ABSTRACT

Morrison's 2006 film The Highwater Trilogy exposes the medium of film to and in its existential condition: the liquid. The exceptional states evoked by the forces of water on the image level, and the material decay of the emulsified celluloid filmstrip fuse the episodes in an at once disturbingly repelling and compelling way. In Morrison's film, the liquid far exceeds a metaphorical meaning that addresses the fluidity of the moving image. As a dynamic assemblage, it invites a rethinking of conventional anthropocentric understandings of ecology as concerning merely the natural surroundings in which humans live. The natural and the social yet form complex networks, which not least redefines our perspective on human and nonhuman agency.

KEYWORDS

ecology, experimental film, film philosophy, wet ontology

The Highwater Trilogy (2006) consists of monochrome found footage of three different liquid environments recorded in the 1920s. While the episodes relay the theme of man's encounter with water – an uncontrollable force that, apart from its beauty, always bears the potential of posing a threat to humans and their dwellings, thus causing ecological disaster – this liquid theme also permeates the structural component of analogue filmmaking as the development of celluloid images demands a submergence in photochemical emulsion. After decades of storage in film archives, the film footage has started to chemically decompose, not only making the fragile materiality of the medium perceptible, but also stressing a conception of cinema as material process (Ivakhiv 2013, 33). In a media-philosophical sense, then, the film is an active component in reflecting on the philosophical implications of the physical and biological relations that are involved in its creation and production (Ivakhiv 2013, 33) and in philosophizing (Sinnerbrink 2014) on its status as an inherently wet medium. While the increasing ‘emergency state’ of the dying images throughout the film – as it literally ‘runs out of time’ in (digitized) time – poses a temporal paradox to the notion of cinema as time-based medium that captures and preserves the moment, the ephemerality of the footage and the corrosive process of materiality also appears as a ‘creative agent’ (Bennett 2010, 65).