Figure 2. Still from Recife Frio

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The World in Motion

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Roughly three-fourths of the short is framed within the conceit of a news program “El Mundo en Movimiento” (“The World in Motion”). This frame is marked with the program’s logo: the letters MM in a circle, visible on the lower right-hand corner of the screen. The title is double-voiced: on the one hand, it references clichéd sound bites about a globalized imaginary that conjugate two key components: world and motion. In this reading, where the term world projects what is presumably a horizon of the largest human scale possible—the time-space compression of new technologies that made the entire planet knowable as a single thing—motion references both physical movement and temporal change cast in the positive terms of globalization-speak: fast travel multiplying the connections that knitted together the planet as a thriving single marketplace of entangled cultures, the happy end-point of civilizational progress. But the title of the news program can also be read in the key of the Anthropocene, insofar as the term conjures up a new epoch in which the impact of human activity has reached a scale of such magnitude that it will be legible in the planet’s geological record. In “Anthropocene Time,” Dipesh Chakrabarty cites a resonant fragment by Edmund Husserl to make a point regarding assumptions about the planet as ground prior to the Anthropocene: “It is on the Earth, toward the Earth, starting from it, but still on it, that motion occurs. The Earth itself, in conformity to the original idea of it, does not move, nor is it at rest; it is in relation to the Earth that motions and rest first have sense.”[10] Read alongside Husserl’s assertion, the phrase “World in Motion” might be understood in a second, more literal and profoundly destabilizing key in which it is precisely the ontic certainty that the planet constitutes stable and unshakeable ground that is put into question. If, according to Chakrabarty, our “political thought has so far been human-centric, holding the ‘world’ as a constant outside human concerns, or treating eruptions into the time of human history as intrusions from an ‘outside,’ it is this ‘outside’ that no longer exists in the time of the Anthropocene.[11] Thus, what is being moved or refigured is the very notion of world itself: the penguins and pieces of other worlds from outer space, such as the comet, metonymically represent this larger displacement. 

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I will return more directly to the question of the Anthropocene further on, but for now I want to suggest that the many figurations of cancerous urbanization throughout Kleber Mendonça’s films insistently raise, even if on a smaller scale, the question of the ongoing construction/destruction of our surrounding environments. Although climate change in Recife Frio seems to come from afar and be tied to non-human agency, it is layered onto forms of preceding environmental degradation identified as being of human origin: they fortuitously meet or coincide in the film but belong to separate logics that are not otherwise brought together.[12] The first iteration of environmental degradation is human waste: tropical Recife (before the cold) is described as reeking of sea, fruits, and urine, a Brazilian Venice traversed by a dark sludge that was once a river. The second iteration places, side by side, a “paralyzing fear of violence” and a “taste for the ugly and aggressive architecture common to Latin American cities,” where this architecture is both a defensive move against a perceived violence (the construction of vertical fortresses that offer security) as well as, in its own aggression, a channel for another kind of violence. The result is described by the TV reporter as a sterile cityscape of straight lines and right angles that is seemingly accepted without question (“without anyone thinking it was strange”). This overproduction of straight lines echoes the description of urbanization by geographer Mazen Labban as the “stratification of the built environment.” Labban also specifically describes urbanization as a “geological process” insofar as it involves excavating the planet, interrupting material flows, and capturing materials and energy from diverse milieus which are then expressed as “quasi-stable layers upon the earth,” leading to a “thickening” upon the body of the earth.[13] For Labban, too, following David Harvey’s appreciation of the inherently destructive nature of urban processes under capitalism, this thickening upon the body of the earth is at the same time a constantly becoming-waste.[14] In Recife Frio this thickening, in its vertical iteration, is cast as inhospitable and uninhabitable to the human element, a “flattening” of the human.  

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The deserted streets of Recife prompt the television crew to search for the missing people: Where are the people? They are at the shopping mall. A reconstructed and inhospitable verticalized city has seemingly ejected humans into shopping centers as spaces of refuge. The sequence of images takes us from deserted streets and rows of cars to throngs of people in clothing stores, and then to a generalized and fragmented multitude engaged in “interiorized activities” and overlaid onto Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.[15] Our view of these multitudes prioritizes fragments of bodies rather than individuals—we see, for example, a series of legs or feet from ground level, or many hands holding bags—until the camera cuts to images of children in giant plastic bubbles floating on water or ice skating. The inverse of the desolate outdoor spaces are the crowded man-made indoor spaces, the multiplication of forms of enclosure (the cars, the bubbles), whose artificiality is emphasized and whose organizing logic is capitalist consumption. If the outside feels amputated or threatening, this human-created, capital-driven enclosed ecosystem doesn’t appear any more habitable or immune from disconnection: the image of the children in the giant plastic bubbles, where they “move on water without getting wet,” only emphasizes the point.[16] Therefore, although climate change and destructive human terraforming seem to run on parallel tracks, the film Recife Frio layers them upon each other like a palimpsest, without explicitly establishing a causal relationship between them. 

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The aggressive transformation of cityscapes via development and real estate investment is a minor point in Recife Frio but is more central in other films like O som ao redor and Aquarius. Neither environmental damage nor climate change are present in the latter two films. Nonetheless, the recurring preoccupation with adverse urban transformation in all three films invites us to read them in relation to each other, as a series or as iterations of an ongoing reflection on urban change which shuffles through different temporal scales and formal choices. 

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In O som ao redor the negative externalities of modernization are made palpable through sound. On screen the emphasis is placed on the continuities harbored by what seems otherwise distinct: the tall buildings are but another version of the colonial great house, embodying class and racial hierarchies anew. Thus, film critic Ismail Xavier describes O som ao redor as an exercise in “archeology” that allows for the “perception of layers of time that accumulate in the social fabric of large cities, making evident the survival of power relations and forms of sociality.”[17] For example, the landowner and modern-day feudal lord Seu Francisco not only owns rural properties but also makes his living through owning, selling, and renting apartments in an upper-class neighborhood in Recife. And although his urban property portfolio seems worlds away from the rural landscape shown in black-and-white photographs at the outset of the film, what is laid bare by the end is that two of the security guards who work within Seu Francisco’s network are children of a man he killed years back on the plantation and who are here in the city to avenge their father’s death. The rural violence that occurred offscreen in the backdrop of the movie—suggested in the gaps between those black-and-white photos—suddenly invades the screen with Seu Francisco’s presumed death at the end. We don’t see it happen, but we hear what sounds simultaneously like a gunshot and fireworks. As has been much noted in the critical reception of the film, sound —particularly acousmatic sound—carries the weight of pointing to the larger offscreen diegetic world. Michel Chion’s distinction between the different fields of extension conjured by visual and sonic tracks in cinema is a useful reference point here: if in cinema “to look is to explore, at once spatially and temporally, in a ‘given-to-see’ (field of vision) that has limits contained by the screen, . . . listening, for its part, explores in a field of audition that is given or even imposed on the ear; this aural field is much less limited or confined, its contours uncertain and changing.”[18] What “the image” designates in the cinema, Chion writes, is not content but container: the frame. But for sound, he says, there is neither frame nor preexisting container.[19] Thus, on one level, sound works as a counterpoint to the constriction of visuality effected by the verticalization, or even containerization, of social life: the walls block sight, creating new landscapes of segregation, even as one lives in proximity to other bodies that one can hear. Sound bleeds through the walls; it surrounds us, as the film’s title suggests. At the same time, the use of sound in the film has been read as pointing to a reality beyond the camera’s frame, beyond what the viewer can see, a reminder of all that “escapes a perspective that is mimetically realist.”[20] In particular, for Pires, acousmatic sound functions as a counter-register to the work of the visual in promoting miscegenation as an ocular proof of the absence of racism. That is, the sonic register, particular in its use of motifs and sounds associated with the genre of terror, functions as a mode of racialization to critique the myth of racial democracy[21]: “The specters of bodies that should be absent become perceptible with the disquieting materiality of sounds through acousmatization.”[22] Although Pires’s argument stresses the use of sound to specifically counter a narrative of racial democracy, sound also functions more generally as the register of a latent reality that has not been buried by the ever thickening layers of skyscrapers.

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Like O som ao redor, the plot of Aquarius also revolves around real estate speculation and hyperdevelopment. In this case, the movie takes the form of one older woman’s (Clara’s) resistance to the overgrowth that is destroying her city’s past and present as she refuses to sell her beachfront apartment in the two-story Aquarius building, which developers want to tear down and replace with a modern high-rise “New Aquarius.” After various increasingly aggressive attempts to get Clara to sell, she discovers that a colony of termites has been brought in to decimate the vacant apartments. With the building structure deemed unsafe, the construction company would have legal grounds to evict Clara and demolish the old Aquarius. As in O som ao redor, this secret other life has been there throughout the film but off-screen and unsighted, concealed behind locked doors and within the walls of the building. When Clara is finally alerted to the termite scheme and has someone else break down the doors so that she can bear witness to it, she walks into rooms where the colonies of termites are first revealed only through brown, web-like tracings that cover the walls. At first glance, the small bodies of the termites themselves pass below the threshold of vision even as the tracings show they are there. In what feels like a strange change in register, the camera then zooms into the termites to show a swarm of bodies moving purposefully and busily along their tracks. This register of termite life returns in the very last scene when Clara requests a meeting with the representatives of the construction company. Clara, who is a cancer survivor, announces that she will be giving them cancer, at which point she opens up a travel suitcase and spreads several infested blocks of wood onto the table of the meeting room. The film’s final shots return to a close-up of the termites, paired with the song “Hoje” [“Today”] by Brazilian songwriter Taiguara (released in 1969), whose lyrics echo Clara’s nostalgic point of view, turning on a comparison of a present moment to a lost past love. Although Clara claims that she is subjecting others to cancer, it isn’t clear that this is a real answer to her dilemma in the movie or that her world isn’t ending in any case. If the apartment building has been infested with termites, she is likely not able to stay there, and even if she has brought termites to the developers’ building, they can always fumigate or tent the office building once she leaves. At best, the gesture seems symbolic. But it allows for a slide into a different register of liveliness: that of the termites, which are oblivious to their agential impact on human habitation and unconcerned with the human dramas that have driven the plot. Underneath it all, residing within the walls, these creatures go unperceived by most of the characters at the heart of the film as well as by the viewers. Their humming presentness is at odds with the sense of temporality and historicity evoked by the song which accompanies them, beginning with the first lines: “I carry in my body the marks of my time, my despair, life in a moment, an abyss, hunger, a flower, the end of the world.”[23] To switch into the world of termites is to perceive another kind of end of the world. Not an end that evokes a nostalgia for the 1980s, torn down and built over by development, but a sense of a reframing of human affairs within a larger ecology, or within a “world where humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are not the correlates of any manifestation; a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the world.”[24] In both films, then, the final scene involves a change in register and the realization that an off-screen element has been operating its logic throughout the movie. In O Som ao redor the sonic register holds clues to the specters of a violent past that continue to haunt the present. In Aquarius, however, the shift is to the busy movement of a non-human element and logic, an alien life form, and one that was not anticipated within the frame of the film. Instead of a feeling of resolution—in which one can finally connect what the sonic register was predicting with what one sees—the sense is, rather, of dislocation. Aquarius does not, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, allow us to rest with the “protection of women (today the ‘third-world woman’) . . . [as] a signifier for the establishment of a good society (now a good planet).”[25] Although Clara temporarily enlists the termites’ potential for destruction, the alliance seems brittle or weak, insofar as the historicity that drives her is irrelevant to them. The penguins in Recife Frio may be considered an early avatar of these termites. Unconcerned with how the cold has upset and unsettled human forms of life in Recife, they have simply arrived. Although they are not themselves a destructive force to human forms of habitation, they are indices of a world in movement.

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Genres Interrupted

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The term Anthropocene was coined by Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, to refer to a “human-dominated geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia.”[26] Although one of the main points behind Crutzen’s use of the term was to signal a scaling-up of human impact on the planet—from affecting other living organisms to changing the very chemistry and geology of the earth—it also implies a historical narrative. As such, the concept has been subject to a number of debates concerning the causal narrative or positing agency it projects. Some of the strongest critiques argue that the very term Anthropocene occludes the responsibility of specific historical configurations such as capitalism, attributing to a species (Anthropos) what is in reality the product of the system of capitalism.[27] What Chakrabarty has brought to the debates in a series of publications on climate change, however, is an attention to history-writing as a particular form/genre that I want to connect back to his participation in the project of subaltern studies. There is a significant thread between Chakrabarty’s early subaltern studies writings and his more recent writings on climate crisis that I would argue has everything to do with an appreciation of genres. Subaltern studies posited historiography as a particular knowledge system, a kind of genre with clear formal structures and limits and presumed subject-positions, rather than an elastic and omnivorous form that could potentially account for all phenomena in time. Chakrabarty’s project in Provincializing Europe was precisely to delineate how historiography was constructed according to the grammar of certain transition narratives (development, modernization, capitalism), which would always ultimately privilege Europe as the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories.[28] Provincializing Europe was about undoing or pushing back on a “nineteenth-century European discourse that universalized the mode of production narrative.”[29] According to the grammar of historiography, subaltern constructions of self and community could therefore only be spoken about through these transition narratives, but they could not speak of themselves, as theory. Cast as anti-historical, neither could these constructions generate narratives recognizable as history. Chakrabarty’s more recent work on climate change continues to tread around an absent presence, that which falls out of, or is incompatible with, the writing of history but nonetheless exerts pressure on it. It is no longer about subaltern constructions of self, however, but about vast temporal scales and non-human agentiality. 

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If Guha pointed out above that in writings about subaltern rebellions the equation of these events with natural phenomena such as wildfires and earthquakes was a sign of the denial of their praxis, will, and reason, it is the presumed distinction between natural history and human history underwriting Guha’s examples that collapses with climate change.[30] In Chakrabarty’s words, the Anthropocene challenges both “ideas of the human that usually sustain the idea of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and postimperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the postwar scenario of decolonization and globalization.”[31] If subaltern agents were denied a subject position in historiography, a historical writing of changes to the planetary system has to grapple with the agential effects of what, in “old Althusserian terms,” constitutes “a ‘process without a subject.’”[32] So vast is the scale at which geological change happens that it comprises a “conceptual-temporal place where the ‘meaning making’ of human history . . . ceases to work.”[33] 

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For Chakrabarty, then, to narrate Anthropocene time means concatenating incompatible scales, walking a tightrope between intellectual formations in tension with each other such as species thinking and critiques of capital.[34] The injunction echoes Prakash’s well-known rebuttal of Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook’s critique of subaltern studies for thinking, simultaneously, two modes that O’Hanlon and Washbrook deemed incompatible: post-structuralism/deconstruction and Marxism. Prakash’s response was: “let us hang on to two horses, inconstantly.”[35] Likewise, Chakrabarty writes that while there is no denying that climate change is profoundly bound up with the history of capitalism, “a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present.”[36] Although “the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to the idea of the species,” nonetheless the current situation is “not a crisis for the inorganic planet in any meaningful way.”[37] Or, put it otherwise, even as critiques of capital, colonialism, and racial violence belie narratives of humanity as a singular category, to the extent that the geological record registers the imprint of the human species as an aggregate it posits a category if only in terms of a negativity: thus, “the mode of being in which humans collectively may act as a geological force is not the mode of being in which humans—individually and collectively—can become conscious of being such a force.”[38] As a way of straddling these incompatible scales, Chakrabarty proposes something like a “negative universal history,” which eludes our capacity to experience or conceive it but is projected through a shared sense of catastrophe, not unlike, perhaps, the way subaltern rebels were deemed to express a negative class consciousness through insurgency.[39] 

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I want to argue that Mendonça Filho’s interplay between what is on-screen and off-screen follows a similar negative logic, particularly when the gap between the two is qualitative. That is, a fundamental discontinuity is posed such that the off-screen world is not merely an extension of the on-screen one, or simply a question of shifting the camera to the right or left, but one in which the very framing of the screen is revealed in its partiality. One of the procedures through which Mendonça Filho gestures to what is missing or out of frame is through genre play. Like his other films, Recife Frio shuffles through a variety of genres: most prominently it starts off with the frame of a news broadcast, a genre that is based on documenting and transmitting real events but here functions at a certain remove from incidents playing out in Recife because the broadcast is Argentine.[40] If for Nixon the dilated and dispersed scales of environmental destruction and climate change mean that violence upon the earth doesn’t adhere to the status of an event, as would a spectacle-driven news programs, the speculative dislocation of science fiction in Recife Frio creates a phenomenon that can, in fact, catch the attention of such a program. That is, the phenomenon in question is sudden and strange enough to draw notice but since it is also small and contained in space (only the city of Recife) it does not evoke a language of absolute catastrophe (Figure 3). As such, too, it does not trigger the imaginary of an apocalypse that some critics associate with the cinematic instantiation of a death drive and with political paralysis.[41]