For a Cinema After Nature: Jacques Perconte and the Art of Withdrawal

Abstract

The ‘ontological turn’ has deconstructed the concept of nature, and the work of thinkers such as Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, or Donna Haraway suggests new paradigms in which we situate ourselves and our presence in a world ‘after nature’. What about film? How to think a cinema after nature? How can film engage with the world without reproducing regimes of organization, and distributions of power, inherited from the systems of dual oppositions constructed around the concept of nature (e.g., visible and invisible, seer and seen, subject and object, shot and reverse shot, absence and presence)? How could a possible ‘cinema after nature’ acknowledge the agency of all things, whatever they are, that signal themselves at different moments of the film's elaboration and give them the possibility to ‘make film’ as they “make world”?