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4.3 Anthropocene: The Human Epoch film
The world premier of the documentary film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, was
launched at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2018 and
subsequently screened at other film festivals including Sundance and Berlin. The
film was produced by the award-winning team of Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de
Pencier and Edward Burtynsky and took four years to make. It is the third in a trilogy that includes Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013) that followed the research of an international body of scientists. After nearly 10 years of
research, scientists are arguing that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the
Anthropocene Epoch in the mid twentieth century because of profound and lasting
human changes to the Earth. The film is a cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet (Baichwal et al. 2018).
4.4 Anthropocene Exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario
From September 2018 to January 2019, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto,
Canada hosted “Anthropocene” a major contemporary art exhibit that illustrates
how humans, individually and collectively, are leaving a signature on earth. Using
film, photography and new experiential technologies world famous Canadian
photographer Edward Burtynsky, and Canadian film makers Jennifer Baichwal
and Nicholas de Pencier use the aesthetic impact of their imagery to trigger an
important dialogue. They state: “Our ambition is for the work to be revelatory, not
accusatory, as we examine human influences on the Earth both on a planetary
scale and in geological time. The shifting of consciousness is the beginning of
change.” We have reached an unprecedented moment in planetary history where
humans now change the Earth’s systems more than all natural forces combined.
This is the central argument that identifies the new geological epoch called The
Anthropocene. They travelled to countries on every continent, except Antarctica,
documenting irreversible marks of humans’ impacts on the environment inspired
by a desire to bear witness to the scale and gravity of humans’ impact on the
planet (AGO 2018).
From concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60% of the mainland coast, to
the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, to psychedelic potash mines
in Russia’s Ural Mountains, to metal festivals in the closed city of Norilsk, to the
devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia and surreal lithium evaporation ponds in
the Atacama desert, the filmmakers have traversed the globe using high end production values and state of the art camera techniques to document evidence and the
experience of human planetary domination.
A. Venton
4.3 Anthropocene: The Human Epoch film
The world premier of the documentary film, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, was
launched at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2018 and
subsequently screened at other film festivals including Sundance and Berlin. The
film was produced by the award-winning team of Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de
Pencier and Edward Burtynsky and took four years to make. It is the third in a trilogy that includes Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013) that followed the research of an international body of scientists. After nearly 10 years of
research, scientists are arguing that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the
Anthropocene Epoch in the mid twentieth century because of profound and lasting
human changes to the Earth. The film is a cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet (Baichwal et al. 2018).
4.4 Anthropocene Exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario
From September 2018 to January 2019, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto,
Canada hosted “Anthropocene” a major contemporary art exhibit that illustrates
how humans, individually and collectively, are leaving a signature on earth. Using
film, photography and new experiential technologies world famous Canadian
photographer Edward Burtynsky, and Canadian film makers Jennifer Baichwal
and Nicholas de Pencier use the aesthetic impact of their imagery to trigger an
important dialogue. They state: “Our ambition is for the work to be revelatory, not
accusatory, as we examine human influences on the Earth both on a planetary
scale and in geological time. The shifting of consciousness is the beginning of
change.” We have reached an unprecedented moment in planetary history where
humans now change the Earth’s systems more than all natural forces combined.
This is the central argument that identifies the new geological epoch called The
Anthropocene. They travelled to countries on every continent, except Antarctica,
documenting irreversible marks of humans’ impacts on the environment inspired
by a desire to bear witness to the scale and gravity of humans’ impact on the
planet (AGO 2018).
From concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60% of the mainland coast, to
the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, to psychedelic potash mines
in Russia’s Ural Mountains, to metal festivals in the closed city of Norilsk, to the
devastated Great Barrier Reef in Australia and surreal lithium evaporation ponds in
the Atacama desert, the filmmakers have traversed the globe using high end production values and state of the art camera techniques to document evidence and the
experience of human planetary domination.
A. Venton