Abstract
Environmental issues in mainstream documentary film have been aestheticized and personified through specific filmmaking methods such as talking-head interviews, single-character narrative arcs, and three-part dramatic structures. These anthropocentric approaches can make it difficult to pay attention to slower temporalities and more-than-human lifeworlds that are at the crux of understanding slower-moving environmental disasters. The groundwork for the ecological collapse of an ecosystem is often only partially discernible within a human time frame, encompassing connections across species, seasons, elements, genres, and time and space too temporally and spatially vast, too micro- or macroscopic to be captured as visible evidence, and therefore more experimental film practices are needed to register these scalar frequencies. Multispecies cinema is a new mode of filmmaking that centers the more-than-human through several experimental methodological expansions, with the goal of decentering the human while narrativizing ecosystems in trouble.
