Three Worlds

Abstract

"Three Worlds" explores three alternatives of cinematic worldhood in popular films that foreground the environment. If the images of the BBC’s recent wave of natural history productions tend towards ocular inflation, Werner Herzog’s ‘wildlife fantasies' offer counter-examples that reflect on humanity’s placement in the world. Yet Herzog’s critique of the commercial natural history film betrays its own Romantic conceit, positing man and nature in stark opposition. A third conception of worldhood is found in Earthlings (2005), an activist animal rights film. Unlike David Attenborough’s ethically neutral work that underplays issues of anthropogenic ecological pressure, and against Herzog’s reactionary tales that cast nature and man in a state of inevitable conflict, Earthlings’ graphic exposure of human violence against animals seeks to overcome the human-animal binary. Each alternative at once registers and transcends a concrete worldview, and signals the (pre-ontological) notion of worldhood. And each raises questions about the ways in which the relationship between images, nature, and worldhood is articulated. In these films, ‘nature’ is both scientifically and aesthetically knowable, and the mode of dwelling Heidegger described as our 'being-in-the-world.' Finally, these cinematic configurations of nature recall the André Bazin theory of realism as a nonanthropocentric appreciation of cinematic worldhood. At its most distilled, Bazin envisions cinematic realism as ‘the world in its own image.’ Each of the films discussed contains intimations of worldhood through the filming of nature and animals or via the image of Earth seen from space. This essay proceeds from nature as a finite terrain, to worldhood as a non-spatial mode of involvement, and back to nature again.