Presenter: Soyoung Kim (Korea National University of Arts)

In the Planetary Age, Whose Well-Being Does Cinema Ask After?

In an age of climate crisis, we can no longer speak of “climate” merely in terms of rain and wind, temperature and humidity. Climate is the condition of the world we inhabit, a way of asking after the well-being of living beings. It is from this perspective that Moment of the Planet, Sensibility of Cinema raises the question of the “climate of cinema.” What kind of world does cinema see today? How does cinema capture planetary transformations that remain beyond the reach of human perception? And how does cinema reach out to the Earth, life, nonhuman beings, technology, and history to ask how they are faring? The planetary age described in this book is not simply an era in which we view the entire planet Earth from above as a single object. Rather, it is an age in which the world can no longer be understood through anthropocentric histories and modes of perception alone. The borders of capital, the boundaries of nation-states, and the temporal scales of human existence are insufficient to grasp the magnitude of the climate crisis and ecological disasters. What we need is a planetary sensibility and imagination capable of perceiving invisible networks of connection. The author, both a film theorist and filmmaker, proposes cinema and cinemedia as sites for cultivating this imagination. Islands, oceans, the deep sea, animals, plants, and digital devices become entangled within cinema, creating new maps of perception. Cinema, in this sense, is a sensory and political apparatus that reveals how humans and nonhumans, nature and technology, memory and matter collectively constitute the world.