Cinema Wears the Mask: The Metaphysics of Animism in Une histoire de vent.

Three minutes into Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan's Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988), at the center of an extreme long shot of the Gobi Desert, Ivens (who appears as a character in the film) sits alone, leaving offscreen his film crew and filmmaking apparatuses, including the wires, antennae, and recording devices that have been revealed in previous shots. This is especially evident if we consider the Araweté's society of "intersubjective animism", which Haraway and Sahlins both see as a support for their theorization of animism.[22] Their distinct understandings of the same set of ethnographic records reveal not simply different dimensions of animism but, more fundamentally, different epistemological positions with regard to animism's relevance to our current historical moment. Although my primary object of study is Une histoire de vent, thinking about this film together with animism opens up new ways that film and film studies might contribute to the recent turn to animism in contemporary ecocriticism. [Extracted from the article]