Director: Catherine Forster
Running time: 6mins
The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers to a theory that in recent centuries, human beings have become the dominant planetary force for change – particularly noting the accelerating geophysical and biochemical changes the atmosphere has undergone in the last 200 years. But while rising global temperatures – and the mass extinction event tied to them – have our fingerprints all over them, the scientific community remains reluctant to confirm this new epoch.
In 2024, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the idea that the Anthropocene should now supersede the Holocene – the 11,700-year period of relative stability, which allowed life on Earth in its current state to thrive. While there might be a degree of denialism tied to these decisions, there is also a philosophical point worth touching on. The term Anthropocene has a certain arrogance to it – that as a species, human beings will have an age in which to continue burning, churning and depleting the Earth. That this can, has to continue, because we are now the main characters of natural history.
The more uncomfortable truth is, if things go on as they are, that will not be the case. If there is a remnant of our species in a-few-hundred years, it will be so small that the idea it could reshape anything on a global scale would be laughable. Beyond that, nature will survive us.
That is the central point of MINE – ?; the latest effort of experimental director Catherine Forster, who returns to Indy Film Library for a third time, with her interpretation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Earth Song. Quoting selectively from the American poet’s verses, Forster’s film opens with the striking opening line:
“Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours.”
Emerson’s first words here could be a summation of the entire history of the United States – a country which relentlessly pledges universal rights and freedoms to its inhabitants; but which is built on the exploitation and exclusion of certain populations, to the extent that promise becomes absurd. But in the context of the poem, in which he essentially imagines Earth’s riposte to the Anthropocene, it also casts the Earth as part of an exploited and excluded class that all the planet’s humans assume a rightful – unsustainable – dominance over.
Forster begins her own work by layering a series of grim images over these words. An octopus in a dwindling pool of water writhes in pain, struggling for breath – spurting ink in fits of distress. An industrial process sees boots, gloves and machines rummaging through a muddy trough for farming some kind of shellfish – while a hand in the foreground empties out an abandoned sea-shell, its contents only being more grimy water. Meanwhile, the strange, discordant bellowing of nearby sea lions provides a chilling soundtrack.
Without directly quoting the poem, Forster’s imagery reflects more of its verses. For example, the land “shaggy with wood” is reflected by a felled tree – its splintered stump bristling with individual fibres reminiscent of a plentiful tree-line, which it is juxtaposed with. It is here one of the limitations of Forster’s adaptation comes to light, though. It borders on becoming too rigid an adaptation – leaning too heavily on the base text, providing a straight-forward rendition of it. There is too little visual invention here, especially when it comes to transitioning between images of conflict or contrast.
In the case of the tree – as with every other transition – we get a simple fade between flat and stationary imagery. The shot almost works for a second, but the second shot of the trees starts to move leftwards, disrupting any synergy between the two.
With some more patience and invention, the camera might have made more of those ‘teeth’ jutting up from the dead tree’s stump. Perhaps a steady zoom in to the stump, to make the splinters more reminiscent of the live trees in the healthy forest, before blending the images, then fading to the full tree-line as the camera zooms out again?
There is also a repetition of some imagery before the end. The spluttering, suffocating octopus returns to traumatise us a second time. And while in a longer film, or one with a greater diversity of shots, that might have supplied a poignant beat, leading into the conclusion, here it feels a little like running out of steam, or of padding the run-time in something which is barely six minutes long.
The film concludes with a final quote of Emerson’s poem:
“Earth endures;
Stars abide…
Old are the shores;
But where are the Old Men?”
Accompanying this, a deer wanders down a deserted bank of pebbles. It wanders past an old brick wall, now surrounded by unkempt greenery, with trees and grass growing long and proud all around. A glimpse of the world that may come after the demise of the “lawyers” and “heritors”, who Emerson’s poem also mocked for speculating for the ownership of Earth until the end of time.
While the final shot does well to embody what this is getting at, it also suffers from the previously mentioned issues. The image is too simply delivered, offering up little more than a flat visual accompaniment to Emerson’s poem – when the point of such an adaptation is surely to find new ways to bring the original text to life, to interpret it and introduce it to new audiences by giving it a fresh set of teeth. Having worked with automatons and animation previously, that might have been one way for Forster to deliver that here. But whatever the medium, we need a final moment with a bit more clout than we get; a punchline with more bite, which lives up to some of the sardonic wit of Emerson’s ‘Earth’.
Like the unpaid or underpaid labourers who the American Dream™ was built upon, Earth’s exploitation has been ideologically naturalised, but without it, all the current norms of the human economy and social orders will crumble. There is no ownership that can survive the contradictions of our time in any meaningful sense – and one way or another, it will come to an end. The Earth, meanwhile, will go on – with or without us.
Catherine Forster’s latest film comes from the right place, and seeks to interject in debates around inequality, exploitation and the climate at a crucial time. It is a welcome intervention, and a welcome return to Indy Film Library. It lacks some of the visual invention or emotional impact of her previous efforts, however, perhaps stemming from this one being an adaptation rather than a totally new creation. Forster might have felt a need to be ‘true’ to the source material – but would have served it better if she had been true to herself first.