Persuading people to care about environmental ruin remains a surprisingly difficult artistic challenge
THE FOCAL points of landscape art changed in the 1970s and 1980s. Where painters and photographers from Caspar David Friedrich to Ansel Adams had homed in on awe-inspiring, untouched vistas with mountains, valleys and lakes, a new generation of artists focused instead on grey car parks, nuclear-test sites and the vast swathes of land being cleared for suburban development.
That idea is dramatised in two new documentaries about mankind’s despoliation of the planet: “Earth”, directed by Nicolas Geyrhalter, and “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.
Mr Geyrhalter anchors “Earth” in interviews with labourers in the mining trade . An American foreman engaged in levelling a range in California expresses unease about the speed with which he and his team can destroy vast, ancient lands in a matter of months: “Do I want to tear the hills down? No!” Yet he sees no other option given the demands of the market.
These films imply that more effort should be made to probe the underlying motivations for ecological damage, be they economic, psychological or political. Neither film offers easy solutions. The spectacular approach of “Anthropocene” is unsatisfying: after surveying the various battlegrounds from high above, the viewer has no better understanding of the causes of the war, let alone how to end it.
“Earth” is screening in Britain now. “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” will be released in America in September
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