Speculative worlds: anthropocentric realities and world-building in speculative documentaries

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the anti-anthropocentric world-building in documentaries that employ aspeculative mode of inquiry and reckon with the ecological crisis. Dubbed speculative documentaries, they move beyond the Griersonian creative treatment of actuality toward a speculative treatment of subjectivity. Understanding their world-building encourages us to place the documentary within the interdisciplinary, multidimensional, and collective undertaking to address the Anthropocene and the increasing climate crisis. Slow Action (2010) imagines the evolution of species and ecosystems when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitats envisioning a science fiction future of island biogeography in face of extinction. Truth or Consequences (2020) considers the possible cataclysmic futurity as its present-day setting. It seeks to define the mode of speculative documentary as documentary footage placed into a fictionalized context where, as if it were science fiction, takes what is nascent today and treats it as though it is already happening. Jan Ijäs’s documentary series Waste (2016-ongoing) assumes a more-than-human approach to anthropogenic habitats by expanding on the concept of waste and critiquing the devastating human effect on the earth. The results are part ethnographic, part science fiction, offering a space for contemplation on constructed and natural environments that bewail and anticipate Earth’s transformation over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Speculative documentary
• world-building
• Anthropocene
• non-fiction futurities

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

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Eneos Çarka

Eneos Çarka is a PhD student and Annenberg Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He is the Head of Documentary Programming at Tirana International Film Festival where, in addition to curating, he organizes events, masterclasses, workshops, and panels with filmmakers and industry. He was awarded an MA in Film Studies with Distinction from University College London and he graduated with Magna Cum laude from DocNomads Masters on Creative Documentary. His films have screened at numerous festivals, galleries, and cultural events such as Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin in Musée du Louvre, Message to Man IFF, and Festival dei Popoli among others. As both filmmaker and researcher, he pays particular attention to issues of representations experimenting with various approaches to the study and practice of non-fiction cinema.