Earth (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2019) (Patreon)

In some respects, this is Geyrhalter's weakest film in quite some time. Whereas the power of his work had always lay in his still, nearly silent images, Earth is quite verbose, featuring brief interviews with numerous men and women involved in the mining, tunneling, and earth-moving industries that the film is profiling. Essentially another cinematic warning flag regarding the unchecked rapaciousness of the capitalist anthropocene, Earth is a very literal film, showing six global instances of massive rearrangement and/or plundering of the planet's surface and beyond. Copper mining in Spain and fracking on the Alberta tar sands is compared with the flattening of California mountains for commercial development space and the extraction of marble from an Italian quarry. Closer to Geyrhalter's home, we see the slow, grinding excavation of a tunnel between Austria and Italy, and the removal and relocation of drums of nuclear waste from an abandoned salt mine.

The workers Geyrhalter speaks with are all quite philosophical in their limited way, expressing a kind of wonder at the massive changes they are exacting upon the planet, and at times, even a tinge of regret. But they all seem to share a down-to-business, "show must go on" attitude toward their tasks, and Geyrhalter wisely refrains from contradicting them, letting the actions speak for themselves. In fact, Earth is arguably a film whose ideology is entirely implicit. I think it would be possible for an industrialist to watch it and come away thinking, yes, what we do has complex ramifications, but we are indeed on the side of Civilization and Progress. (One could argue, I suppose, that Geyrhalter's stark, symmetrical framing of the interviewees, Ulrich Seidl style, implies some degree of irony. But I'm not sure.)

Still, there is a tedium that sets in, watching two hours of big machines dig into the dirt and move it around. Unlike, say, the claims that have been made against Jennifer Baichwal's Anthropocene, there is nothing beautifying about Earth. The labor is slow and the dirt is dirty and even the wide-angle bird's eye shots from above look more like ant farms than seductive Robert Smithson earthworks. At the same time, this departure in Geyrhalter's style results in what is surely his most direct, accessible film, and perhaps that's what he felt the topic demanded. But it's still a bit of a drag to see one of contemporary cinema's most formally advanced documentarians produce such a plodding treatise on Big Dirt.