The natural world onscreen: Non-anthropocentric narratives examined through phenomenology and filmmaking

In the past 12 to 15 years, the proliferation of films with environmental themes has led to the development of ecocinema theory, broadly defined as “ecologically minded film criticism” (Ivakhiv, 1) which studies the framing of environmental narratives and metaphors. Although there exists scholarship on Hollywood productions (Cubitt, Rust), experimental films (MacDonald), and Third and Fourth cinemas (Kääpä, Lu and Mi), to date few scholars have focused on emergent art-house cinema. Addressing this gap, this research-creation conducts an ecocritcal study of works from three contemporary auteurs: Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes (2006), Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2010) and Roberto Minervini’s Low Tide (2012). Drawing on environmental interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of perception, I argue that the chosen films both reflect and themselves produce a phenomenology of nature in accordance with Merleau-Pontian environmentalism. The last chapter discusses the creation portion of my thesis, which involved making two short fiction films, Gaea (2018) and Absence (2019). Both films are centered around young adults yet portray their lives as inseparable from the natural world, thus seeking to create non-anthropocentric narratives