This film tries to overwhelm with the sublimity of nature, but the sublime is ultimately an enfeebling, passive experience, and what the world doesn't need right now is another passive art film.
AQUARELA is ostensibly about climate change and how that will influence humanity--but what that effect is and how we should respond to it essentially boils down to one giant shrug by the time the film ends.
This isn't true of the film's opening scenes in Russia, which are entrancing and devastating. In the opening, with its scarce dialogue, the viewer gradually realizes that a rescue team must work full time to save people and vehicles from the ice. Normally, this ice would be frozen a full three weeks longer, allowing people to drive across it as a shortcut. These routines are interrupted, however, by the changing climate, and the rather brutal impact of that abrupt change is captured on camera. The opening scenes capture the truth of this global moment: that the world is changing quickly, that those changes have already begun to be devastating to certain human and nonhuman communities, and that those changes are going to continue to get worse and have increasingly miserable effects if major remediation does not begin immediately.
Once those opening scenes are over, however, the film devolves into narrative-free splendor--to very poor effect. Greenland glaciers crumble to heavy metal music. A woman in a boat does... something amidst heavy waves. Dolphins frolic, hunting for prey. People cower in a cave during a downpour. A Miami hurricane empties out the streets and whips palm trees into a frenzy. And Angel Falls in Venezuela dissolves into mist and rainbows.
This is all gorgeous, yes, and the music is pretty cool, but the overall effect of this decontextualized music video is to force viewers into a simple acceptance that nature is powerful and cool and beautiful. If one is of a Judeo-Christian background, then the rainbow at the end cannot help but remind one of the covenant made after Noah's Flood--that God will never again destroy the Earth by water. Does that mean our bases are covered, then? Are we in the clear? Is there nothing to worry about?
Sublimity in art is the presentation of massive, jaw-dropping splendor. The viewer cannot respond except with trembling awe and respect. (Given the hydro themes of the film, I'm reminded of the process of sublimation, when solid ice is exposed to a force so hot that it instantly converts to gaseous steam without first passing through the intermediate liquid phase. The sublime sublimates us--turns our minds from thoughts of this solid, material earth to matters of pure spirit.) The sublime is an entrancing experience, but its antithetical to any actual thought or action. With the sublime, we are told that our puny lives are inconsequential against the grand innerworkings of the cosmos. Like Job quaking before the Leviathan, we must accept that we cannot fathom the truth of things and so we should simply stick to smaller concerns.
All that may be so, but such a mindset masks the extent to which human systems, human choices, human lifestyles, human actions have played an enormous role in causing our present environmental crisis. A sublime worldview, like the one this film presents, not only masks that culpability--in doing so, it absolves us of all guilt and excuses us from not bothering to come up with solutions.
Humanity will one day probably cease to exist, but life will still continue to thrive, and the Earth will remain a fearsome and majestic place. Perhaps the film wants to decenter us from our anthropocentric concerns and force us to view the wonders of nature from a broader geologic scale. The hurricane scene in Miami may be bereft of any human presence, but the herons look like they're doing just fine, and I'm sure the gators are having the time of their lives.
At this point in time, however--a point when humans have already set in motion these catastrophic changes yet all hope is not yet quite lost--it seems a little dangerous to be abandoning oneself to such nihilism without sufficiently attending to the immense cost--both human and non-human--that such change is bringing about. This film is similar to Godfrey Reggio's KOYAANISQATSI, but whereas that film forces us to consider and judge the ways in which human civilization has shaped and distorted the natural contours of the earth, AQUARELA is content to simply let us revel in our folly, mistaking it for transcendence.
AQUARELA is ostensibly about climate change and how that will influence humanity--but what that effect is and how we should respond to it essentially boils down to one giant shrug by the time the film ends.
This isn't true of the film's opening scenes in Russia, which are entrancing and devastating. In the opening, with its scarce dialogue, the viewer gradually realizes that a rescue team must work full time to save people and vehicles from the ice. Normally, this ice would be frozen a full three weeks longer, allowing people to drive across it as a shortcut. These routines are interrupted, however, by the changing climate, and the rather brutal impact of that abrupt change is captured on camera. The opening scenes capture the truth of this global moment: that the world is changing quickly, that those changes have already begun to be devastating to certain human and nonhuman communities, and that those changes are going to continue to get worse and have increasingly miserable effects if major remediation does not begin immediately.
Once those opening scenes are over, however, the film devolves into narrative-free splendor--to very poor effect. Greenland glaciers crumble to heavy metal music. A woman in a boat does... something amidst heavy waves. Dolphins frolic, hunting for prey. People cower in a cave during a downpour. A Miami hurricane empties out the streets and whips palm trees into a frenzy. And Angel Falls in Venezuela dissolves into mist and rainbows.
This is all gorgeous, yes, and the music is pretty cool, but the overall effect of this decontextualized music video is to force viewers into a simple acceptance that nature is powerful and cool and beautiful. If one is of a Judeo-Christian background, then the rainbow at the end cannot help but remind one of the covenant made after Noah's Flood--that God will never again destroy the Earth by water. Does that mean our bases are covered, then? Are we in the clear? Is there nothing to worry about?
Sublimity in art is the presentation of massive, jaw-dropping splendor. The viewer cannot respond except with trembling awe and respect. (Given the hydro themes of the film, I'm reminded of the process of sublimation, when solid ice is exposed to a force so hot that it instantly converts to gaseous steam without first passing through the intermediate liquid phase. The sublime sublimates us--turns our minds from thoughts of this solid, material earth to matters of pure spirit.) The sublime is an entrancing experience, but its antithetical to any actual thought or action. With the sublime, we are told that our puny lives are inconsequential against the grand innerworkings of the cosmos. Like Job quaking before the Leviathan, we must accept that we cannot fathom the truth of things and so we should simply stick to smaller concerns.
All that may be so, but such a mindset masks the extent to which human systems, human choices, human lifestyles, human actions have played an enormous role in causing our present environmental crisis. A sublime worldview, like the one this film presents, not only masks that culpability--in doing so, it absolves us of all guilt and excuses us from not bothering to come up with solutions.
Humanity will one day probably cease to exist, but life will still continue to thrive, and the Earth will remain a fearsome and majestic place. Perhaps the film wants to decenter us from our anthropocentric concerns and force us to view the wonders of nature from a broader geologic scale. The hurricane scene in Miami may be bereft of any human presence, but the herons look like they're doing just fine, and I'm sure the gators are having the time of their lives.
At this point in time, however--a point when humans have already set in motion these catastrophic changes yet all hope is not yet quite lost--it seems a little dangerous to be abandoning oneself to such nihilism without sufficiently attending to the immense cost--both human and non-human--that such change is bringing about. This film is similar to Godfrey Reggio's KOYAANISQATSI, but whereas that film forces us to consider and judge the ways in which human civilization has shaped and distorted the natural contours of the earth, AQUARELA is content to simply let us revel in our folly, mistaking it for transcendence.