Canary in a Coal Mine: Carbon Cinema and Three Ecologies of Energy

PATRICIA PISTERS

University of Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS

 

 

For the official version of record, see here:

Pisters, P. (2022). Canary in a Coal Mine. Media Theory, 6(2), 135-158. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/180

 

Abstract

Coal has played a crucial role in energy supply for our modern times, including the development of film and media industries. Choosing the site of mines and mining as a central way of articulating energy regimes, this article addresses three levels of carbon energy as encountered in historical and contemporary coalmining films. By following the black gold from modernity to the contemporary age increasingly marked by the Anthropocene, I will propose a three-folded entangled pharmacology of carbon energy. Inspired by an ecological approach to cinema and Guattari’s ethic-aesthetic ecosophy, a material ecological approach will look at the carbon rock in the earth crust as well as the atmospheric carbon cycle; at another level the socio-economic ecosystems surrounding coal mining are addressed in terms of labor politics and exploitation; and thirdly I will investigate the mental ecologies of coal mining and carbon cycles in relation to our consciousness of emancipatory struggles of rights and recognition but ultimately of a consciousness of the earth, life and death. 

Keywords

Coalmining films, three ecologies, elemental media, energy humanities, metabolic rift, Anthropocene

 

A small moving white fleck in a coalmining landscape; a fragile human figure enclosed by a sea of black rock. The main character of Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) is submerged by the environment that she tries to escape (Fig. 1). The image has a horrifying beauty that brings human and geological energies together. The energy of the tiny body seems to be swallowed by the energy of the totality of the milieu that surrounds her. It is a haunting scene to which I will return momentarily but that I want to invoke here because it invites an ecological understanding of cinema as a process of ‘worlding.’ In an ecological approach toward cinema, film creates worlds, atmospheric environments that embody complex assemblages of material resources, social relations, ideas and affects (Ivakhiv, 2013; Hven, 2022). In The Cinematic Footprint (2012), Nadia Bozak evokes the images of another film, that of the Inuk hunter in Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1924) and argues, by referring to Dudley Andrew’s analysis of the film, how the hunter ties his life to that of the seal, the seal as ‘a mobile, subaqueous source of oil, that is of energy and value’ (Andrews, 2000: 222; Bozak, 2012: 1). The oil feeds both the body of the hunter, and his lantern, as well as the projector of the final film. We can consider this exchange of energies as a pharmacological politics of material harm and cure (in this case, harm for the hunted seal is a cure against darkness for humans, eventually all captured in a projected cinematographic image). In a comparable way, I will investigate cinema’s historic articulation of energy regimes related to coal mining through an analysis of its dynamics with humans in the three ecologies of materiality, the social and the mental, investigating its changing political implications from the early days of coalmining connected to the Industrial Revolution to contemporary concerns related more explicitly to the Anthropocene.

 

 

Energy humanities, elemental media studies and ecosophy

In their anthology Energy Humanities, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer address the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene by focusing on energy, the use and abuse of energy produced by fossil fuels, beginning with coal (and later oil and natural gas). They argue that without these geological energy sources we would never have been modern: energy equates modernity, marked by technological evolution, the industrial revolution, and capitalist economies. They maintain that it is evident how ‘access to and the struggle over energy have had a role in shaping modern geopolitics’ witnessing the many conflicts and wars over oil and other resources. ‘What is less evident,’ Szeman and Boyer continue, ‘is the degree to which the energy riches of the past two centuries have influenced our relationships to our bodies, molded human social relations, and impacted the imperatives of even those varied activities we group together under the term “culture”’ (Szeman and Boyer, 2017: 2). Therefore, from a humanities perspective, one can ask what type of energy epistemologies we find in film, fiction and visual arts ‘with the aim of grasping the curious invisibility of such a powerful substance as [fossil fuels], while also trying to render fuels nameable, readable, and visible’ (Szeman and Boyer, 2017: 6). A humanities perspective on energy that makes these invisible energetic forces visible in culture may contribute to an understanding of the environmental problems humanity currently faces. The qualitative ways in which our experiences have been shaped by energy is by and large unnoticed and not well understood which could be considered as energy unconscious. The films that will be addressed in the following sections all contain certain unconscious ‘energy epistemologies’ that are telling about the different moments in time and space from which they emerged, centered around the extraction of coal as energy resource.

The concept of energy in itself is as polysemic as it is intangible. Connotations range from the felt heat of the sun to physical fitness and (more intuitive) positive or negative vibes that can be picked up; and from calories in food to fossil fuels that are sources of energy for the body or for electricity and machines, including film projectors and other media equipment. As Andrew Morris posits, energy in its most abstract form means the storage of the ‘potential to do something’ (Morris, 2016: 139). Energy means different things in different contexts, but ultimately the ultimate source of energy is elemental. Energy is ‘the arrangement of atoms in molecules,’ forged in different chemical assemblages in various circumstances of the Earth, the atmosphere and under the influence of the Sun, energy’s ultimate source (Morris, 2016: 141). Therefore, also from a humanities perspective, energy is elemental. The current elemental turn in media studies explicitly addresses the elements, investigating the material substrates that compose media. Nadia Bozak, for instance, investigates cinema as ‘fossil image,’ the locus where geology, industrial civilization, and cinematic history intersect and ‘images are powered by the sun in that all mediated vision is plugged into a larger fossil fuel economy’ (Bozak, 2012: 18). Nicole Starosielski lists some of the elemental dimensions in the so-called elemental turn of media studies, notably:  unearthing the minerals that comprise media technologies (such as silver for photography, coltan for mobile phones); the sun as condition for vision; infrastructures that support signal traffic; atmospheric conditions of media environments; and the natural elements as communication media themselves (Starosielski 2019: 1). All in all, an elemental approach in media theory can be considered pharmacological, in that it addresses media in its material substrates and investigates how it unfolds in benefits (modernity, progress, wealth) and costs (exhaustion of laboring bodies and natural resources).

Elemental media studies is therefore an ecological approach. Knowledge about the material conditions of our modern and hypermodern media machines that seem so virtual and immaterial can contribute to ecocritical awareness and allow a more critical and ecological understanding of mediation. One of the key principles of elemental media studies is that its components are not separate building blocks that can be taken apart, but they are processual, dynamic, and relational (Ivakhiv, 2013). In his elemental media book, The Marvelous Clouds, Peters evokes the work of Norbert Elias who understands civilization as ‘a triad of pressure points’: human relations with themselves (psychic), other humans (social), and the natural world (material/biological/‌environmental) (Peters, 2015: 5). This triadic and entangled conception of civilization corresponds to the intertwinements of the dynamic, processual and relational ecological perspective of Félix Guattari’s visionary ecosophical project. In The Three Ecologies Guattari calls for an ecosophy that goes beyond tackling industrial pollution from a purely technocratic perspective and proposes an ethico-aesthetic articulation between what he calls the three ecological registers: the environment, social relations and human subjectivities. Guattari argues for an analysis of what constitutes us as human subjects by acknowledging that each of us is dynamically formed in an assemblage of ‘components of subjectification’ (Guattari, 2000: 24). These components do not stand on their own but are connected to different ecologies that keep on changing. The human subject ‘appears to be something like a “terminal” for processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc.’ (Guattari, 2000: 25). Subjectivity, usually considered as something interior or private, actually establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple components that can best be approached via ethico-aesthetic inspiration, Guattari suggests. In the next sections, a journey (admittedly in big leaps) through film history will serve as such ‘ethico-aesthetic inspiration,’ investigating carbon energies and coalmining films in different ecological articulations of the human subject, acknowledging that, in fact, material, social and mental ecology are always entangled and deeply political.

 

Material ecologies: nature’s gift

Let’s first go back to the material resource itself. Carbon (C6) is a chemical element with the atomic number 6.^[1] Carbon is a key component of all known life on Earth, it is everywhere and sometimes referred to as the King of the elements. Carbon easily bonds with other elements and is an abundant element in the human body, as well as in all other organic compounds. The atoms of carbon itself can bond together in different forms, in so called allotropes of carbon. In its pure form, the softest allotrope of carbon is graphite, the material we know from our pencils; and from the word for ‘graphein’ (writing), which indicates an early and most direct form of elemental media and mediation. The hardest pure form of carbon is diamond. Impure forms of carbon such as peat, charcoal or coal (combustible sedimentary rock) are also abundant. Coal contains primarily high quantities of carbon, combined with some other elements (hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, nitrogen). Over the last 150 years, it has been a hugely important energy resource for the modern world. Carbon energy is largely due to the geological processes that took place over millions of years that allowed the energy of the sun, stored in plants and woods buried underneath the soil to compress and under high temperature carbonize into peat and coal. On another scale, new forms of carbon, allotropes such as carbon nanotubes and graphene (thin sheets of carbon only one atom thick), have been discovered recently. Carbon nanotubes and graphene might become the basis of carbon computing, allowing incredible amounts of data storage and processing, which will allow yet other forms of elemental mediation, with an entirely different pharmacology of benefits and costs, which is beyond the scope of this paper.^[2]

In early coal mining films, the material resource is abundantly present. Of course, cinema itself is connected to the industrial revolution, as one of its technological inventions and thus an important element in modern life itself (see also Fay, 2018). Many films from the early twentieth century give expression to the industrial energy that is embodied in coal. Take for instance Dziga Vertov’s documentary Enthusiasm (1930), filmed in the Donbas coal mine region of Ukraine, in celebration of Stalin’s first five year plan. Enthusiasm was Vertov’s first sound film, in which he combined his famous kino-eye with a kino-radio (ear). In his writings, Vertov expanded not only on the possibilities of the camera and the microphone, but also on the prominent role he envisioned for the natural resource associated with modern life and technological progress: ‘Coal comes out of the earth. Coal for factories. Coal for locomotives. Coal for coke furnaces. Coal has arrived. The conveyors and sorting machines have started up. The aerial chains of coal-filled carts have begun to move. The blast furnaces are operating at full speed. Metal has arrived. The rolling and open-hearth, rolled, open-hearth, rolled, open-hearth—in a single creative thrust toward socialism’ (Michaelson, 1995: 114). Vertov’s film embodies the optimism of coal mining, modernity and progress, nothing but benefits. Composed as a symphony, a large part of its images and sounds expresses the idea “Go for Coal!” and human advancement through mining, steel and industry (Bulgakowa, 2006: 225).

In Europe one finds the same enthusiasm about the black gold from the belly of the earth in many State company sponsored mining films. Full Cycle (John Lewis, 1941), for instance, is announced in the British Council Film Department catalogue with the following praise: ‘In exchange for the commodities she needs, Britain exports her surplus coal, the finest in the world. Welsh miners are seen at work in the pits. Coal is hoisted to the surface, weighed, washed and sorted and shot into waiting trucks. Outward bound, coal travels down to the ships.’^[3] And in fiction films of the same time we see the emphasis on coal and its potential for nation building. In The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed, 1940), a miner’s son who has won a scholarship, Davey Fenwick (played by Michael Redgrave) wants to move into union politics. During a union debate he defends the mines against privatization, forcefully pronouncing: ‘There is a more fundamental difference between coalmining and most other industries. It is briefly that coal, like iron and other natural resources […] is merely put there by nature for men to take. These natural resources […] are not merely the basis for a few industries, they are not merely incidental to our nation’s structure. They are the basis of all our industries. They are the life blood of every industry. They are the foundation upon which our nation is built. The material by which our nation is built. The sustenance without which our nation could not continue to flourish’ (Michael Redgrave as Davis Fenwick in The Stars Look Down, 1940).

During Redgrave’s speech in a union theatre, the images are superimposed by the natural resources that he is referring to, as well as the labor of the mine workers extracting them from deep shafts in the middle of the earth (Fig. 2). The speech expresses a materialist view of the nation, depending on its natural resources that are there ‘for men to take.’ The image expresses quite literally a superimposition of coal, the body of the mine workers, and representatives of the Nation, all intrinsically related. Coal is considered a gift from nature to build the nation, without any reservations. The bodies of the laborers are a tool and a medium of extraction, a sort of proud energy conduit for the greater good of the modernization and industrialization of the nation. So, taking a materialist ecological perspective, in these early mining films, the Earth, the laboring body, and the collective body of the state are inseparable. They seem to be presented as ‘natural gifts’ for one another, positive pharmakons for modernity and progress. Obviously, from the beginning this is not so frictionless as it might seem, as social ecologies and socio-political issues are immediately at stake. The pharmakon has a double face.

 

Social ecology:  exploitation and community bonds

Another look at the optimistic material ecology of The Stars Look Down gives a more nuanced perspective. While natural resources are considered national resources, it is also clear that these property relations are entangled with exploitation, both of the earth and of the bodies of the workers, either by state mines or private capitalism. Filmed just before the outbreak of World War II, the threat of foreign invasion is palpable in Redcliff’s speech where he emphasizes his plea for national resources by referring to the menace of foreign flags on the cliffs of Dover. The other peril to the national resources that he addresses is private ownership. The rapid rise of capitalism runs through the film as an important conflict over the pit. The exploitation of the mineworkers and the frequent strikes organized to call attention to the abuse of workers by mining companies is an event that returns in most pre-war mining films and that relates material extraction to social and political exploitation. It demonstrates that the cure for poverty (labor, progress) turns into its poison (exploitation).

One of the most poignant testimonies in this respect is Misery in Borinage (1933), Henri Stork and Joris Ivens’s documentary on the Belgium Borinage mining district. The film shows the deplorable situation of the mineworkers who completely depended on the mining companies that owned the houses and the shops where the miners had to buy their clothes and food. Large families have to sleep in one small room, using the table (turned upside down) as a bed at night; sometimes even without a roof above their head. Produced during the Great Depression, the film opens with footage from the mineworkers strike in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in 1933 and cuts back to the general strike in the Borinage district in 1932, emphasizing the international dimension of this abuse of the labor force. The strikers carry a portrait of Karl Marx to underscore the exploitative nature of private capitalism (Fig. 3). The film itself is a sharp criticism against the silence that surrounds these practices that go from bad to beyond terrible, from sleeping in a turned table and eating bread crumbs to sleeping in the street without any shelter or food.

We find the same disgraceful circumstances for the miners in Germinal (1993), Claude Berri’s epic feature film based on the famous nineteenth century, mineworkers novel by Emile Zola. Germinal is situated in the North of France, where miners worked themselves literally to death. Exploitation and poverty of the workers is set against the rich mine owners. Like Misery in Borinage, Berri’s film testifies to the need of a communist ideology for the emancipation of the mine workers. Marx’s class struggle of one class exploiting the other is embodied in the laborers, hauling out the energy of their bodies, and undermining the rhetoric of nationalism and property relations. As Marx and Engels argue in their famous communist manifesto of 1848: ‘The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character’ (Marx and Engels, 1969: 20). So, if we couple a pharmacological, material ecology of coal and carbon to its socio-political worlds evoked by these coal mining films, we see a politics of exploitation, as well as resistance in the forms of strikes and demonstrations against the underpinnings of capitalism at work in these images.

Besides this elemental exploitation of human and nonhuman resources that have been at the basis of the modern world and capitalist prosperity and property accumulation for some (and misery for many), there is also another, more community based social ecology connected to the mines, another positive side of the pharmakon. Some films emphasize the communal feeling and strong social bond among the miners. Often miners have their own songs and choirs, as retained in The Proud Valley (Penn Tennyson, 1940), filmed in the South Wales Coal Field. In this film, the villagers receive an African-American sailor, David Goliath (Paul Robeson) after he deserts his ship. Goliath joins the miners’ choir and becomes a miner himself, a respected member of the all-white mining community. “Down there we are all black”, says the miner who received him with open arms when Goliath arrives. At the end of the film, during a mining accident, David Goliath rather stereotypically sacrifices himself for the white man. Nevertheless Robeson, famous singer, actor and activist, is an interesting character in relation to socio-political mining ecologies. In historic reality, Robeson often came to Great Britain to sing for Welsh and Scottish miners, until he was blacklisted by McCarthy for communist sympathies. His presence in The Proud Valley, and his powerful performances during miner’s events, underscores the community bond among laborers, connected by socialism. Underscored by the intermingling of historical facts and the film’s fictional world, we see how following the logic of The Communist Manifesto, ‘working men of all countries unite’ (Marx and Engels, 1969: 34) and form a class that transcends national and arguably even racial boundaries.^[4]

John Ford’s Oscar winning mining drama How Green Was My Valley (1941) shows this ‘specter of communism,’ the famous opening of The Communist Manifesto, in another way. The film is set in a fictional Welsh mining village (modeled yet again on the historic Welsh mining village Gilfach Goch). Here the Morgan family consists of the father and several sons, hardworking miners who on the weekly pay day give their earnings to the mother who (together with the only daughter) takes care of the food, clean clothes and the house. When the miners return from their shift they collectively walk home, singing community songs. But this social ecology of traditional family values and solidarity breaks up when capitalism moves in more forcefully and the pharmakon turns into its bad side: the pays get less and less for the older workers, slowly but surely replaced by young boys who are employed for a lower wage that barely makes a living. Use value becomes exchange value and the desire for ever increasing profit margins replaces family values. Discouraged, the younger generation leaves, strikes are organized by the father, and the bright and sunny light atmosphere of the beginning of the film becomes cloudy, dark and threatening. The film ends when a terrible mining accident kills the father, who becomes an allegorical figure of the end of the hey days of coal mining and prosperity.

In spite of the positive social ecology of strong community bonds expressed in pre-war mining films, most emphasize the growing exploitation of the mining companies of their workers, resulting in the returning representations of mine workers’ strikes to express dissatisfaction with working conditions. Most of the time, the strikers end up empty handed, often expressed in another set of images based in the real physical dangers of mining: a deadly accident or the severe illness of the laborer’s body. Black lungs, the life energy of countless miners covered in the black earth often occurring in coalmining films, signifies not only the material, physical hazards and literal poison of our fossil fueled world, but is also an index to the socio-political exploitation of the labor force (Arnold, 2016).

 

Mental ecologies: education and emancipation

The specter of Marx was transmitted by Labor Unions and organized workers. Education and emancipation have therefore been important for the mental ecologies in labor communities, and this, again, is embodied by characters in the films. Typically in a mining movie there is always someone who ‘has the brains’ and gets a chance to educate himself. In The Stars Look Down it is Michael Redgraves’ character Davey who becomes a teacher before he goes into socialist politics, and who invites younger children to learn and think for themselves. In How Green Was My Valley, all hope is on the youngest son of the Morgans who is the first of his family to go to a national school, situated in the next valley. This emphasis on education points to the need of consciousness raising and ultimately the revolution called forth by Marx and Engels to break the capitalist system of inequality. As utopian this may have turned out to be, this emancipatory spirit fills the air of coalmining films and is an important element of coal mining’s energy epistemologies.

As for the women in coalmining communities, they are mostly limited to the roles of housewives. Sometimes we see a young woman longing for another life, far from the social and mental confinements of the miners’ village, as exemplified by Margaret Lockwood as Jenny in The Stars Look Down and Karen Morley as Anna in Black Fury (Michael Curtiz, 1935). Both these female characters want to escape, to no avail. As Angela John demonstrates, this domestic confinement does not correspond completely to historic reality, since women also performed a variety of jobs outside the household, for instance sorting out and transporting coal and other rough outdoor work. In the early days, sometimes women worked in the pit (as ‘pit women’) but gradually they started working only at the foot of the pit mouth (John, 1982: 14-15). In Germinal, for instance, we do see women working in the mines, but this is exceptional in representations of coalmining as well as in historical accounts of mineworking. Occasionally, women are educators who have played an important role in emancipation. In The Corn Is Green (Irvin Rapper, 1945), Bette Davis is a school teacher who moves to a Welsh mining village and takes it upon herself to educate all children, and in particular Morgan Evans (played by John Dall), who in the end manages to get a scholarship into Oxford. Based on an autobiographic novel, the characters in this film demonstrate that women had an important role in the mental and political education of the workers.

In her article on women in coalmining communities in England in the early nineteen hundreds, Valerie Gordon Jones demonstrates that domestic women who took care of husbands and sons, and political women who fought for a socialist cause, were two different identities that women adopted, sometimes combining them (Jones, 2001). Due to various crises and political developments, women embraced the new ideas of socialism represented by the Labour Party, ‘which advocated for public ownership of the coal industry, an elimination of the environmental problems on the working-class communities, and, in addition, gender equality’ (Jones, 2001: 116). They played an important role in the first feminist wave and the success of Labour at the elections in the 1920s and 1930s. Another interesting historical example is Mary Harris Jones, who became a prominent organized labor representative and community organizer in the US.  In the educational documentary, The Coalminers’ Bitter Battle for Dignity (2016), we see how she helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World. Jones worked as a teacher and dressmaker, but after her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867 and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, she began working as an organizer for the United Mine Workers union. She came to be known as Mother Jones.^[5] In 1902 she was called ‘the most dangerous woman in America’ for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. So in terms of mental ecologies, coalmining films demonstrate that education not only aims at raising class consciousness but also has gender implications which played a role in the first wave of feminism.

However, in spite of the possible roles of women beyond the sphere of the home, it is also clear that their political power remained limited as actual political representation did not arrive easily (Jones, 2001: 122-124) and as education and opportunities did not reach everyone in equal measure across class and gender. Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) gives us a very realistic depiction, not only of the social distress of mine workers’ wives but also of women more generally in the 1970s, just at the cusp of the second feminist wave. Wanda is played by Loden herself (she was an actress known for, among others, her role in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass from 1961); she also wrote the semi-autobiographical story of the film. Wanda is a miner’s wife in Pennsylvania, who is not good at anything, not even at changing diapers. Uneducated, ignorant, naive and without a surrounding that could help her, she does not know how to live. When her husband wants to divorce her, she simply agrees, acknowledging that the kids will be better off with him, after which she aimlessly crosses the coal fields and drifts the mining town.

In an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972, Loden describes her title character as a drop-out who knows what she does not want (to be a miner’s wife and mother) but does not know what she does want; she is a character that resigns from life by lack of any opportunity. As Loden explains, she ‘is trying to get out of this very ugly type of existence, but she doesn’t have the equipment.’^[6] The style of Wanda is of a gritty realism; by accident and lack of awareness Wanda gets involved with a criminal, but there is nothing Hollywood Romantic (à la Bonnie and Clyde) about the affair. The image of Wanda engulfed by a black coal landscape referred to at the beginning of this article embodies the entanglement of material, social and mental ecologies that have become literally and figuratively suffocating, and demonstrates the expanded effects of exploitation, when working conditions, housing and education become mentally oppressive and depressive, extended black poison. With its unique focus on the female perspective, compared to the classical coal mining films discussed earlier, Wanda emphasizes the relation between class and gender struggles in the context of left politics of emancipation and liberation, even if in this film it is by its lack thereof.

In the wake of the second wave of feminism and the fight for gay rights in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see that class struggle in mining communities joins forces with other emancipation movements. A mining film that addresses these socio-political ecologies explicitly is Matthew Warchus’s Pride. Made in 2014 and based on historic events, the film evokes the UK in the 1980s when mineworkers were on strike against the closure of pits by the Thatcher government, who wanted to reduce the power of the trade unions and privatize mines. During the year-long strike in 1984-1985, gay and lesbian communities from London started to support the miners by raising money, which, in spite of their differences, eventually led to a mutual recognition of their similarities in a fight for more rights as citizens. The Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners groups across the country were connected to the Communist Party of Great Britain, so the communist spirit remained connected to coal mining, extended beyond the mining spheres.

Against the same background of strikes against the Thatcher regime, Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2001) is another mining film that addresses an extended emancipatory struggle. In this film, the 11-year-old Billy (Jamie Bell) wants another life than the one of his coal mining father (who is on strike in the background of the film). Contrary to the character of Wanda, Billy does know what he wants, namely to dance, even though this does not fit his father’s expectations. But he does have people around him who support him in this choice. Here we have another female educator, Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters), who helps Billy to find his path towards a different way of life.

In the historical reality of Thatcher’s government, the image of the mineworker had very consciously been transformed from positive pharmakons – workers who risked their lives for the nation (as we saw in The Stars Look Down and other pre-war coal mining films) – into negative pharmakons – workers that were themselves a risk to the nation, especially in their socialist ideologies, community bonds, strikes and fights for their rights and dignity, as well as their emancipatory bonds with other minoritarian groups in society. What we find in all these representations of coalmining that address the conservative and neo-liberal turn of Western capitalism is that the natural energy sources are deeply entangled with the social conditions and political ideologies connected to them, as well as the mental ecologies and mind settings of those involved most closely, the mineworkers’ families and their communities. What is also evident is that political struggle for recognition has regularly crossed over into other emancipatory struggles such as that of women and gay communities. From a pharmacological perspective, what is considered a cure for minorities (education, rights, dignity, respect) is considered a poison from a neo-liberal perspective (too strong Unions and bonds, too costly to make more profit).

 

Beast in the belly of the Anthropocene

In Europe and the US, many mines closed when other fossil fuels (oil, gas) were discovered mid-twentieth century and many modern mines replaced physical labor with machine labor. However, this does not mean that on a global scale mines closed down or that mine workers across the world are no longer exploited. If we move from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, coal mining is now related to global hypercapitalism, and has to be considered in connection to discussions about the Anthropocene. The bodies of the mine workers and large open pit mines are now more evidently connected to the effects on the environment of mining and to the insatiable desire of capitalism to keep on growing. Based in the same structures of capitalist power and exploitation addressed in earlier mining films, there is a shift towards a critique of global capitalism.

Zhao Liang’s (literally) breathtaking documentary Behemoth (2015) offers an exemplary case in point. The filmmaker takes us to vast open cast coalmining areas in Inner Mongolia, where Chinese migrant workers are brought in to ‘feed the Behemoth,’ the insatiable biblical land monster that manifests here as the constant demand for cheap manpower to realize the unending demand of excavation of the black energy source. The images and sounds of dust, rumble and devastated landscapes that are constantly wounded by explosions to create more extractables are overwhelming: mineworkers descending the pitch-black belly of the earth to frightening depths, shepherds with their sheep are looking for ever decreasing pieces of green land for their herd, the infernal and palpable heat of the smelting iron fed by coal, the faces of the migrant workers inked black by coal dust or dripping with sweat, and exhausted suffocating bodies, ill from pneumoconiosis; they are telling without words. The only guide through this purgatory is a migrant worker who crosses the scarred landscape carrying a mirror on his back, and more surreal and poetic images of a naked worker’s body, the dreamer, coiled in fetal position at the pits ends or other devastated environments fragmented by mirrors (Fig. 5). Compared to Wanda’s engulfed body that is still moving, trying to find a way out (Fig. 1), we now see a body that seems to have surrendered to the earth, as if its dissipating energies are returning to the earth. As such the film can be considered as ‘Anthropocenema’, which explicitly refers to an aesthetics of extinction and ‘the attempted intensification and creative destruction of the conditions of global neoliberal capitalism by stretching it to (and ideally beyond) its limits’ (Kara, 2016: 2).

During these more dreamlike moments, we hear the voice of the dreamer/guide who comments on the desires and nature of the Behemoth, looking at the excavators and other machines as ‘the monster’s play thing.’ After the journey through purgatory and inferno we seem to arrive in paradise, when the dreamer speaks: ‘Through the dusty haze / The raging flames, the graves / And through the scattered homeland / All the sacrifices transmuted into steel / are carried off to build the paradise of our desires.’

At the end of the film we have arrived in a newly built ghost city in China, without inhabitants except for a few migrant workers who sweep the empty roads, chasing tumbleweed. The dreamer stands lost before this idle paradise, one of the hundreds of vacant real estate cities that are built with the carbon energy of the natural resources of the earth and the bodies of the workers (Fig. 6) These cities have no longer any use value at all, they have become the symbol of pure exchange value on the capital market. ‘This is no dream,’ the dreamer concludes. ‘This is who we are. We are the monster.’

If we journey across the cinematographic landscape from the optimism of the Industrial Revolution still palpable in the early twentieth century to our contemporary day and age of the Anthropocene, we see that the triple folded ecologies show remarkable parallels but also interesting transformations. The condition of the workers, from Borinage to Behemoth remains deplorable and inhumane, as it is kept in place by the necessity to work for some, and the ferocious desires for capital for others. But these desires are framed differently. In earlier mining films, ‘the stars that look down’ seem to say that nature’s natural resources are there to be taken by men, and that the earth seems to be a free gift to capital (Foster, 2002: 6). During the conservative and neo-liberal turn in politics in the West, mines were closed and privatized, and mineworkers more explicitly formed bonds with other minorities, especially in relation to gender equality.  In Behemoth (and other global mining films), we are confronted with the ‘belly of the beast’ that shows the price of the natural goods in the destruction of landscapes and bodies; from emancipation of the workers, women and other minorities, connected to the social movements around mineworkers’ communities, we are left with migrant workers whose only fight remains a fight for oxygen and a lonely green domestic plant; and from a modern consciousness imbued with enthusiasm, pride and progress into a better modern world, we have entered the inhospitable and unlivable reality of the Anthropocene which demands a fundamental change of consciousness in our ecological thinking.

 

Carbon pharmacologies: the metabolic rift of capital

The transformation of the nature of the crisis that we can draw from this short journey along coalmining films could be connected to the two major contradictions in capitalism described in Marxism, which are both framed in economic terms: one emanates from the class struggle and the inequalities in the distribution of wealth in capitalism; the second emanates from the exhaustion and undermining of the conditions of production and natural resources needed for capitalist growth (Foster, 2002: 7). However, as John Bellamy Foster has argued, to develop a Marxist analysis of ecology in purely economic terms would be short sighted. In his book, Marx’s Ecology, he demonstrates that Marx’s materialism has always recognized the contradictions of capitalism as a double problem of energy in which simultaneously ‘capitalism sapped the vitality of the everlasting sources of wealth – the soil and the worker’ (Marx in Foster, 2000: 156; Foster, 2002: 2).

Foster’s work is a careful reconstruction of Marx’s ecological thought that is more relevant than ever before. In line with Guattari’s ecosophical project, it is a nonreductive approach to sustainability where there is no split between nature, social relations and consciousness, all conceived as coevolutionary. As Foster argues, ‘it was in Capital that Marx’s materialist conception of nature became fully integrated with his materialist conception of history’ (Foster, 2000: 141). Marx used the concept of ‘metabolism’ (Stoffwechsel, which literally means the exchange and transmutation of particles) to describe ‘the processes between man and nature, by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.’  Yet, Foster continues by referring to Marx, ‘an “irreparable rift” had emerged in this metabolism as a result of capitalist relations of production and the antagonistic separation of town and country’ (ibid.). Based on the example of the exhaustion of the soil because of exportation of food to the city, and the temporary reparation of nutrients by natural (such as imported bones) and synthetic fertilizers that cause yet new and other metabolic rifts, Marx extends this notion to get at an integral understanding of the underlying contradictions.

In their article on carbon metabolism, Bett Clack and Richard York propose to extend this discussion of the metabolic rift between nature and humans ‘to the biosphere in general and to the carbon cycle in particular’ (Clack and York, 2005). They demonstrate how the metabolic interaction between humans and the earth, and the rift in this interaction, influences the biosphere and the carbon cycle of CO2 emissions and uptake. Here we return to the question of energy, the captured energy of the sun that is stored in various cycles: ‘The carbon cycle involves the whole biosphere, as carbon moves through the air, rocks, soil water, and all living things in a cyclical process’ (Clack and York, 2005: 402). All life depends on the cycle of absorbed and transformed carbon dioxide. And it is the disruption of this carbon cycle by adding CO2 to the atmosphere at an ever-accelerating rate that is the most pressing problem of global capitalism today: ‘Capitalism, organizing the social relations of commodity production, effectively plunders the historical stock of concentrated energy that has been removed from the biosphere only to transform and transfer this stored energy (coal, oil, and natural gas) from the recesses of the earth to the atmosphere in the form of CO2’ (Clack and York, 2005: 409). They add that the problem is also one of a rift in human and nonhuman temporal scales as the energy that is contained in coal cannot be regained on time-scales that are meaningful to humans since this would take millions of years. The ‘solar-energy budget’ is broken (418).

So, also on a planetary scale, one could say that coal mining creates rifts in social structures, and by breaking carbon metabolisms, rifts in life on earth itself. As the consequences of the Anthropocene become more noticeable in undeniable climate change and pandemics, one can conclude that the ‘pharmakon’ of coal as medicine for progress has slowly but surely turned into a poison that should better remain in the belly of the Earth to sustain its livability.

 

Canary in a coalmine

So, in conclusion, let me return to the question of energy humanities: what could an ethic-aesthetic humanities approach have to offer in this planetary crisis? Humanities scholars from different backgrounds have given important contributions to rethinking the relation between the human and nonhuman in less anthropocentric ways, by proposing new kinship structures across species where humans are not on top of the chain but heavily dependent on nonhuman forces; by returning to the Gaia theory and myth to rethink Nature; or by focusing on the complex intersection of planetary autonomous processes and human imbrications (Haraway, 2016;  Stengers, 2014; Latour, 2017; Connoly, 2017; Yusoff, 2018). All these scholars (and many more) offer new concepts for understanding and rethinking humanity in connection to the micro and macro scales of the world that we are entangled with and depend on. But what about the specific contribution of cinema and film theory?

As I hope to have demonstrated in this short and incomplete return to historical fiction and non-fiction films, we can get a sense of the transformation and of the problem of fossil energy by looking at the different worldings that these films present. As Adrian Ivakhiv has argued in Ecologies of the Moving-Image, cinema is a world-making tool that moves and affects us. By refracting reality, cinematic worlds are informed by reality and, in turn, they inform (our perception of) reality. Across the material, social and mental dimensions they embody, these are stories of modernity, growth and emancipation as well as of exploitation and exhaustion. Ultimately, coalmining films in the current context of the Anthropocene can show and tell us something of these changing and intersecting processes in relation to one of the most important elements of life on earth: carbon. Moreover, there is also another, more direct connection between cinema and the Anthropocene, which has been convincingly argued by Jennifer Fay in her book, Inhospitable World (2018). If the Anthropocene has brought us to an inhospitable world, cinema, in its world-building capacity, has the power to intervene and create worlds that are anthropogenically created, familiar and yet not quite. Referring to, among others, the artificial weather in Buster Keaton’s world, and to nuclear aesthetics in the 1950s in American’s atomic test city (Nevada’s Atomic Testing Site), training films and science fiction cinema, Fay posits that cinema is like the Anthropocene in its uncanny aesthetic effects, but also can be seen as the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene: ‘The Anthropocene confronts us with the fact that we need to learn how to live and die in an unpredictable and increasingly inhospitable world. Cinema has something to teach us about how and why we got there and how we envision our unthinkable future as such’ (11-12).

The experiences of the Anthropocene operate on such infinitely small (carbon emissions) or unimaginably large (climate change) scales that its totality is hard to comprehend on a human level of comprehension, inaccessible to the human sensorium without media technologies. By transforming the effects of the Anthropocene into an aesthetic experience, cinema turns it into something we can think and talk about, which allows a change in perception and, perhaps even ethical consciousness. As an ethico-aesthetic experience, art in general, and coalmining films in particular in respect to the carbon metabolism and its changing entwined ecologies discussed in this paper, might function as the proverbial canary in a coalmine, showing us the world in a refracted mirror, telling us something about how to live and die in a world gone strange, warning us when the carbon levels become too high to continue breathing and sustaining the energy levels, human and nonhuman that we need.

 

References

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Arnold, J. (2016) ‘The Death of Sympathy. Coal Mining, Workplace Hazards, and the politics of Risk in Britain, ca. 1970-1990,’ Historical Social Research 41(1): 91-110.

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Clack, B. and R. York (2005) ‘Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,’ Theory and Society (34)4: 391-428.

Connolly, W. E. (2017) Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Fay, J. (2017) Inhospitable World. Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. New York: Oxford University Press.

Foster, J. B. (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Foster, J. B. (2002) ‘Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction,’ Monthly Review Magazine 54(4): 1-12.

Guattari, F. (2014) The Three Ecologies (trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton). New York and London: Bloomsbury.

Hall, V. G. (2001) ‘Contrasting Female Identities: Women in Coal Mining Communities in Northumberland England, 1900-1939,’ Journal of Women’s History 13(2): 107-131.

Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Kara, S. (2016) ‘Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions.’ In: Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, eds., Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21^st Century Cinema. Falmer: Reframe Books, pp. 1-32.

Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (trans. C. Porter). Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press.

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Ivakhiv, A. (2013) Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

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Yusoff, K. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

Notes

[1] See https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/6/carbon and http://www.periodicvideos.com/‌videos/‌006.htm

[2] See how researchers at IBM have created a nano-film playing with a carbon atom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 and https://www.bbc.com/future/article/‌2013‌1219‌‌-the-micro-movie-transforming-data. Once carbon and quantum computers have arrived, this will create profound new ecologies, subjectivities and politics.

[3] See https://film.britishcouncil.org/resources/film-archive/full-cycle

[4] From a contemporary critical and postcolonial perspective on the Anthropocene, as proposed by Kathryn Yusoff in her book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, one can see that the bodies of the enslaved workers on the sugar plantations also indirectly ‘fueled the English working classes of the Industrial Revolution in the extraction of coal’ (Yusoff, 2018: 15).

[5] See also https://www.motherjones.com/about/history/

[6] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBuOTWoRpw

 

Patricia Pisters is professor of film at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012) and co-editor (with Ruggero Eugeni) of a special issue on Artificial Intelligence and Media for NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Her most recent book is New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror (2020).  See also  www.patriciapisters.com

Email: p.pisters@uva.nl