LANDSCAPE MEMORIES

What is it about?

Chantal Akerman’s documentary Sud (South, 1999) investigates the brutal racist murder of James Byrd Jr. that took place in Jasper, Texas in 1998. Sud is a socio-political documentary, but it is also, as the director explains, an experimental film about the relation between physical and mental landscapes, between social and affective ecologies. This article places Akerman’s film in the context of contemporary debates about non-anthropocentric ontologies. Whereas some critics have been keen to assert a strong distinction between socio-political analysis on the one hand and affective and ecological analysis on the other, Sud demonstrates not only how these approaches can combine, but also how the ecological and the affective can extend a political critique of inequality. To explain how this is achieved, the article draws on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, and introduces the notion of the “spectator-environment”.

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