Alternative ethics for ecocinema: The Tree of Life and post-continuity aesthetics

In this essay, I define ecocinema as a pedagogy of worldly reciprocity, and I ask how contemporary cinematic aesthetics, specifically camera movement and editing, may offer points of access or anchorage to a world which seems to recede further from us with each repeating catastrophe. I analyse Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) as an exemplar of post-continuity filmmaking to make two critical interventions. First, I decouple post-continuity from accelerationism to indicate that the technical aspects of post-continuity engender an immanent experience. Second, I claim that this experience is of value to ecocinematic discourse as it delimits the role typically played by reflection and visuality. To this end, I offer a critique of ecocinema's normalized identification of environmental ethics with cinematic duration. In the case of The Tree of Life, post-continuity style forces an encounter with beauty and its dimension of profound, de-anthropocentric, withdrawal.