Our 5th Caméra-Stylo conference brought together international scholars interested in eco-critical interventions and discussions of the Anthropocene. This was my first Caméra-Stylo conference since joining the network in 2022, and being part of it really captured the network’s merits as an interdisciplinary hub of people who love literature and cinema and engage with pertinent global issues and cultural theory.

There were three fantastic keynotes throughout the conference. Professor Robert Sinnerbrink from Macquarie University raised the question “How can documentary cinema contribute to raising awareness, changing attitudes, and fostering action in relation to environmental threats and social justice issues?” Through an analysis of three ecological documentaries, An Inconvenient Truth, Koyaanisqatsi, and Anthropocene, Professor Sinnerbrink theorised a ‘poetico-discursive’ approach that aims to persuade through hybridising previous documentary practices, what he calls the ‘evidentiary-argumentative’ and ‘poetico-aestheticist’ techniques. For Sinnerbrink, while the didacticism of evidence-based arguments has failed for years now and aestheticism reaches a reduced audience, combining these approaches in film/art provides one way of making intelligible the unrepresentable scale and network of actors that contribute to climate catastrophe. 

Drawing on the work of Claire Colebrook, art historian and Professor at Monash University, Rex Butler recognised the self-importance, futility, and paradoxical nature of many eco-critical interventions, and drew attention to academia’s and the neoliberal university’s complicity in accelerating climate catastrophe. Butler also stressed the disproportionate distribution of catastrophe and the need to decentre the West from visions of dystopia and disaster, reflecting on the privilege of theorising disaster and for whom we consider it. For Butler, our futurism must be non-western, and our thinking shifted from centre and periphery to a network of infinite possibility. 

In our third keynote, medievalist Andrew B. R. Elliott, Visiting Fellow at the University of Lincoln, examined how we narrate the apocalypse through the context of the Anthropocene in fun and forgettable disaster films. For Elliott, the Road Trip subgenre characterises a form of climate denial where physical escape offers salvation. He also explored the anthropocentric tension inherent in narrating the end of the world. Our anthropocentric perspective makes it extremely difficult to imagine the world without humans and yet much climate denial divorces humanity from nature. Elliott examines four common responses to climate catastrophe–denial, allowing the most vulnerable to suffer, technological solutions, and interplanetary colonisation–and shows how these are predicated on a colonial logic closely tied to anthropocentric globalisation. He argues apocalypse films don’t look to the future but to the past. They reproduce the colonial logic of the geographic escape rather than mine history for ways of being outside the anthropocentric logic of globalisation. In these films, preservation and sustainability are rejected in favour of extracting natural resources from new areas, even as these sites dwindle. 

If these sound intriguing and you would like to read more, Robert Sinnerbrink’s and Andrew B.R. Elliott’s keynotes have been peer-reviewed for publication with Caméra-Stylo and feature in our inaugural journal issue’s Approaching Extinction essay cluster: Camera-Stylo Journal Issue 1. 

Also published in the journal’s essay cluster is another article that began as a conference paper at Caméra-Stylo 5, Jakob Boer’s ‘Exploring Ecocinema and Slow Cinema Spectatorship.’ In this article, Boer engages in a meta-critical analysis of the politics of spectatorship and the convergent modes of viewing slow cinema and ecocinema. Boer critiques eco-cinema scholarship for a lack of empiricism in substantiating its claims about spectatorship, for conflating critical terms describing the effects of eco- and slow cinema on spectators, for being too politically committed to an ethos of social and political action in ways that impede their goals for change, and for being too focused on interpreting texts while insufficiently addressing the modes of viewing audiences adopt. An empirically grounded spectator scholarship of ecocinema, Boer contends, lies through interdisciplinarity, forging stronger networks with cognitive psychology, phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology. In particular, Boer sees practices of media psychology and the sociology of the arts as productive methods of mapping ecocinema’s impacts. 

Kaitlin Lake’s video essay, ‘Memory.exe: Screening the (post)human condition through AI modes of ‘memory,” draws on Glenn Albrecht’s concept of the symbiocene–a term that aims to reorient Anthropocentric thinking toward a symbiotic relationship with the environment. Lake rejects the dualistic thinking of Anthropocentrism that places the human in opposition to the nonhuman, and solely identifies memory and morality with humanness. For Lake, embracing a broader understanding of how nonhuman entities ‘remember’ fosters this symbiosis between technology and the environment. This is not a technoutopian gesture, however. The symbiocene values ‘the vital interconnectedness of life’ as the necessary ‘foundation for all subsequent thought, policy, and action’ (163). An eco-optimistic humanism remains at the centre of this rejection of dualism–it is not humanism at the expense of the environment, nor technology at the expense of humanity. This video essay is also published in the online version of the Caméra-Stylo journal: Memory.exe video essay

There were too many other fantastic presentations to highlight in detail here, but some personal favourites include Thomas Britt’s ‘Human Problems and Off-world Solutions in Contemporary Science Fiction Films,’ Wyatt Moss-Wellington and Lili Pâquet’s ‘Engendering Care for the Environment through Podcasts,’ Alex Howard’s “Do you think God gives a damn about miniature donkey’s Colm?’: Animals in the Film and Theatre of Martin McDonagh,’ and Daniel Carrigy’s ‘String Theory and Prophetic Bullets: Perennial Destruction and Decay in There There and Reservation Dogs.’ More information, including the abstracts and bios for these can be found in the conference program, downloadable from this page.

After three days of excellent scholarship and stimulating discussion, the dominant feeling toward the conference’s intervention was hopeful. Despite recognising the flaws of viewing ecocriticism as a solution, undertaking textual analysis in this moment felt valuable to mediate the complex network and scale of ecological crisis. Sharing work, learning of new texts and theories, and forging new collegial connections remains a vital part of what we–academics and the Sydney Literature and Cinema Network–does despite ever-growing chants of austerity.