Materialist Ecofeminist “Holding” Activity and “Feminine Ecological Attunement” in the Formal Features of Perrin, Cluzaud and Debats's Winged Migration (2001)

ABSTRACT

While materialist ecofeminism is arguably more transversal than social ecology or deep ecology, its transversality has historically been limited by its eschewal of technicism, which has reduced the range of domains it has been able to work across. This orientation is also mirrored in certain variants of ecofeminist film criticism, which accordingly prioritize thematic over formal considerations. However, reflections of materialist ecofeminism can also be found in the formal features of an emerging minor tradition of nature documentary that includes Winged Migration, and this article explores this issue with a view to augmenting the ambit of ecofeminist film criticism, and correlatively the transversal parameters of materialist ecofeminism itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecofeminism
• Deleuze
• time-image
• movement-image
• nature documentary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For analysis of the other films, see: Konik's “Nuridsany and Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996) as an invitation to become-insect” (2019), Konik's “Spinoza and cinematic beatitude in Perrin and Cluzaud’s Les Saisons (2015),” and Konik and Konik's “Digital aesthetic war machines in societies of control: Perrin and Cluzaud’s Oceans (2009).”

2 As Salleh elaborates:

My epistemological analysis of ‘holding practices’ spells out how the temporal frameworks of hands-on labours dovetail more sensitively and appropriately with complex ecosystemic processes than mechanised labours can. The latter are distorted by highly abstract instrumental reasoning and reductive 1/0 technologies. (Hanson & Salleh, 1999, p. 215)

3 While “Starhawk … defines ecofeminism as a spiritual movement rooted in a nature-based religion that … views the earth as alive and worthy of … preserv[ation]” (Khannous, 2013, p. 45), Haraway “self-identifies as ecofeminist, yet maintains a critical stance regarding ecofeminism as well as feminist spirituality,” not least because her “image of the cyborg transgresses … essentialist ideas of what women are” (Davy, 2008, p. 442).

4 For Foucault, “the [Marxist] idea” – which social ecology shares – is “that there exists a human nature” which, “as a consequence of certain historical … processes, has been … alienated, or imprisoned,” but that if one “break[s] these repressive deadlocks … man will be reconciled with himself” ([1984] 2000b, p. 282).

5 “Jean Gebser … identified five … phases in the evolution of human … consciousness: the archaic[:] … qualitatively continuous with the intelligence of other primates; the magic[:] impulsive, timeless and empirical[;] … the mythical[:] rule-based, cyclical and concerned with the maintenance of dynamic stability[;] … the mental[:] inquiring and rational-analytic; and the integral[:] aperspectival, pluralistic, and reconciling … of the previous four [stages]” (Henfrey, 2018, p. 92).

6 The influence of second-wave feminist theorists like Germaine Greer and Mary Ellman, among others, is evident in certain ecofeminist thinkers’ approach to literature; for example, Quartarone’s “Teaching Vergil’s Aeneid through ecofeminism” (2006), Fitzsimmons’s “The allegory of the iron fist: Transnational ecofeminism in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” (2018), and Bo’s “An analysis of Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the perspective of ecofeminism” (2018).

7 Salleh formulated the “Man/Woman = Nature equation to parody” how “masculine identity” is seen “as belonging to … culture and the feminine as identical with ‘nature’” (Hanson & Salleh, 1999, p. 208).

8 See Belmont’s “Ecofeminism and the natural disaster heroine” (2007).

9 See Konik’s “Exploring discursive channelling of libidinal flows: A materialist ecofeminist reading of Nadine Labaki’s Caramel (2007)” (2018).

10 See Alonso’s “Ecofeminism and science fiction: Human-alien literary intersections” (2018).

11 Attenborough’s “Life trilogy … consists of the three season-long BBC documentaries Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), and The Trials of Life (1990)” (Taylor, 2010, p. 141).

12 “[A] nomadic distribution is [never] over in terms of generating new principles … because [it] … is always in movement and in a process of becoming” (Williams, 2013, p. 71).

13 For Henri Bergson, memory involves the interface between an actual present that passes, and a virtual “past [that] remains present to us,” but which also “swell[s] … with the duration … it accumulates” (1960, pp. 2, 5). However, this is creatively recalled on different occasions for evolutionary purposes (Bergson 1962, pp. 128, 210–212), and cinematic time-images thematize such innovative memorial processes (Deleuze, 2005a, pp. 1–12).