Juha Suonpää’s documentary “Lynx Man”: From Filmmaker to Active Witness

Abstract This article focuses on the question of filmmakers’ intentions and what transcends them in the context of ecocritical filmmaking. While making his second feature-length documentary, Lynx Man , director Juha Suonpää installed more than thirty trail cameras in the forest near his main characters home. By installing the “camera with no authorship” (Farocki, 2001), was he indeed allowing this camera to capture “operational images that do not depict or represent, entertain or inform but rather track, navigate, activate, oversee, control, visualise, detect and identify?” (Parikka, 2023). When Suonpää left the cameras alone to the forest, they became witnesses to the forest life. Using Barad’s intra-action, Morton’s mesh, and Ivakhiv’s process view, I treat Lynx Man as a sequence of events that happen between bodies, places, and devices. I try to understand nature filmmaking as a cluster of intentions that creates wider possibilities for accessing the reality of nature. A selection of the cinematographic choices used in Lynx Man will broaden and challenge the concept of authorship, arriving at the notion of chance as a narrative tool.