{"id":36334,"date":"2019-06-26T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-06-10T14:08:10","modified_gmt":"2020-06-10T14:08:10","slug":"11334-film-review-earth-by-nikolaus-geyrhalter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/business\/11334-film-review-earth-by-nikolaus-geyrhalter\/","title":{"rendered":"Film review: Earth by Nikolaus Geyrhalter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019ve been on jobs where I\u2019ve had to rip down acres and acres of trees. Sometimes I feel bad. But you gotta move forward for prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steven Kuzar is standing in front of the Caterpillar truck where he spends his weekdays moving mountains. Developers have hired him to chip away at the high terrain surrounding the San Fernando Valley to enlarge California\u2019s buildable area.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we get there it\u2019s not nature anymore. It\u2019s work. It\u2019s a project<\/em>,\u201d he says. \u201cThe Earth is definitely a cruel mistress. She fights us every bit of the way. That\u2019s why we have big machines with a lotta horsepower. We fight back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Steven
\nSan Fernando, California (Image: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion GmbH)<\/span><\/p>\n

San Fernando is the opening location of Earth<\/em>, an extraordinary documentary by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, featuring seven places around the world where the planet\u2019s crust is being dug, drilled, blasted or otherwise cut into. Satellites and drones show the jaw-dropping scale of mining operations today. Each location looks at first like a battlefield captured by a spy plane. Then the camera zooms in to reveal a quarry teeming with yellow ant-sized vehicles. But the film\u2019s real focus is on the next level in: the people who drive the trucks and work the mines.<\/p>\n

Steven Kuzar enjoys being well paid to indulge his childhood passion for diggers. Meanwhile in Italy, the marble miner Francesco Muscolini takes a discomfiting adult pleasure in his work: \u201cWe get to touch this material which no one has ever touched before\u2026 the outer crust is like the virginity of the mountain.\u201d And in Hungary, coal miner Jozsef K\u00f6les is deeply moved by the strength and beauty of the unyielding million-year-old trees his gigantic bucket wheel excavator occasionally tears its teeth on. <\/p>\n

\"\"
\nCoal mine, Gy\u00f6ngy\u00f6s, Hungary (Image: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion GmbH)<\/span><\/p>\n

Earth<\/em> could be seen as a prequel to Geyrhalter\u2019s Homo Sapiens<\/a> (2016), a haunting film of places around the world abandoned by people \u2013 theme parks, tower blocks, churches \u2013 none identified by location. That film offers a glimpse of a post-human future where nature has \u201cfought back\u201d or calmly re-established its dominance. By contrast Earth<\/em> is about the activity that is most viscerally nudging us towards the brink of that humanless future \u2013 industrial mining.<\/p>\n

Extraction of fossil fuels and other minerals is a primary influence on the Holocene\u2019s redefinition as the Anthropocene.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We learn at the beginning of the film that humankind moves 156 million tons of rock and soil each day, making us \u201cthe most decisive geological factor of our time.\u201d Earth<\/em> is a brilliant attempt to show us what that really means on (and for) the ground.<\/p>\n