Research background

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Informed by contemporary philosophies of the environment, writings on geology and audiovisual and image theories, The Clearing takes inspiration from what I understand as Martin Heidegger’s ethics of the earth, and, more broadly, his philosophies of phenomenon, event, art, imaging and technology. Nature, Heidegger asserts, directly confronts human thinking. As such, evoking the luminous opening that is created in the midst of a forest by an area of land devoid of trees, the “Clearing” [Lichtung] refers to the fundamental site where the human sees, understands and shows itself for what it is (Being and Time, 1927). Heidegger’s writings from the mid-to-late-30s further formulate the movement of the clearing as a “strife” that ruptures the relation between earth and world, as it stands, opening ground for a fresh one to emerge.

At once envigorating and contemplative, The Clearing proposes a creative register distinct from realism, naturalism and documentary, approximating the essay film. T.W. Adorno (1954-58) and more recently Laura Rascaroli (2017) theorise the essayistic style (whether in literary or filmic form) as the optimum, because transgressive, medium for critical thought. For Rascaroli, audiovisual thinking takes shape through discontinuities effected by juxtapositions, dissociations, intervals and schisms that invite heterogeneous viewing. In turn, I conceive thoughtful moving-image-making in resonance with Heidegger’s notion of “inceptual thinking” – a renewed perspective on world, earth and all beings that forms, like tectonic plates through the ages, in a loose conjoining of dispositions, such as shock and diffidence, prompting reflection on the present state and future of our world (Contributions to Philosophy [of the event], 1936-38). What is important for Heidegger, as for my own creative endeavour, is, not disjunction or dialectics, but an open striving and unifying where the ground of thinking remains mobile. I adopt the essayistic form not from an evidential place – as proclamation – but from one of searching and interrogation that is carried out both verbally and in a thoughtful play of forms. Here, thought emerges not just in voiceover but out of the temporality of images and sounds, as their certainty is affirmed and questioned over time. I thus approach the image in its ontological and self-reflexive dimensions, seeking proximity over subjectivity.

To help interrogate key conceptual, thematic and aesthetic questions at the core of my creative process I appeal to contemporary thinkers who are either conversant with Heidegger’s thought (Emmanuel Alloa; Andrew Benjamin; Dipesh Chakrabarti; Jean-Luc Nancy; David Wood) or else constitutively counter it (Gilles Deleuze; T.J. Demos; D.N. Rodowick).  

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** The notion of an ethical stance in Heidegger’s thought has often been challenged with regards to his embracing of National Socialism and accompanying antisemitic remarks (during the mid-to-late 1930s). While these remain inexcusable, as recent scholarship has shown, the Heidegger of the Contributions, “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology” can in some important ways be taken to be a precursor to key contemporary philosophies of the environment (Chakrabarty; Storey; Wood).