Ruth Maclennan

In the face of climate change, what can art do?  The question is both practical and ethical: a question of art's efficacy, its ways of working, and its uses to audiences. These intertwined questions are articulated in writing and film-making, both of which draw on an empirical method, alongside research into ethics, ecology, film history, the politics of climate change, and critiques of capitalism.  

I seek to represent the consequences of climate change as they are experienced by the inhabitants of the North of Scotland and Arctic Russia. Through writing and film I document and interpret changing relationships with the sea and the land, thus bringing to light the interplay of climate change with history and memory, and with the social, economic, environmental and political forces that are shaping places and lives.       

One of the research methods of this PhD is a form of fieldwork, consisting of recorded interviews and informal encounters, filming and note taking, which form the source material for a multi-vocal approach to writing and filmmaking.  

The written thesis consists of narrations of journeys, both actual and theoretical. I tell stories of journeys to the White Sea in northeastern Russia, and to the north Highlands and islands of Scotland, where the political, economic and environmental upheavals are emblematic of a geopolitical shift north. I examine how ideas of North and of the sea, of nature and landscape, contained in films, oral histories, myths and writings, contribute to contemporary perceptions.  These ideas are analysed further through Alexander Dovzhenko’s film Aerograd, and Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World. 

The section, Journeys into Theory, takes up questions raised by the other two sections, and proposes a speculative investigation of ethics, politics and ecology and what they mean for contemporary moving image art practice, through readings of Hannah Arendt, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour, and others.

The two bodies of film works are shot in Northern Russia, and during an expedition to the Northern Isles with Cape Farewell. Concomitantly with the first person written narrative, they investigate the camera as a participant-observer, and the implied presence of a future audience. The familiar trope of anthropology whereby the observer influences what is observed is explored here within the context of film. If the camera produces an observer and an observed, what new potentialities are there for addressing an audience? 

Both the written and film works document disappearance: of individuals and their memories, of species, of ecosystems, of ways of life, of imagined worlds, and of entire societies as well as the vertiginous fear of the future annihilation of human civilisation. This documentation of disappearance is examined and articulated as a distinct response to an ethical and ecological imperative.  Meanwhile, the works propose to speak to a future audience––to speak not to the world as it is but as it could become.