For the mouthful of a word it is, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch was one of the most fluently beautiful films I’ve ever seen. If Wes Anderson made a documentary, this would be it. It functions to expose and to inform, rather than to lecture – standing as a voice that a new audience, maybe even a larger audience, are willing to listen to.
The third in a trilogy, preceded by Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013), Anthropocene: The Human Epoch culminates ten years of research; a meditation of the human impact on the Earth. For a bit of science to foreground the film: an ‘epoch’ is ‘a division of time, that is a subdivision of a period, relating to chronostratigraphy (age of rock layers)’. The narrator tells us early on, that the ‘Holocene Epoch’ has concluded, as we enter into the ‘Anthropocene Epoch’ (anth-rop-o-seen) – a period beginning during the mid- twentieth century, and encapsulating the aggregate of human manufactured goods that are now being embedded into the geological integrity of the Earth.
Documentary isn’t often the genre I opt for when I open up my laptop on a Saturday night, but I cannot recommend this film highly enough. I suppose a way of thinking about this film is to consider the many other ways it could have been done. The creators of this documentary hauled efforts into constructing something beautiful, something people won’t want to turn away from. Frankly, the cinematography is what drew me to see the film in the first place. And yet, I walked out of that cinema with the world in mind. So many social issues rely on framing their argument as An Argument. And as a result, that audience is so dominated by people who feel strongly, who feel argumentative.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch offers a new carrot to lead us, the audience, down that same path of Environmental Awareness. As members of a contemporary society, we are so drawn to beauty, and to consumption. And to frame the damage of our obsessive consumption as a beauty that we willingly consume, the creators apply their message once more, but less aggressively. It appeals to our Motivation, rather than our Guilt. And I find this reframing of the Climate Change disaster (the disaster that we as a humanity are unequivocally facing), one that is incredibly needed.
Maddison Stephens
Sydney Film Festival