The river project: A poetics of eco-critical film-making

There is a body of film that falls under the categories of eco-cinema, environmental cinema and landscape cinema. These films take the natural environment, place or landscape as their subject matter. As we try to make meaning of the connections of our lives and world through film, Rust and Monani (2013) note that, 'cinema is a form of negotiation, a mediation that is itself ecologically placed as it consumes the entangled world around it, and in turn, is itself consumed.' This influence is evident in complex, poetic ways, and appears to revolve around the manner in which the films listen to the landscape, rather than seeking to impose themselves upon it - exhibiting a certain kind of humility. As a child I was attracted to flowing water. In my early teens I experienced the fear and awe of canoeing down Australia's wild Snowy River. As an adult I find myself drawn to cross, swim, walk along, look into and film rivers. Not to narrate, or even describe the river, but to use film to find a nonfiction form that acknowledges the river, writes the river. I'm making a series of films around the Snowy River that investigates the poetics of rivers. The first in that series, A View from the Bank, is a 40-minute experimental, structuralist film that documents parts of the Snowy from its source to its mouth. I will examine how this film does not seek to interpret the world as much as listen and bear witness to it. This is realised aesthetically by its use of stillness, long takes and unadulterated audio which has created a form that appears and is experienced as a counter to the deliberate rhetoric common to much documentary. I will show how my methods of production were guided by the river and the landscape around it. Further, in the Anthropocene, how can this film be an agent for environmental awareness without resorting to dogmatic imposition