chapter, When melancholia is exactly what is called for, after presenting different interpretations of the films Melancholia (2011) and Solaris (1972) over the course of a few pages, he brings his reflections together to reach very strong conclusions and well-argued points. For example, that while Melancholia offers its audience an emotional means to transcend death where Solaris is bleaker, more pessimistic, they are both cinematic pointers to the immediacy of life as we live it.

We move from memory, and revisionism, acceptance of the ecological crisis we must accept we are within, and the grief that must flow from that, to hope. Although this must be a real sense of hope brought about by community and change, not by technological fixes or a rational-scientific approach, by reason alone, as is also demonstrated by The Master and his Emissary (2009), the dynamic work of Read’s academic colleague and friend, Iain McGilchrist; his book explores left/right brain consciousness and draws heavily upon the work of visionary artist William Blake. Read makes clear that these are key aspects — and importantly, as he says, “neglected aspects”.

Melancholia, by Lars von Trier
Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier

Ecology and Enlightenment

I have learnt from reading this work that this longer way of watching and cross-referencing films, and of course viewing them at different times of our lives, gives a deeper philosophical perspective; and Read’s deep grounding in Wittgensteinian philosophy takes us deeper still. I’m sure this book will in turn also make me a ‘better’ filmmaker, but more importantly than that, a better attender to, listener, reader, activist for the earth, a seeker of re-feeling and of a spaciousness in our world, in every moment.

Artists within the ClimateCultures network will, I feel, benefit from seeing how the academic eye can respond to what we do, and to bring philosophy into the viewing — and, importantly, into the feeling of engagement. In my own case, this book has widened my personal cinematic perspective. I’m sure it will transform my filmmaking and storytelling more widely, and help sharpen its focus into exploring transformative experience, although mine is a largely documentary eye. After all, however much we love the medium, the screen itself remains a medium, and the infamous Marshall McLuhan quote — from Understanding Media: the extensions of man (1964) — rings true: “The medium is the message. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Read suggests that “One might … risk saying that artists have too often largely only interpreted the world; the point, as any true philosopher or filmmaker will realise, is to change it.” 

And he asks, “So, who would make up stories as horrible as Never Let Me Go and The Road?”

Answer: Ones who wanted us to end our dogmatic, complacent or despairing defeated slumber. Both stories concern adults who tell children ‘noble lies’. They raise starkly the troubling question of what we ought to tell our children, at a time when their very future is being radically compromised. The only way to avoid such a predicament without evasion is to change the future.

In conclusion, A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment is an erudite deep dive into the world of stories of the human/earth experience told visually through film: it has much to reveal to readers, be they practitioner of the art, scholar, viewer or activist keen to explore the genre or be rejuvenated by it.

I highly recommend this book, and thank Rupert for his skills and energy spent researching and writing. 

Find out more

A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment by Rupert Reed (2019) is published by Routledge. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is a renowned Wittgensteinian scholar, with research interests in political and environmental philosophy.

SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife) directed by Gwaai Edenshaw (2018) — which receives its UK premiere as part of the Canada Now film festival in London, from 24 to 28 April — is dsciussed in this recent Guardian article (28/3/19), Canadian film made in language spoken by just 20 people in the world.

The title of this post, ‘Creations of the Mind’, is from a quote in the frontspiece of the book and comes from Jetsun Milarepa, an 11th century (CE) Tibetan yogi and poet:

See demons as demons: that is the danger.
Know that they are powerless: that is the way.
Understand them for what they are: that is deliverance.
Recognise them as your father and mother: that is their end.
Realise that they are creations of the mind: they become its glory.
When these truths are known, all is liberation.

— Milarepa

James Murray-White
James Murray-White
A writer and filmmaker linking art forms to dialogue around climate issues, whose practice stretches back to theatre-making.
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Susan Holliday
Susan Holliday
A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit
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‘What You Need Will Come to You’

Kaupapa Māori approachesEnvironmental artist Laura Donkers follows her initial post on eco-social art engagement with her experience as Visiting Doctoral Researcher, moving to Aotearoa New Zealand from July to November 2018 to expand her research by exploring Kaupapa Māori approaches.

1,600 words: estimated reading time 6.5 minutes 

In her previous post, Laura introduced the form of eco-social art engagement she’s developed in Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, working with communities’ embodied knowledge to help develop climate literacy.

***

My research journey led me to undertake a period of research in Aotearoa New Zealand. It came about through a chance discussion with a New Zealand artist I had met while at a DRAWinternational artist residency in France. She introduced me to the research practice of Māori artist and scholar Dr Huhana Smith, who in the mid-2000s developed a PhD project at Kuku Beach, Palmerston North, working with her local tribe to reinstate the river, estuary and beach ecosystem according to traditional cultural principles. I was fascinated to read how the community had responded to the project, but also was intrigued to find out what the term Kaupapa Māori — literally ‘a Māori way’ —  actually meant. I knew that Māori were the indigenous people of New Zealand, but was not really familiar with their culture of interconnectedness. However, it became apparent from further research that their understanding of their embeddedness in the natural world was similar to something I had recognised in the Uist community, but due to my own incapacities had felt unable to express.

Perhaps a greater knowledge of Kaupapa Māori might give my research the underpinning framework that I felt it was missing? So I expanded my project methodology and combined artistic methods with a modified version of Participatory Action Research that drew from Kaupapa Māori Theory, an academic approach that retrieves space for Māori voices and perspectives, particularly where it affords new perspective into community-led collective thinking and action. My hope is that by including Kaupapa Māori Theory my research can help other communities understand how to address issues of universal concern, such as climate change adaptation, and help restore an understanding of sustainable living.

Kuku beach Photograph by Laura Donkers
Kuku beach
Photograph: Laura Donkers © 2018

Understanding Kaupapa Māori 

I wanted to learn first-hand how Kaupapa Maori is realised in a community. Through university contacts, I approached Elam School of Art to propose a period of research. I met with the Head of the School and learned that Kaupapa Māori praxis underpins teaching and support of their students within the contemporary art framework. Given that I was a trained artist, I felt this would provide a context to experience Kaukapa Māori in an accessible way, and hoped to learn from practitioners, lecturers, and students how mutual trust, respect, reciprocity and kinship manifest in the art school situation.

Over the course of my five-month residency I came to appreciate that I was expecting much more than was possible from a relatively short period of research. Not least, my minimal understanding of the practice of Kaupapa Māori left me unable to articulate what I had hoped to find. And I had the feeling amongst the people that I spoke to that Kaukapa Māori was not really practised in the school in the way I had understood. However, the uncertainties that arose through my questioning slowly led to helpful suggestions of other outlets where I might find answers, and eventually I found my way to groups and individuals in the wider community who were able to share with me their experiences.

Meeting with weavers 

I found the process of searching for points of contact and connection to be difficult and disheartening at times. Initial meetings with academics and practitioners were straightforward to arrange, but they did not seem to go anywhere. I often found the experience more like an interrogation than a discussion and it was hard to pin down whether I was speaking to someone who was interested in my research or just checking my motives. Follow-up discussions never materialised and this left me without the necessary dialogue to explore the subject of Kaupapa Māori in practice. It seemed that the more questions I asked the less clarity I gained, and I wondered how I could achieve the outcome of the research I was seeking. I had arranged to meet a renowned master weaver who was a friend of my supervisor but also, by chance, of a neighbour in Uist. I looked forward to this meeting but had no idea where it would lead.

We met at Auckland’s Memorial Museum where a number of master weavers were gathered in the ‘Te Awe’ Project Room. ‘Te Awe’ is a vast stock take and digitisation exercise being carried out by Auckland Museum to examine 10,000 Māori Taonga — highly prized objects or natural resources. The women had been selected from across the country for their supreme expertise and worked together to agree on specific definitions for the different techniques present in the Korowai (ceremonial cloak) laid before them.

Members from the Taumata Mareikura and Auckland Museum Staff view a few examples of taonga Māori textiles in the collection
Members from the Taumata Mareikura and Auckland Museum Staff view a few examples of taonga Māori textiles in the collection
Source: www.aucklandmuseum.com

They graciously came to greet me, and despite my ignorance, the gravitas of the occasion was palpable as I observed the reverent manner in which the Korowai were examined, and the quiet discussions amongst the weavers as they approached a consensus. And then it was time for tea, further discussion and an unexpected invitation to attend a marae (a communal and sacred meeting ground of Māori people) at the weekend, which I eagerly accepted.

This extraordinary encounter marked a turning point, and I went on to meet a myriad of people who welcomed me. Through quiet explanation and discussion, I slowly began to understand Kaukapa Māori in practice, and its comparability to practices I was all too familiar with from the years spent living in Uist. The gentle acknowledgement of each other’s rights through principles of mutual respect involving face to face encounter; looking, listening and then speaking; sharing and hosting; caution; and not trampling on the rights, personal prestige and character of each other. 

‘What you need will come to you’ 

However, it was a phrase conveyed to me by an artist-weaver that most sums up my research journey in Aotearoa New Zealand. She recounted her experience of having to learn to overcome frustration as she developed her weaving skills by eventually accepting the premise of her weaving teacher that ‘what you need will come to you’. A simple mantra that perhaps all researchers should hold to — that over time and with a little humility you will find what you are looking for.


From our contemporary perspective, it can be difficult to trust that you will find what you need. Will there be time to allow that process to happen? How will you know this is what you needed? Is this a valid methodology?

An extraordinary opportunity opened up for me just as I was preparing to leave. I followed up a chance introduction at Auckland Council’s climate change workshops and was invited to meet with some of the team at the Kaipatiki Project to discuss potential ways of working together in the future.

As part of my SGSAH AHRC Creative Economies scholarship, I could propose an artist-in-resident placement with a non-academic institution, and the Kaipatiki Project’s regenerative approach to working with community and environment seemed to offer an ideal location. SGSAH accepted my proposal for a three-month artist residency, which would further develop my understanding of Kaupapa Maori Theory, this time at community organisation level. 

So, for three months, I am exploring how my creative approach relates to and can contribute towards the organisation’s underpinning objective to help communities live more sustainably, and together we will develop ways to unleash the creativity of the community to identify opportunities to solve local environmental challenges.

I am just beginning this residency and am keeping a diary of my experiences. I’ll be happy to share these in future ClimateCultures posts!

I wish to thank my host Associate Professor Peter Shand, the tutors and students at Elam School of Art and other Professors at Auckland University who helped me on my way, as well as many other artists, weavers, practitioners, and members of community groups who listened, questioned and advised me during my all too brief sojourn in Aotearoa New Zealand. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank my funders Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities for their Visiting Doctoral Researcher Award that made this visit possible. 

Find out more 

Laura’s previous post, introducing her artistic practice and research, is Eco-social Art — Engaging Climate Literacy. 

DRAWinternational caters for fine artists, applied artists, musicians or writers in pursuit of new and dynamic form, in preparation for exhibition, publication or postgraduate qualification. 

Dr Huhana Smith is a visual artist, curator and principal investigator in research who engages in major environmental, trans-disciplinary, kaupapa Māori and action-research projects. She is co-principal investigator for research that includes mātauranga Māori methods with sciences to actively address climate change concerns for coastal Māori lands in Horowhenua-Kāpiti. Huhana actively encourages the use of art and design’s visual systems combined in exhibitions, to expand how solutions might integrate complex issues and make solutions more accessible for local communities.

You can find out more about the principles and practice Kaupapa Māori research at the website of Katoa Ltd, a Māori – Indigenous research organisation.

‘Te Awe’ is a vast stock take and digitisation exercise being carried out by Auckland Museum 

Kaipatiki Project has, since 1998, been inspiring communities to live sustainably by restoring local bush reserves with community and developing environmental education programmes for all ages.

Laura Donkers
Laura Donkers
An ecological artist and researcher connecting people with ecology through community projects and outdoor art workshops to inform more creative and sustainable ways to live.
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