Theoretical Focus: Inspired by Bristow’s mythos and Buell’s idea of “re-plotting” nature from the personal to planetary, we explore poetic cinema as a way to re-narrate memory, myth, and environmental collapse. Through the lens of the Anthropocene as peripeteia—a reversal or rupture in narrative continuity—we consider how cinema enables the poetic reframing of personal and planetary records.  Myth, memory, and environmental urgency intertwine in cinematic time.

Practices:

• Storyboarding a memory-myth hybrid video
• Analyzing eco-poetic film practices and their emotional economies
• Editing tutorials using free tools and accessible video-editing platforms (CapCut, iMovie, DaVinci Resolve)

Exercise:
Film a 1–2 minute video poem that remixes personal audio, archival family/familial footage, and environmental imagery to tell a “memory in reversal.” Can be a continuation of work from previous weeks.

 

‘M’ythos – plot

It is hard to know exactly how we live and die together, and it is difficult to be clear about the

degrees to which we impact upon other species with which we share our planet. And it is in

this space that the purpose of much environmentalism, like Athenian tragedy, is the arousal of

pity and fear. If our museums structured the incidents or actions of their visitors (i.e. ‘plots’) to bridge the gap between the intellectual realm of historicised scientific information and “the

innate, the biological, the instinctual and the affective,” then we might see whether pity or fear

remains relevant to environmental literacy in our century.

– Tom Bristow, Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities.

 

“Individual memories are not information that we simply store in our minds and that we can recall without any distortion every time we want. As psychologists have proved, our memories are constructed: ‘memory is not a literal reproduction of the past, but rather is a constructive process in which bits and pieces of information from various sources are pulled together’ When we receive stimuli from the outside we first select information. We cannot transform all

the images, sounds and smells which we are exposed to into memories, so we do not process every experience but only those to which we pay attention. In addition, we make associations: we make connections between the information we receive from the outside with information we already know in order to understand the events we witness.

 

In other words, the perceived information is regimented into our system of knowledge. Selection, ordering and combination of information are essential for the memory process:

they help us to make sense of what we experience and to remember efficiently. However, the same mechanisms also introduce errors. In fact, we could add information to what we experience and later remember it as if it had been part of the actual event. We not only construct our memories when we encode (i.e. process) experiences – we also re-construct them when we try to recall the past. The reconstruction of memories is based on actual memory traces. However, our current belief of what happened influences this reconstruction process. If our memory of an event is not complete, we tend to fill in the gaps with our beliefs and assumptions. We interpret memories from the past in the light of our present situation.

 

Moreover, we use memories to elaborate conjectures about the future. Since the future is never a repetition of the past, we adapt our memories to simulate future occurrences and anticipate what may happen. Consequently, remembering does not only concern the past but also the present and the future.

 

-Tiziana Caianiello, (RE)Constructing Memories: Some thoughts about conservation.

 

Buell, on re-plotting WASTE as METAPHOR:

 

 The metaphorization of waste is an instructive collateral example.

For Wallace Stevens, a dump was a purely symbolic place, merely a repository of used-up images. A generation later, Thomas Pynchon made W.A.S.T.E. a symbol of another sort: of the subversiveness of the Tristero.  DeLillo, in his massive fictional memoir of the Cold War era,

Underworld, treats waste more materially as literal garbage and as multinational industry, but oscillating between this literalism and waste as image of modern civilization as detritus.  Even for a creative writer of avowedly environmentalist persuasion, the impulse still runs strong to

recycle waste as metaphor, as in A. R. Ammons’s National Book Award-winning poem Garbage. “Garbage has to be the poem of our time,” the speaker insists: but why? Because “garbage is spiritual,” a symbol for the age: a multivalent symbol, connoting among other things Stevens’s old metaphor of shopworn creativity. The title image remains as much a stimulus to aesthetic play as a socioenvironmental referent. Yet Ammons remains aware of garbage’s materiality, of its sullying of the planet, of the human body in terminal states of materiality: body as imminent garbage. In the process, the poem wryly ironizes its own bystander status (“I don’t know anything much about garbage dumps:/I

mean, I’ve never climbed one”); it “ecologizes” Stevens’s trope by insisting on garbage’s reuse (poetry “reaches down into the dead pit/and cool oil of stale recognition and words and/brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays/with light and strings with shiny syllables”). The seriocomic metamorphism alternates with environmental jeremiad (“poetry to no purpose! all this garbage! all these words: we may replace our mountains with/trash: leachments may be our creeks flowing/from the bottoms of corruption”). The poem gathers its energy from angry-bemused nonstop oscillation between the image of garbage as recyclable and garbage as shameful refuse, its extravagance of language aternatively fueled and punctured by recognition of humanity’s irretrievably biological condition.

 

Meanwhile, evidence accumulates of the emergence of toxicity as a widely shared paradigm of cultural self-identification, and of toxic discourse as an increasingly pervasive irritant: evidence too that the eloquence of testimony of ordinary citizens’ anxiety about environmental degradation can have influence on public policy, especially when the media are watching.

 

Neverstop:
As in one continuous take

Dear friend,

Let’s look at our poems in frames, not sentences. The way a shadow crosses the wall at noon, the brief tremor of a leaf before falling—these could be opening shots, scenes in a story we don’t yet know how to tell, until it shows itself to us. I have been thinking about the way cinema—like poetry—does not simply record life but reorders it. One moment follows another, not because that is how it happened, but because that is how the story wishes to be remembered.

Memory works in the same way. We carry it not as a whole but as fragments: a colour, a scent, the outline of a figure in a doorway. Tiziana Caianiello reminds us that “memory is not a literal reproduction of the past, but rather is a constructive process in which bits and pieces of information from various sources are pulled together.” We cannot transform every sight, sound, or smell into memory; we select what we attend to, we combine it with what we already know, and we store it in ways that make sense to us in the moment.

And then we return to it later, not as archivists dusting off an unchanging record, but as editors in the cutting room—shaping, adjusting, reinterpreting. We fill in gaps with our beliefs, our present circumstances, our hopes for the future. Sometimes we add images that were never there; sometimes we remove ones that are too sharp to touch. Remembering, like filmmaking, is a process of re-plotting. It is as much about the present and the imagined future as it is about the past.

We are told that the Anthropocene is a rupture, a reversal in the plot. Peripeteia, as in Athenian tragedy: a turn we did not see coming but that changes everything. Tom Bristow reminds us that mythos—the plot—structures how events are remembered, and how they move us. In cinema, as in myth, the arrangement of images and sounds is not only narrative but also moral. It determines what feels urgent, what feels possible, what compels us to act.

Lawrence Buell speaks of “metaphorizing” waste, turning the ugly into a reflection, shifting the scale of our stories from the personal to the planetary. I wonder what happens when these scales collapse into each other—when a childhood memory folds into the image of a melting glacier, or when the cry of a bird is spliced into a home movie. In this collapse, the boundary between the intimate and the global becomes porous; the timelines bleed together. This is not a distortion but a poetic truth: all stories, whether told in the kitchen or in the cosmos, are part of one shared reel.

I have seen films that feel like remembering: the slow drift between past and present, the way sound bleeds across images, the way a cut can feel like a gasp. Sometimes the rhythm is that of breathing; sometimes it is the uneven pace of grief. The filmmakers who work in this way are not simply documenting events—they are myth-making. They take what is known and what is felt, what is gone and what remains, and weave them into a new continuity.

Cinema in this sense is not entertainment; it is ritual. It is a space in which we can rehearse the act of remembering differently, in which we can splice personal loss with planetary urgency and see that they belong to the same narrative. It allows us to imagine alternative endings or beginnings; it gives us permission to repeat an image until its meaning changes; it lets us hold on to the moment before the reversal, and also to face the moment after.

This week, I invite you to think of your own archive—personal footage, family films, recordings from your walks—and imagine what happens when you weave it together with the more-than-human world. Let the sea interrupt a birthday party. Let a storm share the frame with a kitchen table. Let the sound of your own voice narrate something that happened centuries before you were born.

What new myth might emerge if you tell the story in reverse, or begin in the middle, or let a single frame breathe longer than it should?

Remember: a plot is not just what happens—it is how we choose to remember. And in the edit, we can choose again.