Learning from land cinema: political pedagogy, plots and plantations

This article explores community film-making in Negros, a sugar plantation island in the Philippines, as a material and discursive intervention in pedagogical practices of eco-cinema and environmental media studies. It focuses on the contemporary Filipinx and Taiwanese American artists Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, whose film-making uses phytography, a process that harnesses chemicals within plants as a photographic developer. The article considers the phytogram as an index of contested land, and the co-production of film as a pedagogy of resistance against the plantation’s political and ecological hold. Drawing on the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and histories of plantation resistance developed by Sylvia Wynter, the artists practise phytography and gardening as forms of pedagogy and protest. Local grandmothers, expert in botanical medicine, source plants for phytochemical adhesions. Working with them, the artists facilitate teach-ins, workshops and discursive screenings to resist state and hacienda violence, and techno-scientific practices of monoculture. This approach, I argue, recalls Third Cinema’s anti-colonial politics and extends them in ecological directions emblematic of a genre I am calling ‘land cinema’. Rejecting the tabula rasa blankness of new film stock and associations with terra nullius forms of colonial thinking, phytography resembles composting, the ground of the image reimagined as an earthy site of multispecies connection. Phytography also intervenes in cinema’s imbrication with extractive materials and processes, speaking to a recent environmental turn in film and photography studies. Made collectively on the edges of Negros’s sugar plantations, Camacho and Lien’s phytograms cultivate material pedagogies for climate justice.