ERIKA BALSOM, SHORELINE MOVEMENTS
… how might certain forms of nonfiction cinema - an inherently relational form of image-making - provide a means of doing so?
“Dead spaces of non-connection, which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet, the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common conditions.”
… an in-between realm of intermittent transformation, containing a high diversity of species that have found ways to survive together within the challenging flux of the ecosystem… among the places where our vulnerability to climate emergency is made the most manifest.
The shoreline - a figure of proximity, division, and never-ending motion - becomes a means of thinking through the difficulties of surviving together in an age when it seems as if… “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet” - when in fact we do and we must.
The shoreline is where irreconcilable worlds confront one another in negotiations without end.
… they confront the difficulty and the desirability of building a shared world when deep division and power asymmetries everywhere prevail…
The “Shoreline Movement” is the conviction that the moving image possesses the capacity to gather people, in real and imagined ways, around an object of shared concern; reality itself.
Moving images… by presenting visions of a world that exists beyond any one individual, but of which we are all a part.
“Showing how I can see you, how you can see me and how we are both being perceived. ”
Concerns with what it means to make an image of the other.
… shows human and nonhuman life to be mutually interdependent, both vulnerable to harm and resilient in its aftermath.
A third register, the confrontation between audience and world that occurs through the mediating interface of a film.
The mediating things that relate and separate those who shared a world, creating time to convene over an object of common concern.
Film is defined by the work of living beings - a work that is fundamentally ethical and involves constant self-reflection on how cinema, the filmmaker, and viewers define and position themselves in the environment and how they relate to other living beings.
Performative utterances with the capacity to change the reality they describe, as audiences come to understand themselves in relation to a commons and thereby potentially inhabit the world in altered ways. It is in this sense that the encounter between world and viewer that takes place through the medium of the moving image is a true encounter, an exchange, a negotiation - and not simply a monodirectional address.
In making shareable descriptions of reality, these diplomatic encounters can reconnect their viewers to a sense of a world held in common, to a feeling of membership in an expansive political community.