Book Review: Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema. Seth Peabody. Boydell & Brewer, 2023. ISBN 9781640141612

German cinema had its premiere in a greenhouse.
—Paul Dobryden

In 2024, a subcommittee of the International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the proposal to recognize the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch. In their decision they stated that, while the term would not be formally adopted, the Anthropocene is a concept “well established in the public domain” that will remain “an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions” (UGS and ICS 2024). Indeed, many scholars across various fields embrace the Anthropocene as a framework through which to view ecological entanglements. As Ben Dibley (2012) writes, more than anything, the Anthropocene is a discourse, an assemblage of ecology and culture. It speaks to the exigence of the present moment and recognizes how orientations to the environment are constituted through cultural practices and pose cultural implications.

This is the ecocritical framework Dr. Seth Peabody explores in his latest publication on German cinema. In Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema (Boydell & Brewer, 2023), Peabody revisits various twentieth-century German films with an ecological eye. Through an exploration of material and cultural history, he establishes the “filmic phenomenon” of the Anthropocene (1). Peabody recognizes the limitations of the concept, “justifiably criticized for the universalizing approach to the global environment implied by the term’s suggestion of a monolithic ‘Anthropos’”—one reason why some have offered alternative terms like capitalocene, plantationocene, plasticene, chthulucene, and beyond (174). At the same time, the framework offers “a different way of understanding humans’ view of their creative entanglement with the environment,” one that demands a recognition of and reorientation to environmental impact (4). By revisiting early German cinema through this lens, Peabody extends the enmeshed nature of the phenomenon to the past, demonstrating how ecological entanglement is not restricted to contemporary times.

Film History for the Anthropocene works at the intersection of German film history and environmental studies. Rather than focusing on a specific genre or time period, Peabody engages with a broad range of works: He looks to films that are both narrative and industrial, spanning pre- and postwar eras, encompassing silent and sound cinema. With each, he offers a combination of textual analysis, production history, and reception study. He delves into multiple histories, from Berlin urban planning to German labor relations, drawing on both political economy and media archaeology. This multifaceted approach captures the social ecology of each film—or its “filmic environments”—in order to examine the relationship between materiality and discourse, including the ways film archives environmental discourses of its moment (5).

It is this archive of filmic environments that serves as the object of study. Peabody is interested in the “unexamined environmental aspects of German film,” which offers “creative, critical, and cautionary possibilities of film as an environmental medium” (2). He contends that German film has contained environmental entanglements from the beginning, yet those have not been properly reflected in German film studies. Peabody’s intervention brings together “an environmental, ecological, material-discursive history of German cinema” (22).

The films analyzed represent the broad spectrum of German film history, including the genre of Heimatfilm, which explores the German concept of homeland; Bergfilm, or mountain film; city symphonies; Weimar-era science fiction; German expressionism; and postwar Trümmerfilme, or “rubble” films. The book concludes by bringing the reader into the present through an exploration of more recent films. By engaging with the various genres that make up Germany’s unique film history, Peabody locates environmental discourses within cultural contexts, which he hopes “might prove valuable not only for the study of German cinema, but also for the study of the environment” (159). Indeed, beyond an environmental history of German film, Peabody provides a film history of the German environment. Such an approach demonstrates how “natural or physical environments and cultural representations mutually form and impact each other” (10). The chosen films reveal environmental discourses at any one moment, which collectively constitute the Anthropocene.

Peabody invites us to consider how the Anthropocene and the medium of film are each defined by a desire to control an unpredictable environment—the filmmaker controls the medium, yet the medium exerts agency “fully independent of the filmmaker” through its materiality (8). This tension helps reveal film as the “aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene,” offering “an archive of deliberately constructed worlds” (6, 8). This archive is constituted through texts that yield insights into the environment, both its ecological processes and its cultural discourses. At its moment of creation, a film “contributes to ecological change and records current moments in material environments and environmental discourses”; later, it invites future viewers back into past environments and discourses (159). In this way, film serves as a “visual archive of material landscapes” and a “creative catalyst” for “environmental transformations” (174). In terms of film studies broadly, Peabody cites Jennifer Fay’s notion that the field can uniquely utilize the Anthropocene framework because both are “centered around the human production of a world,” one reliant on aesthetics and artificiality (6). Films manifest through materiality and human creativity, elevating film’s status as an “archive of the Anthropocene” and providing pedagogical promise for engaging such concepts (98).

The book is organized around “prefilmic materiality and their filmic curation,” in which film curates pre-established discourses and infrastructures (73). The first part focuses on cultural systems that inform discourses, including the interplay between rural and industrial, humans and animals, labor and industry, and environment and politics (9). The second half focuses on the materiality of infrastructures—from sewers in cities to ski lifts in the Alps—as well as the infrastructure of filmmaking itself. As Peabody makes clear, “films render infrastructures visible,” while simultaneously relying on infrastructures off-screen (97).

Peabody provides extensive theoretical analysis, particularly through the social-ecological interaction model, which examines society within the overlapping zone between nature and culture. This model is adopted from Verena Winiwarter and the Vienna School, who consider the ways cultural representations “lead to new practices and structures of feeling, which in turn impact the work that human societies carry out on the natural world” (10). They are especially interested in visualizing the environmental impact of cultural products. For Peabody, film is an “accelerator” of this material process, enabling representations to “move faster and show more than would be possible with words or still images,” resulting in a rapid pace of change (11). These films inform cultural processes by allowing the audience to “reflect on, reimagine, critique, or celebrate changes in the non-filmic world through deliberately designed filmic landscapes” (12).

The section in which Peabody achieves his aims most clearly is his analysis of Metropolis. He brings a fresh approach to a film that has been well studied, successfully defining Fritz Lang’s 1927 film as an “archive of environmental discourses” (10). Through both its narrative and as a representation of its moment, the film captures the reliance on infrastructures—not only physical infrastructure like water systems but also knowledge infrastructures, including the self-reflecting filmic environment. Peabody effectively argues that Metropolis enabled the creation of an environment of ecological thought by archiving four discourses happening at the time of the film’s release: the debate about skyscrapers; anxiety of underground infrastructures; interactions between environment and social tensions; and the politics of pollution. Metropolis exemplifies how film has the ability to affectively document the material world for future consideration—“the filmic medium exhibits the mutual influence of knowledge infrastructures, media technologies, and social systems” (97). As a result, “the filmic environment of Metropolis is precisely of its time” (114). Today, Peabody could put the film in conversation with our own time by connecting AI—an aspiring invisible infrastructure with its own environmental implications—to Metropolis’s humanoid robot and its deployment by the wealthy to subjugate and pacify the worker.

The exploration of Bergfilm is also fascinating, specifically those films directed by Arnold Fanck, Der heilige Berg (1926) and Der große Sprung (1927). Peabody contends that films focused on Alpine skiing helped to popularize the sport, contributing to tourism through its representation on-screen. By depicting skiers zooming down vast mountains and accessing remote landscapes, the films viscerally captured both speed (time) and the closing of distance (space), concepts that the medium of film is uniquely suited to bend in order to affect the viewer. This led to a mutual reinforcement of the media and tourism industries—filmic depictions increased skiing’s popularity, which necessitated the introduction of infrastructure like ski lifts, providing yet another on-screen aesthetic to depict. It is a clear example of infrastructure helping to create film, which in turn led to more infrastructure, demonstrating how film “simultaneously documents material environments and creatively manipulates them” (118). Peabody goes on to show how this was later utilized in advertisements for skiing regions. As this episode makes clear, “the interplay between media and landscape accelerated with the advent of film” (122). Through the introduction of infrastructures, these films “envision environmental transformations,” demonstrating the “catalyzing power of film within the socio-ecological interactions between cultural representations and physical landscapes” (137–38). Film serves as both record and catalyst, “an ecological archive for a changing landscape” (138).

Film History for the Anthropocene demonstrates how film—and the environment— is uniquely interdisciplinary, offering insights into art, politics, economics, history, and technology. Peabody’s ambitious approach can be applied to other cultural texts, national identities, time periods, and pedagogical practices. Students and scholars in the environmental humanities would benefit from this book, as well as film and interdisciplinary studies practitioners. It serves as a reminder of the ways film can be used to teach not only film history and cultural studies but also other disciplines such as infrastructure, city planning, tourism, cultural heritage, and ecology. It inspires questions and connections that aren’t always evident, including the way film informs and reflects discourses of a given historical moment. In this way, it provides a historiographical approach that utilizes ecocriticism, offering understandings of the interplay between materiality, environment, and the medium of film.

Peabody’s work resonated with me in particular as I continue my own research in cultural studies and film heritage through an ecocritical lens. For example, the growing genre of ecocinema offers its own kind of archive defined by ecological exigence. While this genre is one in which environmental narratives are explicitly linked, Peabody proves how you can locate them more widely. As a result, the ecocritical mode that is often relied upon can be further extended toward a consideration of infrastructures, both material and epistemic—in other words, an archival approach. This method also offers promising possibilities for exploring the pedagogical practices surrounding film studies itself, including the infrastructures that make it possible to access the film heritage Peabody discusses.

The framework of the Anthropocene offers a way to engage with various texts across time, which collectively form an archive. Specific to a certain time and a certain attitude, they offer insights into the way people orient themselves to the environment, revealing film’s discursive role as an environmental medium. Given the scope of the climate crisis in temporality and degrees of impact, people will have different experiences over time and space. In this way, climate change is a kind of hyperobject, defined by Timothy Morton (2015) as a phenomenon distributed across space and time that we only experience in part. Because of this, we need narrative forms to intervene, as they engender a way to “collectively make sense of and respond to a changing environment” (Lovbrand et al. 2015). Texts begin as cultural products that become historical artifacts, and when analyzed through this lens, they extend our understanding of the crisis from the past to the future. Collectively, they create an archive of the Anthropocene and the nature-culture dynamic. As Peabody makes clear, however, it goes beyond any one genre, discipline, or historical moment—“cinema is not only the recordkeeper but also a contributing member” (14). Indeed, as the Anthropocene suggests, the environment is embedded in everything.