The line between social reality and science fiction is an optical illusion. -The Last Angel of History
The word Civilization is charged with animosity toward its implied opposites: savagery, barbarism, nature. While commonplace to describe the conditions of organized society, the notion of civility wears the violent history of Western imperialism and points to its own justifications for conquest. 400 plus years since the genocidal colonization of the Americas and the outset of American chattel slavery, extractive industries continue to pillage indigenous land for labor and resources in the name of advancement, and at the expense of people and environments.
But when the modern idyll of “civilization” is threatened—whether through active resistance, environmental disaster, or structural collapse—what follows? In an endangered present, the future is not inevitable but to be fought for, reclaimed, reinvented altogether. How do we care for the planet while centering human life, and from where, exactly, will the seeds of collective liberation grow?
After Civilization features documentaries that employ speculative techniques to reckon with ecological crisis and the ongoing material violences of dispossession. While some filmmakers recast observational footage to imagine the future, others invoke surreal imagery to visualize the fragility of their distinct settings. From an Afrofuturist leapfrog between Africa, Detroit and outer space (The Last Angel of History), to a warning that the island nation Tuvalu’s digital domain name will outlive its physical existence (.TV); from a projection of natural resurgence in the Florida Everglades (Wayward Fronds), to a prophetic retelling of contemporary indigenous identity in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (INAATE/SE/), the films in this series consider the interplay of power, technology, growth, and destruction. What results is part ethnographic, part science fiction—a meditation on built and natural environments, which both mourns and predicts Earth’s transformation over time.
Curated by Emily Apter, Annie Horner, and Inney Prakash
Live Zoom Q&A with filmmakers Nicole Macdonald (A PARK FOR DETROIT), Hannah Jayanti (TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES), G. Anthony Svatek (.TV), Christina Battle (BAD STARS and WATER ONCE RULED), Zack Khalil (INAAT/SE) on Tuesday, August 4th at 7pm.
Last Angel Of History
John Akomfrah, 1996, 45 min.
This cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.
Akomfrah's analysis is rooted in an exploration of the cultural works of Pan-African artists, such as funkmaster George Clinton and his Mothership Connection, Sun Ra's use of extraterrestrial iconography, and the very explicit connection drawn between these issues in the writings of black science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler.
.TV
G. Anthony Svatek, 2017, 22 min.
.TV is a found footage essay film: Voicemails left by an anonymous caller from the future guideus to the remote islands of Tuvalu, a place the international media has described as “the first country to disappear due to rising sea levels”. Surrounded by thousands of miles of open water, much of Tuvalu’s revenue comes from its country-code web extension .TV, a popular domain choice among global video-streaming and television industries. The caller describes how heat, digital screens, and distance gave him no choice but to leave his sinking home and escape into cyberspace where rising waters will never reach him.
Water And Power
Pat O’Neill, 1989, 57 min.
Pat O’Neill’s rarely screened masterpiece, the exceptionally dense and technically dazzling Water and Power, is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on Los Angeles, “a city that turned land into desert.” Using time-lapse photography and optical printing, O’Neill intertwines technology and ideas, collaging different locales into montages that suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. His genius comes in combining his raw materials in new and increasingly paradoxical ways, posing the relationship between humans and nature as a series of questions rather than offering fixed answers. –BAMFA
Sneak Preview: Truth Or Consequences
Hannah Jayanti, 2020, 102 min.
This film is no longer available for viewing
Truth or Consequences is a speculative documentary about time and how we weave the past into the present and our possible future. Set in the small desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the film takes place in the shadow of the world's first commercial Spaceport. Subtly set in a near future when space travel has begun, the film follows five residents who stayed. Combining documentary, archival, experimental virtual reality worlds and an improvised score by Bill Frisell, Truth or Consequences is a lyrical meditation on progress, history, and how we navigate a sense of loss within ourselves and a changing world.
Bad Stars: Chemical Valley
Christina Battle, 2018, 9 min.
Beginning with the root of the term disaster – from the Greek (dus-) ‘bad’ and (aster), ‘star’ this project considers disaster from an astronomical sense, imagining multiple scales of disaster as causing disruption and temporary disorientation on a planetary scale. Humans have looked to the movement of stars as a way to make sense of the terrestrial for millennia, developing elaborate systems to read celestial bodies as a way to explain and predict events on earth. Studying the stars in order to discover more about the galaxy, astronomy tells us that we are in fact born of the stars, made up of the heavy elements they distribute across the universe. Bad Stars considers disaster through the metaphor of those stars that have gone wrong—as events that cause unprecedented change from a once-stable structure, and influence a wider, interdependent network.
Seeing warnings about past disasters as a way to bypass potential disasters of the future; and considering disaster as a series of linkages extending from the environmental, cultural, political, economic, and social, Bad Stars draws threads between these connections and wonders how they might be realigned in ways that will help to move beyond them. The project sees the framework of disaster as an active strategy that can aid in the shifts in perspective necessary to advance beyond the causes of disasters themselves.
INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./]
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil , 2016, 71 min.
Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s debut film re-imagines an Anishinaabe story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ explores how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community on the Michigan/Canadian border. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.
Wayward Fronds
Fern Silva, 2014, 13 min.
Mermaids flip a tale of twin detriments, domiciles cradle morph invaders, crocodile trails swallow two-legged twigs in a fecund mash of nature's outlaws... down in the Everglades.
Wayward Fronds references a series of historical events that helped shape the Florida Everglades today, while fictionalizing its geological future and its effects on both native and exotic inhabitants. Guided by recent talks in the Florida legislature to finally disburse billions of dollars in restoration funds, events in this film unfold by giving way to a future eco-flourished Everglades. Nature begins to take over, en-gulfs and tames civilization after centuries of attack, and even guides it into its mysterious aqueous depths, forcing humans to adapt and evolve to its surroundings.
Fordlandia Malaise
Susana de Sousa Dias, 2019, 40 min.
Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rainforest in 1928. His aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States. Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade.
Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times, between the 20th and 21st centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground.Although Fordlandia is well-known due to the brief Fordian period, one must not forget the history either before or after. Giving voice to the inhabitants who claim the right to write their own story and reject the ghost town label, Fordlandia Malaise blends together archival imagery, drone footage, tales and narratives, myths and songs.
A Park For Detroit
Nicole Macdonald, 2019, 27 min.
An island park in the Detroit River functions as a prism for human development in this meditation on the city’s past, present and future from filmmaker Nicole Macdonald. Using news footage and surveillance tapes from motion sensor cameras, Macdonald narrates over images of Belle Isle’s abandoned zoo, posing questions about the reinvestment in Detroit and its intended effects.
Water Once Ruled
Christina Battle, 2018, 6 min.
Mixed-media video installation initially made for Contact Landing(s) Thames Art Gallery. Collaging appropriated footage with original imagery, Water Once Ruled collapses the past, present and future into a single repeating loop. Linking the introduction of satellite imagery with the colonization of our own as well as other planets, the video considers water – and the lack thereof – as the distressed resource connecting Mars’ history with Earth’s present and future.
There is nothing here to breathe.
The Many Colors Of The Sky Radiate Forgetfulness
Basim Magdy, 2015, 11 min.
The devil throws up waterfalls as monuments stand witness to a war being overshadowed by its successor. The water flows through ancient valleys as birds with stolen feet and borrowed beaks stare at nothing in particular. Only stone, bronze and the sky manage to outlive the fading memories. Faces, gestures and final words mumbled before departure camouflage themselves to blend in with the changing colors of the sky. Loss becomes a tradition for the forgetful and our shadows become slow death in a world of kaleidoscopic confusion.
Slow Action
Ben Rivers, 2010, 45 min.
Continuing filmmaker Ben Rivers’ exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.
Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote - a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima - an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu - one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset - an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.
